ICCF 50 years Officials Jubilee Tournament

 

"The tournaments were started in October 2001. Ninety ICCF officials partipated. The ICCF President and his successor, EB members, national delegates and many ICCF Tournament Directors. The last game of the 630 games that were played finished in September 2004. There were two GM- and four IM-groups. Saying that the tournament has been conducted without any problem is beside the truth, but after all I'm very satisfied about the behavior of the players. Ninetynine procent of them have been real ICCF Officials. Of course there have been some problems, but we have been able to solve them in all kind of friendly ways.

 

For quite a number of officials it was their first email tournament. During the first months
that gave some special problems. For me the most important (and also the most surprising)
discovery was that the email connection between two players is dominated by the
connection between the two providers of these two players. I have found out that
 two providers do not always communicate properly with each other. And of course 
not every provider is as good and professional as some other providers.
So quit a number of complaints of some players about the behavior of their
opponents have nothing to do with the behavior of these opponents, but can be
carried back to the electronic relation between their providers. Very often one provider 
is much better and much more professional than the other. While many of us do have
the idea that all providers are the same.

 

It happened many times that player A informed me that he could not send a move
to player B (or that did not get an adequate reaction from player B) and then
asked for meassures against player B. Sometimes I then asked the player A to send
his move to me. I then forwarded the move to player B. And he received it, sent his answer,
and the game could be forwarded for some time in a proper way. So we all
(especially as TD's) should realize this point very strongly: there are all kind of
providers and we don't know what's going on in this  electronic world.
So therefor we absolutely should not reward the distrust of players about the
behavior of their opponents on before hand. There are too many things that
can go wrong between two providers in our new electronic world. 
So first of all in all kind of cases of miscommunication between players we must
try to understand what's going on and then try to solve the problems. 

 

And finally we must support the webserver project, because many of the above mentioned problems will no longer occur once we play our games on the ICCF webserver."