Where is the philosophical divide?

I am grateful for the phone calls, SMSes and emails of support. I am grateful for the few comments of support on this blog and shout boxes. I do realise that most people have more important things to do than to shout in shout boxes. Anyway its a waste of time to write many many times in different guises to project an illusion of numbers. I much rather we sit down and seriously think how we can move our chess forward. More importantly, how we can contribute.

But where is the real divide? This is not a Raymond vs Jimmy, Rationality or Chess Ninja issue. They are not important to me. The development of chess is important to me. This is about the chess community waking up and taking responsibility for the way things are. During the Asean initiative we saw the problems. That was a National project. FGM lost money on this but we didnt mind because it was for the Country.

We will make our money from other projects. But what we saw as a problem was that other people didnt see it this way. They saw it as a way to make money out of FGM. They saw it as a way to pass all the work to FGM and then ride on the success of the project if possible.

That is the divide. We all want improvements but we want someone else to do it. FGM will work with others if we are all sharing the work but not otherwise.

Like I said, if we want the community to prosper, then we must sacrifice and roll up our sleeves too. If that is the case, you can count on us to do our part.

But FGM cannot carry everyone. I stated this after Asean. Nothing has changed. I will continue to write and hopefully one day more will step up to undertake National events. Otherwise FGM will focus on its commercial events. I think those that benefit from chess should give something back.

The stance is for the issues not the personalities. If we think deeply about this, this is also about our players taking responsibility for their game. They need to do the work and think rationally on the board. They must make courageous decisions to win. Not say why we should draw when up against an opponent 300 points higher when we are winning on the board and then write about other Countries/players that took down even stronger players.

This is about that. We need to believe we can first and then we need to do. We need to move away from asking someone else to do things for us. That FGM will not do. That is the philosophical divide.