I hate to dwell on the negative but since my last post on the possible reasons why 3 states (Kedah, Perlis and Melaka) was absent from the 2016 Malaysia Inter States Chess Championship, had the highest visits for the past few weeks (even higher than my posts during the inter states!).
So I have to revisit this subject again.

Thanks to feedbacks via Facebook, more reasons were stated as reason for absenteeism.
The major one being...
Unpreparedness/readiness
No reason for sending a team if they are unprepared and will be "massacred" by top teams that have titled players like IM, FM and NMs.

I will not argue with the above and any other reasons that we do not know of.

However, the organisers have mentioned that they have offered to consider absorbing the cost of entry fee and stay for states that have difficulty raising funds to cover cost of participating. Which state was offered and whether this offer was actually made,  I cannot verify that but if it is true, then the cost factor would have been removed.

In short, I think communication is an important thing here too. If the states had conveyed their difficulties and reason for not participating early directly to the organisers, things may have turned out different instead of doing all this post mortem (via some obscure blog like this :) )