The purpose of this group

As many of you already know, our game against Pogonina is being dominated by drive-by voters. In order for us to have any chance of controlling the votes we will be forming an Alliance whereby we all vote unofficially on the move the Alliance will play. That move will then be played officially by all members. The group will also allow more organization of the moves so you don't have to look through all the junk to find useful posts. Also, for those who are busy, we will have a topic dedicated to the FINAL Variations of each member after they have tweaked it to perfection so you have all the tools you need to make the right decision at your fingertips. Finally, the analysis we make are available to the public so that non-members may read as well.

As of now, your efforts at analyzing and reading is for nothing, as drive-by voters will just overwhelm you with votes that LOOK best. Join the alliance and know that your hard work will be acknowledged and your contributions have the power to decide the flow of the game!

P.S. If you want to join, you MUST read the super-long Rules and Procedures topic, right below this one. This will ensure that things run efficiently and the way they are supposed to.

This is a brilliant idea. Thank you so much for coming up with this.

hey folks, i don't have time to contribute much analytically to the discussion, but i joined the group bc i support what you're trying to do, and if i ever happen to have an insight i'll share it. i do keep up with all the moves.

Thanks so much. Your presence alone will help motivate people to join our cause.

in each of the top 20 teams, there are several strong members who contribute ideas as part of their team's attempt at organised voting. obviously some do it better than others.

if this group is solely intended to be for the purpose of playing against masters, then it would not be competing with those other groups and therefore all admins could post in their respective groups; a news item with a link to this group.

if you attract 5-10 top contributors from each of the top vote chess teams, plus enough other members who agree to vote for the agreed move when notified, we should be able to achieve a majority voting for the best moves...i see there were approx 1000 votes last move.

savyma,

what you say is correct. Only two solutions I know is (1) make our discussions more diagram-oriented (english chess symbols and russian chess symbols are different, which add to the confusion), (2) ask our Russian counterparts to use the "Google Translator" (very slow process, though).

If some of our team-mates are diagram-shy, we can post a separate forum topic on how to create a good diagram (will take time to prepare the posting).

I think Russian chess players have less problems with Western algebraic notation than discussions in English that are more problematic. Most of our posts should be indications of the assessment of how good different moves are, mainly based on explicit variations.

If everyone uses the excellent chess.com analysis diagrams all the time, this will help everyone understand (they don't even need to be able to read algebraic notation really).

As long as we can summarize the discussion in English, there are people among us who are comfortable enough in written/spoken Russian to be able to do a decent job summarizing for them, including using their notation.  I can help with some of that, though I seriously think kirill57 is the best person to do this, given his command of the language and authority among his compatriots. 

This means that readers need to know who/what to look for in the comments -- or else post that summary in the Alliance page, but make it visible to everyone (even if they haven't joined the alliance).

Let's also talk about how to improve the process here on the Chess Alliance, with specifics.  There's plenty of time before the next actual move (which is likely decided already), so we can refine the process and get us to a good set of practices.

Since I said this, I'll offer one initial recommendation:

- Finish with our informal discussions and analysis by 8 hours into the voting (down from 12 hours, which is the present situation).  This will allow us to be more relevant and timely to a larger number of teammates, and we will be less often in need to play catch-up.

Other than that, I felt that our discussion was well-conducted this time, and there was much less contention on this move -- which may or may not have to do with the smaller group size.