Tournament Committee Report - 31/03/06
Committee Members:
1. Chief Toke Aka -
Chairman
2. Albert Hahn
3. Bob Jackman
The Committee presents an overview on the following:
1. Classification as
an International Scrabble Tournament
2. Role of WESPA in
WSC
3. Development of Scrabble
1.Classification as an International Scrabble Tournament:
In discussing this, two major points came up for discussion:
A. Importance/gains of classifying a tournament as International.
B. Criteria for Classification
A. Importance/Gains
The major importance of calling a tournament international is that it
gets to be rated as an international event while attendees of such get "International Ratings".
The tournament also gets to be listed on a dedicated page on the WESPA
site as an international tournament.
It is believed that the above reasons are primary reasons to attract
players to such events, while secondary reasons have to do with issues such as
location/venue, format of play and prize money.
B. Criteria for Classification
1. Tournament must
use SOWPODS as word source
2. Any team event
between different countries
3. Any tournament
with no more than 50% representation from one country
4. Established and
approved international tournaments, e.g. WSC, African Scrabble Championship
(ASC), Gulf Championship, Kings Cup, etc.
5. Tournaments held
in OSPD countries; Canada, USA, Israel, Thailand
6. Any other
tournament approved by the WESPA tournament committee
The last point infers that our committee could consider applications
from tournament organizers to have their tournament classified as
international. Favourable consideration would thus be given to those
tournaments putting up PRIZE MONEY to attract overseas players, as well as
those piggybacking on established events, e.g. Penang and Sri Lanka.
Consideration is also being given to some National Championships (From
any country), that allow overseas players to participate and also have a
sizeable number of internationally rated players taking part in their
championship.
The matter of rules, timely notice, software in use, number of games,
and tournament director (suggestions as to directors of international
tournaments passing a basic test has been mooted), are points that also require
to be sorted out with time.
2. Role of WESPA in WSC
It is the tournament committee's belief that WESPA certainly should be
a major adviser in future WSCs (for as long as WESPA are not the main
organizers).
WESPA should pursue the eventual taking over the organization of future
WSCs.
On the present structure of participants at the WSC, not much response
has been received on this and the committee has not been able to reach a
position on this either. More work/discussion will be carried out as regards
this.
4. Development of Scrabble
As part of the development of Scrabble internationally, it is
recommended that areas such as the following be looked into:
International rules, unification of tournament pairing software for
international events and format of play /minimum number of games that should be
played at international events.