Face Book

[Joey Stewart]

Hello there, has anyone ever tried playing face book chess? I gave it a go a few years back but now it appears that it is linked in with chess.com and you can use your face book account there (which was quite nice, as they also threw in a weeks permium membership by accident).

I got up to 2170 last week - one of my quite good ratings - has anybody ever been higher than me?!

[Jonathan Bryant]

Hello there, has anyone ever tried playing face book chess? I gave it a go a few years back but now it appears that it is linked in with chess.com and you can use your face book account there (which was quite nice, as they also threw in a weeks permium membership by accident).

I got up to 2170 last week - one of my quite good ratings - has anybody ever been higher than me?!

I am aware of one local OTBer with a modest ECF Grade who seems to have been a good deal higher than that ... although he's not allowed to play there [i.e. chess.com] any more.

[Joey Stewart]

Was that because it was the hand of silicon which was responsible for the high rating?

[Peter Lalic]

I stopped at 2170 on chess.com. In fact I decided some time ago to cease all Internet chess playing; it gets addictive, and it's not helping anyone's chess. I really play only ECF-rated games nowadays; I cannot concentrate in friendlies, since there's no incentive.

[Jonathan Bryant]

Was that because it was the hand of silicon which was responsible for the high rating?

Don't know, but the relevant member page did have a clear label saying the account had been suspended because of cheating. Funnily enough, I've just popped back there to find the exact form of words that chess.com used but the page seems to have disappeared. Fortunately I copied the page some time ago just in case this happened.


Not that being labelled a cheat by chess.com is necessarily case closed.

http://www.chesspub.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/Y ... 1284933654



UPDATE:
Have managed to track the page down. It says:-

"ACCOUNT CLOSED FOR CHEATING
This member's account was closed because they were found to be cheating. Chess.com does not tolerate any kind of cheating including: multiple accounts, unfair computer assistance, outside help on games, etc. If you are not sure about the rules, please read the site rules here!

If you feel this was an error, click here."


Happily, the person's successful career on another site continues without hindrance.

[Alex Holowczak]

There was a much worse site for that, that I won't name here.

Quite a few people at our school used it, and one day, it immediately banned all of us. We shared the same IP, so they thought (presumably) we were multi-accounting. The only way to beat this was to pay to become a member. We soon stopped using it.

[Michael Jones]

I've played a few games on it, but not enough to get particularly high. Once you get to around 1700 you tend to find pretty much everyone logged on is lower rated than you, which makes it tricky to progress much further.

[Alex Holowczak]

I've played a few games on it, but not enough to get particularly high. Once you get to around 1700 you tend to find pretty much everyone logged on is lower rated than you, which makes it tricky to progress much further.

That depends on whether you play on Live Chess or Correspondence Chess!

[Michael Jones]

I've found the same with both. The ratings for correspondence are ridiculously reactive - you can gain or lose 150+ points on one game.

[Alex Holowczak]

I've found the same with both. The ratings for correspondence are ridiculously reactive - you can gain or lose 150+ points on one game.

They use Glicko, so activity is proportional to the variance. Either way, I agree, for correspondence chess, it fluctuates too much. When they changed it to something more sensible, people complained.

The other thing I don't like about it is that they have England, Great Britain and United Kingdom as country options. They aren't the only site with this failing.