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01-09-2013, 02:26 PM
All-play-all are great and everyone enjoys them, but the problem is that they are so damn expensive. If you have three professional players then you have to cover travel, accommodation and allow them to make a profit, either through prize money (or they would generally prefer a fee). Sponsorship is pretty unlikely to be significant unless you are very very lucky, so you are left with 7 players to raise a significant sum from and some of these will have to be foreign and/or FMs. That makes the economics really tough.
It isn't too hard to come up with creative ways of getting round this, but putting it into practice is all a different matter. Here is an idea that you can use, you have two teams of nine players who play against each other
Team A 3 GMs 4 FMs 2 2200's
Team B 3 IMs 2 FMs 4 2100+
In this way you organise a GM norm tournament and an IM norm tournament, but you can get away without paying the IMs (much) because their fee is a chance for a GM norm. That leaves you with 12 fee paying punters to cover the cost of the GMs, and the venue and the arbiters and the FIDE fees and the phonecalls and the entry forms. OK, so not an economic masterstroke, but possibly more viable.
It isn't too hard to come up with creative ways of getting round this, but putting it into practice is all a different matter. Here is an idea that you can use, you have two teams of nine players who play against each other
Team A 3 GMs 4 FMs 2 2200's
Team B 3 IMs 2 FMs 4 2100+
In this way you organise a GM norm tournament and an IM norm tournament, but you can get away without paying the IMs (much) because their fee is a chance for a GM norm. That leaves you with 12 fee paying punters to cover the cost of the GMs, and the venue and the arbiters and the FIDE fees and the phonecalls and the entry forms. OK, so not an economic masterstroke, but possibly more viable.