Quote Originally Posted by Michael Lo View Post
What are the plans for the 2021 Canadian Junior Chess Championship (CJCC) and the Canadian Youth Chess Championship (CYCC). For provinces that have qualifying tournaments for the mentioned national tournaments, the qualifying tournament has to finish at least 2 months before the national event for players to arrange for traveling. To organize a sizable qualifying tournament, it has to start organizing (e.g. book venue, etc.) at least 3-4 months ahead, if not longer. That is in total, we need to start organizing at least 5-6 months before the national event. At the moment, with the closeups and gathering restriction, it is unlikely any OTB qualifying tournament can happen in time. Please advise.
The situation should be better defined in about three months as people start to get vaccinated. Currently in Ontario Windsor and areas around Toronto (Toronto, Peel and York) are in lockdown which is the strictest condition. I hope that we can be back to normal by the summer at least in terms of youth chess. I am skeptical that international play can return to normal on that timeline because the pandemic would have to be over almost everywhere to allow that.

I think that we will have to relax conditions for requiring YCC's this year unless the situation has drastically improved by March which does not seem likely with the slow rollout of vaccines in Canada that I am expecting based on news reports. I think we can look at holding online YCCs. Perhaps the CFC may even organize some of them.