Saturday Addendum

Several items came up after the Friday Update.

- I have another victory on ICC Correspondence. Shijith resigned our second game on the 29th move. I'll post the game after I have had a chance to review it.

- Susan Polgar has posted another correspondence chess item on her blog. This is the third correspondence chess blog entry from GM Polgar in the last week or so. While this one is simply a promised update on links for correspondence chess, it and the other entries by GM Polgar serve to raise CorrChess's visibility.

Despite my disagreement with GM Polgar in the first instance, I am very grateful for her interest and promotion of this aspect of the royal game. I have become an avid reader of her blog and suggest it to anyone looking for enjoyable chess content.

- Anthony spoke of entering a Walter Muir E-Quad to be held on ICCF's web server by the USCF's Correspondence Chess Director Alex Dunne. That intrigued me, so I tried to register for a Muir quad on Friday for the web server as is advertised on the web page. The gentleman that answered the phone could not find a web server option, only email Muir quads... Joan DuBois was out of the office but the gentleman stated he would print out the web page (he saw the same thing I did) and place it on her desk for clarification. I'll let you know when I find out something definite. Playing USCF events on a web server would be wonderful!

- The ICCF web server appears to be down this morning. Hopefully it will be back up soon.
[EDIT] 7:15am Received the following from ICCF:

Dear Steve,

please go to www.iccf-webchess.com in your browser and try to refresh the
page.
There was the server update, and pages cached in your browser may no longer
be working.

Your browser may be caching an old version of a script on the game screen.
Please try to refresh the game screen in your browser. If that does not
help, you can try cleaning your browser cache. Let me know if this doesn't
help.

Sincerely, yours
Martin Bennedik

And it now works for me. I did have an old page in the cache that was not updating with the new server update.

Friday Update

The recently started ICCF WS/O/120 is in the very early stages. None of the games have proceeded past the first four moves. One game has not had a single move.

Nothing major has transpired in the other two events, either.

In Correspondence news, Susan Polgar has posted another entry about CC chess. GM Polgar is asking for CC web sites to list on that entry so be sure to see if there is a favorite of yours that has not yet been mentioned. Yours truly was linked (thanks to Anthony for the plug and GM Polgar for the link).

Mike Nolan posted on the USCF Forums on Thursday that Alex Dunne had completed all correspondence rating updates on Monday (April, 16th). This is welcome news and we all hope that the USCF will continue the recent improvements regarding CC chess. One thing I would like to see, failing a return of FM Dunne's column to the print Chess Life, is for his Chess Life Online column, Check Is In The Mail, to be made available via newsreader/blog protocol (RSS, Atom, etc...)

News about USCF Correspondence, GM Polgar on it late

Mike Nolan posted the following on the USCF Forums under the "Correspondence Chess update" thread.

"PostPost:40098 Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2007 11:41 pm

I was wondering if anyone would notice. Smile

As of early this afternoon, MSA has updated CC ratings for over 1200 correspondence players.

Alex has results entered through around April 8th, he expects to be completely caught up over the weekend. The individual results are available at:

http://www.uschess.org/cc/CCSearch/

We may have more good news for correspondence players soon."

There is hope for the USCF CC program yet!

I was disappointed that GM Susan Polgar chose to use this as a political football in her campaign for the USCF Executive Board. GM Polgar wrote, "This is just one of the many problems. We must do better and we must treat our members better, every single member! Mr. Paul Truong, Mr. Mikhail Korenman, Mr. Randy Bauer and I are committed to change the USCF for the better. Thank you Mr. Allard for bringing this to our attention!"

She wrote this on Friday, April 13th when Mike Nolan had started the thread on the Forums back in February! Yes, the USCF needs to do better. However, GM Polgar has repeatedly complained that others do not write a simple email to see if things are being fixed or for explanations of situations about which others have questions. Here, GM Polgar violates her own advice by jumping on a situation that was a problem but has had a solution in the works for months now. In addition, she did this for political gain.

Is this how she intends to operate as a board member?

Back to the USCF... Now, if we can get them to set up a server like the ICCF has!