Date: 28th June 2006
The Executive Committee announces that the discussion with the sponsors about the support of WTHT 2006/2007 wasn’t successful. It means that the organizers of the WTHT tournaments cannot count on any help from a global WTHT sponsor.
The Executive Committee would like to change this situation and would like to find a general sponsor for the next season 2007/2008. The Executive Committee knows that the most important thing for any sponsor is probably the media coverage with news about the WTHT tournaments.
The Executive Committee asks all WTHT tournaments organizers to provide the ITHF with all articles / TV shots / radio news which are related to WTHT tournaments in last and forthcoming season. The Executive Committee would like to create a global media archive describing the WTHT tournaments. This archive is supposed to be used during the next discussion with sponsors for WTHT.
The number of players from each nation playing at the World Championship 2007 in Moscow will be the same as at the World Championship 2005, with an exception of the Veteran category (there were allowed just 2 veterans per nation in Riga because this competition was held for the first time ever). It means 8 players for the Open category, 3 players for Ladies, 3 players for Junior and 3 players for Veteran categories. The organizing nation can send 12 players into the Open category and 4 players into each of the other categories.
Best 10 players from the overall WTHT ranking will be nominated too (see previous EC statement: http://www.ithf.info/stiga/ithf/docs/EC_statement_2006_07.htm.
Also the defending world champions will have a right to participate at WCh and raise the number of players from their nations.
The Team competition and the Ladies Team competition will also be played at the World Championship 2007.
During the last months, the World Ranking has become very unfair. Looking at for example the Moscow Open, all players in the middle of the field got about 200 points more than their highest value. There are more such tournaments with "wrong points" which means that such "wrong" points improve positions of many players at the World Ranking.
Martin Arenlind therefore proposed a change of the ranking system:
Today, the tournament value is calculated, and only the best 8 players are taken into account for the whole tournament. The points are linearly decreased for all players at a tournament. So if there are some good and many "bad" players, this gives the average players too many points.
Martin proposes, that each position will be given a separate value. The tournament winner will get points after the quality of the best 4 players of the tournament.
Position 2 will get points for the 2nd best to the 5th best player. He will get no points for losing to a good player (the winner of that tournament). Position 45 will get points for the quality of players 45-48 and so on.
The new ranking method basically says that if you do not beat a better player, you will not gain a lot of points.
The simulation of this new algorithm was already done and it works great.
The Executive Committee supports this change. We will wait for some time (till the end of July) for the reactions from the table hockey community and then we will probably decide about this change.
The Latvian Table Hockey Federation is informing that Valts Smagars got 4 months disqualification (e.g. Jun 27-Oct 26,2006). He had warning already before. This is related to his behaviour during tournaments and also during trip to and from the European Championship 2006.
LTHF is asking all table hockey community to respect this decision and not include
Valts Smagars in any official tournament, e.g. tournament which results are sent to the ITHF World Ranking.
Signed by:
B. Axelsen, P. Bengtsson, V. Kraus, M. Papp, I.Zubeckis
The Executive Committee members