As I manually organize correspondence tournaments for everyone to join, I have some experience with it and can say that it works quite well. Most of the games (time control: 2 days) are finished within one month and only very few last longer than 2 months. As you can play multiple games at the same time, a small tournament with 4 or 5 rounds should usually be finished within 2 months.
Besides, I never had the impression that players would cheat in a tournament, but of course that’s not that easy to say as the ACPL is quite low in correspondence. I guess most of the cheaters are just to impatient to play correspondence.
In a correspondence game where players analyse intensively for 3 days they come up with moves of engine quality. It is impossible to tell if they consulted an engine or not. That is why ICCF now allows engine consultation. Lichess forbids engine consultation, but cannot detect it for a correspondence game. That is why there are no correspondence tournaments or no correspondence leaderboard on lichess.
The usual way of organising a correspondence tournament is simultaneous round robin. E.g. 10 players all play all at the same time, so you play 9 games at the same time.
@tpr It’s true that it is almost impossible to detect cheaters in correspondence but so what? In classical it shouldn’t be much easier to detect it and we still have classical tournaments.
I am still convinced that the average cheater doesn’t see any point in correspondence where he has to wait for weeks or months before he wins due to his cheat (as long as there are no prizes for winning the tournament. For this reason, I reckon that even few players cheat in correspondence than in other time controls.
#23
No, in classical tournaments there is information on time per move used, information on the computer, information on other games. In classical it is easier to cheat and harder to detect than in rapid, blitz, bullet, but it is still doable. In correspondence it is impossible to tell if an engine was consulted or not.
Correspondence is a different game. Correspondence is about finding optimal moves without a ticking clock. It is more like science. Lichess allows only opening books. ICCF allows nearly everything. It is not cheating if both players are aware of it and both players are allowed to do it.
"In ICCF event games, players must decide their own moves. Players are permitted
to consult prior to those decisions with any publicly available source of information
including chess engines (computer programs), books, DVDs, game archive databases,
endgame tablebases, etc."
@tpr of course it’s no cheating if both players agree that engines should be allowed. However, I can’t believe that playing with engines is fun for beginners or middle-class players because they know that the best move they can find is the one the strongest engine is proposing. As for very good players who can play better than engines by analysing for a long time, I understand that playing with engines can be fun.
@tpr"In correspondence it is impossible to tell if an engine was consulted or not."
You have the right to your personal opinion - but the fact is that
chess.com closes correspondence cheaters' accounts for engine use every day of the year.
In fact, I have personally reported many engine cheaters and have seen
chess.com remove their accounts.
Here's a clue: they didn't do it just to please me - they applied their cheat detection algorithms.
#26
You have the right to your personal opinion - but the fact is that ICCF decided to allow engine consultation as they could not detect it.
@tpr "but the fact is that ICCF decided to allow engine consultation as they could not detect it."
LOL. They don't have the RESOURCES to detect it. Guess what ?
chess.com is a commercial enterprise with money and resources and employees.
What you are saying is like a small town with no police force that decided to allow speeding since they don't own a radar gun.
Yes, we are all entitled to our own personal opinion.
And, yes the ICCF now allow engine use because they had no way of policing their non-use.
But philosophically it turns my stomach and strikes me as ridiculous.
As far as I'm concerned this is the shadow of technology falling over chess. In my eyes when access to engines are allowed during a chess game, its not a chess game anymore...I'm not sure what it is...
And as I said before, the honor system of not using them fell by the wayside because people found it within themselves to cheat and that to me says it all for human nature I'm afraid.
You could extrapolate this and apply human nature to politics... that sure would explain a lot of things...its not what people say that counts, its what they are thinking...
#28
You cannot detect it for correspondence.
By the way if you play ICCF correspondence and play the moves an engine gives, then you will not win a single game.
ICCF correpondence is about what lies behind the engine horizons.
Still in the opening they are analysing endgames.