The ICCF Congress 2004 at Mumbai was a great success. We are still receiving emails, gifts and words of praise about it! To our success we owe good preparation, the AICCF team, satisfactory arrangements at the Hotel Retreat, sponsorships, donations, and excellent rapport with ICCF officials. But most of all it was because the ICCF participants are an extremely sporting and likeable set of people.

The AICCF Management Committee in its meeting on 26th January 205 decided that the Bulletin will be brought out only bi-annually for the present. This has come about because of increased work pressures of your bulletin editor. But if there is a better response from the members in terms of articles received and games submitted as well as help in the production of the bulletin, we can re-consider. Finally it all depends upon what our members want. Certainly there are no financial constraints in this regard.

The Management committee decided on the following re-adjustment of duties, which will come into effect after the publication of this Bulletin. After the election of a new Mamnagement committee these arrangements will be reviewed.

1. Mr. Meherhomji will continue his work as Secretary and Treasurer in the present way. All requests for new postal tournaments should be sent to him. He will handle all general queries, new memberships etc.

2. Santhosh Matthew Paul will continue to look after email tournaments. Entries for email tournaments must be sent to him . He is also the TD for Email tournaments. But he will no longer function as Games Editor. Considering his family and job pressures, he is no longer able to continue editing games for the Bulletin.

3. Shri Anil Anand will take over as the new Games Editor. So from now on, please send all your games (preferably with notes) to him. His address is: 15-6-5/21 Nagamalli Plaza, Maharanipeta, Visakhapatnam (A.P.) 530 002 Email: anilka@hpcl.co.in. One of the complaints of Santhosh Paul was that he was receiving too few games. So please make amends and send a lot of good quality games to the new Games Editor.

4. AICCF President, Shri P.M.Dalvi will take over the calculation of ratings (which upto now was being done by myself). This will be a gradual process, but after the publication of the Bulletin in August 2005, if you have any query regarding rating discrepancies, it will have to be directed to him. All TDs please take note that that in future all tournament result reports should be sent to Shri Dalvi. Players please note that if you find missing or misreported results, you should contact the TD of the relevant tournament. Mr. Dalvi should be contacted only after that.

5. Dr. Alok Saxena will become the new ICCF contact person. So from now on, all requests for International Tournaments (Email and Webserver) should be sent to him. He will also be in touch with the overseas Federations to arrange Friendly International Matches (possibly over webserver). All this will depend on the response of our members. Members wishing to play in ICCF tournaments must (a) send the appropriate fees to the treasurer: World Individual Tournaments 7-player: 8CHF, 11-player 13CHF Master Norm 40CHF, Webserver 12CHF, other tournaments as per www.iccf.com (1CHF is Rs. 32/-) (b) renew or subscribe to the International section (Rs. 300/- for 2 years or one time donation of Rs. 1500/-) (c) After sending the money by M.O. or draft drawn in favour of “All India Correspondence Chess Federation” to Mr. Meherhomji, they should send an email to Dr. Alok Saxena with copy to Mr. Meherhomji indicating the amount sent, the type of tournament desired and their own ICCF ID number (if allotted).

6. You should continue to send articles, comments, suggestions and ideas for the Bulletin to me . We are receiving letters from disappointed members to see the decreased frequency of the Bulletin. Instead of complaining, send us more articles and games for publication!

7. Shri J.Nagesh has offered to manage the AICCF web site. However he does not appear to be ready with the new web site as yet. Therefore we are postponing making any announcement regarding this.

Please take note of my changed address (as announced in the August bulletin) and also of my new email address. The old email address is no longer valid.