These are the names I recognise, from the ICCF top ratings, as Freestyle players:jefk wrote:well as former ICCF world champion i presume Ron L did already
face some serious opponents you know..
as for the difference between correspondence and freestyle chess,
well, during the second half of the Infinity tourn i approached the game in a similar way as i'm doing correspondence chess on ICCF; only this freestyle games were much faster, ofcourse.
Finally, yes the drawing rate is going up, and to avoid that the top ranking is determined by luck of having face a weak opponent (or someone with a disconnect or so), it's probably better to split such a tourn in two or three pools. Something for Infinity/Arno to decide, next time. A 'themed' freestyle tourn with openings restrictions can be an idea ofcourse, as an alternative, justl ike chess960 is an alternative (chess variant).
Some ideas are in the field of scoring systems, a win with Black could/should be rewarded higher than a win with White
Also we can think of some slight endgame rule modifcations, and some, eg with different stalemate scoring can be experimented with
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# ICCF ID Count Titl Name Games Rating
4 81027 GER GM Krabben, Matthias 210 2665
7 241018 ITA GM Riccio, Eros 425 2644
16 81282 GER GM Nickel, Arno 395 2612
Having, at least, two separate categories, is in my opinion a no-brainer, and Arno pretty much admitted to the necessity of such a measure in the tournament chat. Whether he enforces that decision, or postpones it once again (scroll down), is yet to be seen.
I can’t accept your analogy, between chess960 and “chess minus X openings”. The latter is still chess, slightly different from a gameplay perspective (basically when it comes to preparation), but as a problem... totally unchanged. Viewed from that angle, taking the solved lines out of the equation, is the only thing that makes sense; if you want to solve chess, you don’t waste more time in what’s already been solved. We have to move on and focus on the rest of the positions. There’s quite a few of them left, once you remove that bottleneck.
A change in the scoring system won’t have much effect (if at all), as long as everything else remains the same. The stalemate was already tweaked with in the past, and other experiments which have proved to be good in OTB chess, fail when applied to Freestyle (look at the bottom of this report, for a glimpse of what the "Bilbao" scoring system would amount to).
Alternatively, the set of positions could be made public in advance, if it were large enough to prevent people from preparing them, up to the point where draws could become a problem again. Then before each round, a transparent lottery could determine the opening for the day. To minimise randomness, players would need to play both sides of the opening against the same opponent, preferably without pause, to ensure that the number of people, who would just follow on the best players’ footsteps, is kept in check.Nelson Hernandez wrote:Someone could specify a set of selection criteria ensuring ECO variety, draw-rate, human vs. engine popularity, move-length, etc. and come up with however many unique positions that met all requirements. [..] These positions could be kept secret from the players until right before the game started, or the day before. Allotting one day to prep would offer the analysis kings ample time to prepare for the game correspondence-style and possibly spell doom for those who couldn't devote sufficient time and resources to preparation.
A 1000-move mate (or more) would be of little practical use, unless FIDE changes the 50-move rule (which they won’t). It may seem contradictory that I talk about solving the problem that chess is, while ignoring the purely theoretical approach, but as I explained somewhere else, to Bob, long before irrefutable evidence were shown, about chess being a win or a draw, people in the computer chess community would've lost interest. Once engines start being released with 10 ELO improvements, and draw rates approach 100%, who’s going to follow development anymore?Leo wrote:"Many show interest in what is to expect from 8-man endings. First, take note that the longest 6-man mate took 262 moves (KRN-KNN). Moving to 7-man endings doubled this value. Second, 8-man tablebases include much more endings with both sides having relatively equal strength. All this gives us a strong hope to discover a mate in more than 1000 moves in one of 8-man endgames. Unfortunately the size of 8-man tablebases will be 100 times larger than the size of 7-man tablebases. To fully compute them, one will need about 10 PB (10,000 TB) of disk space and 50 TB of RAM. Only the top 10 supercomputers can solve the 8-man problem in 2014. The first 1000-move mate is unlikely to be found until 2020 when a part of a TOP100 supercomputer may be allowed to be used for solving this task."