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.