English Chess Forum

Personally I think that an ELO system, especially a monthly one, would undermine the practice of using a single month’s rating (eg. July/January) for annual competitions. With the ELO rating being more a reflection of current form (and for that matter arguably more open to manipulation) aroundthe eg...

Alex Holowczak wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 16, 2019 10:37 pm

Richard Bates wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 16, 2019 9:55 pm

Alex I know perfectly well why the rule on wildcards exist.

Sorry for the crossed wires. Some people genuinely don't, though...

Apologies for the superfluous “perfectly well”!

Anyway what is this theory re:wildcards all about? It's mostly used to cover last-minute dropouts, where you need to find a replacement at short notice. Hence there is more freedom in the lower divisions. It's a problem if you only have 1 team, whereas it's comparatively trivial for a squad like Gu...

Anyway what is this theory re:wildcards all about? As far as I understand the rules a team can register as many new players as they want, at any point in the season, as long as they are registered 9 days before the weekend in which they will play. Theoretically Manx could register no’s 2-7 in the wo...

Sources say Guildford have already tried, so far without success, to enlist Hou Yifan There you go, Jonathan. You're "sources" from now on: Leonard confirms :) Not a totally reliably researched article though as it claims that Michael Adams was registered at the start of the season. A presumption h...

JustinHorton wrote: ↑

Fri Feb 15, 2019 8:22 am

Roger de Coverly wrote: ↑

Fri Feb 15, 2019 1:06 am

As reported by chessbase

https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-olympic-dream

The 600 million claim is back again

Well who saw that coming

I thought it had risen to 605 million?

Kapil Dev hit Eddie Hemings for four successive sixes to avoid the follow on. Gooch didn’t need an excuse to get greedy.

I knew it! When the case is made strongly enough that ordinary ECF members, many of them low earners, should not indefinitely be wholly or largely subsiding Michael Adams and Luke McShane, then a sponsor would be found - and of course it wouldn't be a reputable one, because respectable commercial o...

It’s not actually as stupid as the ridicule would imply IMO. It could obviously be tweaked eg. the draw must be offered back within a fixed period, eg. 20 moves but if the aim is to avoid draws before the game was effectively played out it would be reasonably effective.

And I think they will have to come up with a better solution to the “junior problem” than FIDE have managed. The latest massive analysis of results showed that, aside from initial ratings still needing work, the predictive power of FIDE ratings for juniors is pretty good. At the risk of banging the...

I think the vast majority of amateur players (largely ignore the views of professionals stronger players who generally claim to have zero interest in their ECF grade) fundamentally trust ECF grades and distrust ELO/FIDE ratings. The reason usually quoted is that they "fundamentally distrust" the FI...

Subject to arm twisting of Congress and League organisers to report results promptly, the ECF could in principle report a grade for new players as soon as they had played, say, five games. That isn't going to work if you have to throw the grades for established juniors up in the air every time you ...

LawrenceCooper wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 28, 2019 10:43 pm

Christopher Kreuzer wrote: ↑

Sun Jan 27, 2019 10:36 pm

Howell isn't doing much better.

Only winning three games in a row?

That wasn’t one of the questions

If the story were true, then I would guess it took place at some point prior to move 8. But those positions have been repeated hundreds of times, with no sign of a big improvement. If they had a preplanned draw then I imagine it would have been down a very specific line, perhaps ending in a flashy ...

If the story were true, then I would guess it took place at some point prior to move 8.