George Duke wrote on Sat, Jul 5, 2008 04:33 PM UTC:
[Tom, Tom the Piper's son learned to play when he was young, / But the only tune that he could play was ''Over the Hills and Far Away.''] Where do so-called ''Chess Grandmasters'' get their credentials? From good play at OrthoChess 8x8 with all its rote practice. Their ELO is a probabilistic system in application. Even ELO 2200 will defeat ELO 2600 certain expected percentage of the time. We are talking about one particular Rules set and one specific narrow time control. How would skill within those parameters translate to other board games? Problematically not automatically. As Joyce discloses, games with movements exclusively Night-, Bishop-, and Rook-like will benefit those experts exclusively used to RNB. As Gifford shows, shorter time controls will help the specialist in FIDE. That is why they always advocate Carrera variants from Bird to Seirawan. Suppose instead their ELOs were based on 80 years (FIDE was founded 80 years ago) of Los Alamos 6x6 (actually developed 1950's). Hey a thought experiment! Isn't that where Chess started in the first place, with thinking? Anyway, it is clear ELO2700 at little
Los Alamos would not mean much at all. Likewise, high rating at standard-rules 8x8 does not mean all that much anymore in world of prolificism. Probably there will be lot of scatter in transferring
skill from small 8x8 to 9x9 (Shogi), 9x10 (Xiangqi), or 10x10
(Centennial). Some will do better than others. Many in CVPage, used to
9x9, 9x10 and 10x10, could already win over the OrthoChess specialists all the way to the top, Kramnik, whoever, at personal games on larger boards with enough time available, as Joyce and others elucidate.