SCCU ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
Saturday 25th June 2011 (start 2.15 pm) at the Exmouth Arms, London NW1
10 attended, plus the Auditor who came along to see what we look like. (1) Insurance. Only a Matter Arising, but it occupied some time. Should we go on insuring our trophies? Last year's AGM touched on the point and suggested the Executive might have a look at it during the year, but that hadn't happened. Anyway, premiums are costing something like £350 a year. No one offered a guess at the number of years we've been paying it without claims, but £350 is maybe a thirtieth of the combined insured values of our trophies. Someone said, what if we set aside a certain annual amount and self-insured instead? Someone else said, if we lost a £3,000 trophy would we really spend the insurance money on a new one of that value? The AGM was in no position to make a decision now, but it asked the Treasurer and President to come up with proposals before the renewal date (1st October). (2) County matches. "Could we have the fixture list earlier in future?" County Match Controller: Not really, because Counties can't decide what teams to enter till the grading list appears in late July. (3) BCET Award. It was announced that the SCCU's 2011 nominee, Wilson's School, has been accepted for an Award. (4) SCCU Bulletin. Digitisation of old copies has not progressed yet, but the Editor said he had arranged for a single issue to be reproduced, on a trial basis, by a firm that does that sort of thing. If the attempt was successful they would be able to do the whole job at a reasonable rate.
For the future, the Editor said he saw no future for the annual omnibus edition unless demand increased. The three copies sold last year did not justify the work involved. (5) Accounts 2010-11. The Treasurer presented the "audited" Accounts, showing a deficit of £191. But still our cash reserves were more than £3600. The Accounts were adopted. (6) Budget 2011-12. The Treasurer said it had been hard to budget without knowing whether we would have a Junior Organiser. (Neill Cooper had made it known well in advance that he would stand down.) The Budget, pessimistically one hopes, assumed no income from the junior NCMs. The Treasurer proposed no change in fees (so County affiliation still £50; NCM affiliation half of that but with a £5 discount for prompt payment; and Counties Championship entry fees £20 per team). The Budget, with a projected deficit of £115, was adopted. (7) Presentation of Trophies. You know who won the trophies. They weren't all presented, but it wasn't for want of being there. Being at AGMs is a thing that SCCU trophies are quite good at these days. The same can't always be said of the winners' reps, but they were all there too. It just happened that a number of the winning teams were due to appear at the ECF Finals a week later, as was the CMC; and he retained them for presentation there. (8) Election of Officers. Some changes this time. Mike Gunn stood down after two years in office and was succeeded by David Howes. The Deputy's slot, twelve months vacant, was filled by retiring Junior Organiser Neill Cooper. Howard Grist, Grading Secretary for the last twelve years, is succeeded by the Sussex Grader Julie Denning. Oh, and the Bulletin Editor declined to stand, for reasons suggested under (4), and was not replaced. That leaves Junior Organiser. No takers so far. Don't be shy if interested. The job could be split. The most urgent part is the U14/130 competition.
The SCCU Officers page is updated. (9) Non-County Member. Council elected a new NCM: the London Chess Classic. Some related information appears in the Executive Report immediately following. (10) Rule Changes Tournament Rule 12. The Executive proposed modifying the order of tie-break rules in such a way that Overall Game Points would stand a sporting chance of being used sometimes. Or if you want to be technical, move 12(b)(6) up so it becomes 12(b)(4). This was agreed by 7 votes to 1. Tournament Rule 19. The Executive proposed relaxing the Mobile Phone rule so that a player merely receives a warning on his first offence in a game (but two strikes and you're out). An amendment to change the warning to "warning, and time is deducted from your clock" was rejected on the ground that the last thing we want is unforced adjustment of clocks. (Specially if they're DGTs, someone said.) The original proposal was then agreed by 5 votes to 3.
The Rules page is updated to reflect both changes. (11) Twice-yearly Standardplay Grades. How is the Union to treat January grades for eligibility purposes? Council decided that it will ignore them, for competitions already in progress (which effectively means the Counties Championships). This is in line with the ECF's announced intention for its own competitions, and with our existing (Rapidplay) rule in the U14/130.
What about previously ungraded players who acquire a grade in January? It was decided to leave this to the Controller's discretion. He may already have granted permission for them to play as ungraded, but he is entitled to withdraw it if no longer satisfied that their strength is below the limit. (12) ECF Counties Team Rapidplay Championship. This remains more or less where we left it (see Exec 8.4.11 below, item 6). The Executive will pursue. (13) ECF Counties Championships: Central Venue. There had been the usual mutterings about going to Leicester to play the County next door to you. Was it time to resurrect our proposal that "will" in the rules be replaced by "may", so that the Home Director doesn't actually have to impose a central venue? It's five years since we unsuccessfully proposed that; which seems a respectable time to wait, and the AGM decided (but only by 5 votes to 3) to propose it again.
Someone said he had worked out, some years ago, what the optimum central venue would be in terms of overall travelling, taking into account the teams that had actually reached the finals over the previous 12 years or so. Any guesses? Milton Keynes. (14) Football Scores. Someone mentioned, à propos of something or other, the possibility of scoring 3 for a win, 1 for a draw, and 0 for a loss. No proposal was made. (15) ECF Funding. You're winding us up. Of course you know what it's about. There was general discussion of the new proposals, but it did not lead anywhere in particular.
The meeting closed at 5.00 pm, to be followed by the traditional post-AGM Executive meeting.
rjh 18.7.11
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEETING
whose attendance was 9. (1) Appointments. The Executive appointed, or re-appointed, the ECF and BCF reps and the Rules & Appeals Sub-Committee (see Who's Who) (2) BCQ Place 2012. We allocated these at the April meeting below (see item 4). But one recipient, the Hastings Masters, had since discovered that it was unable to take up its place. So we had one going spare. What we didn't tell you in April is that there were five applicants for the four places and one of them generously stood aside. It was the London Classic, as you've guessed. The Executive awarded its spare place to the London Classic.
How does this relate to item 9 of the meeting above? Well, another thing we didn't say in April is that the Executive decided you had to be an SCCU Member (County or NCM) in order to host the SCCU Championship or get a BCQ place. There had never been any rule about it, though it was probably more or less always taken for granted. We know the London Classic was poised to apply for Membership anyway. (3) Money. It was agreed to transfer £3000 (most of our reserves) into a Scottish Widows "Club and Association" 7-day notice deposit account. Its interest rate of 1.6% compared well with the 0.05% we seemed to be getting at the moment. (4) Insurance. This is not item 1 from the meeting above. It's an item from the October 2010 Executive meeting which we didn't report then because we couldn't quite make out what it was about. Not that we're much wiser now. The October meeting, with renewal looming (or actually a week overdue) discovered that the policy suddenly had a fresh clause, added scrappily to the reverse of the back page and containing at least two typos, to the effect that we had to meet all sorts of "vulnerable group protection" criteria on pain of invalidating our cover. Training for new personnel having unsupervised access etc is one thing, but annual refresher courses for everyone? Records kept for 30 years? But what struck your Webmaster was not so much the over-the-topness of this as the vagueness of the wording: a vagueness still unresolved months later after correspondence with the insurance company. Oh. Yes, we renewed in October. It's the standard ECF-brokered club policy.
(5) Next Executive Committee meeting: Friday 7th October 2011.
The meeting closed at 5.37 pm.
rjh 18.7.11, amended 19.8.11. Please tell us of errors or omissions.
SCCU OPEN FIXTURES 2010-11
3.5.10
The County Match Controller writes:
Here are the fixtures for the Open Division of the SCCU Counties Championship for next season 20011-12. Still six entries, same as the season just ended.
Oct 8
Nov 5
Jan 7
Feb 4
Mar 3
SxE SyM HK
EH MK SySx
KE HSy SxM
EM SyK SxH
ESy KSx MH
May I emphasise that at this stage the fixtures are provisional only and can be changed by mutual agreement between the Counties and Match Captains concerned. If changes are made however please ensure that the following points are observed:
(a) Ensure that both myself and the SCCU Webmaster Richard Haddrell are advised.
(b) Please do not re-arrange matches for the weekend of 31st March or later, as these dates are too late to ensure timely nominations for the 2012 ECF National Stages.
Surrey have a new Match Captain, Owen Phillips owphillips@hotmail.co.uk 020 8647 0764 (who is already in post for this year's National stage). I understand that all other County Open Match Captains remain the same as in 2010-11.
If there are any queries or problems please advise me as soon as possible.
SCCU EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEETING
Friday 8th April 2011 (start 7 pm) at the Exmouth Arms, London NW1
7 attended. More or less chronologically: (1) Money. The Treasurer said we should roughly break even for the season if you didn't count the new junior trophies we had bought. One team had not yet paid its U14/130 entry fee, and it was being chased. "Speaking of the U14/130," someone said, "they seem to play an awful lot of graded friendlies and they're all costing us Game Fee. Maybe we should put the entry fee up." We're not sure anyone agreed about the entry fee. It is quite a lot of games, though. 60-plus this year, we've just made it.
Buckinghamshire had duly paid last season's Membership fee as intended. We should have said this in our report of the next Executive meeting down, but forgot. (2) BCET Award. The Executive agreed on the Union's 2010-11 nomination for a British Chess Educatonal Trust award. We never say which school it is till the awards are announced. Yes, we said the same about last year's nominee and have never named them yet. It was Homefield Prep School, Sutton, and the award was made last summer. (3) SCCU Bulletin 2009-10. The Editor had now got round to completing this, and sold three copies at the meeting. It is now on sale by post. (Well, we sold a 2008-9 Bulletin that way.) The once-a-year Bulletin is only extracts from the website, but has a permanency that websites lack. In one way, that is. The Editor is not convinced that sales justify the time that goes into its making.
There was some inconclusive discussion of further digitisation of back numbers. (See next item down, for what has been done so far.) The project hasn't gone away yet. (4) SCCU Individual Championship 2011-12 and British Championship qualifying places 2012. The Executive awarded the Union Championship to the Herts Congress (November 2011); and BCQ places to the Thanet Congress (August 2011), the Hastings Masters 2011-12, and the Essex Congress (May 2012). (5) ECF Matters. ECF April Council matters, really.
(a) Game Fee. The ECF is recommending 54p (no change). This seems odd, to one person at least, considering the ECF's cash-strapped situation. But the Executive resolved to vote for 54p. The real increases come a year later, no doubt, under
(b) ECF Funding Arrangements. No, we are not going to tell you what this is about. Go out and read the Council papers! Or better still, the 78 pages of discussion on the EC Forum. Or even 4(d) in the next Executive meeting down. The Executive decided, with 1 dissenting vote, that the Union would support further work on Membership-based funding. We won't attempt to set out the reasons. (6) ECF Counties Team Rapidplay Championship. You will recall that the SCCU ran this at Wanstead last September on the ECF's behalf and was interested in repeating the exercise. A Wanstead person said, as he had before, that an East London venue was the silliest way of attracting teams from outside the Union. However, a provisional booking had been made at Wanstead for Saturday 24th September. It might cost £120. Tentative inquiries had been made about the Open University venue at Milton Keynes, but it was not ideal for catering or equipment. Also perhaps not as cheap as had been hoped, but we would check. We would also investigate the Kidlington Congress venue. (Should we use a venue in a County not affiliated to the Union? The consensus was that it was not unacceptable.)
It was decided to settle on 24th September, at whatever venue. (7) SCCU Officers for next year. You may have heard that Junior Organiser Neill Cooper is relinquishing his role at the AGM because of increasing chess (and maths) commitments at school. The word is out, but there are no takers for the job yet as far as we know. Grading Secretary Howard Grist is also standing down, and there is a potential successor. The Secretary and County Match Controller, while not actually resigning, have made it known that they would welcome the chance to pass their jobs on. [On reflection, this never works. You have to force the issue by actually resigning. Maybe they will.] The other Office in question is President. Mike Gunn is approaching the end of his two-year stint. Oh, and Deputy President. Haven't had one of those for a while. The Webmaster is happy to carry on, but drop him a hint and you could end up with a whole new set of Officers next year. (8) SCCU Tournament Rules
(a) Mobile Phones (Rule 19). It has been suggested that the Union should relax the Mobile Phone rule, so that: for each player, first offence gets a warning; second offence, by the same player in the same game, loss of the game. The Tournament Secretary had put this to the County match captains, who had come out roughly two to one in favour of the change. So the Executive will propose the change at the AGM.
(b) Tie-breaks (Rule 12). It will also be proposed, after a similar consultation, that Overall Game Points be moved up two places in the hierarchy. So the tie-breaks, after Overall Match Points, would be (firstly) result of match(es) between tying teams; (secondly) overall Game Points; and only then (third and fourth) board count and elimination in match(es) between tying teams. The match captains were strongly in favour of this.
The meeting closed at 10.40 pm, horribly late by recent standards.
rjh 13.4.11
28.12.10 DIGITISATION OF SCCU BULLETIN
We have finally made some progress, and you will find four years' worth of digital Bulletins in the Archive.
It's a bit of a cheat, because those four years were digital already and it had never occurred to us. They are the four years immediately preceding the introduction of the Website. The Bulletin was already word-processed a quarter of a century ago, as you'll imagine; and the Word documents of 1994-1998 are still on our hard disk, passed down through four generations of PCs. Earlier years, we fear not. The documents were on other computers and in other formats, and are lost. (Remember 5¼ inch floppies?) Going back another quarter of a century, to Issue 1 in 1958, the Bulletin was ephemerally produced on steam typewriters.
The four documents we offer are not perfect. They are (more or less) one-year compilations, each made up of six original bi-monthly Bulletins. Changes in format have not been kind to the pagination, or to the tabbing in earlier issues, but readability is unimpaired for practical purposes. (If incorrect page breaks give you acres of white space at the page bottoms, you can suppress the white space.) Some of the diagrams have fallen by the wayside, we think always in the earliest year. All of the "½" characters in that year came out as "|", because our daisywheel thought the ½ was where the | is. We've changed them to ½, and made some other adjustments; but expect anomalies. Let us know if any are intolerable, because we've missed them.
Having come this far we can't very well stop now. Scanning hard copy as (searchable) pdf is doable but time-consuming; 60 or 70 scans per season in the later years, though earlier seasons may be lighter. There is the complication that many issues are foolscap and will need scaling (and the early years are lord knows what size but it isn't A4 or foolscap). It isn't a one-man operation. Help, anyone?
The other constraint is Megabytes. We only have so much webspace available. We have economised by converting the original docs to docx format (so if you're using Office 1997 and still haven't got a compatibility pack, tough). But sooner or later we'll run out of space and the SCCU will have to buy us some more. Or we could transfer the Bulletin Archive to CD and sell it for money. There's a thought.
Here's another. Should we carry on backwards from 1994? Or should we start afresh with Issue 1 and go forwards from there? Opinions invited. Update 31.12.10
We've started afresh. 1958-59 (pdf) is now in the Archive. The quality of reproduction isn't great. Well, we scanned at low resolution to save space, and the original was iffy in places to start with. Searching the pdf is hit and miss, and mostly useless on the smallest print. (Higher resolutions don't help there a lot, though they improve the appearance.) The main issue, as we've suggested, is Megabytes. 1958-59 takes up twice the disk space of the other four years put together. Four or five more like that, we'll run out of space altogether. Ideas, anyone?
SCCU COUNCIL MEETING
Friday 1st October 2010 at the Exmouth Arms, London NW1
Council met briefly to do a couple of things Executive meetings can't. 8 attended. The quorum is 8. (1) SCCU U14/140 Championship is now U14/130. Council changed its name and its grading limit. Also its time allowance from 60 minutes per player to 59, so it could go on being graded as Rapidplay. The Rules on the Site are updated. (2) Berkshire Junior CA were elected to Non-County Membership so they could play in the above. It's lucky their application succeeded, because they are already scheduled to play in it this year.
The meeting then morphed seamlessly into an
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEETING
with initially the same attendance, though it had grown to 10 before the meeting was over. (1) Missing Trophies. It was noted that the Fleming Trophy was no longer missing. It had found its way back to Bedfordshire, by a route no one seems very clear about. (Well, it will have been four or five years ago.) We hear rumours that Beds and Bucks may even resurrect the annual match which was its raison d'être.
That was a Matter Arising from the draft AGM minutes. The new Missing Trophy came up later in the meeting, but we'll cover it here. The Junior Organiser said he had never seen, nor heard of, an Under 18 Minor Trophy. Your Webmaster had assumed that the Under 18 Minor (see the Trophies page) was being awarded annually in its designated way, but not so apparently. How long it has been missing isn't known. Past winners of the U18 Minor event will be asked if they've got it. (2) Officers' Reports
(a) Secretary. The Secretary had nothing to report, but got rid of two of the Union's "free" 2010 Yearbooks.
(b) County Match Controller. Someone remarked that the Controller had avoided clashes with the 4NCL for the higher-graded sections but not the U160 and below. This had been his policy for some years, but maybe with the expansion of the 4NCL it was time to avoid clashes all the way down. He agreed to do so next year. In the meantime it was always possible for match captains to change dates by agreement, and some of them already had.
(c) Junior Organiser. Neill Cooper noted that, as well as the seven teams in this year's U14/130, three others had expressed interest but been unable to find organisers. (3) Counties Rapidplay Championship. It was felt that the event held at Wanstead on 18th September had been a qualified success. It had gone smoothly (and the catering had been much appreciated), but it was disappointing to have had entries from only three SCCU Counties. We had, nevertheless, made a small profit. The ECF Home Director was keen to have another SCCU-hosted event next year. Wanstead would again be possible, but it was agreed to investigate the Open University premises at Milton Keynes. (MK is in the SCCU, just, though the MK club plays in East Anglia.) This venue would be more likely to attract teams from other Unions, and someone thought it might be rather inexpensive. We did not know about its catering arrangements or the availability of chess equipment. Provisionally, at whatever venue, we would go for the 24th or maybe 17th September. (4) ECF Things. The Executive talked about four things that were coming up, or expected to come up, at the ECF AGM on 16th October.
(a) More frequent Standardplay grading lists. The ECF was to seek Council's views. Council rejected the idea when it was proposed in April 2007, but the Home Director was keen to try again. What did the Executive think? One view advanced was that we should have a half-yearly list for new players only. Whether this would be a physically separate list, or what grades the system would use next time round, we don't know. The Executive voted 3 in favour of more frequent lists and 4 against, and our rep will make his own mind up.
(b) FIDE rating of Counties Championships. The ECF proposed this for the national stage only. There would be a monetary cost, and the entry fee would have to go up. Apart from which it was not obvious that many players would be interested. (We have heard of GMs agreeing to play in County matches because they were not FIDE rated!) The Executive, on a straw poll, rejected FIDE rating by a lot of votes to 0.
(c) Grading details on website. This is not in the Council Agenda, but there was reason to think the Board would add to the papers on the website and raise it under Matters Arising, seeking a steer from Council. It's about publishing extended details on the grading site, starting with detailed game results for everyone (or for Members only, at choice). We won't go into detail, but a thread on the EC Forum gives some idea of what it's about. (Yes, it's a hobbyhorse of your Webmaster's.) The Executive's preference, by 7 votes to 0, was for publishing details for everyone.
(d) ECF sources of income. Please read this in conjunction with the ECF paper http://www.englishchess.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/C13.12-Office-Review-and-Funding-Options.doc. The Board, faced with an urgent need to cut costs, has identified (and already partially implemented) savings in the Office. The number of staff is down to three, for one thing. But the Game Fee / Membership structure is ridiculously complicated, and it is anticipated that collection costs could be much reduced by simplifying it. The possibilities seemed to be: all-Game-Fee; all-Membership; the hybrid we've got now, but simplified; and the status quo. The Board seeks a steer now, and hopes to present preliminary proposals at the 2011 Finance meeting. The status quo, as you'll have gathered, is not considered viable. Its complications may or may not be responsible for the "significant underpayment of Game Fee" which the review has detected. (Things have changed in the last eighteen months. The then Finance Director said he had checked carefully and the match between GF due and GF collected looked reasonable.)
Things have got worse since the review was carried out. The Federation's DCMS funding, originally expected to be phased out over two or three years, now seems likely to fall to nothing at the end of the current financial year.
To cut a longish story short, the Executive decided it would support any of the options except all-Game-Fee and the status quo. Some had reservations about local collection of Membership fees.
(e) Chess Sets for Schools. Yes, it was five. Someone mentioned the Holloid severance, but there didn't seem to be anything much to say about it.
The meeting closed at 9.36 pm.
rjh 4.10.10
This is a rather abbreviated account and we may come back to it. We will, of course, correct any errors brought to our attention.
SCCU ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
Saturday 26th June 2010 (start 2.15 pm) at the Fountains Abbey, Praed St, London W2 1RL. It was to have been the Exmouth Arms, but the Exmouth Arms somehow unbooked itself. 11 attended. (1) Officers' Reports The Officers who declared Nothing to Report are omitted, and there was otherwise not very much you didn't know about. But we'll mention two points.
(a) Junior Organiser. Neill Cooper was not present but reported in writing. He mentioned his intention to change the U14/140's grading limit to U130 next year, and someone made noises about it being against the rules. The time to change the rules was now, and no proposal had been received. Last year, oddly enough, a proposal on the grading limit had been received but the meeting took no decision and left it to the Organiser anyway. It was agreed, this time, to go by the book and hold a Special General Meeting for this purpose immediately before, if not in the middle of, the next Executive meeting. The SGM might also consider a rule permitting a single jamboree instead of Groups-plus-Final should the number of entries be low.
(b) Bulletin Editor. Remember the SCCU Bulletin? The Editor remarked that the Annual edition, which is all that remains of the printed Bulletin, had sold Two copies last year. He proposed to go on for another year at least.
There had been recent, and very limited, experiments with digitisation of old pre-website Bulletins. The Editor has discovered, to his childlike glee, that his new scanner will do pdfs that are not just pretty pictures but actually searchable as text. It's scarcely a one-man undertaking, though. We're talking about 240-odd issues, averaging maybe 10 pages each, going back to October 1958. (2) Money. The meeting approved the examined (or "audited") Accounts, showing a surplus of £227 and a bank balance of £3871. (The surplus might boil down to maybe £85 in "real" terms, after allowing for things like expenses not paid yet.) It was noted that no affiliation fee had been received from Buckinghamshire, though their AGM had resolved to pay it. No one at the meeting quite knew what the Bucks situation was. [They have since made it clear that they intended, and still intend, to remain affiliated. What happened to their 2008-9 payment is not clear.]
The Treasurer's proposed Budget envisaged no change in fees and a deficit of £54. (Fees, as you will recall, are County affiliation £50; NCM affiliation half of that but with a £5 discount for prompt payment; and Counties Championship entry fees £20 per team.) The budget provided £110 expenditure for replacement of three missing junior individual trophies; a figure which the meeting increased to £300 including engraving. After other adjustments, including the restoration of our £40 Patron's subscription to the Friends of Chess, the deficit rose to something like £400. This was approved.
The meeting wondered, at some length, whether we should go on insuring our Trophies. It wasn't on the agenda, but there was some feeling it should be looked at. (3) Elections & Appointment. All Officers were re-elected. (The Treasurer, appointed last year on a pro tem acting basis, may yet have hoped to get away with a one-year tenure; but it doesn't happen that way.) We still don't have a Deputy President. Stephen Hill, Auditor since we don't know when, took his well earned retirement and was succeeded by Peter Baker MA FCA from Harpenden. (4) ECF Counties Team Rapidplay. The meeting discussed the topic reported further down (Executive Committee 9.4.10, item 6).
To expand a bit on its history, the Championship seems to have been for teams of 12 since the last century, generally over 4 rounds at 30 minutes each, and usually - perhaps always - incorporating a handicap competition based on grades. It was last held in April 2007 at Hatfield with a disappointing entry of 4 teams. Previous venues, working backwards, have been Bedford (2005: 2 teams); Spondon Derbys (September 2003: 7 teams); Gloucester (September 2002: 10 teams); Stevenage (September 2001: 9 teams); Bedford (October 2000: 12 teams, "believed to be a record"); and Sheffield (October 1999: 7 teams). Before this the event was always in the Midlands, and perhaps originally over 16 boards. It was certainly over 16 boards in 1994. We think the competition goes back to 1988, perhaps continuously except for a gap in the early nineties.
We could probably live with the risk of losing money. Opinion swung towards the Wanstead House venue, which tends to be flexible with bookings and would be unlikely to hold us to a 100-player hall if the entry only justified something smaller. Not that Wanstead is an ideal venue for teams from Manchester, but the even more improbable venue of Wallington had attracted two of those for the ECF Junior Jamborees due to be held next day. Wanstead House was available on Saturday 18th September, at £120 for a large hall. It was agreed to go ahead with this date at Wanstead. Entry fee £36 per team, 4 rounds 30/30, with a handicap along the Hatfield lines mentioned below. (The competition appears to have used at least three modes of grading-based handicap over the years. The Hatfield one is sensible.)
We would need to advertise the event speedily. (5) Chess Sets for Schools. Council noted that the CfS fiasco threatened to precipitate an ECF Extraordinary General Meeting. [See the EC Forum. But the threat seems to have gone away since.] (6) SCCU U185/U150 Jamborees. The meeting inconclusively discussed changes to the format, including throwing the event open to non-Member organisations. It would be something for the Executive to think about over the year, unless someone cared to bring specific proposals at the SGM that 1(a) had already agreed on. (7) Missing Trophy. We wanted to put this below item (2), but that's not where it came. The Fleming Trophy (perhaps not the most familiar of our Trophies, but you'll find it in the Trophies page) was suddenly not where the Trophies page thought it was. No one remembered seeing it for five years. This was quite important, considering its 2005 insurance valuation of £1950. Is there a statute of limitation on insurance claims? The meeting thought there were one or two avenues to explore before we took that route. [Note 22.7.10. One of them led to it, and the Trophies page is updated.] (8) Rule Changes.
(a) County Match Rule 23: appeals. The Executive felt that the rule lacked rigour and proposed a revised version. It was approved by 6 votes to 2. The County Match Rules page is revised.
(b) Financial Year. The Treasurer proposed that the Union's financial year be changed, to end on 31st May instead of 30th April. The idea was to bring it more into line with the chess season. Some doubted whether this would leave time for preparation and "audit" of the Accounts before the AGM, and the proposal was lost by 2 votes to 6 (falling some way short of the required two-thirds majority).
The meeting closed at 6.04 pm, to be followed by the traditional post-AGM
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEETING
whose attendance was slightly different. It appointed, or re-appointed, the ECF and BCF reps and the Rules & Appeals Sub-Committee (see Who's Who); but not the London CA rep because the London CA has at last been deemed defunct. The Executive also fixed the date of the Next Executive Committee meeting: Friday 1st October 2010.
The meeting cosed at 6.32 pm, ten minutes earlier than last year.
rjh 22.7.10, revised 23.7.10, 24.7.10, 28.7.10