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The Campbell Report
Correspondence Chess
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Tutorial for using the ICCF Server
Finding player information

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There are times you may wish to discover some information about other players, such as when you are assigned to play against them or if they are friends. There are two ways you can find information about players on the server.

If they are a current opponent or you know an event in which they are competing you can find information directly from the crosstable page.

In the above crosstable I wished to find out about the player Ralph Marconi. Notice that his name is a link. Just click on the link to find out more.

After clicking on the name you'll get this display. The player's ICCF ID#, country flag, full name and current rating are displayed. If you place the cursor over the flag your browser will probably display the country name abbreviation, though it doesn't show in this illustration. Following this information there is a list of current events with this player. If you click on the tournament name you'll see the crosstable and via this crosstable you may be able to view the player's "live" games and/or finished games. This could be very useful for becoming familiar with an opponent's playing style and opening repertoire. Of course, depending on the options specified for the tournaments they may not show "live" or finished games.

If you have the proper server permissions (Tournament Official?) or view your own personal Player Details page you may see additional information, such as the player's email address, mailing address, birth date, etc.

Another way to view player details is via the rating list. Indeed, you may wish to find a player without knowing any of his current events (so you can't locate a pertinent crosstable). You may also just want to look up a player's rating list entry.

Go to the server page and click on the "Rating list" link under "System" in the left navigation bar (as shown above). The system will then display a search page to locate the player's rating listing.

If you are interested in a specific rating, you can choose which rating list to use. Here (above) the 2nd list (October) of 2005 is selected. 2006/1 would be the first rating list of 2006 (April).

Once you have selected the rating list you should enter the name in the "Name" field. Here things get interesting, because a powerful searching facility is available to you. The simple approach is to enter the first letters of the player's last name. For instance, I entered the first four letters of "Campbell" and clicked the "Find" button. Note: sometimes the browser allows you to simple hit the return key to start a search, but in this case that may not work. I suggest that you always use the "Find" button to start a search.

All the players in the specified rating list that have the last name starting with "Camp" are found and the first 20 are listed. At the bottom left are the symbols "< >". By clicking on these symbols you can see the previous 20 / next 20 players found by the search.

Now, by clicking on the rating for a player (as shown by the cursor position above), you can view the player's "Player Details" page.

By using the "wild card" characters "*" and "?" you can do a more flexible search. If you aren't sure how the name is spelled or can't easily enter the special characters (umlauts, etc.) you can replace the characters with the wild card characters.

* -- this character represents any number of unspecified characters.

? -- this character represents exactly one unspecified character.

Say I wanted to search for "Lüers". You don't know how to enter the umlaut character on your keyboard, or perhaps it is spelled "Lueers" ... I don't know. If you enter the name "L*ers" you should find either spelling. In fact, the players found by the search is rather lengthy, but by scanning the list you'll find exactly the name your are looking for, as the following example shows.

If you want to minimize the number of extraneous names found by the search you can use the more restrictive "?" wild card character. This stands for exactly one unspecified character. You can, of course, enter more than one "?" character.

Note that the name you specify is only for the beginning of the name. Additional characters may follow. In the above example, only the first 5 characters were specified, but more lengthy names starting with those five characters were found. Also, in this last example a lower-case "L" was specified. This search is case-independent, so you may use capital or lower-case letters ... it doesn't matter.

© 2006 J. Franklin Campbell. All rights reserved.

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