I thought I'd post my communication with Dietmar and ValleyBoy here so that if you have a care to, you guys can follow it.

The day before I sent NC the challenge:

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Original Message by Elizabeth0 on 9/5 12:50pm:

Dietmar,

Is there a rule against deleting low rated players from matches in the US chess league? Not that I've seen a team do that in the league yet (though I have seen teams do that to us in non-league matches), and that could really help a team out if they outrank the opponent on the top boards but not on the bottom and that wouldn't really be fair...

Elizabeth

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Original Message by Dietmar on 9/5 1:33pm:

Hello Elizabeth,

I am on a [bad] dial-up internection as I am traveling so a short response. No, we don't have a rule for it as we tried to keep them as short as possible due to the reasoning that if we don't have the means to enforce it there is no point for a rule. We will announce rule amendments in terms of how games are counted when a player was banned for cheating. Overall, we trust the teams to adhere to the spirit of the competition. If there are multiple complaints about an admin/team of violating it then we will deal with it. But we cross that bridge once we have to.

Cheers,

Dietmar

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After the deletion with ValleyBoy:

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Original Message by Elizabeth0 on 9/13 7:48pm:

Hi Scott,

In our match against North Carolina, we locked our team about half an hour ago because it seemed that they wanted to start the match before the scheduled date (and were calling us bad sports for not locking our team before, but that was because they didn't know there was a due date). Since then, NC has deleted 10 members on the lower boards where we outranked them by a huge amount. I unlocked our team so that they couldn't lock and start the match after deleting all their outranked players, but what should we do now?! http://www.chess.com/groups/team_match?id=169164

Thank you!

Elizabeth

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Original Message by ValleyBoy on 9/13 8:20pm:

Since the round doesn't have to start until rosters are locked on Sunday, I want to discuss this situation with Dietmar. I have not seen such a situation before. But you are right, we should not have teams deleting their registered players to avoid "bad" pairings.

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Original Message by Elizabeth0 on 9/14 4:20am:

Ok, thank you. Here is a a google spreadsheet of the members registered for both sides before they started deleting members so you can see who was in it and who they deleted. http://tinyurl.com/bpho2bv

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Original Message by ValleyBoy on 9/14 4:31am:

Thank you. This helps clarify the situation.

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