"Dear Member Federations, 

The FIDE Arbiters’ Commission is proud to release a new programme to support the development of arbiters in online and hybrid events. 

Two levels of seminars have been designed:

• A Basic Course (8 hours) to cover roles and duties of Online Arbiters and Local Chief Arbiters in hybrid events. 
   
• An Advanced Course (8 hours) to cover the roles and duties of Chief Arbiters for online and hybrid events. 

Official FIDE events will soon require arbiters worldwide to supervise players in hybrid events. The Arbiter's Commission has proposed that FIDE covers the training of at least 1 or 2 arbiters per federation on the Basic Course and we are very happy that we got strong support from our colleagues from the FIDE Planning and Development Commission and the FIDE Management. 

With this letter, we are inviting you to select 2 arbiters from your federation to take part in the Basic Course. This way, our objective is to train about 400 arbiters worldwide. The training fees of this first wave of training will be covered by the FIDE Development Fund, which means no cost for federations or selected arbiters. 

If your federation wishes to send more candidates, additional arbiters are welcome and may be included in the training at the standard cost of 30 €. Please note that in terms of planning we may consider initial trainees from federations as having the priority over the extra trainees so that we cover as many federations as possible in the short term. 

Please send to the FIDE Arbiters’ Commission (secretary.arbiters@fide.com and chairman.arbiters@fide.com) the names and email addresses of your selected arbiters so that we may plan their registration to the appropriate sessions. Please consider for selection, arbiters of the following profile:

• FIDE Licensed Arbiters (preferably IA or FA)
• Level of English strong enough to follow the sessions
• IT skills strong enough to connect to the sessions and understand/apply online concepts
• Arbiters likely to be involved for your federation in the local supervision of FIDE hybrid events

You will also find attached a 1-page description of the courses for a better understanding of the content. Sessions will usually be 4 times 2 hours of online courses. 

As we intend to start the first sessions at the beginning of April, please get back to us as soon as you can and before the 4th of April 2021. 

Looking forward to a fruitful collaboration on this project, we wish you good health in this difficult period and successful online/hybrid chess events. 

FIDEOnline/HybridArbiter Training (PDF)

Laurent Freyd,
FIDE Arbiters' Commission Chairman"