25.04.2006 ALEXANDER KENTLER. CROSSROADS: INFORMATIONAL NONSENSE

The European Championships in Kusadasi finished. This tournament is not only a significant competition that allows qualifying for the World Cup, but also an important opportunity of gaining popularity for Bessel Cock and Ali Nihat Yazici who are running for the FIDE presidential positions. The tournaments ended a week ago, but even now the results of tiebreaks are not published on the official website. The outcome of the last games makes no difference to the organizers. The players came home. Everything is in the past, and the organizers have nothing to do with it anymore.

However, it is simply necessary to consider the spectator. If at least one eccentric looks for the information, which he is interested in, on the particular website that is supposed to grant it, he has the right to take offence at getting nothing.
Forget about Turks. A real chess fest - the club championships of Russia – takes place in Dagomys these days. Men, women, and children – everyone plays chess. There are 131 grandmasters and about twenty outstanding chessplayers among them. There are a lot of interesting games. Many people are interested in the way the struggle in the matches goes on. However, while it is possible to see almost a half of the games live (is it a technically impossible thing to relay the rest of the games?), the results that can be obtained are limited to the games relayed. Let me notice that sometimes the games that were finished are still marked with “is being played”, or instead of a true result a reversed one is published on the website. If you want to learn the scores, you will have to wait for an hour (sometimes less) from the moment of the end of the round, and then complete information is available on the official website of the Russian Chess League. However, you will never know a current score if you are not in Dagomys. By the way, the results of the first round of the junior championship hadn’t been published for two days. 

It is clear why it happens in this way. People who must publish the results on the website, have other duties during the round. Having coped with them and taken a deep breath, they are ready to satisfy the interest of the audience that can wait. Nobody takes into account that it is not good when “the round pairings” is the only thing published on the website for the whole evening. Is it such a big problem to post the results of at least three adult leagues as they arrive? Delay of publishing until late deprives journalists of the opportunity to inform the readers in the morning newspapers. It looks like the organizers who spend a lot of money and efforts on carrying out important competitions in a good place and in favorable conditions, either try to save a dime on keeping the world informed or simply don’t think about it.     

Now it is not worth dwelling on the disadvantages of the online broadcasting of the events played in our country. This is too painful to discuss in just a few lines. Let me only notice that it would be right to gather those concerned about game relays in order to share positive and negative experience. It is necessary to make every broadcast a fest, leaving irritation in the past.