The Secret of Chess

[BrendanJNorman]

It is great to see Norman revealed for what he is ... thanks

In your 150 posts, have you said anything positive yet?

I seem to only see you put people down.

Self esteem problems?

[Greg Strong]

That is what I have to fight each and every day...
It is... very strenuous, very hard, very desperate at moments.
Why should people be so evil?

You completely brought this all on yourself. You claim to be able to beat Stockfish and then refuse to prove it.

for the time being I simply don't play online

Well isn't that convenient. And then you imply that your opposition would be cheating:

1/3 of the online players are cheaters, right?

But, since you claim to be able to beat the best program in the history of the world, this shouldn't be an issue, right?

If I said I could play golf better than Tiger Woods, but then when challenged said "sorry, I'm not playing golf right now", I would be the object of ridicule. Everyone would consider me to be a liar, and rightly so. Well, that's the situation you have made for yourself.

[gbtami]

1/3 of the online players are cheaters, right?

But, since you claim to be able to beat the best program in the history of the world, this shouldn't be an issue, right?

Touché!

[velmarin]

1/3 of the online players are cheaters, right?

In my experience, it's not like that.
Some people speculate on time in a short time, but it's legal.
Others get lost, and simply close the program and leave you looking at the board for a few minutes.
I haven't found cheaters in a while, and I play a dozen games every day.

[gbtami]

1/3 of the online players are cheaters, right?

In my experience, it's not like that.
Some people speculate on time in a short time, but it's legal.
Others get lost, and simply close the program and leave you looking at the board for a few minutes.
I haven't found cheaters in a while, and I play a dozen games every day.

I myself regularly play on FICS/ICC/Lichess. Cheater detection is getting better and better nowadays. On Lichess in 3-4 cases I got message about they giving back some rating points to me because of "cheater detected".

[velmarin]

1/3 of the online players are cheaters, right?

In my experience, it's not like that.
Some people speculate on time in a short time, but it's legal.
Others get lost, and simply close the program and leave you looking at the board for a few minutes.
I haven't found cheaters in a while, and I play a dozen games every day.

I myself regularly play on FICS/ICC/Lichess. Cheater detection is getting better and better nowadays. On Lichess in 3-4 cases I got message about they giving back some rating points to me because of "cheater detected".

I don't know how many games,
those three or four cheaters played.
It seems to me it's an extra job to cheat. The system puts rivals at your level, it's fun enough.
Talking about massive cheaters is a lot of exaggeration, in my opinion.
I myself regularly play on Chess.com/Lichess/Arena FIDE, ect.

[Ovyron]

Is there anyone who doesn't think this guy behaves like an asshole? His incessant personal attacks on the moderators start to annoy me, and IMO are a severe enough violation of the charter to justify a ban. So if you appreciate the presence of this guy, don't be shy in supporting him...

Here I think you behave like an asshole and are incessantly attacking personally Brendan and other people (like telling them to drink camel's urine) and a severe enough violation of the charter to justify a ban, or at least, being kicked out from the moderator team.

I'm supporting Brendan here.

Now, I want to issue the same challenge here, and want to see if someone appreciates the precence of hgm in the moderator team. Would love to see if HGM applies the same standards towards himself and would issue a warning to himself or if he'd continue with his discrimination.

[hgm]

What I do in CTF is not relevant here; CTF has its own moderators, which apply their own standards. If you don't like what they allow, complain to them.

Unfortunately your opinion is tainted by an earlier remark, that having the current CCC moderator team is a 'failure of democracy'. Before you can be taken seriously, you would first have to explain what exactly you mean by that. Otherwise it looks like you just have an axe to grind, for whatever obscure reason.

Talk is cheap. I challenge you to come up with 3 examples where I 'attacked' Brendan personally, in this forum. (Should not be hard, if this happened 'incessanly', right?)

Fact is that no posting of me has ever been reported by anyone, here.
Fact is that Brendans postings are frequently reported, and that on examination they then indeed turn out to violate the charter, so that it is my duty to remove them. And invariably this then leads to personal attacks on the moderator team by Brendan.

You'd also better show some proof of 'discrimination', other that that prescribed by my task as moderator: separating the offenders from the good guys they harrass.

[Ovyron]

Unfortunately your opinion is tainted by an earlier remark, that having the current CCC moderator team is a 'failure of democracy'. Before you can be taken seriously, you would first have to explain what exactly you mean by that.

It's the "tyranny of the majority" or "tyranny of the masses". Basically, most people don't know what's good for them, so they choose a poor moderator team.

The reason I brought this up is because, as it turns out, if elections happened today things wouldn't improve, because the general population would vote poorly again.

I have been administrator or moderator of at least 8 forums over the years, and what I have learned is that democracy just doesn't work in forums. Imagine a forum full of trolls, what are they gonna do? Nominate themselves to mods and then vote for themselves, now they have green cards to annoy and harass other forum members.

What works is having an administrator that cares and chooses carefully who moderates the forum. This worked great at Rybka Forum for years and you never saw problems members-moderators or moderators being treated with disrespect.

But the chance of something like this was lost for Talkchess several years ago, no wonder a good moderator team might have resigned their position rather than living like this.

Talk is cheap. I challenge you to come up with 3 examples where I 'attacked' Brendan personally, in this forum. (Should not be hard, if this happened 'incessanly', right?)

Gee willikers! Now, that's a challenge! Where am I going to find a single post from you attacking Brendan?? I guess now I'll have to dig up some month old threads and read lots of messages trying to find such examples!

Or, I can just quote your messages of the last 24 hours...

#1

Is there anyone who doesn't think this guy behaves like an asshole?

Calling him an asshole is an attack. Actually, this all began because he called someone a "dipshit", "asshole" is just an equivalent insult. I imagine Brendan's post would have been deleted if he posted "Is there anyone who doesn't think jose behaves like a dipshit?" - double standards...

#2

No, what I am saying is that if it writes like an asshole, behaves like a asshole, and whines like an asshole, there is a good chance that it is indeed an asshole.

This is another post, apparently such attacks aren't creative. If Brendan posted about jose "No, what I am saying is that if it writes like a dipshit, behaves like a dipshit, and whines like a dipshit, there is a good chance that it is indeed an dipshit", his post would have been deleted - double standards.

#3

Do you really think I would be behind my terminal every minute of the day watching the childish nonsense you so eagerly participate in, just in case someone gets fed up with you?

Makes it appear as if all Brendan does is "eagerly participating in childish nonsense", that's an attack. Actually, I don't see the difference with Brendan's engagement and hgm's engagement, other than Brendan being the civilized one, while hgm used the word asshole 5 times. If we didn't separate this by posts, this was 7 attacks on Brendan already.

Fact is that no posting of me has ever been reported by anyone, here.

Really? What for? People know you're going to see your post reported and do nothing about it. Really, nobody expects that you issue a warning to yourself about how you should stop calling Brendan an asshole or be banned. You have the road free to insult everyone because you're a moderator, and really, if the administrator cared they wouldn't allow to call members assholes like that and would take your moderator powers today.

You'd also better show some proof of 'discrimination', other that that prescribed by my task as moderator

You keep making comments alluding to Brendan being from Australia and about his current residence in China. If he was from somewhere else or lived somewhere else your comments would have been a non-sequitur, so that was racism.

[MonteCarlo]

As an outsider to this disagreement, I can say that I would prefer that none of the involved parties leave or be banned.

Everyone involved so far has made contributions to the forums that I enjoyed/appreciated/found informative, and I'd rather not see any of that go away (there is at least one person regularly in the forums I could live without seeing, lest you think I'm just all lovey-dovey, but that person is not involved here).

My impression is that this has gotten heated to a point quite disproportionate to any actual ill-will that might have been present initially.

I'd rather we just go back to discussing computer chess and leave the insults out going forward; there's no need to sort out exactly who has insulted whom more in the past. Let's just not do it going forward.

Just my $0.02