Peter Long on Chess

When organising the KL Open (and now the Raja Nazrin Shah Individual Masters & International Open 2011) each year, I am constantly amazed how so many chessplayers wishing to play just cannot do simple things like fill in the entry form. I get players who can find me on Facebook and then messaging me that they will play. But not only do they not give me essential information to facilitate their entry such as their rating and title but they also have incredible difficulty getting out of Facebook and to the website I give them to get details of the event. (And of course they cannot understand why they need to send me an email let alone the entry form and let's not even pretend to get into making payment of the entry fee). These chessplayers don't read very well either because they miss seeing the actual dates and the schedule and they even often ask about how to get to the website where they first saw the information about the event. Of course there are also those who h

Of course FIDE constantly changes the rules so I may be mistaken but I have long understood that a rating and/or title tournament needs to be published on the FIDE calendar a month in advance and that has to be done by the National Chess Federation's rating administrator (who has been given access to the system). With the Raja Nazrin Shah Invitational Masters and Raja Nazrin Shah International Open, as in the previous KL Opens and in the many events overseas where I was the Chief Arbiter, the information needed to facilitate this registration was provided early to the National Chess Federation which in this case is the Malaysian Chess Federation (MCF). In fact I was informed that this had already been done by both the MCF Secretary and the MCF Ratings Officer but when I checked the FIDE website on Sunday morning, I saw, much to my surprise, that the various Malaysian Chess Festival events were indeed posted but not the Raja Nazrin Shah tournaments even though we certainly anno

Looking back at how successful the KL Open has been over the last three years, I was talking to KLCA President Dato' Sri Edmund Santhara whose Masterskill Education Group has long sponsored the event and after having made the decision to rename the event after our patron Raja Nazrin Shah who has supported us year in year out, I thought that we should take a hard look at our local chess scene and see if indeed the current format made any sense. Frankly, I had delayed the KL Open this year as along as possible to see if indeed there would be a Malaysian Open and with three months to go simply had to make an announcement but now it seems it is on again and that can only be good news for the local chess community and so I do want to congratulate the man I correctly called "an embarrassment and a real disgrace" over his antics leading up and during the FIDE election for successfully getting the old man to fork out once again. So we have decided to step back as we are no l