I don’t know which schedule Lenderman played in. The start date for the tournament was June 29. According to the FIDE Handbook, 0.22:
"0.22 Any such changes shall take effect from 1 July of the year following the decision by the General Assembly. For tournaments, such changes shall apply to those starting on or after that date. "
Well this becomes one of those sticky widgets. I’m willing to bet that rule will be (or has been) interpreted that the start of a schedule is in effect the start of a tournament.
But what’s baffling is the retroactive status unless that was a typo in an email.
Do we still know whose norms were affected by this?
1.1
For a game to be rated each player must have the following minimum periods in which to complete all the moves, assuming the game lasts 60 moves.
Where at least one of the players in the tournament has a rating 2200 or higher, each player must have a minimum of 120 minutes.
Where at least one of the players in the tournament has a rating 1600 or higher, each player must have a minimum of 90 minutes.
Where all the players in the tournament are rated below 1600, each player must have a minimum of 60 minutes.
1.2 Games played with all the moves at a rate faster than the above are excluded from the list.
1.3 Where a certain number of moves is specified in the first time control, it shall be 40 moves. Players benefit from uniformity here.
So as an example with what I did before - if no one is 2200 or higher you can do G/60 + 30/sec increment based on the rules above (because +30/sec based on a game of 60 moves is an additional 90 minutes and using the increment is much better instead of G/90 because players still have to take score).
You could get a full 10-player, 9R-RR event in a 3-day weekend. 6 players with no FIDE rating and 4 players with a FIDE rating and as long as all the non-FIDE rated players score a total of 1 point against anyone in the field, the 6 non-FIDE rated players will have a FIDE rating after the event.
*Note, for non-norm tournaments you can do 3 rounds per day. For norm bearing tournaments maximum 2 per day.
FIDE’s refusal to allow delay (in norm events), while still promoting increment, is a little less illogical than it may at first seem.
They probably want to standardize on a single form of time addback, in games which use addback. Hence, increment is in, delay is out.
For old-time players and organizers, games not using any kind of addback are still allowed (but probably not for long, I’d guess).
There are plenty of other illogical new rules, though. For example, 40/120 SD/30 is legal, as is 40/120 SD/60, but not 40/120 SD/45? If 30 and 60 are both legal, why shouldn’t anything in between also be legal?
Keep in mind that in many European events where norms are possible (even a good number where they are not) equipment is provided by the organizer which includes an increment capable clock.
I think everyone assumed that the rule couldn’t possibly mean that 40/2, SD/1 is allowed, but 40/2, SD/1 with 5-second delay is not allowed, because that seems to make no sense. It was pretty reasonable to assume that the omission of time-delay was just a typo or an oversight, and not a deliberate prohibition. In fact, if time delay were being suddenly outlawed, I would have expected to see something like “No time delay shall be permitted in any of these time controls” (as this would constitute a major departure from the previous policy).
At this point what’s done is done. We can’t change the past. The question is what is the USCF going to do, if anything moving forward on this topic given that other than official changes at FIDE meetings the only other way is to get one off permission from the Qualification Commission.
The other question is what will organizers do to address it until a resolution is reached, if at all, by discussions between USCF and FIDE?