English Chess Forum

In my view you couldn't introduce compulsory membership without changes to the bye laws which would have to be voted on by Council. Changing to monthly grading could be done without reference to Council, but it would be advisable to consult the graders and local bodies who collect the results and su...

From the December ECF newsletter This method of calculation is statistically unsound once the frequency of calculation is such that the number of results in each batch for the majority of players is small. Moving to more frequent grading lists will require us to replace the ECF calculation method w...

Yes, where the single HIGNFY joke about the event was that chess is boring ...

If you're looking for excitement in a sporting encounter I think it comes when one side is just ahead and the other side has to try really hard to get back on terms. There is nothing quite so boring as a 0-0 draw in football even when you are watching great individual skills from the players. The tw...

It's just the same as in football where Sam Allardyce teams play a risk-free approach - get all your men behind the ball and hope to win on the break. The objective is to minimise losses - you get plenty of draws and a few wins. In chess you get lots of draws when you have Sam Allardyce type players...

They think it's all over ...

If Carlsen and Caruana draw all the remaining games (including the armageddon), could this be the only case where a new world champion wins the title without winning a single game in the final? (Answer: no - Karpov in 1975.)

We, 8 not 7.

Googling shows there is more than one Matthew Sadler/ Alpha Zero video (the one I saw was on games 1, 3, 5 and 7). I can’t wait to get home and watch the others.

Check out a great video by Matthew Sadler where he discloses Alpha Zero's evaluations of positions/ games from the WC match.

The players were asked about the noise in press conference after the match. Apparently they could hear voices and the indication is somebody pressed the wrong button so conversations from elsewhere were briefly broadcast into the playing room. Returning to the point about replays I think the point c...

A slightly more practical version of Christopher's idea: let's suppose you have a prize fund of £100,000. The if the match is drawn 6-6 after 12 games (no tiebreak) you give the players £25,000 each and then later you have a full replay match of 12 games if that is drawn 6-6 the players get £12,500 ...

Alex M's point is a fair one, so you could reschedule the idea as 10 standard play games, 10 rapidplay games (only to be played if no decisive result from standardplay) then (if needed) 10 blitz games and then (finally, if needed) 5 armageddons.

Demis H was interviewed yesterday on the official commentary. He said that the best information on Alpha Zero is on their website but there are more academic papers on it due to appear soon. I guess they will focus on the AI, rather than the chess aspects, though.

Although I prefer the longer format of 24 game matches I can see that it may be difficult to go back to that. My main objection to the current format is that the result of the match can revolve around who gets which colour in the Armageddon game. One way of reducing the random element is to play the...