Total Replay by John C.Knudsen which has a bunch of CC games from about 1996 to 2003…nothing recent.
SIM Mike Read which has over 100 of his best/most interesting games from 1978 to 2000 and several are annotated.
Simon Hradecky has a nice site but nothing since 2007
At least Correspondence Chess Database 2011 from Chessbase
has over 800,000 games, some of which are annotated.
The answer, of course, is obvious:A modern CC Master |
Of course, “real” chessplayers don’t care much about correspondence play. I learned that a long time ago. I worked on a game in the US Open Correspondence Championship for three years. I was in the military when it started and it finished up while I was attending college. It was a really well played game featuring a positional Q-sacrifice and I sent it in to John W. Collins at Al Horowitz’ Chess Review hoping it would get published. Much to my surprise, it did get published a couple of months later and I was terribly proud to have the game published and annotated by Collins. Out of about a dozen CC opponents, one saw it and said, “Saw your game.” Nobody at the local chess club saw it. So much for that. And then there was the time I played a correspondence game with Samuel Reshevsky and held him to a draw. That was back in the 1970s and Reshevsky probably treated it like a simultaneous game, but I did hold him to a draw and that was without computers…didn’t have them then! He would never play CC today because of engines and all and if I held a GM to a draw in CC play these days everybody would just chalk it up to engine use. Correspondence players get less respect these days than they ever did and I can't say it's without reason.
I have been going through Bryce Avery’s History of Correspondence Chess in America off and on since I got it for Christmas last year. The title is a misnomer because it’s mostly the history of the Correspondence Chess League of America, but there are still some really great games in it, most of them played by no-names.
In any case, you won’t find many annotated correspondence games by masters these days. What can they say? Probably something like I read the other day: “I created and IDeA project with this position…(using) the Default tree shape…after a hour of analysis with six single core Houdini engines…”And that’s how the modern CC Master would annotate a game…not very interesting.
“I created and IDeA project with this position…(using) the Default tree shape…after a hour of analysis with six single core Houdini engines…” very funny. unfortunately also accurate.
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