October 2008 TC Meeting

Having just been elected chairman of the Tournament Committee and chaired my first meeting, I thought it would be a very good time to write my first blog. It’s an opportunity to introduce myself to people who don’t know me and to talk about some of the issues that we are considering.

First something about me. I have been playing in EBU competitions since I was at University. I have had tremendous enjoyment from these events over the years and I am a very big fan of the EBU’s Tournament Programme and the people who make it all happen — the Competitions department at Aylesbury and the tournament directors at the event.

However just because something is very good doesn’t mean it should remain static — anything that never changes is almost always eventually doomed. So one of the main jobs of the Tournament Committee is to constantly review our programme of events to ensure it evolves to meet the changing needs of the members. For instance in the 1970’s the EBU’s programme consisted of Crockford’s, Hubert Philips, National Pairs and a couple of Congresses — I don’t think people would appreciate that now as a Tournament programme. Although we feel we have a pretty good understanding of what members want there is always a danger in basing decisions on the views of a small group of people. We have therefore decided to embark on three projects to help us ensure we meet the needs of all our members:

1. We will conduct an extensive online survey of members to find out what they want from the EBU’s Competition programme in terms of things like format, venue, location, timings, cost, etc. We are expecting this to take place in the first quarter of 2009, so when it’s launched please, please complete a questionnaire and make sure we have your views.
2. Another big challenge facing the Tournament Committee is the introduction of Universal Membership in April 2010. This is expected to bring to the EBU about 20000 new members. Working with the Club Committee we hope to introduce a number of new events aimed particularly at the typical club player.
3. To try and improve the flow of communication we are going to produce a blog and an electronic newsletter, certainly after each Tournament Committee meeting and hopefully more often. This will keep members up to speed with what’s under discussion and what’s planned for the future and give you the opportunity to make your views known.

I can assure you that the Tournament Committee is a mixture of people with different but complementary skills and experience. They are all wedded to these three objectives and all keen to hear from new and old members alike on how best to move forward.

As with most things in life there is an ebb and flow to most events and not all of them are successful. The EBU has an absolute duty in making decisions to consider the best interests of the membership as a whole and in general we consider subsidising failing events does not meet this duty. Our strategy for dealing with these events is to firstly put them on our “at risk list”, so that they can receive particular discussion and consideration. We then come up with changes that we think might rejuvenate them (eg venue, location, format). If all this attention doesn’t bring a significant improvement then normally they would be discontinued. We never lightly decide to discontinue an event because we recognise it always disappoints a number of players who particularly like the event. The two current events on our at risk list are the Northern Easter Congress and the Great Northern Swiss Pairs.

One change that we expect to be fairly controversial is the move of the Autumn Congress from Bournemouth to Birmingham in 2009. We have decided to do this for a number of reasons:

1. It’s a much more central venue bringing easier access to players in the North and the South-West.
2. We have quite a number of Congresses on the South Coast but none at all in the West Midlands.
3. We have had a number of requests to hold an event at a prestigious hotel — this meets that request.

If this change doesn’t personally suit you then we do apologise but hope you can accept as valid the reasons given above.

Two other decisions we expect to be less controversial are:

1. Provided Crockford’s Plate can be arranged to have 8 teams left at the same time as the main event, then these 8 teams will play a final alongside the main event.
2. During 2009 we will stop issuing EBU vouchers as prizes and move to direct credit of prize money to an individual’s personal EBU account.

At our next meeting in March we will be particularly discussing EBU KO events (Crockford’s, Gerard Faulkner Salver, Hubert Phillips, NICKO) and the National Women’s Teams. We would be very keen to have your views on either or both of these issues. If you do want to comment on these or indeed any other aspect of the EBU’s competition programme then please send an e-mail to tcfeedback@ebu.co.uk. I can’t guarantee that every e-mail will get an individual response but I can guarantee that every opinion will be read and taken into account when the issue is discussed by the Tournament Committee.