Chess Blogging UK

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-T-

Today a little note on the grade rating, in England, and the FIDE ELO rating. I am new to this as I am born in the Netherlands and played for over 30 years with the ELO rating. I didn’t even know that was such a thing as a English Standard and  Rapid Game rating until yesterday. I wanted to join a club and asked for the average rating of the club. The answer was very surprising as I thought that a ELO rating of 130 was a bit low .

Searching the Internet on this a see that I am not the only one thinking why we, here in England, should be different then the rest of the world. English masters have to grade, ELO and an English grade.

Of course every rating system have it flaws and will never be perfect but why not have all the same rating system and and adopt the FIDE ELO then at least when we compare players from all over the world we know what we are talking about.

Any comments on this are welcome.

-T-

To improve your game you should play as much games as possible and try new things out. The problem with that is finding opponents.

In the old days I used correspondence chess, sending moves around by postcards. It was fun and you could play a lot of games at the same time. The only drawback was the time. I had games that took years to finish. With the internet that is now completely changed. There are several chess site where you can play online, in real-time and turn-based, against as many opponents you want. Must of them are free for a basic game of chess or to play in a tournament, although you can upgrade to a paying user and get all the option that those sites have, like: training in tactics, strategy, openings and much more (depending on the site).

I myself play at chess.com which offers a lot of possibilities. have a look:

Free online chess!

-T-

I would like to show you what Fritz 12 can do to analyse your game and give you some lessons. This is a game I played today on chess.com, the site where I play online chess.

It was against a player who had an ELO 200 higher then that of myself but he had some difficulties in handling the opening well. After the game I let Fritz analyse it and this is the result:

B22
hahalera1 1972
stratum 1733
Let’s Play! Chess.com 28.01.2010

B22: Sicilian: 2 c3

In the past years I have played around with an old version of Fritz I had(version 8 ) but turning back to chess after all those year I bought the latest version, Fritz 12.

In the coming weeks I will post tips and tricks in this blog on Fritz. How to create your own training opening books, databases and so on. This because I find that most players you play a game now and then but there is so much more your can do with it to make you a stronger player.

Further down the line I will try and make comparisons between different chess programs with there pro and cons.

–T

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Theo