150 games in progress?!

The game I've got against the fellow with 470+ games is the first of 2 we'll play in the first round of a tournament.  I don't expect to last very many moves against this guy in either game (he out-rates me by about 900 points!), but even so, it may be a long time before he finishes his games against myself and the rest of the group and advances to Round 2.  I'm looking forward to the almost guaranteed whining to come from those who get impatient with slower players. 

--Cystem

I'm playing nine games but my stats show eight. It isn't just the big numbers that the computer stumbles over!

Yes, and I hope that helps!  It doesn't seem to have helped many of his opponents thus far, though-- he's won 96% of his games. 

He's probably one of these people who can just glance at the position and evaluate it, like when a good player is playing a simul.  No need to remember or rebuild strategies from one move to the next, like we mere mortals have to do, so the number of games he's playing doesn't make any difference in his ability unless it makes him take too long to get back for his next move and he times out.  He's only lost 7 games, and all of the ones I saw were lost on time.

over 60 games is a stretch

I know of one player at another site with +2000 games, so what? To each his own. The subjects that constitute worthiness here is mind boggling. If more people concentrated on their own games instead of worrying about what others are doing the ratings would skyrocket here! Maybe they are handicapped, maybe unemployed, maybe a genius, maybe maybe maybe!

I feel that just 15-20 games is too many for me!!

Actually I am pretty amazed with those who can carry that off.  I have a lot of free time that I use on Chess.com and my brain threatens to implode if I go over 50 games at a time. 

I had AWARDCHESS in two games and he played pretty fast...as fast as anyone else in the tournament, if not faster.

Some people are more easily boggled than others.

Like Afaf, I don't find these super-high games numbers to be worrisome, but impressive!

13 is nothing. Takes 1 minute to play. But I now have 451 to play (I couldn't log in for 1 day 4 hours)!

Post cards were fun too...those little rubber stamps with the red and black ink...

Postcard chess is the Romantic era of chess and in my opinion the high watermark of the genre.  Playing 100-200 games was not rare but the norm given the postal medium of the late 70's thru to the 90's. Now with the instantaneous response time of the internet carrying that amount of games is a seperate set of circumstances. If one wishes to carry 100-200-2000 games is a personal decision no one can be derisive or speculative about.

40 minutes passed, I have 212 games to play. Gives over 8 games per minute, excluding some breaks.

 CM Kacparov are you expecting us to genuflect, bow, throw gold doubloons ala Frank Marshall? Is this your impromptu look at me statement? Why not mix cucumbers, coriander, sugar, salt, water, dill, garlic and jalapeno and make pickles because that would be better and more tasty!

I have 0 timeouts, and my max number of games in progress was about 135. It's not THAT bad, but it becomes a bit of a chore. If you login once in the morning, and once in the evening, then you probably have about 30 moves to make both times. The hard part is actually later on. Because some of those 135 games will be against slow players. And then you're down to like 20 games, but every ... opponent ... moves ... so ... slowly ...

And then you realize that those 20 games will take another 4-6 months to finish. I know that some people have proposed alternate time control structures, which would then get rid of this problem. But of course some people don't see it as a problem at all.

Meh.

I wonder how many simultaneous games people play now by snail mail?  The current postcard rate in the U.S. is $0.28 .  Playing 400 simultaneous games by mail now would cost $112.00 per collective move, assuming none of your opponents lived out of the country and required additional postage.  If the games lasted an average of 30 moves each, that works out to $3360 to finish the whole set. Too rich for my blood-- I have a hard enough time paying for my DSL as it is!  

--Cystem

 I was referring to the early 1950s, when penny post cards were still around!

I once had like 600...(greeter games)

WARNING -- Blather and Trivia Follows!

Yes, the penny would have been a good deal, even with inflation.

Just for a lark, I just checked how the current 28-cent rate compares with previous rates in constant dollars.  The turn-over point was in the mid-1960's.  Inflation since 1964 averaged 4.32%, so the 4-cent postcard stamp then corresponds exactly to the 28 cents a postcard stamp costs now.  But by 1974 the postcard rate had doubled to 8 cents, which corresponds to 37 cents in 2010 (average inflation of 4.38% between 1974 and 2010), making today's 28 cents look like a bargain.  So chess by mail cost the same as now in 1964, but was more expensive than now in 1974.

Postcard stamps cost 1 cent from 1898 until January 1, 1952.  At the end of that span it was a bargain-- 1 cent in 1951 converts to 9 cents today.  Obviously, the farther back you go, the less of a deal it was-- 1 cent in 1914 converts to 22 cents today (average inflation of 3.25% since 1914).

So the cheapest period for chess by mail would have been the years just before 1952, when the postcard postage would have had an inflation adjusted cost of about 1/3 the current prices.

--Cystem 

EDIT:  Just to be clear, these are U.S. rates for domestic postage.