Correspondence chess: Why do people play so many games at a time?

"is the registration free"

• €37.50 Euros annually + €0.6 per game.
  https://webfiles.iccf.com/other/financial_regulations/ICCF%20Financial%20Regulations%2C%2001.01.2026.pdf

"We will have to play through that site ?"

• ICCF play is on its server.

"using the same engine"
*They use different engines, different parameter settings of the engine, different time per move, different hardware.

"If there is a draw in the finals how is the Campion decided "

• If all games are draws, then all will be ex aequo Champions.
  In the previous World Championship finals all games were draws, except those of GM Dronov, who died.
  https://www.iccf.com/event?id=100104

@AlexiHarvey said ^

O well that's me out.

I would still argue that time-spent-per-move is a huge factor in correspondence chess.

As a simple example; I had a puzzle challenge on chessdotcom with a known real-life person who was easily +200 OTB relative to me. I managed to get to 2200* whilst my opponent could only manage 1900, +300 to me! The difference was time-spent on the puzzles, amounting to +500 elo differen...

Using correspondence as puzzles, but ones you could see in a game instead of just tactics, seems to be a theme of the responses. I think it definitely could work, but you would probably not have to care too much about results, and more on just playing the position.

@swimmerBill said ^

What happens (to me) is that you sign up for a tournament, play your games and wait a long time for the next round to start because some play really s l o w: 2 s l o w players and an 80 move games takes 240 days!

so you sign up for anther tournament & same thing happens
...
eventually next rounds start happening and suddenly you have 30 games in 6 different events.

On a much lower level, that is relatable to me. I was playing games where I was completely winning, but my opponent played on, so I start another, and another, and it repeats.

@Keshav09-11 said ^

I have recently gotten into and I love playing correspondence chess, but one thing that struck my eye was that when I click on an opponent of mine's profile they always have about 15-30 games on at once. Why is this? I know it is their choice but to me it kind of looks like it defeats the purpose of correspondence. Do they fall into ...

That makes sense. I sometimes find that opponents, rather surprisingly, make blunders I would not expect with so much time, but I assume they are just playing too quickly.

"make blunders"

• even at top ICCF level clerical errors occur.
  They analyze so much and so deeply, that they sometimes think the position is already one move advanced.

@tpr said ^

"make blunders"

• even at top ICCF level clerical errors occur.
  They analyze so much and so deeply, that they sometimes think the position is already one move advanced.

Some of them aren't strong players on their own, so they occasionally don't notice that they are blundering, although there is a move confirmation. I heard a story about an ICCF grandmaster struggling to mate an opponent with king and rook against a bare king in an over-the-board game. Stress and time pressure perhaps played a role, but one should know the basics well enough to overcome such obstacles.

Here is an example of clerical error at top ICCF level
https://www.iccf.com/game?id=1164303

"Some of them aren't strong players on their own"

• For various reasons: health, concentration, nerves... Most are elder players, often retired with lots of time to analyze. They do have a thorough understanding of the game.

Here is an interview with Dr. Jon Edwards, 32nd ICCF World Champion.
https://backinamericathepodcast.com/episodes/world-correspondence-chess-champion-jon-edwards-on-playing-alongside-ai-and-the-search-for-truth

@bongcloudmaster41 said ^

O well that's me out.

I would still argue that time-spent-per-move is a huge factor in correspondence chess.

As a simple example; I had a puzzle challenge on chessdotcom with a known real-life person who was easily +200 OTB relative to me. I managed to get to 2200* whilst my opponent could only manage 1900, +300 to me! The differenc...

More a case of attitude to selecting moves, and the more time invested in a game the more the result matters, surely!

I have dug around a bit:-

For English Federation Correspondence play the average elo rating is around 2100, compared to LiChess' 1600 for classical and 1400 for Blitz. No distribution stats are available for correspondence play on LiChess. This does suggest that using elo ratings for determining cheating behaviours in correspondence play is likely to be dodgy. I had wrongly assumed the distributions would be very similar however apparently correspondence distributions have very high elo ratings and are much narrower - in retrospect, probably obviously so.

A couple of other points. If the average is around 2100, say, then clearly the use of engines is not endemic, even when allowed! I also noted that players can claim wins based on endgame tablebases - which makes a good bit of sense, as even 'won' endgames can take another 20 to 30 moves to execute.

Aside: I have noticed that Chessiverse have added a new feature to create your own unique Bot - you create the Bot initially by feeding it games in PGN format and training with gameplay - idea being to train against a known opponent, possibly a club member etc. I did wonder what would happen if I feed it my own best games, would this improve my gameplay faster?!

@tpr said ^

"is the registration free"

• €37.50 Euros annually + €0.6 per game.
  https://webfiles.iccf.com/other/financial_regulations/ICCF%20Financial%20Regulations%2C%2001.01.2026.pdf

"We will have to play through that site ?"

• ICCF play is on its server.

"using the same engine"
*They use different engines, different parameter settings of the engine, different time per move, different hardware.

"If there...

Bro you are so good at explaing , I am glad that u tell me all these in so simple worlds , I m sure chatgpt must have confused me a lot
Would you like to be a freind of mine

Aside Update: Went ahead with the Chessiverse Bot-of-Self idea. Was all very smooth but you do need a lot of games - 320 in my case - but easily pulled them directly off my LiChess account in seconds. Whole process took under 5minutes. One thing not mentioned is that you a make the Bot-of-Self public. Certainly a novelty!