English Chess Forum

I recall from my time on the ECF board that FIDE would only pay attention to communications from either the FIDE delegate or the President of each affiliated member, so perhaps this is an example of this policy in reverse.

The usual version of the story has Nimzowitsch standing on the table and shouting: "Why must I lose to this idiot?" after losing a game to Samisch.

The first year I played over the New Year at Hastings was 96/97 when Jim and I stayed in the same hotel (The Grand). The Grand had an eccentric owner/ proprietor who placed the four chess players staying there at the same table complete with those little paper national flags on sticks that you used ...

It's so all players can grumble about having an unequal number of whites and blacks.

Here is my post about my two humped distribution of my exam marks: https://www.ecforum.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10832&p=245701#p245701 . Just coincidentally (during a rather boring section of a Skype meeting yesterday) when catching up with my university emails I found one stating that attempts to...

Wasn't Tony Banks (Minister of Sport in the 1st Blair government) just about to declare chess a sport when he was replaced by someone else?

Would participants in this Portmeirion chess congress dream of being chased through the streets by large bouncing balls looking like the Covid19 virus?

Pocket Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings by Jon Speelman (1981). This will be in my pocket when I set out on my daily walk in a few minutes time. There are lots of single volume (and some multi volume) guides which are not (and don't aim to be) encyclopaedic such as the 4 volumes by John Watson, the 2...

A chat room is a good idea.

Kevin, it's a bit like having a team full of Fred Mannings (in his later years).

Kevin, it's much worse online. At least in the flesh you can count them and see them playing. You know the late ones are usually late and will probably turn up anyway. Online you wonder whether they all saw that last email or read the instructions properly ...

Speaking as a captain I found it approximately ten times more stressful and time consuming than organising a team and playing in an OTB county match. I really miss the social aspects, travelling, meeting people and so forth. But it is chess, although not as we know it (and we won our match by 1 poin...

Thibault Duplessis (the founder of Lichess) has explained in a talk available on youtube that they don't actually ban cheaters, they don't allow them to play any more rated games and deliberately pair them against other cheaters. This talk was mentioned either higher up this thread or on another thr...

Screw alignment: because this is the correct way to align one's knights on a chessboard?

As a university teacher I used to plot the distribution of exam marks and I very rarely got a normal distribution. My distributions more commonly resembled a two humped camel with maxima in the mark ranges 40-55 and 70-85. When we fed the marks into university marks system it would calculate mean ma...

If you don’t want to wade your way through all of this I’m basically backing up OP Roger’s points that statistical inference may not work so well when applied to events resulting from human decisions. I wonder if anyone here has read any of the works of Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Professor of Risk Engin...