OPENING DISCOURS

ICCF Congress 2017 – Albena, Bulgaria

Monday, 4th September 2017.

Distinguished Guests, dear Members of the Bulgarian Chess Federation, dear Delegates, Member federation delegation members and accompanying persons, dear ICCF officials, ladies and gentleman,

May I first of all thank M. Mr.Ruslan Yordanov - Sports Director of Albena for those very kind words of welcome and for your great support of this Congress and our Bulgarian correspondence chess friends for your warm welcome.

It is my great pleasure that an ICCF Congress is being held here for the second time in Bulgaria, after our first meeting in Pleven ten years ago. I would like to thank all the members of the committee of the Bulgarian Correspondence Chess Federation for their dedicated work in for the Congress preparation and especially Petyo Marinov who has been instrumental in the long preparation work throughout this year.

I can also add the names of Alexander Kiprov and Prof. Sapundjiev – who were awarded the Bertl of Massow Gold medal.

I would also like to mention our Honorary Member and World Champion Fritz Baumbach (GER) who is attending this year his 30th Congress in a row. Congratulations! In the recent years I can only think of Nol Van’t Riet (NED) having reached the same record.

During this year, we have lost some friends.

  • Bojan Fajs (SLO)
  • Tõnu Tiits (EST)
  • Petr Boukal (CZE)
  • Andris Roze (LAT)
  • Two world champions Hans Berliner (USA) and Joop van Oosterom (NED)

Could I ask you to stand for a moment, in silence, in respect to these CC friends and other players and officials who passed away in the last year.

One minute silence

I will highlight three topics that we will discuss during this Congress.

The first and the most important I think for our players are the tournaments. I am very proud to report that our tournaments are more and more popular and I thank all TOs, TDs and officials for that great achievement. In 2016 the number of players who have entered a tournament has increased by about 20% which is mainly due to the tremendous success of the Direct Entry 10 years anniversary. It is worth to note that the number of DE entry has exceeded 3000 (an average of more than 9 entries every day!). This trend seems to continue in 2017, the last Veteran World Cup has reached a record of 708 entries. When we will discuss topics related to tournaments (organization, rules, calendar,…) we should never forget that our goal is the satisfaction of our customers.

For the first time since many years we have received the application for membership from the Indonesian Federation and we are excited to welcome their delegate, Yousu Sitorus to Congress. I wish to thank all officials who have worked many months to make that happen and also inform Congress that progress are made with groups of players from Mexico and Serbia that hopefully will result in an application for membership in the coming years.

A more controversial subject will probably be the discussion about the new Zonal concept. I would like the thanks the Zonal Working group that I have set up this year to come up with a first step in the modernization of ICCF zonal systems that dates back to the postal area. Apologies for Gino.

We need to develop a new concept for our zonal system.

Finally I would like to welcome new friends attending Congress for the first time and all delegates, delegation members, accompanying persons and families for coming to Albena and wish them a productive and very enjoyable week here in Albena

46th ICCF Congress, Bulgaria 2017, duly open 

Could I now ask you all to stand for the playing of the ICCF Anthem