difference in quality of games between ICCF and FIDE

To all chess community:

Recently we had a very long discussion on chess database logics and what quality means for different kind of chess players (although on different forum www.talkchess.com) But it still worth to mention it. The post started innocently with posting 52,000 games for free on A00 - Irregular Openings and informing chess community where to download it. (you can still find at http://www.openingmaster.com )

One of the last topics raised by James Constance was talking about deduplication process but also the inclusion of ICCF / Correspondence games into main stream (OTB - over the board game) database. Is it correct?

[quote]Quote from James Constance : Also the base seems to include correspondence games - so quantity-wise shouldn't it be compared to megabase + correspondence 2009?[/quote]

Our answer and also basis for perhaps another discussion is YES. We would welcome anybody who has his/her opinion on this subject to post the answer here. Appreciated.

1)
We start with simplification of two bodies (and again this is just simplification we respect very much other chess associations as well)
a) Practical chess games (OTB - over the board) under FIDE
b) Correspondence chess games under ICCF

The last ''conflict'' between FIDE and ICCF was when group of top players from ICCF wanted to play on FIDE chess Olympics. The answer was NO, you have your own Olympics. Let's see why. There are players like Ulf Anderson who are good Corr. chess players but also practical ('OTB') players. There was no will for confrontation. Secondly, practical chess as we all know is played under totally different conditions. The players who played both forms can best understand this. I used to play some time ago the practical chess myself for about 5 years, for todays FIDE rating I would say something between 2000-2200 ELO. Then I entered the Corr chess world due to several reasons.

What is the difference between Corr chess (ICCF) and Practical Chess (FIDE)?

i) It's all about which players play the game. Implicitly it goes hand in hand with quality of the game. If we can compare ELO of players who play both types of competitions , the ICCF players have 100-200 lower score compared to those from FIDE.

ii) Then it is about the external factors influencing the practical chess such as stress or other indispositions. The corr chess player unlike his colleague from practical chess, can use all the tools available - books, databases, computers engines etc... Therefore the results of ICCF players are lower in reality.

And why am I talking about this?
The ChessBase first started to divide players into two groups. It was due to underestimation of corr.chess games from the past. This schizophrenia is kept until now. However today it doesn't have any more meaning as play under the stress is one thing (including making stress mistakes) and deep analysis of chess moves is another (when we talk about corr chess players we mean those with higher ELO)
The future speaks in favor to correspondence chess only because of distance and costs associated to moving between point A and B. This is also a silent point of conflict.

To conclude : Virtual Chess or Practical OTB chess? Each has it's pros and cons. We cannot accept the dogma of the past that only practical chess games are real games where many officials these days try to present it this way.

2)
Answer to James:
Each chess database builder considers what to insert into his/her chess database under certain common rules. We think, correspondence chess games should be included because they don't talk about two chesses but one. Actually in the practical chess games ('OTB') one may find more mistakes than in corr chess which is perfectly ok, but nobody discuss about it. Therefore the ratio of infiltration of correspondence chess games into the main Opening Master database is higher. Mainly we talk about the quality games or insufficiently present openings such as A00. Therefore we say now, yes, we have more correspondence chess games included in the ''main'' database but this is mainly due to increasing level of the quality and not about some irrelevant criteria set up by ''officials''.
Therefore if a chess player wants to order the database which should support his plays he or she can better decide based on his own criteria.

Best Regards,
Alexander Horvath, SIM ICCF
http://www.openingmaster.com

interesting topic!

I have been pleased today, because I realized that infamous Mr. Alexander Horvath had kicked the bucket in August 2013. He was 58 years old.

He was online chess cheater and arrogant dirty scumbag. Aside of the account "budfit" promoting of his snake-oil-chess-db product, he cheated here under nick "Mosur". After getting caught, he attacked chess.com and kohai in various forums.

May his fallen soul play eternal futile chess match vs Deep Hydra in dark depths of nether world.