Leaving postal chess
behind …
for every gain there is a loss
by J. Franklin Campbell
(posted 5 May 2003)
There has been much
discussion about the demise of postal chess … it's too slow;
too expensive; too prone to transmission problems leading to
lengthy delays or lost cards; you have to hand-write every card.
In a recent TCCMB
posting John Knudsen said,
"The thought of physically
filling out post cards makes me ill."
I'm certain that John isn't alone in that sentiment.
I, too, have been
caught up in the more modern and faster-moving form of correspondence
chess known as email chess. There's something really great and
exhilarating about sending moves halfway 'round the world in
minutes instead of weeks. The occasional lost email transmission
can be easily dealt with by sending a second email repeat. Sending
a move to Eastern Europe (normal transmission time six weeks)
with the need to send a repeat meant around three months required
for a single exchange of moves. Now that was discouraging.
The advantage of
compression of time for a game by using email leads to some
real advantages. Here are a few of them.
- With moves exchanged
more rapidly the flow of the game is better, avoiding some
of the loss of continuity often felt in postal chess.
- Tournaments,
especially multi-round tournaments, can be finished in more
reasonable time scales.
- If the players
already have email service, the cost of postage (which increases
frequently) can be avoided. I recall a few years ago that
several Russian women had to drop out of a major event,
the ladies' world championship I believe, simply because
they could not afford the postage.
- Frequency of
delivery is much higher. Instead of the six mail deliveries
a week I've lived with for years, I now receive mail continuously,
even on Sundays and holidays. Theoretically, I could even
log on to the Internet while on a vacation or business trip
and collect my email moves without waiting to get home (though
I recall occasions when I called home and asked my understanding
wife to read the cards to me).
- Intervention
by tournament directors can be much easier and faster. A
complaint can be emailed to the TD and she could collect
information from both players very quickly using email.
The TD could even require the players to copy her on every
move of a problem game to allow absolute confidence that
both players are sending moves and recording the time correctly.
There are other
benefits to being on-line, not specifically based on transmitting
moves by email.
- Reporting results
to the TD is faster and easier.
- Dealing with
archiving the games is easier, resulting in more complete
records of events.
- On-line crosstables
can be kept up-to-date.
- Corrections
to published results/crosstables can be made quickly and
easily.
- Cutting and
pasting game scores and creating PGN databases of games
is relatively easy.
- The possibility
of "live" on-line coverage of games is an exciting possibility.
Man, all of this
sounds so great! Why wouldn't everyone switch to email chess
immediately and leave postal chess to the dusty past history
of correspondence chess? There are disadvantages, of course.
Every advance comes at some cost. A few of these disadvantages,
some of them just temporary, are as follows.
- Moves can arrive
so quickly that a player can feel the game is more like
blitz than cc.
- Because of the
practically instantaneous transmission of moves, most players
can only play a third to half the number of games previously
played by post. This means more care must be taken in selecting
events. For many competitors this means playing in a single
event at a time. Many invitational and other events comprise
14 games, a good size email load.
- A working email
address must be maintained by each player, which can prove
difficult. For instance, a Russian opponent was using an
email domain which my email domain identified as a source
of spam. They stopped accepting email from, and refused
to send email to, my opponent's email domain. This never
happened in postal chess!
- There is a psychological
problem for some people having a batch of moves always waiting
for response. For some I am sure this can be an advantage.
For me it's a source of depression, knowing I'm constantly
"behind" on my moves. As one player once said, there was
never any "down time."
- There is a need
to develop a new methodology, which can take some time.
I was quite comfortable with the methodology I developed
over decades of postal play. When I was first thrown into
the email ring I found myself in unfamiliar territory and
I made many mistakes based on the simple mechanics of play.
- Stamp and picture
postcard collectors will suffer a real loss. A player will
no longer have an interesting collection of cc artifacts
(postcards) from exotic and far-away places. An email from
Russia or Japan is just like an email from California or
any other locale.
There's nothing new
in the above. All these things have been discussed numerous
times on TCCMB and other places. However, there is another more
subtle loss that many may not notice … may not miss. For some
of us this is a significant loss. Just as people write with
simpler handwriting than people of past centuries, people playing
email chess play without some of the old tactile experience
of postal chess. There's no more examining carefully crossed
and obliterated moves on a card to determine what your opponent
almost sent. I can recall writing down a move and wanting
to change it. I would frequently write several legal and reasonable-looking
moves on top of the one I wanted to mark out just to make it
impossible for my opponent to figure out what I had decided
against. If you held the postcard at the right angle with the
right lighting you could sometimes detect what had been written
and then overwritten with a splotch of ink. It could be exasperating,
of course, to see that an opponent had written down a losing
move only to change it before mailing!
Through the years
I've formed my own special set of pleasures I've taken from
postal chess. Some of these I still enjoy with email chess.
I still design and print my own score sheets. Each move that
arrives is carefully (lovingly?) hand written into my 3-ring
binder on my own custom score sheets. If my computer crashes
I may lose email contact with my opponents, but the moves are
all safely stored in my binder. Other things have been lost,
though.
I remember buying
my first 9-pin dot matrix printer. I carefully shopped for a
printer that would allow me to design my own chess font for
printing chess diagrams. I carefully laid out each needed chess
character for printing chess diagrams … white pawn on white
square, white pawn on black square, white knight on white square,
etc. … and then wrote a Basic program to load the special font
to the printer. Every postcard I mailed had the current position
printed on the card. Sometimes I'd share positions from other
games with my opponent. Every game report to the TD had the
final position of the game printed on the postcard.
More recently I used
the Linares font in Word documents to print my postcards on
an HP LaserJet printer. It felt odd when I sent that last postcard
off in my last postal game. There was no competitive advantage
to printing diagrams. In ICCF competition, supplying a diagram
has no legal standing. A mistake in the position does not negate
the move sent (in some organizations a supplied diagram must
agree with the written moves or the move is considered ambiguous).
I suppose I could have applied some "gamesmanship" and intentionally
printed an incorrect diagram to try to trick my opponent. It
did occur to me, of course, but I never tried that ploy.
I had a lot of fun
writing my own programs to save information about opponents
for printing on the postcards (such as name and address). I
took a lot of pride in my self-developed chess font. I won't
even go into the details about how the printer documentation
I read before purchasing that first dot-matrix printer claimed
a larger uploadable to the printer character set than actually
existed. Losing 32 graphics characters required a complete redesign
… bummer!
I once wrote something
that provoked chess journalist and master player Stephan
Gerzadowicz to say something like, "I don't want to compete
in record-keeping." I always felt otherwise. I actually enjoyed
writing down the moves, insuring that I was analyzing the correct
position, and avoiding notation errors. To me that was a big
part of the game. With the advent of chess databases much of
that has disappeared. I also analyze using ChessBase to keep
my game score, set up the correct position to analyze and save
all my game notes. I enjoy using the search feature to find
games of interest, such as master games that reached the same
position as one of my current games. For me the play of the
game has evolved over the years as I've adopted more and more
computer tools. Gone is the old Post-A-Log binder for keeping
track of all my current positions. Sometimes I miss this, such
as when I go to a doctor's appointment. My Post-A-Log use to
accompany me everywhere. When I had a little time to kill I
could either look at a position to develop ideas and make long-range
plans or I could look at a won game and bask in the glow of
the winning position.
Progress occurs …
as a computer programmer who had at one time planned a scientific
or mathematical career I am willing to learn new skills and
adapt to new circumstances and technological advances.. However,
this doesn't mean I don't also appreciate the more sensual side
of the game, the tactile appreciation of handling a postcard
or moving a physical chess piece. I miss the noble postcard
with all it's frailties. Of course, there's no turning back.
I love the many advances such as email, the Internet and chess
databases. But I never-the-less have nostalgia for some of the
things that disappear with the end of postal chess. I may yet
enter some postal events. I am hoping that when the ICCF server
goes on-line that some of my perceived problems with email chess
will be solved. But, just as we no longer arrange our silverware
just so before meals and the women don't wear white gloves before
Easter, certain things pass away never to return. I will miss
some of those things that were so much a part of my postal chess
experience.
© 2003 J.
Franklin Campbell, All Rights Reserved.
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