Thursday 18 October 2007

Title Regulations - Rule 1.43e

For years the big difficulty in earning title norms in Australia was getting overseas players to play in local tournaments. There were some specially organised round robins (eg Mercantile Mutual, ASK Masters, Australian Masters), but it was next to impossible for Open swisses to have enough OS players. And even when a swiss attracted a number of overseas GM/IM's often local players fell foul of the rule requiring themselves to 33% of opponents to come from non-local federations, representing at least 2 other federations.
These days FIDE have made it a little easier for tournament organisers to avoid this problem. Under rule 1.43e of the FIDE Title Regulations if a tournament has 20 FIDE rated players not from the host federation, representing 3 other federations, with at least 10 GM's/IM's/WGM's/WIM's from those federations, then the previous restrictions no longer apply.
For the 2008 Doeberl Cup and 2008 Sydney International Open, what this means is that if both tournaments can attract such a field (and both are working on it), then title norms can be awarded based solely on performance, and the player no longer has to worry about the nationality of his/her opponents. And with the Doeberl Cup moving to 9 rounds, hopefully there will be a number of talented local players who can pick up norms that may have previously been impossible to achieve.

No comments: