What caught my eye was the ratings of some of the players with ICCF and FIDE ratings.
For the ICCF players here’s the breakdown:
One Senior Master rated 2158,
Five International Masters with an average rating of 2119
Three Senior Masters with an average rating of 1951. The lowest rated SM is 1769
The FIDE rated players:
Two International Masters rated 2109 and 192217 FIDE Masters rated from 1664 to 2160 with the average rating being 1989
What I thought was interesting is that LSS allows engine use, as does the ICCF, in its tournaments and here are these obviously accomplished players who you would think would be among the site’s top rated by virtue of being good enough to obtain a title in either correspondence or otb play.
Looking at the site’s top rated players I see a lot of names of top level CC players, but only one otb titled player. That of Brazilain GM Alex Fier. The 24 year old Feir got his FM title in 1996, IM title in 2004 and was awarded the GM title in 2007 and currently sports a pretty good 2603 rating with the FIDE. Fier’s record on LSS so far is +1 -10 =5 which includes one forfeit win and 8 (!) forfeit losses. It looks like he got off to a bad start but he’s still playing and is ranked #2 with a 2644 rating.
Anyway, I just thought it was interesting to notice that even using an engine is no guarantee of success in correspondence play…just look at some of those ratings. Some of them are actually worse than mine!
Using an engine in correspondence chess seems to me unsporting even if both players have agreed to
ReplyDeletethis. Doesn't it boil down to 'my engine vs yours'?
Alastair
This is a FAQ! I have posted on it many times but the answer is no. If engines leveled the playing field most correspondence games would end in draws but the fact is tailenders lose most of their games and the leaders win most of them. So the deciding fact cannot be the engine. For anyone that is skeptical my challenge is to play in an ICCF or LSS tournament and see how they do against CC Masters and other titled players!
ReplyDeleteIn my last completed event the winner scored +3 -0 =3 while the last place finisher went +1 -4 =1 and the only titled player (an ICCF Senior Master) only managed +1 -1 =4. See the crosstable for the 10th World CC Championship for an example.
http://correspondencechess.com/palciauskas/tenth/tenth.htm