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Karsten Fyhn wrote on 28 March 2003 (TCCMB).

Hi John

I like these “Nuts” very much!

The one about JJ is very nice, surely he is very much missed on TCCMB.

“The Last Thing We Need...” is right on, we have too many choices. When I started to play CC 15 years ago it was quite obvious that my first tournament had to be a domestic postal third class. Back then it was normal to start playing domestic tournaments and later when you got more experienced to join ICCF tournaments creating a natural “food-chain”. Today many players first experience with CC is some randomly picked more-or-less obscure server. These servers can be entertaining and OK for fun chess but are not serious CC. Further more all these opportunities are taking players away from domestic play making it very difficult for small federations to get enough players for their domestic tournaments breaking the natural “food-chain” for ICCF. I don’t think it is possible to reverse this development, so perhaps it is time for ICCF to make changes to the “food chain” by incorporation the serious servers in the food chain.

Regarding game load it is also my experience that it is not possible to play more than about 15 games at the same time if you want to keep a high level. The last year or so I have constantly played more than 30 games simultaneously and it is really time consuming and is taking the fun out off it for me and no doubt the quality of my games are suffering. Now my game load is down to 24 and I plan to further reduce my game load to max. 15 games. Therefore I have just declined to play in an invitational IM tournament and I will probably not enter any new tournament until the next Champions League but I will probably start in a few international friendly team matches. Today there are more tournaments offers than ever before, so it seems the most important word in a CC players vocabulary is “NO!”. Not to enter more tournaments than what is manageable. 

I am looking forward to your next “ChessNut” :-)

Best Wishes.
Karsten