Firstly, i'd like to thank Yelena Dembo for brining this article to my attention. She posted a link to the Chessbase article on her website and I've been ill lately again so I wasn't paying attention. From Chessbase we get the long and the short ... I'll publish the 'short' here. Ali Nihat Yazici TCF President issued an opening letter and he summarizes this this way:

"These last few weeks, we started to communicate with the General Secretary of ECU to finalise the details of this event and then, as a result of insulting and condescending behaviour on her part, we requested the intervention of the President of the ECU, Mr. Silvio Danailov. None of those attempts have however worked, as you will see from the various emails and letters sent, and we were completely neglected by ECU management. This is really a big disappointment for me considering that I was the first person celebrating the victory of ECU President just after election and wishing him good luck in the next four years."

As a small aside (bringing positive out of negative) I LOVED the events banner:

Merry Christmas Everyone!

For those of you that don't know skype is a handy online tool to communicate with voice and video with other skype users around the world or in the next room.

And for those of you who are curious about why I'm bringing this service up on a chess site ... wonder no more ... skype has an add-on or "extra" where you can be in a call with someone and play chess at the same time! Of course in my search for informative links on the topic I came across some pretty disheartening news. Along with said chess support there has now emerged a convenient way to cheat at chess on skype. see the link HERE. I have no idea what the strength of this cheating helper might be but just in case I wouldn't bet the deed to my house on a chess game on skype.

I'm not as interested in chess variants as I used to be but I find a variant interesting that says all over its main page "Recommendation: To understand the complexity of MCX4, it is necessary to be a regular chess player."

Check it out for yourself: The Official MCX4 website