"you can't win the game in the opening, but you sure can lose the game in the opening."
"the most valuable item is perfect calculation"
May I quote you sometime?
"you can't win the game in the opening, but you sure can lose the game in the opening."
"the most valuable item is perfect calculation"
May I quote you sometime?
I think that if you could perfect any of the relevant chess skills (calculation, positional understanding, perfect opening play), obviously your rating would go up - but by how much?
I suspect that the answer differs from person to person. Different players have different relative strengths and weaknesses. Some play inspired chess, and then blunder pieces. Some get through the opening with an advantage and then have no sense of how to develop a plan. Some survive the middlegame and then play the endgame with great precision.
My own small gap between my Online rating here and my USCF strikes me as an aberration. My correspondence ratings on several sites are very close to what they were when I was 300 points lower in USCF. 200-400 points seems more common, and as you state, simplistic comparisons of this sort are unreliable.
Do we have good reason to think that 8 piece tablebases are going to be available in a decade or so?
It was a wild guess. I'll throw a few bucks on the table, though, if you want to gamble on the notion.
Ugg...I have been sucked into this nonsense...At least it is killing the too much time I have at work.
It's amazing how often I have this reaction around here...
A photographic memory would be very useful for openings, for middlegame plans, and for certain types of endings. The openings portion alone, for me, would be worth about 100-150 ELO, is my guess.
Memory, yes. Photographic memory, no.
You should watch the documentary series My Beatiful Brain. It will help with your understanding of the kind of memory that seems to help chess players, and the inaccurate label that folks tend to use to describe it.
Condescension Man rears his head again...
"If you could remember databases perfectly, your OTB skill would match your ability in correspondence chess."
Actually that seems pretty logical to me. I'd never thought about it that way.
Huh?
Maybe I'm alone in this, but I find being able to move the pieces around and analyze gives me a big advantage over OTB.
I think generalizing can be dangerous.
She generalized (heehee!).
No, stating that generalizing is dangerous would be generalizing.
There's no documentary My Beautiful Brain, there's a documentary My Brilliant Brain and the movie A Beautiful Mind. When I found out it was about chess I'm not so inclined, I've already read a lot about Susan Polgar, memory in chess, blindfold etc. The name seems a tad egotistical also.
Yes, I mistyped the title. A scene in the documentary illustrates well what research dating back more than a century has demonstrated. The subjects of the documentary are not the authors.
"If you could remember databases perfectly, your OTB skill would match your ability in correspondence chess."
Actually that seems pretty logical to me. I'd never thought about it that way.
Huh?
Maybe I'm alone in this, but I find being able to move the pieces around and analyze gives me a big advantage over OTB.
Perhaps there's more than one reason that you find other people condescending.
If you could remember databases perfectly, your OTB skill would match your ability in correspondence chess.
My current Online rating here is 46 points higher than my current USCF. Perhaps you could do slightly better than a 50 point gain.
This is too simplistic. Both sides still have a fixed amount of time for an OTB game, a constraint that [more or less] disappears for correspondence. But it's even more than that - what would really happen if one played as though one had access to a database is that opening mistakes would disappear and one would get a time advantage going into the middlegame. But you still have to play.
As I like to think about it - you can't win the game in the opening, but you sure can lose the game in the opening.
So unless you're lucky enough for your opponent to fall into an existing opening trap, you'll "just" be blessed with a small advantage to white, or an equal game for black, or whatever. And you'll have more time. Now this alone is worth something, but not (for me) 300 points, which would put me over 2500 USCF. I've had a couple of games recently which I lost out of the opening to players rated about 2300, and the only game I won out of the opening was to a player rated about 1800, which isn't a fair tradeoff, from a purely ratings point of view.
I think that if you could perfect any of the relevant chess skills (calculation, positional understanding, perfect opening play), obviously your rating would go up - but by how much?
You can approximate perfect calculation by pretending you have access to an engine, perfect positional understanding by pretending you have access to a GM and their opinion, and perfect opening play by pretending you have access to a DB. For each player, the answer is different, and depends on their specific strengths and weaknesses, and opponents. For example, if you open 1.b3 and your opponent plays 1...h5, you're probably already out of book. And if this type of "nonsense opening moves" occur often for you, then the DB will be not very useful. On the other hand, if you make game-changing tactical mistakes all the time (and so does your opponent) then who really cares about deeper positional understanding.
I think for sure that the most valuable item is perfect calculation, and calculation can be worked on, but I'm trying to get a handle on the quantification of these items.