Hey, I was just wondering what the dollar sign followed by a number means in analysis, e.g.

({11:+3.78} 13. ... Rf8 14. Rxe6 g6 15. Re2 Nd5 16. Rde1 Qb6 17. Qa3 O-O-O 18. Rxe7 Nxe7 19. Rxe7 Qxd4 20. Nxf7 $18)

you've won the lotto !

Haha, it was a matter of time until this comment came up :)

were you using the rybka ? I have no idea. 

Thanks vowles.  I've wondered the same thing.  You will often see those lines of analysis in Tactics Trainer, when you click on View Analysis & Source, for example http://www.chess.com/tactics/view_source.html?id=40743&t=1220649286

I always assumed it was something like the depth of search (# of half-moves) that the computer was using during it's analysis.  Hopefully someone can confirm or deny this.

I would assume it was depth too.

Wow, you learn something new every day!

RetGuvvie98, chess.com could easily display $18 as +- and $19 as -+. That's what Scid and other tools do for me when I import PGN with NAGs.

Having said that though, they don't seem to understand PGN very well or care about supporting it properly. I found a bug in their PGN parser for the embedded chess widget on blog pages where Recursive Annotation Variations of a certain kind (which are supposed to be nestable to any level) worked two levels deep and failed three levels deep, and after hours of explaining the issue to them, they just said "it's not a bug" and couldn't say why it was not valid PGN. This was after I pointed them to the spec and the exact paragraph that governs the Recursive Annotation Variations. Multiple emails in the long chain of back and forth were concerned with trying to get the non-technical support person to see that the opening and closing parentheses don't have to all be on one line! The support person thought that since there were three closing parentheses ')))' on one line, and there was only 1 opening '(' before those on the same line, that it must be illegal, despite my explaining that the opening parentheses were on previous lines and that newlines are ignored.

That's when I decided to stop wasting my time reporting bugs and to downgrade my membership from diamond. Not that they cared in the slightest.

Yeah, they do have many excellent videos, which I do miss, but I've been enjoying videos at ICC. They have a much smaller selection, with less frequent updates, but I've found Dan Heisman's videos truly superb.

Downgrading may have been extreme, but I feel like losing a customer is the only thing they really care about. They didn't actually express any care or say anything to try to dissuade me though, when I said was going to downgrade.

Their customer service is pretty lousy in general. There are lots of forum threads like this one and this one and this one with suggestions that they can't be bothered to respond to (even just to say thanks for the suggestion or that they don't think it's a good idea), and then when I've reported a problem, like this one I reported in the forums (where the support person asks me some questions and never responds again after I answer them). Other issues I reported through their support system have gotten the same kind of terrible support that you expect out of a free service.

When the last support nightmare happened, I just decided that I don't feel right supporting them anymore.

Thankyou very much Ret!

what about $10