Quote Originally Posted by Nikolay Noritsyn View Post
We are not in a big disagreement here. Personally, I think pre-olympiad training camp with a strong coach is much more important, but any help from a good coach should amount to some slight improvement. However, we do not have such an individual in Canada. If we had a 2600 non playing grandmaster, if he had a lot of coaching experience, if he was willing to volunteer to be captain and coach, that would be great. There are just too many "if's" in that sentence.

Lets try to at least imagine in advance (18 months is a lot of time to wait) how you want the new system to work...Who do you think could serve as captain+coach?
It seems like we agree on major points, and that's a good opportunity to combine our efforts and work together for the sake of chess in Canada.
Let's summarize what we do agree upon
1) A training camp would be great (yes, we know that so far there is no money for it, but I hope to contribute to launching a number of programs that might change that to a degree)
2) Even a slight improvement is better than no improvement - so any reasonably strong player who is also an experienced coach might be useful to the team.
We should establish if we agree on a definition of "a reasonably strong player" - and by doing that I could answer your actual question concerning the coach.
So, 2600+ would be great, no doubt. Do we have anybody like that who would other requirements you mentioned as well? It doesn't seem to be the case right now. Even if we manage to convince one of our high-rated GMs to return to chess, he would probably prefer playing rather than captaining/coaching. And so will Eric and Bator who are our only active 2500+s so far
So, what we have in Canada is a number of 2400+ titled players some of whom have quite a lot of coaching experience. Let's take yourself, for instance - your current resume is marked with a commendable WYCC experience as well as private coaching. Fore sure, as a second, you could be quite useful to any of our team members, whoever they turn out to be. The problem is, of course, that you yourself have every reason to expect to be one of them - so, you'll prefer to play, I presume. But IF for some reason you don't make the team, I would consider you a solid candidate for position.