English Chess Forum

The number of deaths registered in the UK over one week has fallen below the five-year average for the first time since mid-March. Is this to be expected? Corona virus prematurely kills some people who wouldn't have lived much longer anyway. You then get fewer deaths in the weeks when those people ...

That's part of what online chess is, like it or not. Bit of a different culture.

You couldn't even trust spyware to be honest. Not when its running on my computer in my house. So many really quite straightforward ways to engineer round it.

I was wondering about wild cards, I mean risking someone else winning something to do with the 4NCL? Not really their usual style

The White Rose - Wood Green emi is making me feel better about the number of pieces I give away playing online

Mildly impressed that Sielecki has managed to keep playing moves rather than resigning on aesthetic grounds after e6 nailed both kingside pieces down for good.

League/congress chess is a write off for the duration anyway. The trick is going to be make sure there's something to come back to.

I'd fully reccommend, if personally financially viable right now of course, joining as per usual.

Still - how many outgoings does a normal chess club have right now? The ECF has some, I don't think a club will.

This seemed a matter of some concern so I enquired of someone, non-participant in this discussion, more familiar with Ken Regan's methods than I am. I was told, and I have absolutely no reason to doubt the integrity of my informant, that - in such cases - Ken Regan is informed of the higher figure ...

Of course, ratings have effectively been frozen for the last 3/4 months, whereas playing strength can still change. So a junior on a national training programme, for example, could gain, say, 200 points in that time, but would still be judged against their old baseline? His strength has changed, bu...

Yes, some strong teams in those matches :) Glad it all seems to have worked! Middlesex and Northumberland both running at ~195 average, Yorkshire/Lincs & Norfolk all ten points/board behind that. Yorkshire obviously have (much) more to potentially add on paper, not sure quite how likely. Unless Surr...

David, I don’t really understand what you are trying to say here. For Ken Regan’s test the standard deviation is based on the entire population. So if knightie is 206 that is 2245 and he would have to select engine moves at a rate associated with a player rated 3045 to get a z score of 4. Matt He's...

I think, in the case of low ELO ratings in the UK, its surely very safe to say ‘badly messed up, don’t use for detailed statistics’ :) If we wanted a discussion it might be about whether ECF ratings are quite stable enough to use instead.... (They’ve been messed around several times recently of cour...

So anyway, just to clarify re: Regan tool. If you are still within known theory you can cheat to your heart’s content?! Yes, so long as the tool knows that you're in known theory..... Which must be a genuinely very difficult task these days. My a priori assumption was definitely that there'd be rel...

Sort of, except you'd then need to use whatever LiChess/Chess.com did to a strict replication study on a controlled data set. This is a very strict standard indeed though.

Just out of interest - I don't know that much about what Ken Regan does, but do we know how accurate his system is, and if so, how do we know? Plenty of reasons to trust. He's a sensible, knowledgable person and he's calibrated and tested his numbers against the vast extant database of FIDE rated g...