I never really noticed this before even though it has been there for years, but can I make a suggestion that we consider raising the minimum number of games to 10, for a player to be able to join a team match, for next season?
No competition promoting fairness should have a 0 minimum number of games requirement for people to take part. Even 10 games is not necessarily enough for people to have gained a non-provisional rating, but it's at least a sensible compromise.
Good idea. Thank you. I will discuss it with the other County Championship organisers.
That's a really interesting point from @glamdring27 about a minimum daily game requirement. I can see reasons for and against introducing it.
At Team Buckinghamshire we've coincidentally introduced a club rule that to join you must have played 10 daily games or been on Chess.com for 6 months or be recommended by a current member. This was introduced to guarantee that we have serious players who are more likely to operate within the rules and also reduce chances of having a lot of time outs. We've recruited a high % of players this season who haven't played Daily before but are established at Rapid/Blitz. This means that the order of our line ups has looked very different as the season has progressed, which is in line with glamding27's excellent point about the fairness of having underrated (literally!) players on lower boards while having your weaker but established players (that's me!) on a board too high.
The downside is that it will make recruitment trickier. I should say that I may be biased here as Bucks has the 4th smallest membership in the county leagues so my experience may be very different from the other clubs. Where we have actively found & recruited frequent Blitz/Rapid players they've joined because of the lure of playing for their county in the fantastic leagues. I don't think that we'd have got many people if we insisted on them playing 10 games before making their league debut. If this rule was in place I feel that most admins would spend the summer having to organise a lot of friendlies so that new members met the minimum rule, particularly with the volume of OTB players coming online. In addition, while the rule may make sense in the main county league/cup it's seems a bit contradictory in a U1200 league, which seems a great way to bring new players on board, many who will have a low rating through lack of experience - would it be fair to have different rules in different leagues?
I'm not sure what the answer is but this is always the difficult thing with trying to achieve fairness, changing one thing always has repercussions!
Please read update to rule 15 (part b) Thank you.
15b)4 months after the start of a cup match if a team hasn’t achieved an unassailable lead then the match will be judged on the current position in order to allow a team to proceed to the next round.