Why play turn-based?

Me too. Tonight for instance, I will be playing at the Spokane Chess Club. All are welcome.

I can't quite understand why everyone's live rating would be significantly lower than their online rating. If we all start with 1200 points in both forms then shouldn't there be a similar distribution in the end?

The player pools are different.

To me that's just saying that a better player gets given more points for the same victory than someone else.

The top rated player in turn-based chess here is currently atlantischess, rating 2943; 143 wins, 1 loss, 16 draws. His live chess performance is much weaker, but still at the 98.1 percentile.

The top rated player in Live Blitz has played nine games. The top blitz player that has played over 100 games is Mongke Qutugh, rating 2416; 92 wins, 5 losses, seven draws. His turn-based rating is less impressive, but still at the 96.2 percentile.

For ratings to grow significantly above 2400, there must be a large and active pool of players at or near that level. There are not such in live here; there are in turn-based. Turn-based appeals more to strong players because this site excells at turn-based chess. For live, ICC and Playchess are far better for the top players. Those site have players rated well above 3000 using approximately the same Elo or Glicko formula.

That was really well explained.

wat

How could what he said possibly be interpreted that way? The numbers are relative to other players that you have played against, and who they have played against and who they have played against and so on. It's like how getting an 80% in a class of med students earns you a C but in a class of arts students earns you an A. Same knowledge of the subject, but relative to the rest of the class, you have a different "rating".

This would seem to explain the absence of very high (2500+) ratings in Live Chess. (3000 + ratings are anyway ridiculous on any internet site seeing that there are only a few human players in the world with Fide ratings above 2800.) But it doesn't seem to explain why the average ratings are much lower in Live than in Online, or at least I can't work it out.

I completely agree.

I believe that according to Fide rules games under 15 minutes are considered blitz, while 15-60 minutes are considered 'rapid.' When I play standard games in Live Chess it is usually 15 minutes with 5 or 6 seconds increment. Ideally I might like to play longer games but often there isn't enough time for this and also most of the opponents are not really that interesting.

There would be a similar distribution if the same players were represented. But, the overall pool in Live is weaker, so the ratings should be lower.

I fail to see how the time controls affect the math of the ratings.

Turn-based vs live, for me, comes completely down to time. I can play 15-20 turn based games (I prefer 7 days/move) at a time and only get on occassionally when it is my turn to think over the game. Do that a few times during my time then spend a little extra time when I'm getting close to a plan. On complex positions, or what I consider complex positions, I can take an extended amount of time to analyze the position and try to make the best move that I can find.

Turn-basd also helps me with stopping to think about my move longer, something I have a hard time doing in live chess (OTB, haven't played live here). Due to the extra time I also tend to make fewer outright blunders and I hope the practice will translate into better OTB play.

Ratings differences between live and turn-based chess can have many causes. One of the primary reasons relates to spending longer on a position; you are less likely to make blunders and will perform better. Another reason, in turn-based, at least here and another site I play on, people time out and your rating goes up from winning those games. On that site, my rating is probably 200-300 point higher that what my actual rating should be.

Obviously everybody plays at a somewhat higher level when they have unlimited time to move, can use opening books, and can move around pieces in advance, but, no, this does not account for the ratings difference between live and turn-based.

I think it's pretty pathetic how some of you correspondance players try to claim that you are more legitimate than live players. OTB chess is by far the most legitimate form of chess (honestly, how can anybody even argue this?). Correspondance chess originated when mail/courier communication was the only way for people in different areas to play chess. If they could come together to play a real game they would have, but they couldn't so they settled on an inferior version. Once chess went online, this problem was solved, and we are now able to play OTB chess (as 'Live Chess' here) with people from all over the world. Someone even tried to claim that turn-based was "REAL chess", which is beyond laughable to any serious player. There is a reason why we have world championships in OTB chess, or maybe you think Anand and Topalov should play for the title by correspondance? Nah, they would probably lose because there are probably lots of turn-based pros more serious about chess than those clowns. Why bother having real OTB events at all when everything can be done by correspondance? I won't criticize you if you enjoy correspondance more, but please at least understand that OTB chess is REAL chess and that live chess aims to imitate REAL chess. Turn-based chess is akin to flag football, 9x9 Go, and 5-card draw poker :)

In trying to defend your turn-based ratings all you guys have done is proven that they're grossly inflated relative to live ratings. If turn-based players were truly superior, you guys would be dominating at live instead of losing to players rated 500+ points below your turn-based rating. A 2000 turn-based guy is probably equivalent to a 1500 live guy, which is why live players have such a hard time advancing higher in the ratings.

Actually, I'm ranked at around 1100 for both Online and Live chess, which I find to be somewhat interesting, BUT I do play much better opponents on turn-based chess.

deepshredder, You start well, and hopefully your comment will put to rest a misunderstanding of ratings that is common in this thread.

However, if the rest of your comment is directed towards anything I've written here, then I have failed to make my point clear enough to you.

I am not asserting that turn-based is superior, nor that turn-based players are better. I am pointing out that on this site, most of the strongest players--I'm mainly thinking of those with real world OTB titles like NM, FM, IM, WIM, etc--play turn-based, but not Live here. The reason is simple: they play live chess elsewhere (ICC and Playchess mostly).

Notions of inflation and deflation of ratings presume an error: ratings are comparable. They are not. Ratings have internal consistency within any given pool. They serve as measures of self-improvement, and guides to finding appropriate opponents. Comparing live chess ratings to turn-based cannot establish that one is inflated, or the other deflated. Neither is "real" as a standard against which the other might be measured.

I have online ratings (blitz, bullet, standard, and some chess variants, as well as turn-based) at dozens of sites. These range from a low near 1600 to a high near 2400. My USCF OTB rating carries more substance but only for comparing my performance to other USCF OTB players.

I suspect that my chess skill puts me in the top 10-15% of active players in the world. My percentile rank at most sites is close to 90 (upper 10%), My USCF percentile near that. My live chess here is above 98%, turn-based just over 95%. My assertions that turn-based has a stronger pool here is based on this data.

The average rating in live chess here is ~200 below that of turn-based. I suspect that the most significant cause, but not the only cause, is that live chess here appeals to more casual and weak players, while it fails to appeal to serious and strong players.

As for quality of play, blitz and bullet are battles of smoke and mirrors. OTB is a battle of skill and psychology and endurance. Corresponedence chess is part of a search for truth, as is post-game analysis. One could very well argue that turn-based chess is real chess, and that all other forms are handicapped one way or another. I have not done that here.

This is exactly right. Don't look at the number, look at the percentile. In this way it can be determined that a player with a standard live rating of 1640-1650 should be equal to a player with a CC rating of 2020-2050.

Looks like you are way more concerned about ratings than most of us here are. I dont think that CC inflates chess skill level and ratings. Its the opposite: 15 min Live chess actually deflates the skill level and ratings.

Serious chess players want to improve their skill not their ratings. As a Live chess player you are more concerned towards ratings and winning, but CC players are more concerned about their quality of chess.

If you cannot acknowledge this fact, you should probably not be criticising.

Edit: For others who are interested to know, I have lost most of my live chess games in openings and timeouts; and have never played a pawn endgame in blitz; and never calculated a 15 move variation in Live chess.

No. This makes no sense. The average live rating is actually much much deflated from the average CC rating (by about 400 points).

However a 2000 CC player is not a 2000 USCF player, and when said player goes to live he's often somewhere between 1600-1700.

That's because there are more strong players at lower levels in LIVE CHESS and USCF chess.

What a terrible stupid post. Your parents should be ashamed of you.