EL2015 - Rules (Discussions)

In this place we can discuss the EL-rules, and any changes of it.

Current EL2015 rules are available here:
http://www.chess.com/groups/forumview/el2015---rules

During January:
It will be allowed to propose minor changes of the rules for EL2015 during January. Proposals in order to align to World League and Asian League rules will be especially considered.

February and onward
We normally do not change rules during an on-going season. But sometimes (bbut selldom) we may have to clarify rules or slightly adjust them. 

For EL2016
Other proposals will be considered for inclusion into the EL2016-rules (next season). Also major changes can be proposed. Proposals will be listed, and to be further gathered at time for preparing for EL2016.

The list , as to be covered in the preparation for next season:
- Penalties for various kind of rule violations incl. criteria for that
  Example  of situations (more to be added):
  * Players are unfairly/unexplainely removed from their spots before
    roosters get locked.  (reference cases: EL2014 Team England vs
    Team Romania, EL2015 Belarus vs Team Moldova).

EL2015 - Tournament Setup and Rules (proposed)
(J.Palmaer, updated 2015-01-18)

The European League (EL) is the league of European countries and nationalities playing team match tournament on Chess.com. Teams battle it out in fierce competition to determine the European League Champion for each year. The league is arranged by the European Chess Federation.

TOURNAMENT FORMAT

Tournament schedule: The tournament starts by 19th of January 2014, and finish by 31st of December 2014.

European country and national teams are divided into five divisions according to final outcome and rules of EL2014.

I notice division min players per team has been increased in some divisions.

Thanks!

The year for start and finish should be 2015. Now corrected.

But the rules of EL2014 are applied for the promotions to EL2015.
It's always the rules from the previous season (i.e. EL2014 in this case) that gives which promotions we doing for next season (i.e. EL2015 in this case).

Yes, that's a change for EL2015.

                  EL2014   EL2015

Division 1        50 ----> 80
Division 2        30 ----> 40
Division 3        10 ----> 20
Division 4        10 ----> 10

Please remove the sentence

"However, a game lost by time won’t gain a point."

This favours cheaters, and indeed the only person who really and strongly had kept suggesting this rule has by now turned out to be a banned cheater.

And of course it adds an unnecessary complication for calculating the standings --- it had not even been correctly implemented in the standings for last season.

c) If a player repeatedly participating in matches with different teams will these teams lose ALL the individual games the player have played or is playing. Team admins must detect and report such players.

I am afraid the last sentence is not realistic. Please do try to find/implement an automated central way for detection. This might even turn out to be very easy in cooperation with www.chessleagues.com/

, especially if match link collections are updated regularly.

Seem like yneves (founder of www.chessleagues.com) not been able make it yet. If he make it then we'll apply it.

Yes. We'd some support last season during the spring, but not in the autumn. If someone are willing and able for support in this, that would be really great.

"Clear win" vs "Tie" - for 10 boards matches 1 point means 10%. That's more than enough for a "Clear win", IMHO.

P.S. Sorry for posting so late here, but the idea of checking the existing rules just crossed my mind ...

@DorinN69 - the 'Clear Win' rule has always been a bit of an anomaly to the European League. However their does not appear to be a mechanism to get rid of it.

I know rikldn, Johan is quite inflexible sometimes ... However, from my experience I know he can be convinced by the way of repeated arguments

:-) Well...no change in this for this season..
The clear win rule seem to work fine. The European League has become a competetive tourney, and the clear win rule is one of the components that contributes to it. Remember that we'd a lot of cheating in the previous seasons, and the rule is something that - together with other rules - contributes to make less sence of any cheating. Don't forget that some cheaters doing more or less anything to gain a few points more in order to make wins.

it's a good idea

Johan,
You might misunderstood me, I have nothing against the rule, just that for 10-20-30 boards match, 2 points it's too much

The level is set to 2 due to if you later on find yet another cheater in the match troups, which may would had lead to a switch of the entire match result.

Let's look at this:

Case 1/ 10 pairs, where Team A vs Team B = 10.5-9.5  (diff 1 point)
Case 2/ 20 pairs, where Team A vs Team B = 20.5-19.5 (diff 1 point)
Case 3/ 30 pairs, where Team A vs Team B = 30.5-29.5 (diff 1 point)

Let's assume that yet a cheater later on are detected in Team A, and who played against a non-cheater and won this games with 2-0.

It would lead to following switches of the match results:

Case 1/ 8.5-11.5  (diff 3 points)
Case 2/ 18.5-21.5 (diff 3 points)
Case 3/ 28.5-31.5) diff 3 points)

Is it really fair that Team A wins the matches if yet another cheater later on would be detected in that team?

To me it seem more fair that to give the scores 1-1 in matches that are very even, i.e. not a clear win like above, even though cheaters could be detected later on which may had result in a switch to 0-2.

I agree that in even larger matches with more players could it be reasonable to require even larger wins in order to make it more even. But as for now we assuming the probability to later on to find yet another cheaters are on a similar level for all teams (even though may not actually are so).

I'm aware that the clear win rule impacting quit a lot on smaller games with fewer pairs in the lower divisions. But the outcome is that we are even better able to detect the clear fair winners in the lower divisions.
But on other hand, in higher divisions are there less frequency of very even matches. (Saying: the clear win rule doesn't matter so much for the teams in the higher divisions).

To me it seem like the clear win rule makes the tourney more fair as it better detects which teams are the real winners. I believe it contributes to make the games less affected by cheating, and to ensure that smaller teams don't get heavily affected by it. It also gives that smaller teams in the longer terms get the opportunity improving without any help by any cheaters.

@johanpalmaer ,

I do understand your point of view and I really appreciate that you take time to reply. Thanks ! As I was saying, I am not against the rule. However I hardly see any contribution against cheating, but on contrary, for smaller teams. From the side of the devil's advocate, wouldn't some be tempted to score more against the opponents just to be sure they win ? Just a thought ...

Dear colleagues, 

I’m asking your opinion about a cheating situation that happened yesterday in a EL match: Team Moldova vs Team Belarus http://www.chess.com/groups/team_match?id=497574.

In brief, an admin of the Team Belarus excluded 12 players from 29 registered from his team. Because of this, 24 players from both team couldn't play their games and Team Moldova was disadvantaged by an unbalanced tables rating.

On the one hand, this is a violation of EL rules, and on other hand, this is a total lack of fairplay.

Should we tolerate such tricks or not? Is the EL a serious international tournament or we are just wasting time here? 

Thank you in advance for your thoughts!

Traian, admin of Team Moldova

It is extremely difficult to believe that the Team Belarus admins excluded almost half of their team (12 people, while there are 18 boards) for any common sense reason.

This kind of incidents appear every year and are popularised either on WL or EL forums, thus it is hard to believe the admins of an old team are not informed about the rules of not "fixing" the team for official matches. Even if there was no rule, the common sense would tell the same thing.

In my oppinion this should not be tolerated.

Looking forward for a logical decision from EL Director.

Servus bumika , koszonom szepen !

Due to the grace of colleague bumika (thanks again) anybody can clearly see the fixing. Compairing the actual match boards and the list supplied gracefully by bumika, one can notice Team Belarus added several top players and deleted from its rooster all the chess players under 1700 rating, except one. 

This is cheating, not with software, but with fixing boards.

Johan, I do expect a win by default for Team Moldova, as the official Tournaments needs to be consistent in the fight against cheating, whatever cheating methods are.