somehow i have never seen a game posted in which this kind of opening loses.

Actually i hate this stuff. Play provocatively, unorthodox or the London, whatever. I don't care if someone moves 1. Na3. But make moves that make sense.

Today my wife and I went antique shopping and came across a booth that had old editions of Life magazine. I didn't expect this one to be here and was very surprised to find it. Turns out it was only $8. Very excited about this purchase

I was scrolling through this game tonight and am perplexed by white's play from moves 23-26. 23.Bc7 seems to win the b6 pawn and 25.Rad1 seems awkward to me. 25.Rxe8 followed by Re1 feels much more natural. Then retreating the bishop to e3 and then to f2 on moves 26 and 27 feels very passive. Is there something I'm overlooking? The rest of the game seems pretty normal and straightforward, but this handful of moves feels strange. The players are rated 2559 and 2471, respectively.

http://www.chessvideos.tv/chess-game...r.php?id=79708

Years ago, I had input several hundred of my chess games onto a database on my Fritz 5.32 program. Yes, a very old version of Fritz, probably 15 years out of date.

I would like to convert these games to PGN format. Pretty sure I don't have the Fritz CD anymore, and even if I did, I doubt it would have that functionality.

I have about a dozen different Fritz 5.32 files in my posession. It's all one database, spread over a bunch of different files. Some examples: .cba, .cbc, .cbg,

Can anyone help me with this conversion? Surely someone has a swanky program that can do this in no time.

I will ask around..pm me late friday to see if I find anything

Those aren't "Fritz" files, per se, it's more generic than that, which is good for you. That database is in the ChessBase format. You can download ChessBase Reader for free here: http://en.chessbase.com/Download/download

At the worst, that will at least let you view the games in your database. I don't know if the reader allows you to export to pgn or not, though.

I briefly went over this game just now and thought it was interesting. Black's 19...Nh3! is really a great move, it seemed to come out of what looks like a fairly tame position.

Sargissian-Nisipeanu 0-1

sorry if it's repost

TexAg06: The USCF ratings committee has heard you loud and clear. Prepare for additional ratings volatility!

Seriously? Uh oh haha. So what is their motivation behind that? Is there any article or something explaining it?

The latest cartoon by Jose Diaz over on chessvibes, inspired by the Norway Tournament:

Apparently I'm unusually slow and missed the fact that you linked the article in your original post.

I'm pretty dang interested to see what this will look like in a couple of tournaments. I wish they would have given an example tournament performance and shown the rating change of the fictional player before and after this k-factor change.

Although I must say I'm a little worried about the added volatility. On the positive side, I'm thrilled to think about potentially gaining more points than before. I'm sure everyone probably thinks this, but gaining rating points with the old k-factor seemed extremely slow and difficult, while losing points felt all too easy.

This report is probably the best source.

Basically, it sounds like the objective is to inflate ratings to ~1997 levels while still maintaining predictive accuracy until things reach that point. Still ~20 points shy.

But I didn't try to parse all of the details, and the USCF board made some non-Glickman-approved changes as well.

Very interesting indeed, thanks for the link. Most of that was well over my head, but I'm excited to see what these changes look like in practice. Can't wait actually.

Oh, I wasn't joking earlier; the biggest change is an increase in volatility. That is, K is a multiplicative factor in the formula that determines how much your rating goes up or down after an event.

The reason this is inflationary is that for "very good" results, there's an additional bonus to the rating gain. Increasing K makes it easier to reach that threshold and get those bonus points.

So bigger changes to your rating from all of your tournaments, and when you have a good result, a larger than expected increase. (This calculator breaks out the bonus points in the approximation formula, but it's based on the old K -- not sure if they plan to update it.)

Maybe a dumb question, but what qualifies as a "very good" performance and is eligible for the bonus?

I was going through Keres' game collection tonight and came across this little gem. Great attacking game from the black side of the Ruy, hope y'all like it as much as I do.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1071800

Nice, I like it. Not a bad named defense either.

hahahaha

Not a bad question, but it's hard for me to summarize without doing actual work -- a couple of links on the above site explain how to calculate it precisely, but I'm not sure whether it gives a statistical view.

If I said "a result where you'd gain 20+ points" I'm probably not too far off, if you find that an intuitive idea.

Another way to explain this would be something like "based on this event your true rating is YY% like to be at least XX points higher than your current rating". Not sure if that would be more or less satisfactory...and I don't have an intuition for those numbers.

I bet Keres was thinking, "Kxg2 is forced, what is this guy thinking about. <instantly plays Qg4>. And now 20 minutes to 'find' Kh1!? Seriously, either blitz out the forced moves or resign."

Maybe that's only my opponent's, though.

Appreciate the explanation. I did some googling and see what you mean. I read through Glicko's latest report, but he doesn't specifically address bonus specifics other than mentioning its place in the formula and saying it is achieved when a player performs much better than expected. I'm assuming he doesn't talk about it much because he probably has done so in prior writings.

I did find this link which is helpful. It's old, back from 2001 so the formulas are different now, but it at least gives some good ballpark figures. If you check out table 3 on that page, you'll see the values. Your earlier estimate of 20 is pretty much right on the money.

Haha. Isn't it funny how opponents will blitz through the first 20 moves of a game, but once they're in huge trouble or lost they'll start to finally think and use their time?

Hi I've been following this forum for like 2 years now finally I will post something, I am rated like 1300 started playing 2 years ago, in my last 4 games i've played all 1700's in game 1 i won, he was in time trouble missed a tactic that allowed me to mate and win, game 2 i have drawn endgame if i dont trade bishop's - i trade bishops and lose, game 3 i get a lost position from around move 5 in caro kann and game 4 i get rolled as white from around move 8 in grunfeld. Just thought i'd share.

That's not too bad for 1300. Post some positions/games if you want input