If you found Duck chess too strange, here’s an even weirder chess variant - Spell Chess. Two nice Youtube videos from Eric Rosen. BTW, I really enjoy these crazy variants:
27 minutes
43 minutes
Wait for it …
Watched that yesterday. A lot harder than you’d expect.
The more games of Spell Chess that I watch, the more sneaky tricks I learn.
Super-sneaky and UNDOCUMENTED trick on the last move of this Spell Chess game:
@MayanActuary don’t know if you saw, but Hikaru’s (w/ black) game against Javokhir Sindarov in the Qatar Masters essentially transposed into a Yugoslav. It was initially like an Accelerated Dragon with the exception of white playing Nc3 instead of d4, which would’ve instead led to an unpleasant Maroczy Bind.
Game ended up with a draw. Apparently the position in the game at one point was a game between Tal and Larsen.
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Any GoA tournaments coming up?
Man is that Minnesotah guy tough. Congratulations to him, and good game to all of you.
There’s gonna be a 2nd round where the top 3 (or 4 if there is a tie) from each group will for a new group, once all round 1 games finish. There is 1 game remaining in my group, and 2 remaining in your group.
Agreed Minnesotah is really good at Daily. He doesn’t participate anymore but Tospeke is also really good.
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@Italian_Halibut as mentioned in the post above, there is currently a big actuarial tourney going on, with a 2nd round still yet to be played. I’m okay with starting another GoA tourney sometime soon, but I will need to ask those who are still participating in the current tourney if they are okay with participating in the regular tourney at the same time. I’ll be playing in the next round and I’m fine with playing. But if the general mood among the players is they’d rather not, then I’ll host the tourneys either later in the year or early next year.
These daily tournaments drag on so long. It kind of is what it is. I used to join more site-wide tournaments. Now I will only join if they are “1 day” time control and “no vacation”. Anything else and each round takes months and the whole tournament can take years. Yes, years.
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I would certainly be in favor of faster time restrictions. I doubt there’s a setting for 18 hours, but that feels like what’s about right to give people leeway around work.
@AbstractActuary I get where you’re coming from. I will draft a message on chess dot com to send to everyone who has participated in at least one tournament, and ask for feedback. I will compile what everyone has to say and go from there.
I’m all for faster time controls. I feel like many (maybe most) people on here are okay with a 1-day tourney except that they don’t want to play on weekends. I wonder if it’s possible to have a tournament that has a variable time control that suspends timeouts over the weekend?
I know that there have been times where I had a tournament going that I forgot about because it took so long for the next round to start. That’s not really the experience that I want.
The good news is for the regular GoA tourneys, there aren’t any subsequent rounds, so the round you’re playing in the group is the final round.
For the Big Actuarial Tourneys (e.g the ones going on right now), I can send a reminder or a heads up to the people who are just waiting (and will advance) that the next round will start soon. For these kind of tournaments, a next round can only happen when all games are complete for all groups. Alternatively, you can look at the standings for the tournament to see the remaining games.
I recognize some people like a more relaxed time frame. So I wouldn’t want to alienate some of our group by forcing that. Just an overall comment, really.
Did any of y’all receive a message from me via an announcement on chess dot com? No one messaged me back so I’m wondering if it was even sent.
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The last message I got from you was 05/19/2023…for the “Big Actuarial Tourney”
How about now?
Yes. I received it.