Well, then I  suggest you talk to Tim McGrew yourself. His handle on ICC is Tim. Maybe  then you can come back and tell us what he told you.

Btw, Birchbeer has not been seen on ICC since 1999.

Yes, there is. I heard it from an administrator on the Internet Chess Club. Also, I talked to Tim McGrew about it. They both said the same thing.

TopNotch wrote on 09/26/07 at 21:21:15:


Well now Toppy, I am sixty seven years old and my over the board play which was never really strong is weakening. However my correspondence play is steadily improving. Make no mistake correspondence and over the board chess provide quite different challenges. 

First in Correspondence Chess the opening phase of the game is different and in many ways more interesting. Cecil Purdy made the point that openings suitable for correspondence lay are not suitable for over the board play and vice versa. 

I spend time before playing my first move looking through my opponents games looking at what lines they play, looking for suitable lines and variations or errors in their opening repertoire. Once the game starts a tremendous amount of work is required. Yesterday I looked at three recent books and several on-line databases before deciding not to play a line given on the dragon pages. Since the line was suggested it has been taking a bath in over the board play and I could not find improvements for black.   

Another point is that in correspondence chess you can vary your repertoire far more than in over the board chess. 

Next in the middle game you can play much deeper and more accurately than in over the board chess. Attacks are refuted much more often and defence tends to be much better.  When you see the comment "and white has compensation for the sacrificed material" you start looking for whether this is true. Of course you want to do this before you reach the crucial position. 

I am no end game specialist but I played through some games by the very top correspondence specialists and they displayed awesome end game technique.

It is quite common to find players who are very strong at correspondence but much weaker over the board. As Clint Eastwood said in the movie "A man has got to know his limitations". 

Best wishes.

kylemeister wrote on 09/26/07 at 18:44:10:


Ok perhaps my argument/solution is not perfect, but I believe there is some merit to it. If you want to  know how good or bad a chessplayer you really are, a good indicator is how you play against opponents you know nothing or little about beforehand.

Anybody can look/play like a GM at least for awhile if they know exactly what their opponent is going to play beforehand and book up before the game. This is what I mean about playing the man. The argument about elite players protecting their ratings by playing among themselves may or may not be partly true but one should note that all these elite players came through the ranks to where they currently are, and their status and chess strength is proven. 

Incidentally the lack of reliance on one's wits is a major reason that correspondence chess has never appealed to me, and hence I don't play it, at least not yet. Correspondence chess often gives a false sense of chess ability, for e.g on another forum their was thread by a Correspondence player who for some reason was forced into over the board play to represent his army team or some such, when he suddenly realised that he could not employ any of the chess openings he enjoyed in Correspondence play such as The Najdorf etc. simply because he would not be able to consult his extensive library/media etc. during the games. This is a common dilemma among non OTB players.

The small digression above was just to emphasise the point that a chessplayer's strength can only be measured accurately when his play is unassisted. Moving on, my understanding is you can only get a USCF rating by playing in the United States and on that basis I don't see how it can be compared in weight or qulaity to Fide's, which reflects an international standard encompassing almost all chess playing nations. 

This may sound a bit elitest but as far as I am concerned competitive players should be more concerned with acquiring a Fide rating as this is the one that counts most. National ratings and titles are very nice and in some instances neccessary, but ultimately they should be considered as secondary.

Toppy  

TopNotch wrote on 09/26/07 at 15:26:25:


I agree that one world rating system would be a good idea; I also agree that FIDE titles are more worthy than national titles.  I don't know what to make about your arguments about play inside just one country, though.  In a big country like this one, it's not so easy to attend tournaments outside your country.  With the exception of Canada, of course.

However, the United States being the enormous country that it is, there is certainly no presumption that U.S. ratings are based on interraction with a narrower range of players than FIDE ratings are.   

If you think of chess pairings as establishing a sort of world network, there would be scant interconnection across the Atlantic even if one system of ratings were used.  These same arguments are made here, in any case, about ratings in given regions of the U.S..  It probably applies mostly between the Pacific Coast and the East, but I'm sure there's a lot more connection there than there is across the Atlantic.   

It might be worth observing that using computers and the internet, most U.S. events are rated within a day or two of their completion.  I doubt that FIDE today could match that turnaround.   

I apologize for my ignorance, but my understanding is that the British, the Swedes and possible some others also have national rating systems.  Nicht war?

On the whole I think National ratings should be done away with, and only Fide ratings used. I think this as what Fide is moving towards.

A big issue with national ratings such as USCF and others, is that it is often not an accurate measure of chess strength since the opponents faced are usally from one's own country and thus very familiar. This intimate familiarity often allows one to prepare for the man rather than the board, while in international competition this luxury is less present, at least in my observation anyway.

Toppy

In the US, master has in recent times approximately corresponded (though not by definition) to the 99th percentile of tournament players.  I don't know comparable figures for other countries.

In my most active playing days, the minimum FIDE rating was (for some reason) 2205.  2005 for women, I think.  (Or was it 1805?)  But now they rate down to 1400, if I'm not mistaken.

Another bit that occurs to me is that US master is approximately equidistant between WIM (2100 FIDE, which I would think is marginally weaker than 2100 USCF) and WGM (2300 FIDE, which I would think is marginally stronger than 2300 USCF).