English Chess Forum

It’s hard at this point not to expect the present government to make a dog’s breakfast of this uniquely huge vaccination roll out. I'm going to keep trying, although yes :) In terms of a vaccine roll out in the UK, the Oxford vaccine still has a few questions marks. The news today is they haven't g...

So Cornwall can have a little rule of 6 adult chess. Lol The chances of much of the country going into Tier 1 before the summer seems quite remote given that the vaccine roll out will likely be a longer process than some optimistic predictions suggest. Vaccinating 'everyone' (or enough for herd imm...

It is. Getting a venue that good in central York for basically nothing for decades was some form of minor miracle

I'd definitely be somewhat wary of 'distorting' the winter league by finishing off several matches of it in summer. Maybe best to use 'points per game' to decide these leagues, as was done in football by EFL divisions 1&2 and NL. But perhaps it's still too early to be discussing this. That can get ...

Very unlikely to get the second - there'll be a fair few marginal venues who have shut for good, or at least until some brave soul tries to reopen them. For instance, York have lost the RI in York. Sold back to Network rail. That had, to be honest, been coming for a while - its bang in the city cent...

Are people really going to want to play the winter 2018/19 remanent in Summer 2021 and then immediately into a winter season? Especially since the restrictions on a variety of types of holiday are likely to be in place through Spring then gradually lift as we go further into the year. I'd definitely...

Have people started thinking of planning for Autumn 2021/22 yet? With the vaccine (and likely others as same targets etc) coming through, it looks to be a pretty good bet that we'll finally be clear in time to start a putative 21/22 league season on a roughly normal time scale. That will leave a lot...

If a 1500 player is consistently performing at 2500 then either the initial rating is very very wrong or they are cheating. How do you tell the difference, particularly for Juniors with out of date rapid ratings? Actually why not forget about ratings determined by results at all? Produce ratings by...

That's sad.

I'm hopeless with names but Darlington was definitely a nice little club when I was there a few years back.

Yes, its just hard. I do find the idea of effectively setting out to catch only the casual cheats a bit 'off' somehow, but obvious practical reasons. As for Wifi? Most vs Ethernet on a landline I think. Some won't have good internet at all of course but they're already excluded by it being an online...

Potentially nearly impossible to have no electronics in its strictest sense I would think, especially if they're still living with their parents. (Not that I imagine many people would fully apply that.). I do wonder slightly how worthwhile it is. Even with all of this there's a variety of ways someo...

In SF's case its a purposeful choice to limit their search space to make them stronger in real games. There's probably some way to force it to do a more exhaustive search than usual which would let it solve the puzzle. (Really old engines definitely had this, no idea if it has survived.). Leela is f...

The geography of this stuff does get a bit amusing. Warrington has apparently declared independence from all counties?!

Maybe at some point they'll manage to admit that Liverpool & Manchester & friends aren't that far off one conurbation

Having heard of another friend (of 200+ strength) being banned by Lichess is it possible to document the criteria Lichess use to ban people? Are the following possible? I'll try at least. 1. Having someone follow the same game using the same IP address? 2. Having another lichess window open and wat...

I'd be very surprised if private testing did that - there's quite a large false negative rate on the current tests