The Cats out of the Bag

Over the last couple of weeks there have been plenty of rumors of prospective bids for the 2007-08 Australian Chess Championships. Apart from the publicly announced Box Hill CC bid, there was talk of a bid from the Parramatta CC, as well as the Melbourne CC.
As today is the deadline for bids to be submitted to the ACF, it seems that the various bids (real or imagined) have stuck their heads above the trenches.
It seems that the MCC bid was a non-starter, probably being more talk than action. This will please the current ACF President Gary Wastell, who expressed a worry to me that if the ACF decided not to hold the Australian Championship this year that "the Melbourne chess club would organise some tournament after Xmas and call it the Australian Championship anyway".
The Parramatta CC bid is also short on detail, but this may be because they have chosen not to publicise the details of their bid, instead submitting to the NSWCA/ACF.
But the real surprise is the Chess Discount Sales (Peter Parr) bid, which he has announced here. Peter had proposed a format for the Australian Championship earlier this year, without actually committing to a bid himself. Now he has actually bitten the bullet and put together a complete bid, including all the things a good bid needs (Budget, Prize list, entry fees, format). While the bid is contingent upon venue availability (no longer Bondi Beach or UTS), it seems to meet the requirements for a championship chess tournament.

So does this flood of competing bids mean that the Australian tournament scene is flourishing? In my opinion, not really. I think the major driver for bids was the lowered expectation and requirements expected of this years championship. With 6 months to go, pretty much any bid that involved the provision of chess sets and clocks would be considered. And frankly I would consider this a much more realistic state of affairs. Having been involved in every Australian Open since 2000, there seems to be an expectation that every Open/Championship needs to be held in a 4 or 5 star hotel, with full conference facilities, high class but cheap accommodation, and 24 hour transport to and from the venue. But even when these requirements are met, the number of players who turn up to these events fall way below expectations. Put simply, there are not enough paying chess players to meet these demands.
Instead what I think we are seeing this year is a return to the cheap and cheerful events held prior to the mid 80's. The Australian Open in 82/83 was held in a big hall, and still managed to attract a bigger field than any of the Australian Opens since 2000. In fact most of the Championship events of the 70's seemed to involve trestle tables, sets and clocks, and a whole bunch of players who just wanted to turn up and play chess. As that group of players has got smaller over the year, realistically we have to accept that the financial base of such tournaments will shrink as well.