All irrelevent. Again...how does playing in computer-assisted matches speak to your personal playing strength currently? You're just dodging, and I don't know why since you've already flat out admitted that your chess performance has deteriorated over time...
Ponziani: Impractical in non-computer Correspondence Chess?
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btickler
Again you misquote me. I said that now I am not as strong as I was when I played the two exhibition matches. This is due to health.
My strength has been rather level since I won the US Championship until just very recently.
Again you are nothing but a disparager. [and one who will lie and twist facts to do so]
ponz111 wrote:
btickler
Again you misquote me. I said that now I am not as strong as I was when I played the two exhibition matches. This is due to health.
My strength has been rather level since I won the US Championship until just very recently.
Again you are nothing but a disparager. [and one who will lie and twist facts to do so]
Those were centaur matches...good god, what will it take for you to admit the obvious? A centaur match will not prove you can maintain a 2500+ performance rating without an engine. So how can you point to them as evidence that your play has remained at your US correspondence championship level?
Your circular logic here does not lend itself well to your argument that your playing is as razor sharp now as it used to be.
I've already told you that you're free to ignore my opinion. You might want to stop before I go digging around in the 150 page votechess thread and dig up some chestnuts about how the Ponziani Power votechess games were driven almost completely by you, and yet how those games have a 95%-ish T3 matchup rate (astronomically high), or how you talked about how sorely you were tempted to use your engine, but then didn't...
There's no shame in a declining level of play over time, so, please leave it at that. My intention was/is to address Kantfields' hypocrisy about Ponziani Power, not to disparage you.
This is from Wikipedia's article on Ponz111:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Taylor_(chess_player)&oldid=577175221
To quote the article verbatim:
David C. Taylor was the seventh U.S. Correspondence Chess Champion. He is a chess book author and a leading contemporary expert on the Ponziani Opening. A duplicate bridge expert, Taylor lives in Kankakee, Illinois.
The David "Ponz" Taylor was born in on 2 March 1909 on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. His family later moved to the Bridgeport neighborhood of that city in the 1920's. In High School, Ponz Taylor was a well regarded boxer with a 29-1 record.
David Taylor attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois on a full scholarship, having graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. degree in 1930. It was at Northwestern University where his interest in the game of chess started. Ponz got a job as a bond trader and futures commodity broker in Chicago and made a massive fortune in short selling stock throughout the Great Depression. Estimates of his profits between 1930 and 1939 vary from a low of $15 million to a high of perhaps $35 million in the dollar values of the time. (When adjusted for inflation as 2012 dollars, that comes to anywhere from $244 million to $570 million).[1]
David Taylor's decade in the stock market earned him many valuable contacts and connections, including that of Joseph P. Kennedy. Ponz was a frequent visitor at both the Kennedy family compounds in Hyannisport, Massachusetts and Palm Beach, Florida. In fact, Taylor taught Joseph Kennedy, Jr, John F. Kennedy, and Ted Kennedy how to play chess when they were teenagers. David Taylor's fanatical campaigning for John F. Kennedy, as well as his generous financial support in the 1960 Presidential Campaign earned Ponz access to the highest levels of the Kennedy Administration. Taylor and his wife were invited to the White House thirty-nine (39) separate times from 1961 to 1963.
johnmusacha wrote:
This is from Wikipedia's article on Ponz111:.
That link is actually to an old Wikipedia article that was removed for being inaccurate/unsupported. Thus the "oldid=" in the URL. You knew that when you posted it, JM...tsk tsk.
Regardless, I am aware of Ponz's contributions to chess and I respect them.
Even more reason not to press the issue...I would prefer to leave the legacy alone and not tarnish anything. That doesn't mean I will let a player use Ponz's past reputation as a crutch to justify hypocritical statements, though.
btickler wrote:
johnmusacha wrote:
This is from Wikipedia's article on Ponz111:.
That link is actually to a Wikipedia article that was removed for being inaccurate/unsupported. Thus the "oldid=" in the URL.
Regardless, I am aware of Ponz's contributions to chess.
Even more reason not to press the issue...I would prefer to leave the legacy alone and not tarnish anything. That doesn't mean I will let a player use Ponz's past reputation as a crutch to justify hypocritical statements, though.
Hahaha! You believed that fiction? You think the dude is 105 years old?
bigpoison wrote:
btickler wrote:
johnmusacha wrote:
This is from Wikipedia's article on Ponz111:.
That link is actually to a Wikipedia article that was removed for being inaccurate/unsupported. Thus the "oldid=" in the URL.
Regardless, I am aware of Ponz's contributions to chess.
Even more reason not to press the issue...I would prefer to leave the legacy alone and not tarnish anything. That doesn't mean I will let a player use Ponz's past reputation as a crutch to justify hypocritical statements, though.
Hahaha! You believed that fiction? You think the dude is 109 years old?
He doesn't believe it, he's well versed in Wikipedia knowledge and knew exactly what he was doing when he went to an archive of a removed article. Ponz is actually 64, as far as I can tell.
Ha! I can't even do simple subtraction.
A hundred and nine years old? [citation needed] brah.
Who wrote that article anyway?
Jul 25, 2014
0
#152
btickler wrote:
johnmusacha wrote:
This is from Wikipedia's article on Ponz111:.
That link is actually to an old Wikipedia article that was removed for being inaccurate/unsupported. Thus the "oldid=" in the URL. You knew that when you posted it, JM...tsk tsk.
Regardless, I am aware of Ponz's contributions to chess and I respect them.
Even more reason not to press the issue...I would prefer to leave the legacy alone and not tarnish anything. That doesn't mean I will let a player use Ponz's past reputation as a crutch to justify hypocritical statements, though.
you are talking to the author of the article.
johnmusacha wrote:
A hundred and nine years old? [citation needed] brah.
Who wrote that article anyway?
You should have mentioned the time he spent in the Justice League in that article. Or the time he went to Mars.
SocialPanda wrote:
you are talking to the author of the article.
Yep, I assumed as much :).
Or the time he saved Mao from drowning in the Yellow River.
SmyslovFan wrote:
I respect Ponz for having written a book and for his correspondence accomplishments years ago. But those accomplishments were indeed years ago. He's no longer as good as he once was, not by a long stretch.
I did analyse more than 200 pages of vote chess game commentary from the ponziani group. There was no secret opening book that stretched for 30 moves. There were a few players who conveniently added extremely precise calculations to brand new positions and pretended they had them all along, after the fact.
Go and look through the game notes yourself, kanti. Other teams clearly used engines. Players on ponziani power also clearly used engines too. Several of those players have since had their accounts closed. Some have not.
Smyslov I hope you don't have me in mind,do you?
sexonthebitch yeah!
Smyslov do you believe I was 'clearly using an engine' at any time?
LuisGruezo wrote:
If ponz111 expected to have good results against the Ponziani as black (I am referring to the exhibition match), and he in fact did, then this suggests that he had done significant computer analysis beforehand [yes, that's the claim]. If this is true, I see no reason why other players in the Ponziani team could not have seen this analysis, or had done the same analysis independently. [yes, also claimed, a second member did the 30-ish move analysis, and quit all his votechess teams and closed his account soon after the T3 matchup rates were published.]
Similarly, I don't see why it is so unreasonable that members of their opponent team could also have done extensive analysis of the line before the game started. [also addressed, but Ponziani Power representatives will only buy that they did extensive analysis, not that anyone else did]
It is mentioned in this thread that the Ponziani group had analysed lines to more than 30 moves. If this is the case for the game given in post #117, then how do they know their opponents had not done the same thing? [again, PP does not acknowledge this possibility] Much of it appears very forcing. [it is] After move 30 white makes a mistake, and black appears to be making normal moves, so it is quite possible that all the moves made after move 30 were without the input of an engine. [white's mistakes came after the member who was driving the game closed his account]
Apparently the accounts of some members in these games have been closed, either for cheating or otherwise. If they were banned for perceived computer assistance, was it because of the team games in the Ponziani opening? [no, chess.com does not monitor votechess games] And if so, how does anybody know that they had not analysed the line beforehand? [they can't...if chess.com detects a high enough matchup rate, they might ban someone even if that person prepped a 50-move variation in advance via engine analysis]
You're rehashing something that has been discussed to death elsewhere. There's 150 pages to wade through if you want to get yourself up to speed, but suffice to say that every one of your points has been addressed, some a dozen times ;). I added some quick edits above to make the story short.
LuisGruezo wrote:
I don't think I want to read that much... What was the verdict?
I added some bracketed info above in the quote of your post to give you some idea how things went. I happened to be playing on the BFG side of the game in question, and, much like a 2000+ player on Ponziani Power claimed to have done a ton of computer analysis on the Fraser Defense, BFG had a 2000+ player who claimed to have extensively analyzed the Fraser Defense and guaranteed a win or draw if BFG played the Fraser Defense.
Easy for me to remember, because I fought against the Fraser Defense in favor of a more commonly used database line. The player in question convinced the team to try it, after which a wild game ensued, which was highly engaging and fun...right up until the votechess league published their "banned teams" list and a massive thread ensued. The Ponziani Power player I mentioned quickly vacated, and the BFG player was banned around the same time period (and that's when I started digging a lot more into things).
Hugely disappointing to find out you've put many dozens of hours into a single game (and not just purely analyzing or researching things like Ponz's exhibition match thread...the now-banned BFG player was sometimes not around to make comments, and I spent time actually holding the team's feet to the Fraser fire when they were going to deviate from the Fraser Defense ideas (which basically trade 2 pieces in order to get a pretty firm hammerlock on white's position and reduce their piece mobility to almost nil)), only to discover in the end that it was entirely wasted and that both teams were cheating...
btickler
There were two Centaur matches, not one, and one was The King's Gambit.
In both matches my opponents were allowed to play ANY line they wanted
[Kings Gambit Ponziani] and they had White.
So your facts as to what happened are not true.
But in any event you are nothing but a disparager.