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Policy / Politique
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Dark Knight / Le Chevalier Noir
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---- Nous avons besoin d'un traduction français!
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yeah yeah - you state that a particular some one will make a donation with the expectation of receiving something and conclude that ALL people will donate only for those reasons. A logical fallacy.
Meanwhile, we do have numerous examples of people who donate in real life or forgo benefits under anonymous conditions who don't receive any obvious apparent direct benefit. True they have self knowledge of the event and you say - AHA: their preferences are such that this knowledge is the benefit and without that knowledge they would not donate. This is an arguement of circularity - another logical fallacy. You simply refuse to accept the possibility that they gave the money 'just because'.
Incidentally, there are donations to tournaments, at least the ones I organize, that are made anonymously. I suppose I could presume that these people are acting solely for their own personal benefit but really, it is simpler to take them at their word.
Okay, I will try one more time then drop it.
My view, in a nutshell:
- People don't just "do things", like random molecules spinning around the room. They have reasons for doing things. Sometimes those reasons are illogical, or stupid, or make no sense to anyone but the person doing them.
- People who donate whatever (time, money, things in lieu of money, etc.) always derive some benefit from what they are doing, if only a personal feeling that presumably they wanted. Of course they cannot know exactly what they are going to get from others ... so perhaps chess should aim to solicit donations from masochists and that way when the people who benefit monetarily from the donations don't reciprocate the original donor will still get something from the donation. ;-)
"Tom is a well known racist, and like most of them he won't admit it, possibly even to himself." - Ed Seedhouse, October 4, 2020.
- People don't just "do things", like random molecules spinning around the room. They have reasons for doing things. Sometimes those reasons are illogical, or stupid, or make no sense to anyone but the person doing them.
- People who donate whatever (time, money, things in lieu of money, etc.) always derive some benefit from what they are doing, if only a personal feeling that presumably they wanted. Of course they cannot know exactly what they are going to get from others ... so perhaps chess should aim to solicit donations from masochists and that way when the people who benefit monetarily from the donations don't reciprocate the original donor will still get something from the donation. ;-)
so basically, you posted your hypothetical question knowing (believing) in advance that there was one and only one true answer and you would refuse all others?
so basically, you posted your hypothetical question knowing (believing) in advance that there was one and only one true answer and you would refuse all others?
+1. And YHWH is watching you, Tom.
I am imagining a player, but before he clicks Send, he thinks: "Hey, it's not Tim Horton, it's Ottosen, what's he doing this for? Aaaaah, so he can lecture us. So if I want to indulge him, I won't send this thank-you note."
So, as you probably all know, I recently put up some money to help sponsor a chess tourney in Calgary. I did this in part because Vlad is a good guy and I wanted his tourney to be a success, but I also thought that I've made a lot of posts about sponsorship in chess, why it doesn't work in the current model, and who is to blame for it, and I thought it would be an interesting case study for all of Canadian chess to consider.
I have always posted that I believe chess cannot position itself as a sponsorship opportunity with positive ROI; the reach of the publicity will be extremely limited and unlikely to generate substantial new business for a company - this has been debated, but I still believe it to be so, and will until chess somehow gets mainstream media coverage. So, I have always believed that you must position chess as a goodwill/community type of sponsorship that will allow a company to feel like it's giving back.
For this type of sponsorship, potential sponsors must be shown first that the sponsorship activity is beneficial and worthwhile; I think this can be done. There is no shortage of links between chess and intelligence, links to improvement in chess and school performance, etc. It's a game with lots of positive goodwill towards it, and one that any company would be proud to say they are sponsoring in their employee newsletter. Making this first contact can come from anywhere; a player, an organizer, a dedicated parent, maybe even the sponsor comes to you first, whatever.
Once that first contact is made, however, the challenge is now shared by all members of the community. The initial point of contact has put themselves out there and gotten some money into the community. Now, it's up to everyone to make an effort to keep the sponsor feeling good about what they are doing, and want to continue it. This involves simple courtesies like adding the sponsor to the web site (and letting the sponsor know they are added to the site), communicating with the sponsor during the event, having the participants give some mention or thank you to the sponsor.
So, let's take this event (though I don't want to single Vlad or these particular players out - they are essentially the same as I'd have expected from any tournament or organizer in Canadian chess). When I first offered it, I communicated quickly and easily with Vlad, finding a way to transfer money overseas and ensure that it was added to the prize fund in the way I preferred.
Then the prize was announced, and the tournament went on; no further direct emails from Vlad of any sort - just a few posts on the ECC group and here. No mention of the sponsorship of any sort on the web site. No thank you from a single player (despite several of them being members of the ECC group, and my contact information being relatively easy to obtain from many ACA members and the availability of direct PM via this site).
Essentially, none of the common courtesies you'd expect shown to a sponsor, and as such, no good feeling from me about this and no interest in continuing to do so. I received Vlad's email immediately after the tourney about potentially continuing the offer for the Edmonton tourney, and I decided to wait one week until after the end of the tourney to see if anything came from any player; had anything come, I would have carried on the offer. Nothing came, so I'm not. In reality, I don't care that much about the thank you or the web site or whatever, but then I didn't care that much about some tourney thousands of kilometres away either. For me, it was just a way to test my beliefs.
So, in this case, both the organizers and the players have "cost" themselves a potential sponsor, and (to be frank) confirmed my belief in why Canadian chess does not have any record of getting and keeping sponsors. I've expressed this all to Vlad, but I hope other organizers and players can also give some thought to this.
David, kudos for giving Canadian chess a chance to surprise you, and with the nice touch of specifying the prize being based on % of decisive games.
Since it was an experiment on your part, you may have been better to create an anonymous name for the sponsor. You are known in that chess community as a (former?) player, and so at least some may have thought "Oh, it's one of our own giving back to the game", and with that idea of sympathy money in their heads, they may have thought it superficial to thank you. That said, I still think the result would have been very similar had you been anonymous.
I know that anything I might do in the future for Canadian chess will be done anonymously or through a 3rd party. I'm trying to decide whether it is worth going that route for chess as it is now, or instead trying to create a whole new scene that will likely compete with classical chess. I have no ill will towards the diehard enthusiasts of classical chess. But at the same time, it is somewhat painful to see the vast numbers of younger chess enthusiasts who are confined to the relative stagnation of classical chess by the organizations that refuse to consider even the slightest expansionary changes (such as holding parallel classical chess and chess960 tournaments). These younger enthusiasts start out with optimism about the future of their chosen game, but gradually realize that the game has worked itself out and is basically a contest of mistakes. Which is why you see Candidates Matches and other high-level events having to resort to rapid play games to reach a decision. It is too easy now to play a game free of mistakes, unless the time gets compressed. Now we have the likes of Kramnik and Grischuk openly expressing disatisfaction with the status quo, and with all the work that must go into studying openings and the diminishing level of true chess creativity they are allowed to express. But as Kramnik painfully attests, what can one do?
As you may know from my posts, I've been trying to get chess players to think out of the box, either with the non-radical(?) idea of chess960 or even more "radical" variants, geared toward minimizing draws and toward shorter games (in terms of moves per game, not in terms of time controls) more appealing to the general public. The overall goal would be to get television / internet media involved. Overall the chess scene, Canada and elsewhere, seems highly resistant to any sort of change, so I'm thinking this new scene will necessarily compete with chess.
Many chess players have migrated to poker, a game that rewards skill almost not at all because skill is too often subverted by luck (so much so that its professionals have been unable to convince U.S. authorities otherwise, and so online play for money is for the most part outlawed for U.S. players). If these migratory chess players see a game that is somewhat in between poker and chess on the luck - skill spectrum (and in the rewards that luck and skill can bring in), there could be an even larger migration -- especially if the game has a significant chess component to it. In turn, an online version of such a more skill-oriented (but still luck-influenced) game could be a replacement for online poker in "moral" zones such as the U.S.
This is the direction I would like to see things go, and it would leave the diehard classical chess enthusiasts to never leave their comfort zone, which will always have enough such enthusiasts to survive in at least local club form. Perhaps David, now that you have confirmed your worst suspicions about classical chess organization at least in Canada, you might be interested in this kind of sponsorship, or more to the point, in helping form whole new organizations that feed such a new scene.
Only the rushing is heard...
Onward flies the bird.
Correction: It's too easy to play 20 moves free of mistakes and be winning because your opponent played only 15 moves free of mistakes because he didn't read the extended analysis and you did.
What a wonderful world in Chesstalks: complains by fans, complains by players, complains by the champion, complains by organizers, and now we got a complain by the benefactor :D
Personally I think it is a responsibility of the organizers to do "thanx". They may involve players too: make photos/chessboards and force players to sign, and distribute that to sponsors/donors/benefactors.
What a wonderful world in Chesstalks: complains by fans, complains by players, complains by the champion, complains by organizers, and now we got a complain by the benefactor :D
Oops! And here I thought CT stood for Carping Talkers!
Correction: It's too easy to play 20 moves free of mistakes and be winning because your opponent played only 15 moves free of mistakes because he didn't read the extended analysis and you did.
That's not correct either. It should read:
It's too easy to play 20 moves free of mistakes and get a winning position because your opponent played only 15 moves free of mistakes because he didn't read the extended analysis and you did, and yet still lose because you really don't know how to play good chess. :p
I still see lots of question marks on my scoresheets! :o:D
Ok, but you're still a newbie, aren't you? :D
On another thread, someone said you spent about 400 hours on the phone since becoming CFC president. Imagine if you had spent those 400 hours studying chess openings? Then, as Alan Baljeu has pointed out, maybe your question marks wouldn't show up until about move 20.
Another option is always Correspondence Chess. :D
Only the rushing is heard...
Onward flies the bird.
It's too easy to play 20 moves free of mistakes and get a winning position because your opponent played only 15 moves free of mistakes because he didn't read the extended analysis and you did, and yet still lose because you really don't know how to play good chess. :p
Good points. If one loses every time from a winning position, though, maybe one should take up something that makes ones inadequacies less evident, such as arguing for man-made global climate warming.
Only the rushing is heard...
Onward flies the bird.
On another thread, someone said you spent about 400 hours on the phone since becoming CFC president. Imagine if you had spent those 400 hours studying chess openings? Then, as Alan Baljeu has pointed out, maybe your question marks wouldn't show up until about move 20.
Another option is always Correspondence Chess. :D
There would be less global warming if he had stayed off the phone...
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