JonH wrote:

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I realised I should have saved the original post til today and conjured some April fools mileage out of it. Darn!

But seriously, it was actually the Neil Pauffley playing in Thailand thread that caught my imagination and thought of players playing non ranking tournaments and how that might be of value to them

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 It happens all the time in Europe - not really the top 100 or 150 but, outside of that, you'll see quite a lot of players playing the big money tournaments - for practice, for money, for club loyalty, whatever.

One local tournament to me is actually pretty medium-sized and, out of nowhere, quite a few years back, two Russian women suddenly called up and entered - ranked 176 and 234 in the world ! I actually had to umpire one of the matches because the women didn't speak French and they needed bilingual umpires - I was a tad nervous but luckily the match was so one-sided it was over in 40 mins !