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In an article entitled How to Become a CC World Champion, there is this paragraph:
Finally, you must be prepared to spend an inordinate amount of time at the chess board and with your computer. During the final, this could be all your waking hours. For example, the final for the 20th CC World Championship, won by Pertti Lehikoinen, lasted three and a half years. In an interview, he revealed how in the beginning he spent eleven hours a day on his games and for several months he had to increase it to seventeen hours a day. According to his diary, he logged more than 14,700 hours on the final alone. This is an average of twelve hours per day! He also admitted to fainting because of fatigue at times. He spent half of his time at the chess board or analyzing blind during long walks and half with a computer. Nowadays, he does not like to play CC any more. No wonder after such an effort!
The whole article, with one of Lehikoinen’s games is at
Have you ever spent days analyzing the game and doing nothing else?
I looked at the table for that event. He had 16 opponents so lots of games to analyze.
I've played a couple of his opponents in that event when I was on board 1 for Canada in a couple of events. Some players handle 40 or 50 games at a time. At that level not being able to analyze without a board a pieces would probably be more unusual.
I see that the ACC's Bill Evans is the #2 rated correspondence player at chess.com with a 2603 rating. Given Bill is my likely opponent Monday night at the ACC, I'm just glad it's not a correspondence game (:
I'm just hoping Bill is going to surprise the hell out of me and allow me to play a BDG (:
I see that the ACC's Bill Evans is the #2 rated correspondence player at chess.com with a 2603 rating. Given Bill is my likely opponent Monday night at the ACC, I'm just glad it's not a correspondence game (:
I'm just hoping Bill is going to surprise the hell out of me and allow me to play a BDG (:
I used to have the perception that CC was something OTB players would 'graduate' to when they got a bit older, as it was less tiring perhaps. Based on the above posts, I'm obviously wrong about that. I played CC for a while, but was limited by 1) laziness and 2) insufficient creativity and imagination. You can go a fair distance OTB playing in a straightforward manner, relying on exploiting opponents' blunders or bad time management, that doesn't cut it in correspondence...
The last nine World Correspondence Chess Champions are:
20. Pertti Lehikoinen [Finland] (2004-11)
21. Joop van Oosterom [Netherlands] (2005-08)
22. Aleksandr Dronov [Russia] (2007-10)
23. Ulrich Stephan [Germany] (2007-10)
24. Marjan Semri [Slovenia] (2009-11)
25. Fabio Finocchiaro [Italy] (2009-13)
26. Ron Langeveld [Netherlands] (2010-14)
27. Aleksandr Dronov [Russia] (2011-14)
28. Ing. Leonardo Ljubicic [Croatia] (2013-16)
_________
The World CC Championships are played in cycles. Every year a new cycle starts and finals are played every two years. The standard time control is 50 days for 10 moves and competitive tournaments are finished within a period of two years – though not every game lasts that long.
______
Earlier in this thread there was a post on Pertti Lehikoinen, the 20th CC World Champion.
This from an interview with No. 26, Ron Langeveld:
You play very few games but obviously excel. Besides the simple substitution of quantity for quality, how do you decide the best number of active games to play? Do you ever see yourself playing more games at a time?
The secret to successful correspondence chess in my opinion is effective time management, and time management itself is largely effected by the number of active games. There is never enough time you could spend at a single game as long as there are ideas to try. Ideas need to be created behind the board and then have them refuted by the computer until you find an idea that sticks and makes the difference.
This is how it should be yet I belief that most players approach it the other way around. The notion that correspondence chess nowadays may be all about an arms race can also be mitigated if you stick to the better approach. Of course you need a relatively modern computer to do the dirty work of refutation for you but in my opinion it is rather pointless to invest in more hardware in order to make a difference.
How many ideas can you interactively throw at the computer in one hour is the key question you should ask yourself when trying to decide exactly what to invest in. The players that don’t get to this stage or run out of ideas quickly might decide to expand in hardware instead of time. If increasing your game load compensates for this missing aspect then be my guest and check your bank account. Regarding number of games: for me the ideal number right now would be zero games. I could slowly work on my opening repertoire and prepare some head start in less explored territory. Unfortunately every ambitious tournament has its price in terms of game load. Given my preference for the ideal number I have strong objections against playing more games by starting another event earlier than necessary.
and a more recent interview with No. 28 Leonardo Ljubicic:
Today chess engines are much stronger than the best humans and many people wonder about the role of humans in correspondence chess. What can you do that the engines cannot do?
It is indeed impossible to achieve any significant result in today’s correspondence chess without engines and databases. But we humans play, not the engines, and the input of humans mainly affects two areas: a) the choice of a suitable opening, and b) steering the engine toward (or away) from certain types of position.
If you want to be successful in top correspondence chess you can only play a certain set of openings because you simply cannot afford one single sub-optimal move – if you do, you will sooner or later regret it. That’s as certain as death and taxes.
How well you guide your engines depends on your general chess knowledge. The better your chess knowledge (the significance of pawn structures, good bishop, bad bishop, etc.) the better you will do here – today’s engines are very strong but they still misjudge positions. If you have enough time and patience and composure you can feed the computer with more good ideas than your opponent – exactly the process described by former World CC Champion GM Ron Langeveld in an interview on the ICCF website.
I used Rybka for a number of years but around 2012 and 2103 I switched to Stockfish. Of course, I tested other engines as well but these two are my main engines. I firmly believe that the top CC players must not change their engines too much because you have to understand and recognize the strengths and weaknesses of your engines. Otherwise, you again and again have to choose between two or three moves the engines suggest, however, without understanding the differences these moves.
In my case, this would basically mean that I, as a player with a FIDE rating of about 2200, had to evaluate the moves of several 3300+ “players”. That cannot up well. If you stick to one engine you gradually get to know it better, you know where it is strong, you know where it is weak, you know, which positions it plays well and which positions it does not like.
But you should not let the engine do all the work, for instance, by giving the engine a certain position, then leave the computer for a couple of hours, and when returning just check what the computer proposes. You will do much better if you watch the thinking process, to try to recognise and understand the strengths and weaknesses of the machine and to guide the analysis.
You also need a lot of patience! If you are unsure what move to make, wait – and sleep one night over it. Use your 24-hour time buffer. Let the engine finish the iteration. All top engines today prune very heavily, so using the “Next Best” function is the main tool for correspondence play.
I use the ChessBase GUI which is non-negotiable because of its stability and because it is easy use. I also use several databases, particularly the ICCF archive database. I also use the ChessBase MegaDatabase and the Playchess games database but ONLY for getting new ideas – human games are just too unreliable.
I form opening trees in these databases but I do not rely on statistics. I analyse all variations carefully and only decide on my move after I’ve checked and prepared for all worst-case scenarios. In CC you cannot rely on a “if he doesn’t see” strategy.
As much as my time allows I try to follow the latest in chess engine development. From what I’ve seen, the best engines of today are Komodo and Stockfish. Both have their virtues and ... well, almost no weaknesses. Stockfish calculates variations fast, and excels in tactics and attacking, while Komodo is solid in style, and its positional play is second to none. They are very close in strength continuously developed further. Both are an excellent choice for serious correspondence chess.
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