It has been clearly proven this year that as far as the Olympiad is concerned, MCF does more harm than good. They could not afford to pay for Greg's accommodation, so they sent him as a reserve player to have it paid for. Correct me if I'm wrong (you probably can't, though), but the only reason Greg went was to vote for the next FIDE president.
Is it so difficult to just let someone else on the team make the vote? Is the secrecy of your vote so important that you are willing to fill a valuable slot in our team with someone only for the sole purpose of casting a single vote? Get your priorities straight, fools. What use is it to protect your international political stance, when your local image to the non-blind is like shit? And I stress: this one vote came at the cost of a player for our team. A player who might have contributed greatly to the team's progress. Allowing us to meet stronger teams, get better games. Let our players learn more by playing with good opposition. Look at this; we met good teams up to round 4. It went downhill from there on.
Next question: How did you people select our team?
Well, that question was obviously rhetorical; you took the 2 highest rated players in the country, the winner of this year's National Championship and the first strong player to raise his hand. I don't blame any of the players for this. Given the opportunity, who would pass the chance to qualify to play in the Olympiad with minimal effort?
Compare this to 2008. I forgot the primary selection criteria (probably because it never really existed), but there was a round-robin tournament between some players to pick a representative. At least that is more decent than this year. We might as well have selected our players with a dartboard.
Perhaps I'm wrong about the "2 highest rated players in the country" as selection criteria. Mas and Mok might have been chosen because of their result in the 2009 Malaysian Masters. But then again, playing in the Olympiad was not explicitly stated in the details of that tournament as far as I know. And, it was a knockout tournament. Anyone with a level of intelligence above borderline retardation can tell that a KO tournament only produces a first place. Everything below that cannot be ranked accurately.
The National Championship? Perhaps it is prestigious (though it does not have the country's top players participating), but if I'm not mistaken, in 2008 (and only 2008 if my memory serves me well), the winner still had to play in the round-robin. This year, Tan Khai Boon automatically qualified.
The fourth is by far the most ridiculous. Yes, maybe we had run out of strong players to pick from. Peter volunteered himself as a last resort. Apparently MCF skipped the hundred options before that and saw this as an instant resolution to the problem.
Just wondering, what happened to the juniors? No need to elaborate much on this; how are we going to progress if we keep sending a team fully composed of the 'experienced' elite to the Olympiad every time? We have some strong juniors, in particular, one who is still studying in primary school. Looks like the MCF "selection committee" have never heard of him.
Anyway, so we had our lineup:
1. Malaysian #1 rated
2. Malaysian #2 rated
3. Wildcard!
4. National Championship winner
5. Vote carrier
Does anyone notice that the players from boards 1/2, 3, 4 and 5 were chosen from totally different pools of players? To MCF's credit, at least I can tell with 100% certainty that they picked the right 5th board player. Greg is definitely better than Hamid...
Please, selecting people to represent Malaysia in the Olympiad is not like selecting countries that qualify to play in the FIFA World Cup. This team looks like the chess equivalent of Rojak. It may be an identity to our country, but we don't have to demonstrate it in the selection criteria. Besides, Rojak is foodstuff. Let's keep it that way.
