Consequently, a question posed in the comments section to Tuesday's post set me thinking, 'Paul H' asking how I accounted for raising my Fide rating "by I think 300 points 'at your age'."
He is quite right, in that my Fide in October 2021, when I was 64, was 1731, while five years later it is 2035, albeit set to fall after a disastrous outing in Mallorca.
It would be easy to give a glib off-the cuff reply, but I want to treat the question seriously, and I hope the answer will be of interest to a wider audience than myself and Paul H.
I hoped to post today, but I am rather busy today and tomorrow, so I plan to work out a considered reply and deliver it at Beau Chess on Friday.
Meanwhile, I received the following emailed comment from Joe Skielnik, who, unlike me, had a decent tournament in Mallorca, gaining 5.8 elo, finishing with a flourish by beating a player rated more than 100 points higher.
"Personally I would ignore ratings (if that is really possible for a chessplayer). I think it would be best to just consider the number of errors that one makes and their size relative to the computer's suggestion. One has to consider what might be causing the error, tiredness being one of the culprits."Joe likes the way chess.com categorises every move of a game, from 'brilliant' to 'blunder', taking in along the way 'inaccuracy', 'miss' and 'mistake', and several other fine gradings.
I do not use chess.com, so I am not sure exactly what each of these means, but I have reservations about accepting engine verdicts, certainly not without many caveats.
After, for example, 1.e4 e5, Stockfish18 and Dragon1 flash red at 2.f4, the starting point of the King's Gambit. In other words, they are declaring 2.f4 to be a mistake.
Yet, in ChessBase's 2026 Mega database, White scores 57% after 1.e4 e5 2.f4, which is considerably better than in most openings.
There are other problems, one being that the engines' current word on any given move is often far from being the final word.
It is not uncommon, for instance, when I go through old games of mine, that I find a move condemned at the time by Fritz, Junior or whichever engine I was then using, now gets a nod of approval from my modern engines.
Anyway, this post has somewhat veered from its starting point, and I will write no more now, but hope to have a lot more to say on Friday.
Current engines have a notorious disapproval of the Kings Gambit, perhaps second only to their dislike of the Kings Indian. I suppose they are expressing confidence in their ability to defuse complications without taking account of a human propensity to get it wrong in complex and messy positions.
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Yes, that's probably true, although it often seems to me that the elite take engine evaluations in the opening very seriously.
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