Well, I don't mind either way - happy to kick off soon, equally happy to wait. But from their comments above it sounds as if it'll be a good few months before either VT or ad hoc feel able to join another OTF tourney. Such a shame that Kev stopped. Did Matt indicate if his absence was a temporary issue or a longer term thing?
[Edit: another thought - does anyone have any chess-playing mates they could tempt to join to boost our numbers?]
He did leave in a rather large huff, but as far as I am aware it wasn't really related to anyone on this thread, so he might be encouraged to be involved.
The other ex-OTFers famously interested in chess are "The Horse" and the other one involved in that famous early ezboard chess related stramash. I am connected to the equine one on facebook and I can ask him if you'd like.
I'd say the more the merrier (though I'm happy to play in a tournament with depleted numbers too).
I've put a post in the Mundane Thread to let folk know, too, on the basis that there might be some chessheads on here who never come in Sport and thus have remained largely oblivious to the existence of OTF Chess (hard to imagine, I know).
Online chess tactics puzzles seem to be a good indicator of how much analytical ability can be impaired by tiredness. Slowly and with great effort I'd built up my tactics rating over a period of a few weeks to a new PB of 1610. Then the last 2 days I've played the tactics puzzles a lot while pretty sleep-deprived, and I've just fallen 230 points in 2 days, down to 1380. Time for early nights if I can get them.
Heh, my tactics rating graph shows a big spike last week as, in one session and clearly in the zone, I somehow got it up to around 1480, only for it to drop back to around 1200 by the time I hang up my boo- er, tablet for the night.
I've messaged MSR on Facebook about the tournament, by the way.
I'm well up for starting as I currently only have two games underway in other tournaments and they're both against people who are taking about a day and a half over each move.
And almost as soon as we start, MSR replies to my Facebook message saying he'd love to join in! He was delayed by having to dash around hospitals for a few days (he's fine). I've told him he was just too late this time, but that I'll share his chess.com username here in case any of us want to challenge him to a friendly, and so that Wouter can include him in the next tournament. It is: the_purple_cow.
Sam wrote: Heh, my tactics rating graph shows a big spike last week as, in one session and clearly in the zone, I somehow got it up to around 1480, only for it to drop back to around 1200 by the time I hang up my boo- er, tablet for the night.
I'm not at all sure how this has happened - one assumes it's indicative of at least a slight underlying improvement in my overall game, although I've not demonstrated that so far in this OTF tournament! - but my tactics rating is now firmly into the 1700s! Bloody hell!
That's extremely impressive Sam - my best so far is 1651, earlier today.
I see that you get slightly more wrong than right, but have very quick average response times, which counts for a lot under the Tactics scoring algorithm. So you;re getting a good proportion (nearly half) correct in a very short time. My own approach is very different - I get a little over half correct but score less on average per correct response as I take a lot more time over them on average, because I simply can't think through the positions more quickly. No doubt you would whip my butt at speed chess.
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