Game Load: Turn-Based Chess

Correspondence players, as well as those engaged in what some are calling turn-based chess, play many games at once. At sites such as Chess World, Red Hot Pawn (aka Chess at Work), and Chess.com, some folks have hundreds of games going at once. Others limit themselves to a small number. At most of these sites, you can join and play for free, but becoming a paying member unlocks additional site features, including more generous limits, or none at all, on the number of games going at once.

Quality play calls for fewer games, but much of the fun comes from tournaments and team play, and these often increase the game load dramatically.

Last week I was down to a dozen games on four such sites--two paid memberships, two free. I entered two club tournaments. One event needed one more player, and was wholly composed of players rated lower than me. They had been waiting some time--several weeks I believe--for one last player so they could begin, and I opted to take the risk to help them out. It's a risk because I won't gain much in the way of experience or rating beating all of them, but a little bit of slop on my part (or running up against an engine user) could hurt me. The other club tournament had been planned months ago, and finally started today. I'm number two in my group, but most of the others are near the rating I had a year ago, and where I had been for two years up to that point. I lose to those two hundred points below me often enough to know that all these games are serious, and most of my opponents are within one hundred on the rating scale. It has prospects of being a difficult and competitive tournament. The winners of the section advance to play the top finishers from the other section, so success means more games, and tougher too.

Both of these tournaments are double round robins with all games played at once. Thus, I have ten new opponents and twenty new games. In the past, I've carried as many as seventy-five games at once in this form of online play, but have learned through experience that thirty is a heavy load, and with more than that, I might as well play blitz. Too many games cause fast, and too often unsound, moves. Throughout 2008, when my skills and ratings improved notably, I maintained a load that varied from six to twenty correspondence games.

I try to play at a minimum of three days per move, which was the standard rate of play when I played via postcard. One of my games that is currently dragging on (I have a decisive advantage) is ten days per move. My opponent moves once every nine and one-half days. Perhaps he's using what called the "dead man's defense"--playing slow enough that there's a chance the opponent will pass away before delivering the coup de grace. Some games can be really slow. Most often, however, they last a couple of months in contrast to one to two years for postal chess.

In postal chess the clock starts running the day you receive the postcard. In turn-based, it starts running the instant your opponent submits his or her move. Postal chess typically requires one move per week for each player, while turn-based is often more than twice as fast--and the "mail" arrives Saturday night, Sunday morning, or any other time. There is no rest. Someone is always moving on these sites, except in the rare instances that the site goes down for ten minutes or three hours for some new coding uploads.


Getting Help

Engines are forbidden at most turn-based sites, and in most other forms of correspondence chess with a few exceptions. Several years ago, the International Correspondence Chess Federation abandoned all efforts to prevent engine use. In contrast, the International E-mail Chess Club still bans engine use. FICGS, the Free Internet Correspondence Games Server, permits engine use and is a good place to go for players interested in trying to use their engines to beat another's engines. Many strong correspondence players long have maintained that engines are not yet better than humans when players have three or more days per move. Indeed, engines playing alone without significant human guidance probably never achieve impressive ratings on FICGS.

One of the pleasures of turn-based and correspondence chess is the assumption that players will be using their books and databases, even when engines are not allowed. A player can buy the latest monograph on an opening, or create a deeply annotated electronic "book," then enter a thematic tournament in that opening. I learned some new lines and generally became much more comfortable playing both sides of the closed Spanish as a result of such an event four years ago. I did the same with the Reti, and I've played in thematic tournaments in openings with which I'm relatively uncomfortable or even almost wholly unfamiliar. It's a good way to get practical experience while learning a new opening.

Still, there are those who eschew books and databases on these sites. Questions whether they are legal is one of the standard noob inquiries in the forums of all these sites. A few purists and dogmatists understand that such help is allowed, but prefer not to use them and seek opponents with similar convictions. They are in the minority. Most players realize that any sort of game load whatsoever under such conditions would preclude the study of most chess books. For example, a week never goes by that I'm not looking at some grandmaster's game in the Queen's Gambit, French Defense, or Catalan, and I nearly always have games going in these openings. I cannot pledge to play only openings that I'm not studying. Giving up book study is completely out of the question. I play to improve.

Those who often face me in OTB chess know that I play a lot of different openings. A broad repertoire is a natural consequence of two activities: correspondence chess, and many years nurturing a blitz addiction. One of these helps me strengthen my preparation; the other assures only that there's nothing I haven't seen.


Inquiries
So, gentle reader, I ask you:

Do you play at these sites?

What size game load do you maintain?

How do you manage your time?