Top ICCF-US Players

ICCF-US TOP 50 RATED PLAYERS 
Note: this list is limited to living ACTIVE players (last 2 years) 
with FIXED ratings, i.e. at least 30 games.
ICCF ratings beginning April  2015 

In the above list I checked for OTB ratings of the 10 players listed and found 2 B class players and 1 unrated in OTB play !  Only 2 of the top 10 even have an OTB title and that is NM .  The top 50 can be found here : 

http://www.iccfus.com/ranks.htm

The computer engines have taken over modern day correspondence chess and is why I quit this form of chess in the 90s . I am not interested in seeing who has the strongest engine or who best knows how to use them . 

Are engines allowed in ICCF, or only databases?

Was reading the OP wondering when Firebrandx would come give the other side of the coin. Happened pretty fast.

Yes, ICCF allows engine use . 

Yes, I see you are another B class player OTB and have never been over 1800 OTB .  I agree correspondence these days requires a different skill set than OTB chess . In OTB chess you actually have to be a good chess player to get high ratings and OTB titles .  In correspondence chess you dont need to be a strong chess player to get high ratings and titles .  I played ICCF and USCF corr chess for a couple decades myself , also played in APCT and CCLA over the years but quit as soon as the engines started taking over this form of chess . 

In my limited experience, engines have given me bad moves and tons and tons of non-best moves. (I don't play in ICCF, just my own analysis).

One reason ICCF seems so different to me is I think in some way OTB is characterized by our lows and gaps in knowledge and in ICCF those seems to be completely covered. But when everyone has these I have to wonder what separates one player from another. FbX's explanation of who is the better researcher makes sense to me.

I imagine when you have to lean heavily on your engines even then it's very difficult. If all you do is e.g. leave it on over night I imagine that would be fairly useless as so can your opponent. You'd have to increase its depth by choosing which lines to to follow. And (again in my limited experience) when an engine gives its top few moves all within a few eval points of each other it's really leaving you on your own. I wonder if one ICCF strategy is to go into these middlegames where the top 10 moves are all within -0.10 to +0.10

Yeah but it's a little convenient to say you really came up with your own plan when you alter a few, even many, computer suggestions. In ICCF you will inevitably always have that sort of structure. The computers will give some course of action that at least does something without any obvious blunder. Working off of that structure seems to require somewhat less chess understanding than making a plan only based off of your previous experiences -- sometimes I can think about a position for 20 minutes and struggle to find some course of action that even makes sense. Not to mention if you want to see that a plan is good you can just play out 15 more moves and see what happens.

Yeah, it's a different game really.

At least that's how I imagine it being :p

What a foolish statement. You state they are different skill sets, then give us the "No true Scotsman" nonsense. Chess is just a set or rules. There is no "true chess". It's just as foolish as the sprinters mocking the marathoners as not being "good runners", when the reality is, both the sprinters and the marathoners are equally incompetent at the other's craft.

I don't blame him for looking for some kind of basis on which to judge, rather than none at all. Without any basis, we wouldn't be able to have any idea on whether a person who claims monopoly is harder than chess is lying. So I find it a bit dishonest to do the whole "don't make judgments on anything that is different" thing, because everyone does this, and it actually makes us more efficient. I mean, yeah, have some doubt, but when you see blatant cases like a B class player being an ICCF GM it gets pretty ridiculous. Yeah, I'm going to call it more like researching chess. And if you like that sort of thing well that's great, but don't pretend that you have no clue what is meant by "true chess."

Your analogy fails completely .  Why doesnt this surprise me ?  The runners actually do their own running , they arent aided by say .... riding a bicycle and calling it running .  Chess is about thinking and knowledge/understanding of the game of chess , don't you agree ? Well , correspondence players using engines arent doing all their own thinking , the engine is doing a lot of it .   D U H    Modern correspondence chess is actually centaur chess , a chess variant . 

I have very limited the type of chess in current correspondence chess.

I played the two exhibitions on chess.com where I took  Black against strong correspondence players including quite a few games vs players who have over-the-board titles.  I learned a lot about current correspondence chess.

 Those who claim that a strong correspondence player is just following an engine are quite wrong.  Those who claim that correspondence players are not doing ALL of their own thinking are misleading. Nobody does ALL of his own thinking while playing a game. They have read chess books or have looked at games on the internet or have been taught by a person or other means. So they are not using ALL of their own thinking either.

It is incongrous to disparage a group of players [thousands of players] because they play a type of chess you do not like.

Please look at the other thread where I gave a Wikidpedia of one of the GrandMasters I have played in the past.  You will see that Daniel Fleetwood should not be disparaged on the basis that he plays a type of chess that only a small percentage could master.

I repeat, those who criticize modern ICCF correspondence chess have no real idea of how it works and the beauty it gives.  Those who like to disparage this type of chess could never do themselves the type of chess they disparage.

Almost every statement you made here shows you have almost no understanding on how current ICCF correspondence chess works.

I have to admit that was the funniest statement I have ever heard. LOL I almost spit out my drink all over my PC screen lol.

It was a terrible metaphor but it sure was a funny one.

I believe the essence of the argument is this: "Centaur" advocates believe that this type of chess is an art of its own. Which is defensible. "OTB" advocates claim the "Centaur" players do not have the same skills of OTB players. Which is true.

How will these opposing viewpoints be reconciled?

Ultimately, the centaur chess variant is a different game than OTB chess.

My point is that you can be a weak chess player OTB and still be a correspondence GM . It is fact that B class players ( OTB ) are correspondence GMs .  For me this just greatly lessens the value of the correspondence GM title . Oh .... and one of the top 5 I checked in that list is apparently unrated . I would bet money that there were no B class players that were also correspondence GMs before the engines .... So , when someone is bragging about what they are and what they have done in correspondence just keep in mind that unrateds and B class players ( OTB ) are among the top correspondence players these days . 

Well, engines made it a different kind of game, so yeah, these days the top players are different when in the past they were also strong OTB players. So different that apparently some of them don't even play OTB. I don't know that you can use that fact to claim they don't know much about chess, just that they focus on that type of chess while OTB pros spend all their energy on OTB chess.

If it's a variant it seems as silly as saying a marathon runner isn't as much of an athlete or doesn't have strong legs because he can't finish top 10 in a bike race.

I would claim, for example, that the chess knowledge of the best correspondence players is way below the chess knowledge of the best OTB players.

I would also claim that the main problem for a very strong OTB player to get good at cc would be the time to adjust, and patience, and motivation too I guess. On the other hand, for a B player who is good at cc chess to "adjust" to playing like a GM OTB? I'm sorry there isn't a way lol.