Rating Chess tempo and FIDE....

[uri blass]

Hi Uri,

CTS is a good site and does have both those advantages. Another disadvantage of CTS is that CTS has no "allowed alternatives" and no cut-off gap between best and second best moves so you can find problems where you can say for example win a Rook but be marked wrong because there was also a Queen win you missed.  There are situations where Chess Tempo fails a winning move (for example when you miss mate in 1 or play a mate 8 when there was a mate in 2), but in general Chess Tempo does not allow situations like the Rook win versus Queen situation mentioned above (it would have the Rook take as an allowed alternative).

In any case enjoy playing wherever you go :-)

Regards,
Richard.

Hi Richard.
I agree with you about the disadvantage of CTS that you mention but having 2 good moves  does not happen often that there are 2 winning moves and I consider the advantage of CTS to be bigger than the disadvantage at this point of time.

Maybe things are going to be changed later.

Uri

[drahacikfm]

I've used CTS and Chess Tempo, and I think Chess Tempo is much better for training.  I use it for myself (FIDE Master)  and my son (Slovak champion for Boys 10 years old) almost every day.  I have no interest in going back to CTS.

Of course to take advantage of all the great features here to get the best training, you need a silver membership.  Then you can train many different things.  For example, going through all the problems you missed, training certain kinds of tactics (overloading, pins, etc), training mates, etc.

[uri blass]

I may consider go back to Chess tempo later.

Chess Tempo has advantages but as long as the problems are only to win games and not find the best move I prefer  CTS.

Note that going through the problem you missed is possible always if you care to write the problem numbers of the problem that you missed.

It is more convenient to do it automatically but I do not consider it as advantage that it is important enough to go back to chess tempo.

I also think that you do not memorize the problem well if you cannot give
the solution in less than 3 seconds so even repeating problems that I already solved is an advantage if I learn to see the same thing faster and I do not solve most problems in CTS in less than 3 seconds.

The significant advantage of chess tempo silver membership is probably
training in a certain type of tactics.

Maybe I can learn faster in this way but I am improving my rating in CTS every day.

I consider the blitz time control as an advantage for me because I train in more problems and every hard problem can be based on smaller problems that you need to solve at blitz.

It may be a problem for part of the players who learn to play too quickly
but I know that this danger does not exist for me and even in the time that I
played a lot of blitz games I never played too fast in OTB games.

Uri

[drahacikfm]

I also think that you do not memorize the problem well if you cannot give
the solution in less than 3 seconds so even repeating problems that I already solved is an advantage if I learn to see the same thing faster and I do not solve most problems in CTS in less than 3 seconds.

The significant advantage of chess tempo silver membership is probably
training in a certain type of tactics.

I don't understand what the 3 seconds has to do with anything.

The silver membership has lots of advantages besides training certain types of tactics.  I've actually never used it for that, but I've used it for lots of other things (pasting the problem into an engine to analyze more, seeing the 4 best move at every step, practicing problems in a certain rating range, the calendar to track training progress, etc.)

[uri blass]

I also think that you do not memorize the problem well if you cannot give
the solution in less than 3 seconds so even repeating problems that I already solved is an advantage if I learn to see the same thing faster and I do not solve most problems in CTS in less than 3 seconds.

The significant advantage of chess tempo silver membership is probably
training in a certain type of tactics.

I don't understand what the 3 seconds has to do with anything.

The silver membership has lots of advantages besides training certain types of tactics.  I've actually never used it for that, but I've used it for lots of other things (pasting the problem into an engine to analyze more, seeing the 4 best move at every step, practicing problems in a certain rating range, the calendar to track training progress, etc.)

I get the full points in the second site only if I solve the problem in 3 seconds or faster(if I remember it well enough to be sure about the solution I can do it even if the problem is not easy).
To be more correct
I think that it is 3 seconds per move and if the problem has 4 moves and I use 2 seconds for every one of them then it is considered as solving it in less than 3 seconds.

I practically tried to pass the problem into an engine to analyze more and I needed to do it manually but I did it only in a small number of cases and in more than 95%  of the problems I did not need an engine to understand the solution.

I can practice problems in a certain rating range also without being a member
both in this site and in the second site.

The way is simple(order the problems based on rating and go to the right page).
It is possible that you can do it in more convenient way if you are a silver member.

in this site it is possible to do it by clicking on
view problem->all problems->rating(in standard rating column)
and this order the problems based on standard rating.
Uri

[hikaru shindou]

Hi all.

This is my first thread in chess tempo  Here are some of my statistics. I have no FIDE rating yet.I need one more FIDE rated game to get my rating. My playchess.com blitz rating = 2200, FICS standard rating = 2000, CT blitz rating = 2215 (once reaching as high as 2380, but under a different account), CT standard rating = 2089 (just started solving standard tactics today ~85 of them)

Thank you, Richard for creating such a great website. I will be going for a tournament soon. It will be held at the end of this month and I hope that I will give a decent performance after training intensely in CT for the past 2-3 mths.

Best regards,
Hikaru Shindou

[richard]

Thanks Hikaru,

Good luck at the tournament! let us know how you go.

Regards,
Richard.

[diskamyl]

Hi Richard. Several months ago, you had posted some stats about the equivalence of ratings:

For standard ratings the equivalent is (based on 55 users):
CT Rating: 1679.1636
Fide Rating: 1825.8727

For standard ratings the equivalent is (based on 55 users):
CT Rating: 1679.1636
Fide Rating: 1825.8727

I wonder if you can post any updates about this?

[uri blass]

Hi Richard. Several months ago, you had posted some stats about the equivalence of ratings:

For standard ratings the equivalent is (based on 55 users):
CT Rating: 1679.1636
Fide Rating: 1825.8727

For standard ratings the equivalent is (based on 55 users):
CT Rating: 1679.1636
Fide Rating: 1825.8727

I wonder if you can post any updates about this?

My fide rating is 2049 when my standard rating is 2343.1
I believe that getting 2200 OTB is an harder task than getting standard CT rating of 2400.
 
Uri

[richard]

Here is the current data:

Average standard rating of users who have done more then 50 standard problems and entered a fide rating >0 and <3000 (141 users):
CT Standard Rating:1786.62
Fide Rating:1900.73

And for equivalent blitz (238 users):
CT Blitz Rating:1970.57
Fide Rating:2080.07


Note the "equivalent" in your pasted text refers to "the equivalent to the previous data" not CT rating X is equivalent to fide rating Y, these are just the average of each of the users which met the criteria outlined above , a regression equation between the entered and achieved values would probably be more useful.

Some users have ratings in standard very close to their FIDE rating, but there are a few users who use the untimed nature of standard mode to think very carefully before moving and they have quite high standard ratings compared to their FIDE ratings.  If I get around to produce a regression equation I'd probably include "average seconds spent on each problem" as one of the variables.  Uri, you are currently spending about 3.5 times the average time spent on average problems which is probably why your standard rating is so much higher than your FIDE rating.

Blitz average ratings are very close to FIDE rating, but I suspect that blitz ratings are still slightly morely inflated than standard ratings (on average) for the highest rated players. Actually here is the data for blitz users over 2300 who entered fide ratings (39 users):
CT  Blitz Rating: 2546.25
Fide Rating: 2145.82

and for standard over 2000:
CT Standard:2105.64
Fide Rating: 2067.28

The blitz ratings include older ratings when blitz was a little easier so it probably exaggerates the effect.


Richard.

[drahacikfm]

It might be biased to look at the average FIDE ratings of people with CT Blitz over 2300 or CT Standard over 2000, because that may include people who are especially good at CT Blitz or CT Standard.

How about a comparision in the opposite direction?   For example, what is the average CT Blitz rating and average CT Standard rating for people with a FIDE rating over 2100?  I bet it won't result in CT blitz 400 points higher and CT Standard 38 points higher, as in the comparision you gave above.  The CT ratings will be relatively lower.

[richard]

Drahacik:
CT Standard for >2100 fide (39 users):
- Fide Av : 2260
- Ct Av: 1950

CT Blitz for >2100 fide (76 users):
- Fide Av: 2226
- Ct Av: 2243

So you were right :-)

Richard.

[diskamyl]

OK, thanks for the info.

[uri blass]

My experience so far is that solving problems at standard and inproving my chess rating here does not help me in normal games.

I have only 3 games after I started to solve problems but results are not good.
My israeli rating is 2070 and here are results so far
 
round 1:1857 black loss
round 2:1955 white win
round 3:2196 white loss(only opponent from round 3 has fide rating)
 

The tournament is one game per week.

Unfortunately this site is only about finding winning moves and tactics in games is not about finding winning moves.

This is simply not the same type of problem.

I think that it may be better to have not blunder rating list
when the idea is to take positions from human-human games when one human blundered based on computer analysis and the exercise should be simply to make a move that is not a blunder(it can have a single solution but can have more than a single solution).

blunder can be every move that lose more than 0.5 pawns based on computer analysis(positional non accurate moves that lose 0.2 or 0.3 pawns are relatively less improtant and I believe that  most humans can get more than 200 elo if they can replace most of the big mistakes that they do by moves
that are not mistakes)

Uri

[richard]

Hi Uri,

I think the 232 problems (at time of writing) that you've done here are probably a little too early to draw conclusions on.  I agree that your rating increase in standard is not likely to be caused by any substantial improvements but is rather a combination of standard taking some time to reach the "correct level" for a user and a tendency for all users to be able to improve their rating by being more careful rather than more skillful , although I think it is hard to separate these, thinking a bit longer in tricky positions is probably a skill in itself.

As I've mentioned elsewhere I think offering a mode where some problems are about avoiding blunders (and other moves which are "good" but don't end up winning large amounts of material) would be useful. However I think it is a bit unfair to blame not having these on the lack of improvement in your latest tournament results, especially given the relatively small number of standard problems you've actually done here.

CTS does have some problems of the type you describe and you've done almost 20,000 problems there, so I think a more interesting question would be why haven't the 20K problems you've done on CTS had a positive impact on your latest tournament results even WITH the types of problems you mention :-)

Regards,
Richard.