From: bogin YAHOO CO JP> Date: 13 dec 2002 Subject: Re: Proposal I am still not sure what anyone would have to gain by "cheating" in this type of event. If the final is going to be somewhere in Europe and if all the participants are going to have to pay their own expenses then cheating only gets you the opportunity to pay lots of money to play in a tournament where the fact that you've cheated will be painfully exposed for all to see. Isn't safe to assume that most of the players playing in such a tournament will be strong enough that they don't have to cheat. After all, don't they hold strong world- championship level postal chess tournaments all of the time and I don't seem to think they have a problem with cheating. It seems this high level of play cheating would be more of a disadvantage than it's worth. Also, I'm not assuming that the qualification for the round robin would be an open tournament for all to play in. You could have at least 1 representative from each of the member countries of FESA and the USSF play in a sort of a A Class Jun-I Sen (ladder tournament) like the Japanese Pro's do. This could be done over the Internet. Of course there may be some lower dans mixed in there but more than likely they won't survive the Jun-I Sen tournament. Since this is the first year, the top 4 could meet in a round robin type tournament face to face to decide the winner. The winner would be champion and the other 3 would automatically be seeded back into the upcoming year's Jun-I Sen tournament. Then in previous years only the top finisher in the Jun-I Sen would advance to match with the current champion. This is the way that most of the good Internet sites run their tournaments and they seem to work fine. Would something like that work? Bill Gaudry __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! BB is Broadband by Yahoo! http://bb.yahoo.co.jp/