Life sometimes gets strange in the TD room. At one event, we got talking about combining chess and Roller Derby. Each team can make a move once each time around the rink, but only if they’re not blocked out.
It is important to note, however, that the pentagon is formed by the short dimensions of the tables. For example, if the tables are 6 feet by 30 inches, then it is the 30-inch sides that form the small pentagon in the middle. The 6-foot sides then stick out in all directions like the blades on a five-blade ceiling fan. All the players sit outside the small pentagon, close to the center, in the V-shaped areas formed by the 6-foot sides.
There should be a 72-degree angle between each pair of 6-foot sides, and a 108-degree angle between each pair of 30-inch sides inside the small central pentagon.
A little visualization is required.
Bill Smythe
Biathlon. Other people should not be able to physically interfere with your actions. G/25;d3. Before you move you have to go to your laser rifle (no real bullets) and shoot a target associated with the piece you want to move. You can keep on shooting until you hit a desired target but the rifle would have a governor requiring five seconds to pass before it is ready to shoot again.
PS probably time for a topic split
haha that’s great! I know that the USCF does not rate chess variants, but is there any organization that does rate ancient variants that you know of? I’m guessing if I wanted to start holding tourney’s for the variants I would just have to use the ratings calculator unofficially.
I’m not aware of any organization that rates chess variants, though there has been some talk about US Chess rating Chess960 games at some point, as a separate ratings system.
Doing a full-blown Elo-type ratings system might be a bit cumbersome, but there are simpler ratings systems that could probably be done in Excel. The Ratings Estimator doesn’t completely reproduce the US Chess formulas, though it comes fairly close for established players.
Back in 2004 when I was rewriting the ratings programming, I built an Excel spreadsheet to rate a quad using the US Chess formulas, it took me several hours to get it working correctly and that was for players with established ratings, adding provisional or unrated players complicates things a lot.
Yeah, if I did hold variant tournaments they would be very informal and just for fun, so I’d probably just use the online rating estimator and that would be good enough for our purposes. Rewriting ratings programming is outside my aptitude lol.
That’s pretty much what you’d have to do if you want ratings for a variant – compute them yourself. Either use the rating estimator or use a modified version of the U.S. Chess ratings formula. That would be good enough to create interest among your players.
Bill Smythe
I’ve always wanted to run a quad as (what I call) a “simul-simul-simul”.
a) set up 6 boards on one long table (with plenty of room surrounding the table):
b) post pairings for all 6 games
- A B
- C D
- A C
- D B
- D A
- B C
c) play all 6 games at once.
Blitz, of course.
D has a huge advantage in the seating arrangements.
Feel free to improve…but I was thinking more of sneakers than seating.
“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all”. Peter Drucker I think that quote fits well here.
Hey guys, tonight I am trying to enter my first rated games for my club. There was no tournament, it was just 4 rated individual games. A new member who is unrated [and 10 years old], played 4 games. He alternated back and forth between playing myself and another member [playing each of us twice total]. I can’t seem to get the configuration right regarding how to enter this into the system. I keep getting errors that I can’t resolve. How would this situation be correctly entered? Thanks you much! 
Just to make sure I understand, was it something like this: A-B C-A B-A A-C where these are the “rounds” in order and the first named player had White?
Alex Relyea
Yes, that was exactly it. 
Thanks for your help via PM. Problem solved! Is there much of a wait time for the ratings to be updated?
It usually takes an hour or two. This late you might have to wait until morning.
Alex Relyea
hey again, it seems as if it hasn’t gone through yet. And when I click on “pay for pending events” it shows I have 0 events to pay for. I’m wondering if something went wrong possibly?
According to our internal records event ID 201811152252 is in the ‘no errors ready to release’ state. Until it has been released for payment it will not show up in the events ready to be paid for. This needs to be done by the TD in TD/A. (Update: I see this has now been done, and the event should be rated in the next hourly pass.)
This extra step was added a few years back because we changed how payments by credit card are handled so that all the sensitive material such as the credit card number is handled by the payment processor, not by US Chess, so we have to get the release (which finalizes the amount due) prior to selecting the event for payment. This also allows affiliates to process the ratings fee, since the chief/submitting TD has already signed off on the event.
Thanks Nolan. Yeah last night the site seemed to be acting wonky and it wasn’t directing me to the payment page [or perhaps it was an issue with my computer], but today I was able to do it fine.