English Chess Forum

Good luck but... is this really an event that is allowed within "the rules"? Don’t see why not - if you are thinking ‘rule of six’ and the like, ‘supervised activities for children’ is one of the specifically exempted areas. Plus, covid-secure venues like schools, council buildings etc are a bit di...

Wadih: no, not beforehand. Not really sure what the purpose of such a list is?

Simon: yes. As, indeed, it says on the entry form. Wadih: Yes, rapid 15+8 time control. +8 is intended as 5 seconds +an extra 3 seconds to wait for your opponent to sit back and increase distance before replying...but if this also restrains the instinctive bang-bang-bang of juniors blitzing at the s...

I am organising an OTB U11 tournament in Oxfordshire on the 24th October - obviously subject to potential changes in the rules on what is allowed and what is isn't.

Capacity 30.

Details on the ECF calendar or directly via https://forms.gle/QdA76Z5S64KntGrv7

John - have sent you an email with various full names from U9/U10/U11 in the late 1980s.

Some of the earlier photos are marked 2000 but look more like 1970/1980 - I'm very sure tournaments did not look like that in 2000!

In the immediate future, clarity on "Rule of Six" would be necessary, noticing that in this context, more than six English juniors and presumably their parents had been able to assemble in a hotel venue for the recent European Junior online event. Indoor sports such as five a side football have rec...

So we have it that morally convincing arguments that someone is cheating go like this: Chess - he is *not* a strong player; if he were a grandmaster his moves might be legitimate, but as it is the chance of him playing like that, unless he is cheating, is infinitesimal Poker - he *is* a strong playe...

Echoing earlier replies, I think many juniors grow up on a tactical style which aims for decisive victory in the middle game, but then have little understanding of positional chess or endgames. So I can easily imagine juniors being graded 125, but with effective 150 tactical strength and 100 at endg...

Paul Habershon wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 03, 2020 3:14 pm

I fear the day will come when 'lay' will replace the 'correct' 'lie', as in something laying/lying in the road or someone having a lay-in instead of a lie-in.

So a driver could have a lay-in in a lie-by?

I'll get my coat....

To be explicit about the solution for those who have never done crosswords -

Church = CH followed by
EN = 'heart of K(en)t'
which has 'SSMA' ('Mass' arranged, i.e. anagrammatised) inside it, for E(SSMA)N

with the definition 'Castle for one'

apologies to those for whom this is redundant

Does anyone know how English chess terminology settled on 'rook' for the piece and 'castling' for, well, castling?

Roger: you seem to be assuming that the online distribution ought to be normal. The normal distribution has the feature that the number of 'outliers' - i.e. the chance of being 'far' from the mean, here z>3 - depends on the standard deviation, and increases drastically if the s.d. increases. But the...

Roger: To me I think arguments over whether the distribution of 'B' or 'C' are precisely normal are not relevant. The question is what is the chance of objective online performance lying in the tail of the distribution (z>3 here). Unless one can think of a reason why objective online performance sho...

Lichess puzzle rating explicitly allows engine use, going back to the game, etc (unless there has been a recent policy change) so it is not a measure of very much. Even without that, puzzle ratings still don’t mean very much as there is a big difference between trying to solve it in 5 seconds and al...