Saturday, February 04, 2006

Unlucky Lukey

Well, it remains to be seen.

As a continuation to our Abnormal Norm story, we can now confirm that New Zealand's FM Stephen Lukey played only 4 titled players at the Queenstown Chess Classic. His titled opponents were GM Rogers and IMs Zhao, Lane and Van Riemsdijk. Thus he failed to meet the 5-titled opponents requirement for the IM norm.

It is worth quoting Peter Parr's words again:

THE FIDE Qualifications Commission were aware of the old rule that if two players competed in a Swiss event and played exactly the same opponents with exactly the same results, exactly the same performance rating it was absurd that one player (if a FIDE Master) scores a norm and the other non titled player does not get a norm. This was abolished and rightly so.

New South Wales Chess Association president, Bill Gletsos, shares Mr Parr's opinion. But most interesting is what grandmaster Ian Rogers informed Aussie chess fans in Australia's most lively chess bulletin board:

Regarding Igor's IM norm:
Advice was received (from overseas) before norms for Bjelobrk and Lukey had been achieved that the rules for title norms had been simplified in late 2004 with the wording about including your own title as part of your field no longer included. Since they had a valid norm under the old rules, it was advised that an application to the Titles Commission from the NZ Chess Federation to have possible Bjelobrk and Lukey titles norms approved (they hadn't actually been achieved at that stage) would most likely be accepted because it had never been intended by the Titles Commission that a norm which would have been valid 18 months ago should suddenly become not a norm because the wording about including your own title was no longer in the new rules.

I guess we'll have to wait and see. But I'd bet that Bjelobrk and Lukey will not have their norms approved. Let's just think about this. There was presumably a good reason why FIDE changed the rules. See Parr quote. So why in the world would FIDE, even as a one-off, suddenly ignore their own "current" rules?

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