The best alternative is to say you don't have an official rating or "Yeah, I play sometimes". Class C will be somewhat of an overestimate wrt to your OTB strength.

Agree with Rei.

Rei — With all this stockfish tomfoolery why not just play, you know, actual games or do you do that too?

Human games end up forcing me to spend a lot more serious time working on chess.

That would be utter bs. I got an elo of 2119 from that test.

Seeing a middle or endgame position with no prior knowledge of how you got there, and then having only 30 seconds to figure out what is going on and find the right move, has little to do with actually playing competitive chess.

But isn't it a fair test for everyone*? (Aside from the arbitrary 30 second time control)

Nobody taking the test knows how they got there so shouldn't it even out pretty much?

The 30 second thing is pretty arbitrary but they had to pick something that wasn't so long that people would lose interest. But yeah maybe 3 tests of varying time controls would be better. There are plenty of people who are better than me in blitz but in correspondence I am better. Not everyone's brain works at the same speed or to the same depth.

This test was quite tough. I thought I was doing horribly and was surprised by the number it spit out.

*Except blind people, paraplegics, etc.

I intentionally said no to all the things asking for what my ratings were and if I'd played before because I didn't want that to influence my score. I got 1844. My USCF is 1576 and lichess ratings are in the 1700-1900 range.

plus1, got 300 points lower than my fide rating, although i tripped near the end.

It's not so much about fairness. It's more like "trying to measure height with a scale". Sure you'll have a correlation that is better than random, but you'll also have many individuals way off in the rankings.

Still if you did this you would only have one person in forty with a height greater than your predicted interval. I think the chess survey is more broken than that but can't see exactly why.

I didn't know how to answer the "hours with a trainer" question since I've never handed a titled player money to train me or whatever. But I counted time spent reading Rei's (and other strong players') assessments of my games, as well as time doing tactics problems (discounted) and time watching videos from Seirawan or other strong players that I assume would count as "chess training". Anyway I just put 10 hours lol.

Can someone explain the draw by repetition rule to me? I'm in a game where it may rear its ugly head in a position I'm crushing so I just want to make sure I don't blunder into a draw by not knowing the rules of chess.

What does "a position is repeated 3 times" mean? Does that mean occurs 3 times or 4 times (original position + 3 repetitions of it)? Does it have to be consecutive or can the identical position be repeated with other moves interpersed? How many pieces are used to define "a position"? The king and the pieces checking it? Or all pieces on the board? In other words, if a pawn is captured during part of the repetition process, is the "repeated" position that follows now defined as a fresh new position (since the pawn is now gone)?

Additionally, identical positions are those with identical castling and en passant statuses. In the game 1. f3 f6 2. Kf2 Kf7 3. Ke1 Ke8 4. Kf2 Kf7 5. Ke1 Ke8 6. Kf2 Kf7 1/2-1/2, a draw claim isn't possible after 5.-Ke8, despite the active configuration of pieces appearing for a third time.

So after 1....f6 the "position" is as it appears but with castling ability for both sides.

So after 2....Kf7 we have the first iteration of the position that in this game will occur 3 times (un-castle-able kings on f2 and f7).

So if I have a game where I can discover a check by moving another checking piece to capture a pawn, then move back to the original checking square (both my pieces are being used to check), which, again is a check since his King has only 2 squares, this is deemed a new position since last time I was checking him he had his pawn (that has since been captured)?

Yes.

Also note that the moves don't need to be played in succession. I had a game I claimed where there was 3 moves between the first and second repetition and and I think like 6 or so moves before the position reappeared a third time. This was a R+2P+K vs K+R ending I was on the worse side of, but his pawns where doubled so was more like R+P that was already a draw

It also needs to be the same player's move. For instance, 1. e4 e5 2. Bc4 Bc5 3. Bf1 Bf8 4. Bc4 Bc5 5. Bf1 Bf8 6. Bb5 Bc5 7. Bc4 and a draw can't be claimed now because, despite identical looking positions arising after 2...Bc5, 4...Bc5, and 7. Bc4, it's white to move in the first 2 positions but black in the last.

Thanks guys. Glad I asked.

There is quite literally nothing better than playing a guy who has 1,043 correspondence games outstanding, in a 3-day/move game, in which he is in check and has a forced move to 1 exact square, who won't get to make his move for 2-3 days. Even though you sent him a kind message (I mean it, it was!) informing him his sole move is forced and maybe we don't have to wait 3 days. Chess is a great game but, like golf, a lot of the people who play it can blow me. Including myself, if I could reach.

Not only does this tactic not cause a draw, it's common enough to have its own name, the windmill. The two most famous windmill games, both featuring spectacular queen sacrifices:

Torre-Em. Lasker, Moscow 1925 The most common type of windmill, with a rook checking on g2/g7 backed up by a bishop on the long diagonal.

D. Byrne-Fischer, New York 1956 One of the best known games in chess history, a brilliancy by the 13-year old Fischer. A much less common knight-and-bishop windmill.

I was familiar with that Fischer game but not the Lasker game, which is awesome. The Lasker game is a great example of what I needed answered, thanks! That game certainly repeats the same position three times but due to the captures in between those 3 "repeated" positions are actually unique positions.

See, that's my problem with lichess - It's just so, so soft compared to ICC and FICS. I was rated over 1900 on that site after like 8 or 9 classical time control games. That means something's wrong considering that I'm roughly ~1375 USCF/FIDE.

Besides...you're a huge fan of great visuals when it comes to chess. You're telling me you prefer the look of web based lichess to FICS with BabasChess or ICC with Blitzin?

If lichess started everyone off with a rating of 900, your rating would have been just "over 1300", yet the pool wouldn't be any tougher or softer than it currently is. chess.com blitz ratings are a lot lower than FIDE ratings due to Glicko-related deflatory effects, so are we supposed to say, purely on that basis, that the pool is a lot tougher than FIDE?

If I started my own chess server and assigned everyone a starting rating of -500, would I have, zomg, the toughest chess site in the world?! GMs would be like 800! Would my essentially identical server where everyone begins at 2 x 10⁸ be one of those typical soft sites where everyone has a hyper-inflated internet rating?

A more useful definition of "soft" would speak to the compositions of the player pools, independent of ratings. ICC is the chosen playground of countless titled players, and the subscription cost acts as a soft barrier against non-serious players. That, and not the totally meaningless comparison of ratings, is why we can say it's tougher than lichess.

I agree. I don't think you should really compare any ratings with any others too closely. Only if you're playing a high volume of games across the same time controls across many platforms will you really have an accurate idea of how they truly compare. And then at that point I doubt you will feel a certain site is "softer" than another, simply that 1800 lichess could be 1500 ICC (I completely made that up, I have absolutely no idea).

The only sense (imo) that a site could truly be softer or harder is at the very top. Some sites simply won't have many GMs, so if you are IM level I think it's reasonable to consider those sites soft. We are not there yet, .

Higher numbers for the ratings don't really mean much. There are plenty of people around my rating and higher for me to play on lichess.

And, yes, lichess is actually better graphically than Babaschess since I can directly use svg pieces on it instead of having to convert to a (very limited) ttf format.

See:
http://en.lichess.org/forum/lichess-...ustom-graphics

Also, the solution to "not enough players" or "not enough good players" isn't to play somewhere else, it's to try to get more people to play there. At least in my book. It's currently growing like wildfire, so if you aren't pleased with the pool at present, stick around. It's growing every day. Better yet, promote it and help it grow.

Here's one of the graphical setups I use on lichess (again, I have converted most of the good stuff to lichess-compatible already--it's much easier and more flexible than BabasChess was):



I'm hoping I'll be able to find the setting to change the figurine font in the move list so that it just displays letters, next. I hate figurine notation.

It's just that, features wise, Lichess doesn't do a fraction of what BabasChess does. Basically, you can play and analyze on Lichess. That's it. Babaschess + FICS = community, chat channels, tournaments, analysis with any engine you want, deeper piece/board customization, user formulas and server variables, and unique features like showing move time during a game. I respect that you're enjoying Lichess and I think it has some good things going for it, too but I don't see how it matches up to FICS right now in any way.