Wednesday, July 04, 2007

celebrating rebellion against our lawful rulers appointed by Almighty God Himself

I'm celebrating by, in a quick burst, bringing the rating up to 1525 and the ranking up to 667th. Hard work pays off? I suppose we can let bygones be bygones and simply enjoy the day off, no discussing the monarchy today. But I thought you all would, of course, be glad to hear of my continued rise through the ranks of the mediocre.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

1500

So I was writing about my goals for chess earlier and I just hit 1500 at CTS after doing all the mates-in-one in the Polgar book in one sitting a couple times. Of course, this just means that my next big goal is 1550 and my next minor goal is 1510. NOTE: no correlation to real ratings. I noticed some web-logging discussion of correlations of CTS ratings to real ratings, such as Mousetrapper's anecdotal data, but I would discourage such speculations. I mean, yes, the people rated over 2000 on CTS are pretty intense, and even people rated 1700 are fairly intense, but I highly doubt that I'd be at even 1500 in real ratings at the moment, much less 1500+200 or 1500+300 as some people's discussion seems to suggest! It's a number to note and not take much stock of. The only real numbers that matter are the ones involved when you crush the ego of your opponent. There is some value to CTS ratings: they measure one narrowly-defined set of skills which might be valuable to have and having a higher score is better than having a lower score.

EDIT: 1530 would put me in the top third of active players, so I'll take a week off and shoot for that.