Y gracias por la bienvenida, es un honor.

<Zeratul1979: so i think we can safely say that a person is 400 or more ELO points stronger in CM than in real life? (what is real life anyways) :P>

Your response:

<LIFE Master AJ: Hmmm. CM is rated around 2700 by SSDF and CETG. Anyone who is rated 400+ better than that ...>

You clearly didn't understand what he said (completely clearly and logically, I read over it myself until <ganstaman> pointed it out). If you DID read it correctly and didn't understand it, then it's probably your fault for not understanding completely normal English.

<Jim Bartle: Most of us just admit it and move on.>

<LIFE Master AJ: <Jim Bartle> Nope. I know what I said. (and) I didn't misread anything.>

O.

M.

G.

CM is not real people. You need experience playing against real people before you get a rating. Tournaments don't ask you for your CM rating. Indeed, there is no FIDE/USCF/CM scale existing today. Maybe GM Keene will change that.

So if you've never had any experience in tournament play, then take a few hundred points off of your CM rating to estimate how you would perform in your first tournament.

And let's not argue anymore. We're all chessplayers, so let's save our abilities to stir up conflict for OTB play. Idiots!!!

Is Chessmaster 10th edition more powerfull then this Chessmaster?

http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/Baye...

While the Bayesian Elo rating is not interchangeable with traditional Elo ratings (such as the system FIDE uses), I suspect there is a very strong correlation between the two.

More on the Bayesian Elo system of Rémi Coulom:

http://remi.coulom.free.fr/Bayesian...

More on the traditional Elo Rating System of Árpád Élő:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_ra...

Looking at the latest Top 100 [Human] Chessplayers list of FIDE, we see that the lowest rating on the list is 2619 ( Giovanni Vescovi ), the highest is 2813 ( Veselin Topalov ) with an average Elo rating for the Top 100 players of 2665.6 (a quick MS-Excel number crunch, facilitated by the glorious "Snag-It" screen/text capture utility: www.SnagIt.com ):

http://fide.com/ratings/top.phtml?l...

If we make the not-unreasonable (I think) guess that the Bayesian Elo typically comes within plus-or-minus 100 points of the traditional Elo rating, I think we would expect that Chessmaster would hold its own very nicely against players in the middle of the Top 100. Chessmaster has also distinguished itself in the past for being a particularly strong blitz player, so in this medium, it might fare especially well.

Hope this is helpful!

(: ♗ Bishop Berkeley ♗ :)

I guess what I'm asking is this: In Chessmaster, I am currently able to beat the personality rated 2001. Is that a good estimate of how I would fare in actual USCF rated play?

But why on earth would anyone want to do this, you may wonder?! Isn't it "natural" to play from the bottom?

Well, I think it is more natural to play from the bottom of the board, but I think that playing from the top can be a significant learning tool, at least for those who are experienced playing in the "conventional" way. Playing from the top gives you the "driver's seat" perspective of Chessmaster itself. And since the latest versions of Chessmaster are playing at the solid Grandmaster level, that's a pretty worthwhile perspective to have.

I won't develop the psychological theory at any length, I suspect the benefit may be intuitively clear to many who reflect on it. Suffice it to say, if you have never tried playing against Chessmaster from the top of the board, you might just give it a try! You may experience a bit of vertigo at first :), but I bet you'll adjust pretty quickly.

I have not been able to find a way to play from the top of the board against the Chessbase-distributed programs (such as Shredder (Computer) , Junior (Computer) , Fritz (Computer) , etc.) If anyone knows how to set them up to do this, I would be interested to learn of it. I play against Chessbase programs at least as often as against Chessmaster (usually while pedalling my exercise bicycle -- a great workout for body and mind!)

Now if I can only find a human opponent who will agree to play from opposite sides -- me moving the pieces which start closest to him/her, and my opponent moving the pieces which start closest to me! (I've also thought it might be interesting to play with the board turned 90-degrees: "side-by-side" as it were; or with the board turned 45-degrees, a "diamond orientation". But even Chessmaster can't do these things!)

Cheers!

(: ♗ Bishop Berkeley ♗ :)