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The Delegates’ Meeting and Hoosiers Score above 50% at US Open.

Published on 8/12/2016

Terry Winchester (Web Editor) and I represented Indiana as delegates to 2017 Delegates Meeting on Sat/Sun in Indy. These meetings have a lot of minutiae brought up, many motions are referred to other committees, withdrawn and declared “Moot” because of previous motions. There are many “characters” at these meetings including Tim Just, many of you may know, who every time he steps to a microphone will simply say "Call the motion" when debate has gone on too long, but I think they are the biggest collections of chess brains in the US also.

 

One motion that passed this year (I don`t know when it will take effect though [editor: All rule changes take effect Jan 2017]) is that an erroneously set delay or increment on a clock should be corrected for the rest of the game.

 

A big issue this year was an attempt modify Term Limits language in the By-laws. As it stands now (after this meeting) no Board member can serve more than 9 consecutive years and would have to be off the Board for a year before running for reelection.

 
A rule was clarified that Time Pressure does not exist with a delay or increment set to 30 seconds. One thing this means is that scorekeeping is still required in the final 5 minutes of time control. It also means that the tournament director may call, and correct, illegal moves during this time, as well as at any time during the game.
 
Regarding the above mention of correcting illegal moves, the main rule is that the director may call attention to illegal moves, no matter whether or not the director is able to witness all illegal moves. This is USCF Rule 11H in the 6th edition of the rulebook. 11H1 is the variation that allows the director to abstain from calling illegal moves, and has not been modified.

 

An interesting  problem corrected this year was that  many Club and Local TDs apparently have applied for and been granted National Arbiter licenses by FIDE. The delegates felt that these TDs did not have enough experience to be NAs and their licenses were revoked or suspended.

 
Text in italics is that of Winchester.

 

Many Hoosiers finished above 50% at the Open this year. Here is a list:

 
6.5 6.0 5.5 5.0
Monokroussos, D.     Dean, J.  Porter, A.  Ariel, O.
   Gater, D.        Parham, B.
   Bousum, J.     Coffey, J.
     Galstain, A.
       Hollinberger, D.
       Parham II, B.
       Herr, J.
       Banta, B.
       Bjorklund, M.