Ray Gordon

Is anyone familiar with Ray Gordon who claims to have solved chess? I watched one of his videos and he seems to be sincere so I sent him fifty bucks for his materials. From what I see he might be a new Nimzovich and I didn't want to miss out.  Has anyone had experience with him and the system he is teaching? Did I waste my money or is he on the up and up? 

I watched a few minutes of one of his videos.

I didn't find it convincing.

Definitely not a waste of money. Im sure he will share his secret with you and no one else wont know how to solve chess or what the solution is

Thank you for the name, his YouTube channel is legitimately a glimpse into the insane. Like a car crash that you can't take your eyes off

What a character.

Interesting. I wanna watch these

He seemed OK to me. Of course I'm quite mad. He does seem to know what he's doing so I sent for his materials just to see what he was doing.  At least he's not pretentious.

That seems true.  He obviously has a ton of knowledge. 

Whether or not he has produced anything you could use is another matter.

I have a strange feeling that he is onto something. He was talking about narrowing the tree and that seems to me to be the right method. I now see that Paypal has taken my money so I should be getting the materials in a few days. I will report back when I get it and look it over.

'solving chess' is currently impossible & will most likely remain so forever.

There have been many amateur players, over the recent years, who believe they have figured out a unique "system" to solve chess. Usually via the help of Stockfish.

Yet none of these players have managed to play at any respectable level.

I suspect, for most of these individuals, mental health should be the main conversation.

Besides, there are already players in the world who have learned the "secrets" of chess, and who consistently play it at the highest level of human mastery.

You know them by their official title: Grandmasters.

He seems perfectly fine to me.

In my own parallel universe regards,

Esch

Yeah, lol. A humorous one being when he attempted to sue google for 10 billion dollars

Anyway, Ray's chess improvement in his mid-fifties and with such poor health is relatively admirable. I'm in a ~2 year long flame war with him, where I promised that if he broke 2300 bullet on lichess before the end of 2021 I would paypal him $500 USD and make a video apoligising for calling him insane.

I watched him stay up all night with 1 day to go grinding his rating, luckily for me he peaked at 2276 on lichess.

That sounded like a close call.

Perhaps you should've set the rating floor at 2500.

Sorry, it was across various videos on his channel which he has since made private.

Speaking of his channel, he has recently made a video where he releases part 1 of his "solution to chess".

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=obspXnwFkzQ

lol

That's pretty amazing. I'm glad you didn't have to pay up, but it's kind of sad to get so close.

Watching him talk about positions in the first video... I'm amazed he got a rating that high.

I guess you could say it's bullet, and as long as you can capture free pieces consistently you'll have a high rating but... still kind of amazing. The lines he looked at and the comments he made were nonsense. I wonder what his OTB rating would be if he played.

Holy crap... this guy basically never premoves.

I was looking at his games on lichess and I noticed he was using a lot of time in the opening (consistently about 10 seconds for the first 10 moves) which led me to check the move times... he'll premove things like recaptures, but he doesn't seem to premove otherwise.

That's a huge handicap IMO.

Looking at some of your games, when you're going fast, you're getting to around move 15-20 having only used 10 seconds, which is what I'd expect.

His profile says he's about 1900 USCF. If that's true, 2300 bullet online shouldn't be much of a suprise, I think.