Moonlighting

I've recently been asked to play for two different Chess Teams. I agreed because there do not seem to be any rules against belonging to two different teams - albeit a conflict of interest should the two be pitted one against the other. I would like to know if anyone else is on more than one team and how they would cope with this dilemma.

Is 'team' the same thing as 'group'?

I'm not sure but I believe so.

Interesting thought. I am a member of more than one team and could theoretically end up playing myself! I suppose (hope) that there are safeguards in place to avoid that. Maybe if I pick one team in a particular match I will not be able to choose the other or perhaps I will be unable to participate in the match at all.

From my limited experience, a team is a subset of a group that is actually participating in a Team Match against another team (presumably from another group - I'm not aware that two teams can play each other inside the same group). Many members here are members of more than one group (http://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/group-hysteria).

The question of what would actually happen if you tried to join BOTH teams in a Team Match between two groups you belonged to (raised in post #9 here - http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/groups) has not been resolved.

we're going to make it so that you can't be on both teams and play a team match

Yo,I play for a few teams,but if they are playing each other I'll play for the team that I joined first, end of story!

I think it could be considered sportsmanlike to not play if both your teams are pitted against each other. Apart from that I don;t see a problem really.

Thanks, Erik, much appreciated. Although, I probably would have otherwise opted for abstention.

Yes! 

and No! (see post #5).

I think at CC it's the same,in groups we play team matchs,it's just two different words for the same meaning,in reality, there is a difference but not here!

I agree there's not usually much difference in practice, but they are fundamentally different - even here at chess.com. A group is a static entity (like your blood group, your nationality, your hair colour, etc.) that persists until you leave. It is analagous to a football CLUB.

A team is a dynamic entity - a short-term, transient set of people assembled for the specific purpose of a Team Match. You can participate within several teams simultaneously (and you can belong to several groups simultaneously).

A team only has significance in relation to a second team (from a different group). If I belong to both the Apples and Pears groups, I can be in (A) the Apples' team against the Pears, (B) a second Apples' team against the Oranges, and (C) a Pears' team against a third Apples' team.

Although as Wittgenstein wrote, 'meaning is use', so in that view practical application is where we derive our understanding of the terms.

This view gets a lot complicated when you take 'use' to mean an amalgam of all applications that have been put into practice, as opposed to whatever use in context is on the table at the time, but either way, in this sense both 'teams' and 'groups' are 'dynamic entities'.

In THAT sense (if sense is the right word to do justice to what you have written), everything is dynamic. But some things (and people) are more dynamic than others.

'Sense' may or may not do justice to what I wrote, but it certainly does little justice to what Wittgenstein expounded at length, and rather beautifully, in Philisophical Investigations. He talks more accurately of 'language games' being in one early explanation 'the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven'.

Of course he does use 'sense', or rather its German equivalent, for instance when tackling the problem of different sentences seeming to have the same sense: 'But doesn't the fact that sentences have the same sense consist in their having the same use?' They are variations on a theme.

It seems to me to be a truism that everything is indeed dynamic. If you're talking about language, then that dynamism must be curbed at some point for the analysis to be fruitful. That doesn't change the essential dynamism, however.

In the case of teams and groups here, it could well be said that if a team is a subset of a group, then if the team is dynamic, some element of the overall character of the main set, the group is shown to be dynamic. Is, then, the group at least as dynamic as one of its subsets (one of the teams)? Or would you say it has some further characteristic of immutability that renders it less dynamic?

The rate of change of a thing is part of its essence. Would you classify a glacier as static or dynamic? It depends on the time scale, surely. Over centuries, a glacier doesn't change much. Over millennia, it could change quite a lot.

Chess.com groups probably have a life-span of months - if not years. Chess.com teams probably have an average life span of weeks (or days in some cases). The membership of groups is constantly changing but at a slow rate. The membership of a team is fixed once it starts to play.

Dynamic and static were not a good choice of descriptors on my part. A group is like a river: slow moving, slow to change, persistent, the repository of identity. A team is like an ice-cube: a microcosm of the group. Inheriting the group's values and aims. Formed for a particular purpose. Transient.

Looked at that way, an individual team is more static than its parent group. Taking teams as a whole: they form, do a job, melt away. Conceptually, TEAMS have a greater dynamism than the owning group.

Regarding the original moonlighting question, in my experiences, the set-up is currently:

In Team Matches, if you belong to both groups, you may not enter the Team Match for either side.

In Vote Chess, if you belong to both groups, you may pick which of the two Teams you wish to join.  If at any point you leave the game, you may not re-enter on either side.