I'm on the downhill side of my 70s and have been playing chess off and on for more than 50 years. I was "off" for about 20+ years from the early 1990s until about 2015 when I joined chess.com and started playing correspondence ("Daily") chess. My main activity is playing World League on Team USA.

Aside from my USCF rating, I have a "leftover" rating of 2162 with the International Correspondence Chess Federation. I am currently (December 2019) playing a tournament with ICCF. I decided after all those years I would give it a try.

Update: I completed the ICCF tournament with a score of 10 draws and one loss against a field with an average rating of 2167. The top rated player was 2346.

The difference between Chess.com Daily chess and ICCF Correspondence is that ICCF allows the use of computers to calculate moves. I was curious about how it would go. In the end I felt that it was pretty much my computer against their computer. Also, using the computer did not prevent me from simply overlooking a completely obvious blunder in an otherwise drawn position, resulting in the one loss.

While I found the experience interesting in some ways, it was not really all that satisfying. It is, perhaps, an indication of my own bias, but I prefer to think that if I win a game without using the computer to calculate moves, that is something of an accomplishment beyond being able to manipulate a machine.

In the end I felt I held my own against a pretty strong field on their terms, which is what I wanted to find out. But I'll forego the computer analysis in favor of challenging my own creativity.

webmeister