England Team: Freddy Bush, Michael Blake, Robert Pallett, David J Grobler, Dr. Mark C. Pooley and Richard Perrin.

Team Captain: Barry Sheppard

Update: 19th May 2007 by ICCF Europe Zonal Director Gian-Maria Tani

Dear chessfriends, I’m happy to inform you that Harro Otte Memorial is ready to start.26 national federations have entered their team and therefore I organized three preliminaries groups (two with 9 teams and one with 8 teams). 

The teams have been distributed in the preliminary groups using an “arithmetical controlled pairing system”.  If anyone of you would like to know “how”, I’ll send him a full description.

The Tournament Director is I.A. Thed Klauner (LUX)

GROUP 1	GROUP 2	GROUP 3
Slovenia	Finland	Poland
Romania	Slovakia	Czech Republic
Germany	France	Denmark
Russia	Turkey	Scotland
England	Netherlands	Spain
Portugal	Norway	Israel
Sweden	Italy	Latvia
Bulgaria	Switzerland	Austria
Lithuania	Belgium	---

The tournament will be played on ICCF web-server and the starting e-mails will be sent to the players in a few days; probably the ones for group 2 will be sent a bit later, because I’m waiting for the name of a substitute player.

The official start date is -as planned- June 17.th, the second anniversary of Harro Otte’s death.  Obviously, games can be started immediately. The best three teams from each group will play the Final.

Please, note that a few players have a 2007/1 ELO higher than the maximum accepted (2050).  The reason is that players have been entered accordingly 2006/2 ELO list. I thank all the Delegates and the E-mail Contacts for their efforts and I’m very happy that our friend Harro will be remembered with a so important memorial tournament (156 players!).

Amici sumus.
Gian-Maria Tani
ICCF-Europa Zonal Director