Ray Gordon

Well... let me change that... I don't expect the worst in people, it's just about 1/2 of the strangers who randomly message me for games cheat against me

So if people who don't know me cheat over unimportant games, it's kind of amazing this Ray guy didn't cheat to boost his rating a measly few points to win a bet against someone he hated.

Nah, you're a bit of a fruit.

Can I make that joke on the regular forums?

(he knows I'm kidding)

Ok, maybe not hardcore, but what was it... 18,000 bullet games and 20 blitz games? I'd say he's a specialist

fruit or not, send the cash!

"chess politics"? 

i bet you're the life of the office christmas party.

Let's see, digging up some old info...

Back in 2016 I'd played ~40 games in ICC's 5 minute pool and had a rating of 1800.

The pools were harder than regular seeks... I was... roughly the same rating on chess.com I think.

I don't think I ever had a rating over 2000 on ICC, but also I didn't play often (or after 2016 that I recall). But that's a better reference than nothing I guess.

And  yeah, I remember running into that guy a few years ago in that topic.

Yeah, ICC...

See back in the old days, n00bs like me would play on Yahoo!

"Real" players played on sites like ICC, Playchess, and FICS.

So there I am, having never even read a single chess book, just derping around in some online games, eventually I get to something like 1400-1500 on Yahoo! and my chess engine (which weren't free back then, you had to purchase them and they came on a CD in the mail) has a free trial of Playchess.

Oh, that's another thing, you had to pay to play on sites with good players (although FICS was free). So getting a free trial of Playchess was nice.

So I go to Playchess and it lets you enter your starting rating. So I thought ok, I'll put 1500.

I played maybe 3 games and got destroyed. I was playing real 1500s, not the fake Yahoo! 1500s who were probably pretty close to beginner level.

Years later I went to ICC was was frustrated that I could only get to 1700, but at least at that point I knew what to expect.

I guess these days players experience something similar when switching from lichess to chess.com... classical lichess 1500 is like 800 chess.com blitz or something right (I don't actually know).

What are you talking about?

Another friend of mine, whose identity is not too hard to figure out but who I'll just refer to by his chesscom handle 2012VAChamp, has a puzzle rating over 10,000.

I know how he did it, and he didn't cheat whatsoever, unless you consider chesscom's system being silly to be cheating. 

The fact of the matter is for a long time there were a finite, not crazy number of chesscom high-rated puzzles and a lot of them were famous studies and if you knew them you knew them. 

What's your credential btw? Are you just a person who tries to follow chess drama or do you actually know all of these people like I do...

I don't think usually if someone writes a bad review for something that they should expect many of their other reviews for completely unrelated products to be flagged and deleted, or for their parents' music to be spammed with negative comments. 

FWIW if I make a list of people who have seen/dealt with this stuff who you might have heard of, several of them don't like each other and aren't really on speaking terms, so any theory that some group of people are in cahoots against EK for no reason at all kinda goes out the window, but anyway

As for Ray Gordon, I think he gives us all something to aspire not to be. 

he speaks too much yet shows a little.. 

give me money and i'll give you the wisdom of the universe.. never is a logical claim.

his house.. is mostly empty he definately needs money.. why doesnt he join super gms and win tournaments instead of selling it on youtube..

last world championship paid 800k dollars to even losing challenger.. and 1.2m to the winner.

no one would sell the goose that laid the golden eggs..

I don’t feel like you phrased that in a way that makes sense but anyway. I know the lore and have been in these VCs and have seen the receipts and talked to all these people and you don’t/haven’t. You are a rando watching from afar. So it’s hard for me to put much stock into what you have to say 🤷 

got to 3600 puzzles legitimately, fyi:

i expect to hit my goal of 5000 without too much trouble:  just took a year off to work on puzzle rush (30/40/72) & achievements (currently at 129/136).

'borderline non-human':

refuting this particular statement.

well i only meant to show that it's possible to get a high score legitimately... i've done 11,000+ puzzles & put in many hours to hit my 3600.

Gordon Roy Parker a/k/a Ray Gordon and I go back to the mid-90s.

I was writing about Usenet culture in those days, because Usenet interested me and I didn't know it would be dead soon.

Ray was a well-known character to several newsgroups: for instance, alt.seduction.fast, rec.sport.gymnastics, rec.games.chess, alt.hypnosis, and he was a frequent subject of discussion at alt.usenet.kooks. 

Ray's grandiose exaggeration of his accomplishments and talents (and all those lawsuits) brought on a lot of ridicule, but there was one claim that was genuine: His USCF rating hit 2000 in one rating supplement.

I played through some of Ray's gambit games at very fast time controls, and some of them were really charming in the way quick tactical crushes can be. But he dismissed compliments about them, which I thought was kind of sad. Ray claimed professional expertise at so many things, but one thing that he was verifiably good at, he shrugged off.

Ah, I had completely forgotten about this guy. He even has his own Encyclopedia Dramatica article (quite an achievement in my opinion).

By the way, this reminded me of that other user who also claimed to be extremely strong at chess, good old Lyudmil Tsvetkov. Does anybody know if he's still around?

It's too bad that psychology will be a big factor, I half expect him to withdraw mid tournament. It would be interesting to see how well playing bullet exclusively prepares you for such a tournament.

Backyard professor comes to mind. As far as I know he only played 1 or 2 OTB tournaments then quit. He definitely would have improved had he kept at it, but it was probably discouraging to lose to children rated U1000 (which is nothing to be ashamed of, I've lost to low rated kids too).

This seems really interesting and I really want to watch it but at the same time I don't know if it's worth 27 minutes of my time