Important announcement.

Ref: Here.

Hazard warning. The link above leads to a very toxic site and only visit if you are ready to see what these people subject our young chess players to.

But if you really want to know why Malaysian chess has reached such historic lows then you need to go no further than a proper evaluation of the recent National Junior. Without objective evaluation or postmortems you cannot arrive at the basis for improvement. So that is the very first thing you want from your coach. If he is unable to evaluate objectively then he will be unable to take your child any further and will be addressing the wrong problems.

So I will be doing this shortly as soon as I have cleared up a little more work. In the meantime do think of what the National Junior is supposed to be about. The National Junior is meant to find the strongest Juniors in Malaysia for the current year. This means any player under 20 can play for that honour. So you can be 12yo for instance and still be the strongest Junior for that year by beating any other player at 20yo for instance.

As such it can highlight exceptional talent outside of age groups. And so one would think it is logical that more emphasis will be put on this group as opposed to the age groups. For really it is within this group that we will find the players for the new senior team for they will be the very closest in terms of the completion of skills and knowledge for that challenge.

I will leave you with this question before I return with a complete evaluation together with examples of competitor analysis.

The question is why do we send out 4 official players for age group events and only one National Junior for International competition?

To look at this question intelligently you must also realise that MCF does not offer any sponsorship to any Junior players, age group or otherwise. The money for the trips are arranged by the parents. So why only send out one player at Junior level indeed when there is no output from MCF at all? What does MCF lose? And now it looks like the policy is only to support the players by arranging International Tournaments only up to U16. Does this make any sense?

Note: There is sponsorship for the senior team arranged by MCF. This is a big clue to the above policy that now involves MCF, the sponsors and the senior players.

Another fact you must also know is that the greatest amount of learning the Juniors get is when they are pitched against International competitors as a group. By this I mean that when it is likely that any of them may face the same competitor, then what happens is that the players will join forces and share knowledge in order to take on the superior players from overseas with access to much better support than our Malaysian players have. I saw this happen at Asean 2010 and to an extent at Asian Youth 2011.

Think this through and you will understand much better what I have to say about the National Junior and why we have gone from teaching China at one time to where we are today. See you again soon.