English Chess Forum

What about asking also the ECF members themselves to express an opinion on the matter, before the ECF council is deciding their own future? An email will hopefully be going out to all ECF members next week drawing their attention to the report and asking for comments. That's a good initiative, but ...

For what my personal opinion is worth, both option 1 and option 2 would be an improvement. On second thought there might be a way to make option 3, or even the status quo, completely acceptable. The main issue with the current ECF governance model is that direct member have no direct representation...

So... the URS has in fact used all the results of all the games rated by FIDE in the last 6 years (and there are 246,022 players in the initial URS list - as I found after downloading a copy). And presumably this data has been willingly provided - for a fee? - by FIDE. The data is available for fre...

Reading their own website, their driver seems the ability to correctly predict the result of future games. The current FIDE approach tells us that even if A and B are equal at long time controls, that A may be somewhat better at Rapid and Blitz. If you discard this information how does this help pr...

Their rating system will lack acceptance until they publish the detail workings. Otherwise there might be a secret formula that adds a few points for players approved of by Kasparov and subtracts points for those who don't. I agree that more details of the inner workings are required in order to ga...

using more relevant data makes your statistical model more accurate What are you trying to model though? Reading their own website, their driver seems the ability to correctly predict the result of future games. Whatever works, it works. It can be very misleading to think only in abstract terms. Yo...

I would have thought it self evident that some players are better at "classical" chess than at rapid or blitz or vice versa. That is true. However these are also self evident: there is some correlation between the chess abilities at different time controls; using more relevant data makes your stati...

By the way - think of the comparative size of the markets. When NRK broadcast the World Championship match, they had a more than 50% share of the TV audience, and about 750,000 viewers. This isn't quite the World Championship, so the audience will not be so great, but still measurable in the hundre...

Just did, not sure a comment to an article on the guardian will have much audience though.

10. In case of a tie at the end of the match, you would prefer I like the idea of playing the match with an odd number of classical games (13 or 17 for example), with the challenger given one more game with white and the champion retaining the crown in case of a draw. It retains the concept of a ne...

However, it is not only the super rich who will move for tax purposes. That is shown by the number of medium and small French businesses and business persons who have crossed the Channel to work and live in London and its environs. My point is the the super-rich are the only one that might move (fo...

It is you who cannot be serious when you say what you have said, immediately above, which I will not bother repeating or addressing since it does not merit any discussion whatsoever. I must be so out of touch with what's out there then. It might be just me, but I still think it's ridiculous to cons...

Next year even more people will be trying to migrate to the United States in the hope that Trump leads by example when setting their tax rate. Seriously? Did you ever move to another country yourself? Unless you are a billionaire, the idea to migrate to another country because of (the hope of) bett...

With respect to the actual question of the referendum, I believe many Italians feel that good intentions (reducing the complexity of the law-making process and reducing the size/cost of parliament) were poorly implemented (major source of concern that the senators would be in practice named as oppo...