All, Those of you that were at tour 4 this year will have been aware of complications, those of you that weren't probably heard about them. This is the decisions made after the event following some official complaints from teams. I apologise for the delay in this, missive, but recently I haven't had the time to follow this through until now. There were three issues that arose from T4; the late withdrawal from the tournament by a Clapham team, the incorrect seeding of LeedsLeedsLeeds, and the consequence that some teams only played four games. 1. The late withdrawal from Clapham. The rules on this are very clear. "Lose 5% of final ranking score PER DAY (including the Monday) to be deducted at the end of the tour." Therefore Clapham 2 (the team that withdrew) withdrawing on the Thursday lose 20% of their final ranking score. Clapham 2 are also blacklisted for the next tour event - the rules are very specific in that a team cannot be blacklisted for National Finals. (Check the Tour rules for what exactly is meant by blacklisting). However it was decided by the committee that to then seed Clapham 2 for Nationals (should they wish to attend) according to the position after penalties had been deducted would skew the seeding unnecessarily, and unreasonably. Therefore Nationals would be seeded based on points score before penalties (which applies to all teams with penalties). That Clapham 2 finished 8th is due to their involvement in less than all four tours, like a number of other teams, which is each teams individual! choice. This in itself may skew the rankings, however to artificially alter them would cause further problems. I wish to applaud Clapham, and particularly RT, for the manner in which they conducted themselves over the incident. They have repeatedly apologised and accepted with good grace the penalties imposed, and were aware enough of the rules to be able to tell me what they expected any penalty to be. Whilst having the seedings altered before Nationals with a points penalty might actually benefit the Clapham 2 team, they were able to see the problems that this might cause other teams, and felt that this would benefit the majority of players, and not just their own. 2. The incorrect seeding of LeedsLeedsLeeds. The rules did not foresee such an event as a such the u8c had to set a precedent. The withdrawal of Clapham did leave a space in the top 8 group, and LLL were the logical team to fill this, but all teams should have simply shuffled up a slot. The placing of LLL at 4th was unacceptable. Whilst I was not available for consultation, any member of the u8c would have been able to advise the TD's of this, as would any member of the BUF committee. Therefore it was decided to penalise LLL 36 points for the infraction. This decision is not a punitive decision based on a number of reasons, however the main reasoning is that tour was not organised by LLL as a team, instead it was run by a number of individuals, with the core members are part of LLL. To drastically penalise or disqualify a team for a mistake made by one of its members running an event is liable to have an negative effect on those groups or people who are prepared to organise a tour event - why run an event if a mistake by you will hurt your team. Instead the T4 organisers should consider this a slap on the wrists with more sever penalties if this occurs again in the future. Apart from this error, made under pressure as time ran out, the T4 event was superbly run, and a great contribution to the years tour. Without out the organisation of Arum, Rik and others there would have been far fewer events on the Calendar this year, and for that we thank them. 3. Teams who only played 4 games. During the season, a number of teams may only play five games in a tour event, without compensation. This is unfortunate and is a by product of trying to accommodate so many teams. Attempts are made in scheduling to avoid this occurring to teams too often, but this cannot always be prevented as teams move up, or down the seedings. To have teams only play four games in one tournament is unacceptable for the costs paid. The T4 organisers agreed with this has have agreed to give those teams only playing four games a partial refund (and I understand this has already happened). Thank you all for your patience in this, and whilst I am aware that this is not to everyone's satisfaction, it should meet with approval from the majority of teams. Chris Hughes (DoC)
