New Met League aquires more brain cells

This weekend was a good one. Ken and I had a chance to discuss New Met League with Bernardo of Boylston CC (BCC blog: http://boylston-chess-club.blogspot.com/ - BCC website: http://world.std.com/~boylston/) as well as Robert Oresick of Boston Univ CC (website: http://buchess.org/). They agreed to work with us to flesh out the concept, and help on rules, in addition to tapping into their membership to gauge interest. Thanks to Bernardo, Robert, Ken and John for adding brain cells to the effort!

A key and interesting point is the difference between head-to-head "live" competition (as in USCL), vs several simultaneous team games via correspondence chess webserver. If you calculate the USCL has a 10 week cycle plus 3 weeks for playoffs, we could get a lot more games under our belt using a correspondence webserver. Plus, the physical coordination is reduced, since players don't have to reserve an exact start time on a webserver, and stay for the duration (effectively using an additional weeknight). More games means more teams and greater OTB Club participation. Of course this isn't for everyone, but interested Clubs should be able to field four players to make a team.

Also Danna Alarie of Greater Worcester CC (website: http://www.chesspals.com/index.html) gave the nod last night to participate in an inaugural match. The full set of folks involved in discussion are:

• Punxsutawney CC - John Caliguire and his team
• MetroWest CC - my Club, and we're recruiting players during July
• Greater Worcester CC - Donna Alarie needs a flyer to help recruit (I'm making a flyer today)
• Pittsburgh CC ? Other Western PA? - John and his team will be talking with these folks next weekend, and they are optimistic. Since Pitt has a working Met League, we could sure use their expertise in scaling this one up.
  
• Boylston CC - Bernardo will help with rules/organization, and start discussing this and see if they want to field a team
• Boston Univ CC - Robert will help with rules/organization, and I think he might try to recruit
• Sven Brask CC - I'm still waiting to hear back from them

I'll be setting up a website using the MetroWest CC infrastructure as soon as I get FrontPage. We'll need this for basic communication, and later for marketing.

That's it for now.