Live chess 2.0

Amen to that!  Any chance to get certified by USCF as correspondence chess so USCF members could play other members?

I have read the USCF stuff.  Cheaters can cheat in correspondence chess as well.  As far I see it, it is correspondence chess, only faster.  Nothing keeps a correspondence player from cheating with a computer or another person. 

An argument could be made they are the same.  I think it seems the dying chess clubs, BUT the growing number of players is a problem.  It seems the USCF is leaning a bit about making their online site official.  

That would make it the same here.  30 min, 1 hr, 1.5 hr live games would be all that would qualify most like.  30 minutes sure makes it hard to cheat -- you would run out of time.

Just an idea and perhaps a growing trend??

There is no doubt about it.  But again, cheating is just as easy in correspondence chess and the USCF sanctions that.  You may notice I have been giving this a lot of thought lately.  I have considered starting a chess club, but it is financially intensive and right now impossible for me.

I am not sure what the "check against cheaters" is in correspondence chess.  But I think there is a solution that may have some merit.  Perhaps I should email the USCF -- but they have 6 lawsuits at the moment, one brought by Polgar.  Lots on their plate.  And ugly BOD election has caused some problems because of technology - email!

But what if "online chess" with checks built into like Chess.com has done, was sanctioned.  But you could only achieve a certain official rating to a certain Elo score.  I am pulling a number off the top of my head.  Say 1700.  Than any further advances would have to be done OTB.

The player who cheated to get to 1700 would get KILLED OTB and it would help inspire people to not cheat.  Maybe the number should be lower such as 1600.  That way people would be less inclined to "brag" they have a 1700 USCF rating without ever playing OTB.

I live in a fairly large metro area.  There are NO active chess clubs.  I would have to drive 2.5 hours to play in a USCF sanctioned event or game.  Although I am a USCF member, I simply cannot play in an official game.  

Now my rating here is nothing to brag about.  I have been trying to learn more than being concerned with winning.

Technology marches on.  At one time, it took Deep Blue to play a great game.  Now it takes an inexpensive program for your computer.   Chess may have to make way for technology.

I played some 30 years ago, championship level golf.  A player would walk up to his/her ball and NOTHING would keep them from improving their lie, etc. -- except honor.  Did YOU want to score well by your ability -- or did you want to cheat.  

I had a golf scholarship to a small school.  We lost the conference championship to cheaters.  At the time the took the best 4 scores from a 5 man team.  Our 5th player could not make it.  Without anyone to play with the other 5th players, they scored 15 (no kidding) strokes better than they had ever posted in any tournament.  

We should have won, but got cheated out of it.   Everyone knew they cheated, but it could not be proved.  So when it comes to cheating, I am VERY cognizant of such things.

You cannot stop all cheating.  The best you can ever hope for is to limit it to a tolerable level and encourage people to be honorable.

 The whole idea behnd any chess game with a time limit is that you need to manage your time.  And being down material no matter how much does not mean you should lose.  if you win on time, its a win no matter the material.  Its chess, time limits are part of the game. 

For certain.  I have made it very clear my first post was a knee jerk reaction.  I just will not play in "long games" or tournaments.   It is a simple solution.  And clocks and timed games were devised because people would stall, or hope their opponent would die overnight.

I think if you can't win a game when  you're "20 points" ahead in material (what's that 2 rooks and a queen!!!)  and you've got some time left (say 1 minute) then you should shut up and learn to play better.   Face it, people who play here often are very protective of their ratings and they'll wiggle around for as long as possible inorder to hold on to them.  I can't blame them.  That's why I often like to play unrated games.  In Urated games people are more likely to accept a draw in an even position or resign in a miserable one.  Then we can all get on with our lives and to our next game. 

Also, in faster time controls, I suggest using what I think they call "bonus time" here.  Sometimes it's called "increment".  It's like the "Fisher clock".  Each time you move you get a pre-determined number of seconds added to your time.  I like it because even if you're down to seconds and you have an advantage, you can usually "get 'er done", but playing quickly and hopefully efficently.

How many others besides myself just skimmed the thread looking for a post from erik? :P

Me!

 The point of blitz games is to play fast chess.  If you don't play quickly, you might play better than the other guy, but you aren't playing blitz and will probably run out of time at blitz time controls.  If you want to play a version of chess where you have the time to finish your opponents off, you can set the time control on your seek to 60 minutes or something like that (you already can play at time controls similar to the classical time control, if you set your seek to 120 minutes + 90 seconds per move), but beware-your opponents will have more time too, and they might use that time to avoid getting into positions where they are big material down.

You can avoid the problem of playing too many correspondence games at one time if you have multiple opponents online, simply by staying on one game until that opponent leaves.  You don't have to make a move in a correspondence game just because it's your move and your opponent is online.  Just change the setting (below the chat box) so that it stays on the same game when you submit a move!

I would like to see fewer disconnects (I've had them often, even while using FireFox 3!), and I'd also like to see other stability improvements (I often cannot accept a seek once I've just finished playing a live game, as it won't let me click on the accept seek button).  That being said, I do NOT want this site to become like ICC where (to the best of what I could figure out) you have to complete a 3-hour download (if you're on dial-up like I am) to get the program to play with.  The increase in stability and the decrease in lag are not worth the problems associated with successfully making huge downloads over a slow Internet connection.

I'd like to see Chess960 in Live chess!

p.s.  could there be some system put in place to guarantee that at least half of your disconnects occur when you're in a hopeless position, rather than 90% of them being when you're about to deliver checkmate?

That would be cool

Can we just please get live chess that works! I haven't played live in almost a year until yesterday, and within ten games I had a game where my opponent lost on time but nothing happened(this has happened to me before I still don't really know what it is) so after waiting for about a minute(since there was no reason for him to move with the timer being broken) I was promptly disconnected giving him the win. At that point I remembered why I don't play live chess at chess.com and I don't plan on doing it for another year(or until this chesslive2.0 comes out).

Your opponent did play to win.  He won because of the way he played didn't he?

http://www.rateitall.com/t-7965-record-stores-and-cd--new-york-city--ratings-and-reviews-on-rateitall.aspx

Kupov your obsession is amusing, but this isn't the appropriate place to post about it.  Just have a conversation with me through private messages or on my profile page if you insist. 

In any case, is there one of those shops you are trying to point me to?  Most of the entries on that page are not music stores at all (The Charlie Rose show?), and the rest are all stores that market themselves as used music stores (The review of the top hit is "Academy had a good selection of used records great place for one whom likes to dig, you dig?").  There is one exception:  Barnes and Noble records.  So I stand by my stated point that there are no places in NYC to buy new CDs except for stores that primarily sell used music and market themselves that way, and nation wide book chains.

Now lets take this out of other people's threads, shall we?

1. done

2. done and done and done. there is no way to disconnect now :)

3. yep - big boards!

I'd like the player tab back, and better performance.

Crossing my fingers for no disconnections. 

 explain?

It could also be argued that the reason you had a strong position was because you took alot of time to make it that way. However, what is horrible is when in some blitz game with 0 increment (like 5 0 or 3 0) and they're only up like 15 seconds (say 30 sec to your 15 sec) and they just move as fast as possible. You're up two pawns, and the win is so easy you can move every second and easily win. There's just one problem! If you both move every sec, you will lose unless you can win in like 10 moves! Having even a 1 or 2 second increment could easily solve the problem, but instead even though you would have won convincingly in another 20 and was hardly behind on time, the other guy wins. This happens to me all the time. And anything more severe, of course, makes things even worse. So a player taking it to that extreme is annoying and for that reason I usually use an increment.

I would personally like to see a better piece count thing (the bit where the pieces are "kept" when they are taken off the board"). At the moment on live chess 2.0, the pawns overlap each other, then so do the knights, bishops and rooks (if you manage to take both of the pieces of the board). I prefered the old version (live chess 1) of this where the pieces just lined up by each other when they were taken off the board.

Btw Eric, good work on the live chess 2.0. No disconnects and the clocks seem to be working fine now :)

Will we still be able to organize group chats? Aside from that it looks great, I even tried crashing my browser in midgame and reloading- the game was right where I left off!

Becoming clear that you don't understand bonus time. Opponents can regain time after each move- the clock's not running backwards.