Diabolic wrote:
If Koreans are interested in prizes, this years congress is a bit late in providing that information. Best I could find is 5k€ for Europeans (
viewtopic.php?p=16217#p16217), looks like non-europeans get warm handshake and "see you all next year speech".
Is this normal for EGC that the prize money is not revealed before the congress starts (less than a week now, most people like to plan a bit more ahead)? What I recall reading from last year, they didn't announce any prizes before the prize giving or did I miss something again?
Perhaps people organizing the next congress in France can learn from this year and provide the information a bit earlier.
Of course it is always better to announce the prizes early, especially if they are meant to attract players. But it may often be difficult to do that. Many congresses have been very late with announcing prizes, or haven't announced anything at all.
Most organizers of EGC:s don't have ny big funds to draw on, in case of poor financial outcome. Normally one doesn't know for sure how many will turn up until the event actually starts. There are also many fixed expenses involved, such as rent of venue, down payments on accommodation and many other things, so one needs some flexible items in the budget, that can be cut down if necessary, in order to avoid a big loss. It is easier to announce prizes early if in a conditional manner, such as prizes will be such and such if the number of participants is > N.
At the EGC 2008 we didn't announce prizes well in advance either. In the end the cash prizes came up as 15 keuro or so (136 kSEK), which is ok I think, but that was not announced in advance, nor was the distribution between europeans/non-europeans, main tournament and other events. We still got a good number of Korean participants.
We had a fair idea early that there would be many participants at EGC2008, so if we had given it higher priority we could have announced minimum prizes early. A reason why we didn't get there was a longish internal discussion on what the the relation should be between open championship prizes and prizes for europeans - a difficult question at the time as it still is.
One possibly big failure in 2008 was that the European Masters was decided/announced so late. If it had been in the schedule from the beginning we could have announced substantial prizes for that, maybe we could have attracted more top European players that way (we did have many of them anyway of course...).
In 2008 the largest Korean group was sensitive to costs, such as accommodation. I would guess that this is an important parameter as well for their paticipation, not only prizes. Of course, with the intercontinental flight to pay, attending the EGC is not cheap for non-europeans.
best regards,
Henric