English Chess Forum

It's authorized for norms, but the schedules that would make it sensible are not. Yay, joined-up thinking.

Gibraltar eventually did start refusing it, and that of one or two other suspected sandbaggers.

Ah, Oleg Kozlov and his eternal sub-2250 rating. Everyone always enjoyed his performances at Gibraltar.

For me, 4NCL weekends across a season probably edge above week-long chess tournaments in terms of cost, but that's because of where I live.

FIDE provides code for programs, without having to code it themselves. This way it will always score 100% on reproducability, by definition. Why go to the effort of coding it yourself? The main reason is usually to test your own coding abilities. If you can successfully replicate a known pairing sy...

Ah, club championships. They don't usually have scheduled round dates in the UK.

(The Super Rapidplay in question was a Swiss.)

Where exactly do you play that withdrawals from all-play-alls are common?

The former.

Kevin Thurlow wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 05, 2026 12:11 pm

Some of the other pairings in the challengers look odd - there are two games where a 1.5 plays a 2.5!

That looks like a late result correction - maybe Tedd v Finch was originally listed as a black win and paired as such, and then corrected to a white win after the pairings were published.

I don't think a rule like that would be even remotely near the sorts of things that would lead the ECF to consider the event's not being rated.

Yeah, that was probably the late Bill Frost. His game-inputting wasn't up to much.

Yeah, looking at the Blackthorne match line-ups, the individual rating differences were 400 or more on every board, so that's an expected match aggregate score that cannot be higher than 0.48.

Christopher Kreuzer wrote: ↑

Sat Oct 17, 2026 12:00 am

There is an upper limit as well?

It's a limit on how weak the field can be relative to the norm target: if 76% would not be enough, you can't get a norm no matter how high you score.

If I recall correctly, the limits are 35% and 76%, yes.

Black Knights' Tango rather than a Czech Benoni, but yes. Third game against Botterill in the first series semi-final.