Do pawns count for a shot of absynthe?

If so, 1800 is a hugeeeee overdog.

The 1800 could just aim for an opening where a lot of pawns/pieces are traded and the 2400 would become black out drunk.

Made some mistakes but really took my time and played within my abilities this game. Didn't rush through anything and make moves I knew weren't right but just didn't feel like thinking of anything better (as I often do).


http://www.chessvideos.tv/chess-game...r.php?id=40453

that would be at most 10-12 shots before the weaker player is mated. If a shot is 2cl i'm pretty sure the 2400 guy would be a favourite.

Maybe the 2400+ players are different where you live, but almost every one I've seen already drinks ~ this much during a game.

yes, pawns count for the shots. I think 1800 is a huge overdog as well but this somehow became a debate between a friend and I, haha

haha dude i just saw this.
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Does anyone know what the USCF rule is on by winning a prize of a certain amount in a section you can't win another prize in that section? What is the amount?

Like if you win $3,000 in the Class A section of the world open, you can never win a cash prize in the Class A section again.

I think it's if you win $2000 or more in a UXXXX prize, your rating is set with a floor that you can't go below XXXX. So if you win a $2,000 U1900 prize, your new floor is 1900. These only apply to U2000 and lower prizes, I think.

I don't think the USCF sets rating floors on that basis. The CCA (which organizes a lot of the tournaments with big class prizes) has its own minimum ratings list although not all large prizewinners are added.

Ah interesting. The CCA standards may have been what I heard about. So does USCF have any input on the prizes you can win?

Not that I'm aware of (other than their regular rating floors). Prizes are pretty much just up to the TD/organizer. CCA, of course, being the organizaers of teh biggest tournaments.

cool thanks

Has anyone noticed that there are bumhunters in chess? There are many people who will ONLY play someone with a much lower rating than them. It's pathetic.

Yea, it's called eeking. Someone has even bothered posting the term on urbandictionary (#4). At least in the good ole days hardcore bullet/lightning players were giving a lot of flak to these guys, actually kinda similar to bumhunting indeed

I may have posted this before, but I saw this IRL. A player in southern Missouri was a bad class B player for years and all of a sudden his rating jumped up near 2100 in about 6 months. Strange. He was also a TD and I had played in one of his tournaments about a year before this sudden spike. The tournament was very ... different. It was advertised as a 4-round even with the first round on Friday night and the next 3 on Saturday. If you couldn't make it Friday night, you could play a much quicker game early Saturday morning. Since I was driving in with a friend Saturday morning, we decided to just take a first round bye. We show up 30 min before the 2nd round (first round of Saturday) and two guys are just getting started with their first round game. A little off, but we go get breakfast and figure very few chess tournaments actually start on time. We get back and destroy the first round where I actually have been allowed to play 2 opponents because there are an odd number of players and I and my friend are much higher rated than everyone else. That's right. I simuled in a rated tournament. I was so pumped.

I finish my second game around noon and the TD has announced that the 3rd round will start at 1:00, so I go get lunch with my friend. We come back to find that we are paired together even though only one player has 2 points and we are the highest 1.5's. WTF? So the TD started one game at 12:30 "because they have to leave early" and has decided to take a bye himself (he was the 3rd highest 1.5) and then magically paired the 2 point person way down. Totally unacceptable but it's a chess tournament so I'm not going to complain too much. I beat my friend and then demolish the tournament leader in the 4th round. Okay, so truly bizarre but didn't seem too bad until I saw this guy's "improvement" a year or so later.

Since he was the only TD in town he started running tournaments non-stop. Some weren't even tournaments, he'd just cobble together various individual games and then submit them for rating. Worst of all is how he somehow lost several games in a row to one or two unrated players until they had provisional ratings established around 2000 and then magically went 5/5 against the same player. That's right. He appeared to be throwing games to inflate bad, unrated players' ratings and then beating them. He also avoided ever playing any real 1800+ players by taking byes and/or simply altering the pairings. It was ridiculous. Unfortunately for him, this was super obvious and experts from Arkansas started complaining. This caught the attention of the Berry's in nearby Oklahoma and it was squashed flat. Most of his "tournaments" were re-rated as matches and some games may have been thrown out. He's back down in the 1600's and still only plays in his own tournaments.

lmao wow nice scam story swingdoc. Sounds like a movie of the week! You could play the detective that tracks him down, figures out his scheme, and brings him to justice!

I've heard of my fair share of ratings manipulation.

People trying to get closer to 2200, maybe having a "match" with "games" and submitting them to get from 2000 to 2060. Okay great, but when you make 2200 (if you ever do), you're really not honestly 2200, you're actually just 2140.

It's all just rather silly.

Just think about it, someone sitting down, taking the time to create fake games, and then submitting them to an official organization of CHESS. All for a higher "rating".

Maybe someone here will know what I am talking about:

I can't remember all of the details, but there was this Russian player fairly recently,he lived somewhere in Siberia or something, and was rated 2600+ ELO, but he was either untitled at all, or had only an FM title, I can't remember. He would just play against the locals mainly, score 8.5/9 or so every tournament, and got his ELO ridiculously high up. I tried looking for him now on FIDE, but I can't seem to find him as I don't remember his last name :/ He used to be easy to find as he was very high on the Russian top-100 list, but had no title/FM title, and now there are no such players anymore on that list (Except Nechepurenko, but thats def not that guy). So he either became a GM somehow, or got banned or something, or maybe just lost a bunch of rating points.

Does anyone know what I am talking about?

Sometimes I play in these small tournaments run by this guy. Now I'm 100% positive he isn't altering the pairings due to favoritism or doing any kind of immoral activity like that. However this guy is just so insanely incompetent its laughable. It may also be more of a matter of (well its just chess, its just a game, so who cares) more than incompetence. Here are the things that always happen.

He doesn't get the amount of people he estimates so he changes the prize STRUCTURE, not just the amounts. He'll eliminate 2nd and 3rd and actually change the top U2000 prize to top 1900 or something because that makes more sense for the field he has. Both times the unannounced changes benefited me so I didn't complain. In the future if they don't benefit me I still won't complain because I have accepted I'm entering a gauntlet of randomness by even joining. The last one I joined was comical.

He has no internet access and we're asked to just write our ratings down for pairings. We can estimate if we don't know them (lol). Only seven of us are there so he has our seven 'ratings' along with one unrated person. For whatever reason the person with the highest rating was in the 2 spot and the 2nd highest in the 1 spot and the unrated guy got the bye! ugh! After a draw on Board 1, and a new entry coming into round 2 we were left with these scores.


Player A - 1/2
Player B - 1
Player C - 1
Player D - 1/2
Player E - 0
Player F - 1/2
Player G - 0
Player H - 1

Player B took a round 2 bye and the pairings for the round were as follows...

B1 - PlayerC(1) vs PlayerF(1/2)
B2 - PlayerA(1/2) vs PlayerE(0)
B3 - PlayerH(1) vs. PlayerD(1/2)

Player G - 1 pt BYE
Player B - 1/2 pt BYE

This I guess was based on the little known USCF Swiss pairing rule that in round 2, no one with a like score is allowed to play each other.

Don't you have to pass a test to become a TD? Seriously, swiss pairing has to be one of the most basic parts of directing. It really only gets more complicated from there. I remember when I started 9 years ago that a lot of TD's would have some little magazine that sort of looked like the old magazines with baseball card prices. It'd have all the ratings. They'd do ratings with index cards. Pretty baller.

lol this guy doesn't have a program. He still uses the index cards you're talking about. IDK how he became a TD its just so bad.

Index cards aren't bad. They're better than a bad program, I've got some really weird results from crappy pairings programs.

There are bad programs? Don't they just have USCF priority rules programmed in. How can they mess up? Seems like a pretty simple writable thing. And the index cards ARE bad if my above posts are the result, lol.

The problem with the pairing rules (I'm assuming the same applies for USCF as does for FIDE) is that they are imprecise, so there is room for 'fiddling'.
This happens generally later in a tournament when you have issues with players in the same score group having played some of the other players, issues with colour balancing & floating (players who have to play outside of a score group because of uneven numbers). There is no standard system of what to prioritise (top half v bottom half, colour balancing, floats, etc), so its possible to get multiple pairings that are both legal and 'by the book'.

As for your scenario, I think the pairings should be as follows:
B1: C v H (1 v 1)
B2: A v F (.5 v .5)
B3: E v D (0 v .5)

B - Bye (.5)
G - Bye (1)

That should also allow everyone to have the opposite colour to what they had in round 1 (I'm assuming A had black in round 1 based on the 'done' draw & colour allocations).

Of course you have to wonder why you're playing a swiss with 8 people ... but that's a whole other question, which will I'm sure create much pairing-related amusement later in the event!

They screw up by not thinking ahead. They'll come up with pairings in one round that, while technically within the rules, make it impossible to pair the following round properly, when with a little fiddling you could alter "this" round's pairings so that the future works out a lot better.

And the index cards aren't bad in your example, the person using them is!

Swiss pairings are easy to get somewhat right, but doing them exactly according to the ruleset you are using is not all that easy. Getting them that badly wrong isn't easy either

Can't remember the Siberian YKW is after, but this game is my all-time favorite amongst "games played by players with bogus ratings" (admittedly he did well to get into a drawn ending but the way he bungles it from move 57 on is just hilarious)