Chess Elite: An iPhone game that allows players to play chess against opponents across geographies and rank them based on their win-loss records now provides an unique opportunity to all the chess players to polish and hone their chess skill and win cool gadgets including MacBook Pro from 99Games Grab your copy of Chess Elite from iTunes App Store and register with the Chess Elite Online Community to begin with an Elo rating of 1600. Just keep winning games against real human opponents from Chess Elite Online Community right away and you could be a proud winner of: A MacBook Pro 13-inch 2.26GHz, if you are the first player to achieve 2,500 Elo Or an iPod touch 32GB, if you are one of the first 2 players to achieve 2,400 Elo Or an iPod touch 16GB, if you are one of the first 3 players to achieve 2,300 Elo Or an iPod Nano 8GB, if you are the first player to achieve 2,200 Elo Or an iPod Shuffle 2GB, if you are the first player to achieve 2,100 Elo For more information regarding rules and regulations please visit http://www.99games.in/chesscontest Grab your copy of Chess Elite right now from iTunes App Store. Lots of instant prizes to be won including iPod Nanos! So keep following 99Games on Twitter
Yeaaa..I can. I picked it up a looong time ago but you know, I suck at chess so I didn't play much..although those prizes are tempting [even though my chances of winning are about as good as the lottery ]
You can claim any one of them. If you reach an Elo of 2100 first and feel that you are a good chess player and easily reach 2400 Elo and claim a 32 GB iPod touch, then you can choose to let go the prize allotted for 2100 Elo and move further up for the next higher prize
Awarding free stuff to the first person to cheat using Rybka 3 (the strongest chess program in the world, which anyone can buy for 50 bucks) is not a great promotion at all. GMs are few and far between, and all can earn a little bit of cash by winning a local level Saturday tournament easily enough. (Maybe not GMs that live in Manhattan, but everyone else). So its not too likely you'll get a real GM interested in winning a Macbook by playing a large number of games on chess elite. Far, far more likely you'll be paying a cheater. Of course, an FM or IM that takes correspondence chess seriously can get a +2500 rating, depending on the rating pool, but that hardly helps make it fair either. Realistically, your either paying an FM/IM working their tail off -- fine, but no chance for the rest of us -- or a cheater. The saddest thing would if an FM/IM were to take your contest seriously and get beat by a cheater. Too late to adjust the promotion now, but it should have been done differently.
We are hoping that such people would be in minority and that this contest would actually get all the chess lovers to participate and face off for a good game of chess with players around the world.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the contest, Art. We did consider all these scenarios but felt that there are more people who play fair than there are cheaters. As you know, the contest is dependent on a wide set of participants to take the overall ranking of individual players higher. We have built in some mechanism on both the client and server side to detect cheating and unless cheaters resort to sophisticated form of cheating, it is a difficult to rise to the top on their own. They require an equally sophisticated set of players to be in the pool to gain on their rating at later stages. Again, what you have mentioned can happen but it is more likely that some genuine would take the title. Since all the stats of the player are available online, the community can also continuously monitor the progress different players are making and highlight suspicious activities to us.. Yes, there is money to be made by playing these small, local weekend tournaments but with this contest, players get a chance to face off against the best from around the world and the recognition that follows. We are hoping to get some coverage from the various sites and blogs and have started writing to them to spread the word around. Hopefully TA would also mention about the contest on their home page given that the TA forum members deserve a lot of credit for getting this game to this level of sophistication. May the best chess player win. For others, there are some equally interesting goodies to claim along the way (lots of iPods to be won too)
There is a reason why most serious correspondence chess organizations now allow computer assisted chess. Its because they cant catch cheaters, and people do cheat. Sure, if someone is dumb enough to pick Rybka's best move every time, every game, you can catch them (particularly in the endgame, where even Rybka is known to botch certain types of positions). But that is hardly necessary. Selective/measured use of Rybka is basically undetectable and more then enough to win games against anyone without computer assistance. About the only kind of cheating you could reliably catch is the old pump and dump (get 1 account up, feed its points to your other account). Anyway, I wish you the best with the contest. As you say, most are honest and hopefully cheaters dont get too many of your prizes.
