Information on Novice Session rates

Please note the following regulations which apply to Novice Sessions: 1) Sessions may be considered to be Novice Sessions for Universal Membership Subscription (UMS, formerly P2P) purposes only if they strictly satisfy the following requirements:

  • a. They are either teaching sessions, supervised sessions or special duplicate sessions designed to help new players make the transition from classes to regular duplicates.
  • b. As such they are not usually longer than 16 or 18 boards.
  • c. In all cases no more than three players, or 10% of the players if greater, may be above the rank of Area Master.
  • d. Since they are intended as an intermediate stage in a player’s development, they should not have a regular clientele that comes back year after year.

2) Novice Sessions that satisfy the above conditions do not have to be submitted to the EBU under the UMS scheme and are therefore not charged for, but these sessions will not attract master points and will not be graded for the NGS. Clubs that do need to upload these results for their own purposes (eg in order to display them using Pianola) may use Code 04 for this, but that is only permitted for games that completely satisfy the above conditions to be considered Novice Sessions. 3) Magazine points are not issued for these Novice Sessions unless the club voluntarily chooses to submit the games to the EBU under code 22 which is charged at 50% of the UMS rate of normal sessions. It is up to the club to decide whether they wish to submit the results in order for their novices to earn magazine points or not. The EBU magazine is expensive to produce and therefore we feel that everyone receiving a copy should make a contribution to the cost. 4) Games that are submitted under code 22 are not graded for the NGS and do not issue master points. 5) Code 11 was reintroduced in April 2017 (it was originally discontinued in 2014). Code 11 is charged full UMS and should be used for sessions which are not Novice sessions (as more than 10% of the players have more than 1000 Master Points) but, as supervision is given, it is not appropriate to award Master Points or grade the sessions for NGS. Please see here for more details. 6) In addition, Code 12 now provides for "Mentor Sessions" by awarding Master Points but not processing results for NGS. 7) Clubs may choose to treat novice games as regular duplicates and submit them under code 10, paying the full UMS rate, to allow master points to be issued and for them to be graded for the NGS. Such games will be subject to all the usual requirements of a regular duplicate game, which means they must not be supervised games and no aides-memoire may be used by the players.

If you require any further clarification then please don’t hesitate to our Club Liaison Officer, Jonathan Lillycrop, by emailing jonathan@ebu.co.uk or calling 01296 317206