My reward is Mato Jelic in R2. Welp.

My two favorite youngsters both had good weeks.

Wei Yi won Danzhou by a full point, seeing his rating climb to a career high (by a large margin) at 2755, and moving up to #14 in the world. He's not as young as when I first started following him, but still only just turned 18 last month. Time will tell whether this was his "breakthrough" with the top ten just around the corner, or whether it was just an upswing to be followed by regression. I expect this will earn him some more super tournament invites, though, and give us a chance to find out!

And Alireza Firouzja managed a +1 score at the Stars Cup, closing with wins in his last two games over Van Wely and Jobava!!! The result brings his rating up over 2500 for the first time. He turned 14 last month and has 2 GM norms so far (he far exceeded the performance rating needed for a third norm in this event, but it was only six games unfortunately.) This was a nice result after his rating had stalled out just under 2500 for over a year (having hit 2485 in May 2016), and hopefully the start of another period of rapid rating gain and sooner than later the GM title

I agree that's a nice result from Firouzja, but at this point I imagine half of our forum could beat Jobava right now in a rated game at any time control.

Do you guys ever play Crazy House?



In this position I tried the cute fxg8=N+, which wins, but promoting to a queen is actually faster.

In general I have such a hard time calculating with the mindset that piece drops are possible.

This is pretty cool...thanks for the link. I've been out of the loop for awhile and have been looking for something like this.

Also, can anyone recommend good accounts to follow on Twitter? (how I get most news these days).

Chess24 on Twitter if I have to pick one. They retweet most of the good stuff anyway. Anton squared me is the best chess related Twitter account due to his Photoshops. Many don't get reposted but almost all are amazing.

This might take the cake as one of my most unusual material imbalances

👍👍

Funnily enough, I just learned about Chess24 today listening to the Svidler interview on the Perpetual pod.

Lol. That is pretty great. At this point I think it's smart to also make sure you are familiar with lichess.

I'd easily play black here. It looks totally crushing with the passed pawns, and white's sad rook on h1. What does the engine say?

Um...

Something lie -3

It wasnt a very well played game, but was alot of fun


https://lichess.org/O2qPtyfU/black#82

Grischuk back in the top 10. After Grischuk's rise from 2760->2780, the gap between Giri at #13 and Wei Yi at #14 is 20 points, 2772 to 2752.

Does anyone else hate it when players instantly request a rematch in the ICC pools? I find that it mainly happens to me right after they blunder and resign or right after I play very poorly in hopes that I will keep dumping points.

Whether or not this hatred is rational, I have come up with a solution. I instantly counter their rematch offer with an unrated game of two kings, loser's chess, three checks, or some other obscure variant. They usually snap accept the challenge, play a couple moves before noticing they are playing some absurd variant, and then tilt disconnect. This causes the game to adjourn and they now have to get the "resume adjourned game" pop-up every time we are both logged in. Owned.

Why is it bad if someone wants to play more than one games with you?

Chess is supposed to be fun. Don't act like a douche, especially towards someone you just beat.

Because he's playing pools, and manually matching someone is not pools. So it's like.. you're gonna stop playing pools just because your opponent is tilted? No thanks. Whatever, I guess it doesn't hurt much to make the offer, but if you're playing pools, you shouldn't expect to get rematches, that's not what the pools are about.

I don't Icc but I play pools on lichess and pretty much always rematch someone I've just played unless they are much lower rated than I am.

Even if they are bum hunting you just move on to the next game or, since you sound very tilted, take a break and play later.

Internet chess is serious business yo.

ZH is sooo sweet. just gotta realize ur safe here, which makes Queening better. Obv making a knight seems the play

I agree it was an overreaction on the other poster's part. But on the topic of pools, lichess doesn't have them. They did briefly, but did away with them. Their buttons on the home page are just seeks that can also be manually issued/accepted. ICC pools give you a separate rating, and the server determines all matchups. The pool ratings are considered to have the most integrity. If you rematch a pool opponent, it will just be a 'regular' blitz game and not affect your pool rating.

Ahh, ok, so pools are completely different. That helps explain the situation. So, yeah, overreaction but at least I understand the initial situation better.

The ICC 1, 3, and 5-minute pools are awesome imo. They are by far the toughest fields I have encountered in online chess. I forget that ICC is more obscure now that everyone is on chess.com and lichess.

But ya, the pools are pretty much the zoom/rush poker of online chess. Most of us instantly rejoin the pool after a game ends and are playing again within seconds. Rematching affects out blitz rating, but most of us only care about pool ratings. The main reason people play normal blitz on ICC is for tournaments.

And ya, it is a total dick move on my part that is at best partially justified. But it is a lot of fun and I plan to continue doing it until it stops amusing me

Yeah the ICC pools are great. Best way to play blitz online by FAR.

I think lichess felt that the pools competed with their arena tournaments and decided to cast their lot with the arenas. Probably the right decision, but... arenas are fun but so scrubby. It's a gimmick that got old eventually. I'm back to the point where I prefer a regular old tournament where everyone plays the same number of games. Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like more people play the arenas just to get some quick games rather than caring about the tournament standings, and at that point, why not just have pools.

I dont know, I love the Arenas. I especially crush in the >2000 blitz and super blitz