We all knew an axe was going to fall, but I think even the most
pessimistic of us felt it would probably be about 10-11 employees and
not 17, including the entire publications management staff.

I had a feeling that Anson and Kurzdorfer might be targeted. Chess Life
has been roundly criticized for several years, and Kurzdorfer was
editing the magazine from Buffalo. Anson was a major figure in the
Sherry fiasco, and there were huge numbers of mistakes just in the TLA's
this past month pointed out by Bill Goichberg.

I met Peter in Framingham, and found him to be a nice guy.
Unfortunately, we are past the point of no return and what is needed now
is a heavy to gut the personnel line. That's where CPA's come in. They
are dollars and cents guys and when push comes to shove, the axe has to
fall and someone has to make the call of who it falls on.

I seriously doubt that Chess Life will be produced for the rest of this
calendar year, although there may be one issue in the pipeline for
September (October Issue).

Perhaps now is the time to consider what the future of Chess Life should
be? Is it time to make Chess Life, plain, vanilla, with few
photographs, on newsprint rather than glossy paper and much shorter in
length.

Strangely the firing of 17 employees in a single day, may prove to be
the easiest and most straightforward decision to be made in a long line
of excruciating decisions that will be made between now and the next
Summer. The immediate bottom line impact of personnel savings can be
seen. This doesn't take into account that these are human beings with
families, children and lives. I am encouraged a bit by the comment that
they may be brought back if things turn around. I hope that they
survive this and are able to perservere.

Whose ox will be gored next? I'm betting that it will be scholastic
rating fees, which will be seriously increased, so that the USCF will
actually start making rather than losing money on them.

I can hear the grumbling already starting in scholastic la-la lands
everywhere. I'm sure from Connecticut to Florida, and from Mississippi
to Texas and from Arizona to California, there will be talk of armed
revolt by the coaches and organizers who must endure these outrageous
price increases on their 10 cents/game fees. Why there's one equipment
dealer in Texas who might not be able to afford a big screen TV for his
mansion if rating fees go to 30 cents/game for scholastic chess
tournaments.

The immediate need was to reduce expenses and personnel is almost always
the largest expense of any organization. The real question will be
whether 23 employees can even cope with the workload that 40 could not
cope with for several years?

Best Regards,

Bruce

I may have jumped the gun on my previous post about a ratings service.
Sounds to me like this is about all the USCF is going to do for now on.

Losing the magazine will be dramatic, and sad, but it hasn't been a very
good magazine for many years, although I liked Kurzdorfer, and lord knows he
tried--but you can't polish a turd. The rag has got to be killing any
chances at profitability.

The Internet has killed any chances at running a "books and boards"
mail-order house. Amazaon, along with its used book affiliations, can get
you just about any book on chess ever printed. And the sets and clocks can
be had from at least a dozen good Internet dealers who've been way ahead of
the USCF on the e-commerce game.

The ICC has the ****tiest, cheapest interface around (and it's a slap to
every member that they never improve it...come on, guys...Unix command lines
in 2003?), but lots of people play there, for good or ill. The USCF's site
was a lot nicer, but the party was way too late...no-one came.

Scholastic chess..another discussion. Suffice it to say that when the smoke
has finally cleared, it will be acknowledged that the persistant
unwillingness to adequately charge the schools was one of the driving forces
towards this self-destruction.

tmb

The more and more I look at this, the happier I am.

One of the major things we've been pushing for is the USCF to "get real" about
what it can and can't do. This act not only saves a ton of money (our biggest
expense by far is payroll), but allows us to see what we need to focus on and
how.

Also, I heard grumblings that there were many people in the office who were
very political, and that this caused some problems. Hopefully we were able to
pare down as much as possible and keep functioning.

Quite honestly, it's unforgivable that McCrary and Camarratta kept this
nonsense up. Niro's blatant lying to me with regards to GamesParlor gives him
zero credibility anymore in my book. Redman and DeFeis were bad, but the
warnings about covering up finances were ignored by these people. They also
were completely inactive when it came down to the real problems, and doing
anything about it. If we had cut 7 employees a year ago, we wouldn't have to
cut 17 now.

John Fernandez

The Masked Bishop wrote:

I may have jumped the gun on my previous post about a ratings service.
Sounds to me like this is about all the USCF is going to do for now on.

Losing the magazine will be dramatic, and sad, but it hasn't been a very
good magazine for many years, although I liked Kurzdorfer, and lord knows he
tried--but you can't polish a turd. The rag has got to be killing any
chances at profitability.

The Internet has killed any chances at running a "books and boards"
mail-order house. Amazaon, along with its used book affiliations, can get
you just about any book on chess ever printed. And the sets and clocks can
be had from at least a dozen good Internet dealers who've been way ahead of
the USCF on the e-commerce game.

The ICC has the ****tiest, cheapest interface around (and it's a slap to
every member that they never improve it...come on, guys...Unix command lines
in 2003?), but lots of people play there, for good or ill. The USCF's site
was a lot nicer, but the party was way too late...no-one came.

Scholastic chess..another discussion. Suffice it to say that when the smoke
has finally cleared, it will be acknowledged that the persistant
unwillingness to adequately charge the schools was one of the driving forces
towards this self-destruction.

tmb

I think you will never get most members of the scholastic lobby to ever
acknowledge that they are in any way responsible for USCF's financial
problems. Some still insist that they are helping USCF's bottom line,
not hurting it. Instead they will claim they are being scapegoated for
poor management and inadequate technology. While it is impossible to
deny that we have had poor management and inadequate technology, this
does not excuse the pillaging of the organization by selfish special
interests over the years.

In fact, I suspect that you will get the most angry and bitter reaction
from that group when fees are raised to even break even level on ratings
after more than 25 years where we sold our number one product at a loss
and didn't even know or want to find out. Until 1997 I think we didn't
sell it at all to that group. We literally gave it away for free if the
organizer of a scholastic event submitted it on disk. It was only in
Orlando, I believe where they started charging 10 cents a game. Nolan's
figures just released revealed that USCF lost money on ratings every
year with even the 10 cent per game on disk fees. Those huge disks
filled with thousands of games played by hundreds of children cost a
helluva lot more than 10 cents per game to process and rate,
particularly in an office that is Flintstone comparable.

Best Regards,

Bruce

Is it for sure that Chess Life isn't coming out the rest of the year? As
someone who just sent in a check for a TLA for a tournament in December with
guaranteed prizes, it'd be nice to have a definitive answer to this?

"Bruce Draney" wrote in message
...
We all knew an axe was going to fall, but I think even the most
pessimistic of us felt it would probably be about 10-11 employees and
not 17, including the entire publications management staff.

I had a feeling that Anson and Kurzdorfer might be targeted. Chess Life
has been roundly criticized for several years, and Kurzdorfer was
editing the magazine from Buffalo. Anson was a major figure in the
Sherry fiasco, and there were huge numbers of mistakes just in the TLA's
this past month pointed out by Bill Goichberg.

I met Peter in Framingham, and found him to be a nice guy.
Unfortunately, we are past the point of no return and what is needed now
is a heavy to gut the personnel line. That's where CPA's come in. They
are dollars and cents guys and when push comes to shove, the axe has to
fall and someone has to make the call of who it falls on.

I seriously doubt that Chess Life will be produced for the rest of this
calendar year, although there may be one issue in the pipeline for
September (October Issue).

Perhaps now is the time to consider what the future of Chess Life should
be? Is it time to make Chess Life, plain, vanilla, with few
photographs, on newsprint rather than glossy paper and much shorter in
length.

Strangely the firing of 17 employees in a single day, may prove to be
the easiest and most straightforward decision to be made in a long line
of excruciating decisions that will be made between now and the next
Summer. The immediate bottom line impact of personnel savings can be
seen. This doesn't take into account that these are human beings with
families, children and lives. I am encouraged a bit by the comment that
they may be brought back if things turn around. I hope that they
survive this and are able to perservere.

Whose ox will be gored next? I'm betting that it will be scholastic
rating fees, which will be seriously increased, so that the USCF will
actually start making rather than losing money on them.

I can hear the grumbling already starting in scholastic la-la lands
everywhere. I'm sure from Connecticut to Florida, and from Mississippi
to Texas and from Arizona to California, there will be talk of armed
revolt by the coaches and organizers who must endure these outrageous
price increases on their 10 cents/game fees. Why there's one equipment
dealer in Texas who might not be able to afford a big screen TV for his
mansion if rating fees go to 30 cents/game for scholastic chess
tournaments.

The immediate need was to reduce expenses and personnel is almost always
the largest expense of any organization. The real question will be
whether 23 employees can even cope with the workload that 40 could not
cope with for several years?

Best Regards,

Bruce

Can Stan or someone give us a heads up on what services will or won't be cut?
Will ratings be processed? Should we bother sending in TLAs?

John Fernandez

particularly in an office that is Flintstone comparable

Speaking of, you haven't lived until you've watched Irv Sedlock manually key
in all those results, with two very deliberate fingers, on a lone laptop in
some barricaded classroom, with scores of parents and kids lurking about
waiting for postings...one can read Dante at such a point to feel better,
but slouching on a folding bench in the screaming cafeteria with the
ambience of steamed hotdogs, greasy bags of chips, and sugar-saturated
hyper-tweens flinging plastic chess pieces on the tile floor is something
even he could not have conceived of, in his most hellish moments...

Douglas L Stewart wrote:

Is it for sure that Chess Life isn't coming out the rest of the year? As
someone who just sent in a check for a TLA for a tournament in December with
guaranteed prizes, it'd be nice to have a definitive answer to this?


No. I am just surmising and they may have a plan in place to produce
something and call it Chess Life over the next several months. Someone
else just postulated that they may save money on printing and postage by
just not producing a couple issues, which would most likely be the
November and December issues. One thing though and that is that if
they're still going to do B&E, they'll have to still print and produce
catalogs and mail them. In the past, they mailed them as part of Chess
Life in the Fall.

Can they produce Chess Life without an editor, or a Senior Art
Director? I'm sure they can. Perhaps Glenn Peterson will retake the
wheel and put out the magazine for a couple months at a reduced price.
Perhaps a junior member of the department has sufficient expertise to
throw something together for the next couple months, although I'm highly
doubtful given the dreadful number of TLA mistakes mentioned in this
last issue of CL. If this many errors in just one section of the mag
were occurring WITH an editor and a Sr. Art Director, it makes one
wonder what horror stories are lurking below the surface if someone
messes with publication that hasn't got a clue.

Cancellation of Chess Life issues without notification is a major can
of worms and will cause severe problems for organizers who were counting
on TLA's in those issues that are suddenly cancelled.

Again, I have no information that CL is being cancelled, only what was
mentioned in the posts by others that consideration was being given to
eliminating some issues of CL.

Best Regards,

Bruce

will cause severe problems for organizers who were counting
on TLA's in those issues that are suddenly cancelled.

I can't believe there are still organizers out there who use Chess Life TLAs
as the prime vehicle for announcing their tournaments. If there are, then
they must be wearing hair shirts and living in caves, because between the
Internet explosion and the USCF implosion, who the hell would put their eggs
in that basket?

Just because you have alternate means of publishing your tournament
announcement doesn't mean you're comfortable running a tournament with the
same amount of guaranteed money if one of your primary advertising avenues
were to dissapear. Sounds like Chess Life will be around in some fashion or
the other.

I was actually pretty pleased with the tournaround of one my TLA's I sent in
the other day. I hadn't sent one in in almost 10 years. It was emailed
back to me after about a week or so with everything correct. Seemed like a
fairly professional job.

"The Masked Bishop" wrote in message
y.com...
will cause severe problems for organizers who were counting
on TLA's in those issues that are suddenly cancelled.

I can't believe there are still organizers out there who use Chess Life
TLAs
as the prime vehicle for announcing their tournaments. If there are, then
they must be wearing hair shirts and living in caves, because between the
Internet explosion and the USCF implosion, who the hell would put their
eggs
in that basket?