English Chess Forum

If they are doing what Peter suggests does it really matter. Think of the joy he spreading about by giving people 5 move wins. If playing on line for some semi-serious practice or self training, it adds another category of time wasting opponent. You already have the non-resigners and those who let ...

Ian Thompson wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 10, 2021 4:32 pm

I thought I read somewhere that there might be another incentive to join the ECF offered by Chess & Bridge.

Isn't the best incentive that the ECF encourages some OTB chess to actually take place? Even better that it takes place unrestricted by rules inspired by risk aversion.

The solution that the service providers recommend is - get a new account and sin no more. As a consequence it's rare for them to be called out over false accusations. That enables them to claim a higher success rate for their methods than are deserved. When OTB organisations migrate to on line comp...

The player was breaking the rules, the system caught him and he was flagged. There is a question though as to what the rules actually are, how well or badly they are publicised and whether households sharing a connection could run foul of them. We seem to have it that players sharing an email addre...

You could try this for example https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-com-fair-play-and-cheat-detection As we know, their system made a false accusation against Justin based on his games in "daily" chess. I believe that in OTB chess, a line in the sand was drawn some years ago that accusations sh...

Indeed it was. If I remember correctly. Wood states in "To Our Readers" that the Federation of Master Printers had advised him to "settle" the dispute by closing down his in house printing operation, ostensibly on age and health grounds, and to make the staff redundant. I remember that as a recomme...

Win for Black: 2K5/1P6/2q5/8/3B4/2Pk4/8/8 w - - 0 1 There's an obvious winning plan of K-c4-b5-a6(or c6) and then Qxb7 mate. That works if the Black King just shuffles between b8 and a8. If however it tries to escape with .. Ka7 and .. Kb6, White has Qb5 putting the King back in the zugswang box an...

I think they are all still drawn. Not checked with an engine. Are these sort of positions in the 7-man tablebases? There's an Android app which looks up Lomonosov tables. Verdicts Variant 1: 2K5/1P6/2q3k1/8/3B4/2P5/8/8 Drawn (as is the original position) Variant 2: 5K2/6P1/5q2/1kB5/1P6/8/5P2/8 Mate...

The ECF Grading record for the event suggests MV Abbott or R Thompson won it, although it's not helpful that all sections have been graded as one. I'm assuming both players who scored 6 points, and the other two 5.5 point scorers, weren't playing in the Championship section. I'm also assuming D Cut...

ECF Grading record for the event confirms this, assuming neither of Steven Berry and Andrew Smith were eligible. Both were regular competitors in Exmouth, but never eligible for the title. The crosstable derived from the grading records is unreliable because it doesn't record what are now known as ...

The Thanet Congress, usually the weekend before the August Bank Holiday, is not taking place in 2021. Non availability of the usual premises (a school) is cited as one of the reasons.

I can't vouch for later years, but the first or second Whitby Festival in 1955, in which I played, was certainly organised by CHESS I thought the story was that after BH established the concept of two week tournaments that weren't the British Championship, that local organisers in Whitby carried on...

Joseph Conlon wrote: ↑

Mon Apr 05, 2021 12:36 pm

I will always have a sense of what a 130 or a 150 or a 170 player means, I am not sure I will ever manage that with 1300 or 1500 or 1800....

The "traditional" exchange rate was easy to remember.

225 = 2400
200 = 2200
175 = 2000
150 = 1800
125 = 1600
100 = 1400

How can a computer possibly know what a human mistake is. Getting a computer to suddenly decide now is the time to slip in a human blunder is beyond me. The "cheat finder" programs operate by comparing the human choice to the top three choices of an engine. You could potentially program a chess eng...

I presume that Whitby was a Festival organised by Wood at which Morry was arbiting. I think Whitby was locally organised by the Akeroyd family and others with BH present as a player. Morry was certainly there as an arbiter. In the only time I played there he contrived to give me in the first week o...