At some tournaments in Hong Kong the organizers sell certificates with a player’s tournament rating at the end of the event. However, there is no official national rating system for youth to indicate relative strength.
Yet, it is imperative to any sport to understand one’s personal or team rank compared to competitor peers. Without it, there is no sport spirit, and without sport spirit there is little motive to train, endure and overcome obstacles for the greater good of becoming better or as good as one can be.
The World Chess Federation, FIDE, and many national chess federations around the world, meticulously keeps track of players’ performance in a number that indicates one’s relative strength: the chess rating.
FIDE also attempts to help chess federations with their Chess in Schools Commission, CIS, and it offers national federations various kinds of assistance to introduce chess in schools. Several countries through this initiative have already introduced chess in one form or the other in a school setting and the results, for example seen from the Turkey case, are impressive when it comes to the increase of quantity and quality of their youth players.
An official FIDE CIS rating, study materials, newsletters and a nice credit card size ID comes with the Premium Student Membership
As part of the CIS approach, by obtaining (10 euro/year) a Premium Student Membership (PSM) – demo), players get an official FIDE ID and a CIS rating (somewhere between 600 and 800 to start with, depending on the age). Studying chess, playing in tournaments or doing otherwise chess work will help improve the CIS rating.
Caissa is proud to be the first, but hopefully not the only one for too long, chess organization in Hong Kong to have members enrolled in PSM.
