TalkChess.com

With regret I wanted to let everyone know that I've closed shop. I have put the server to rest.

I wanted to thank all those that have participated and watched the tournaments we've been running for the past few months. I wish things would have turned out differently. I really do. It seems one needs a lot more time on his hands to run something like this on a regular basis while keeping interest high. This is not my area of expertise either. And right now I've no time at all.

With viewers down to about 15 it makes no sense for me to continue. Perhaps in the future, if there's renewed demand and interest I will bring it back up again. However I don't see why that would happen all of a sudden so for now, this is it.

It was fun while it lasted.

My biggest thank you to arun and khagrin for the design, function and features of the site. Without them I'd have shut it down much sooner. It's only been up because of their hard work. I wish their hard work would have paid off. They deserved better. Also huge thanks to Mark and Larry of the Komodo team for providing their development versions.

I will keep the site up for the next few days so for those interested please download all the games while they're available at

http://chess.my2dollars.ca/archive.html

Sincerely,
Yorkman.

Thanks you for having host these tournament. I couldn't follow them closely, but I was happy it happened. I m sure you will resume your tournament between two season of TCEC.

Really sorry to hear this, David.
You certainly deserved better support. Our loss.

YLCET seemed to me to be a tournament offering approximately similar functionality to TCEC. This (in itself) is not a bad thing. For instance CCRL and CEGT offer similar functionality and yet both are popular and closely followed.

But TCEC already had an enormous following and plenty of advertizing and a sponsor. It will be quite difficult to compete with this, if you expect to rival TCEC in popularity.

Martin Thoresen had lots of effort in the tournament before it became popular. I guess that if you ask him, Martin had lots of disappointment before TCEC became a hit also.

These tournaments get hounded by trolls. The kibitzers go on wild, quirky rampages. These sorts of things require maintenance and effort.

I guess that what I am saying is that YLCET could have worked, but:
1) You would have had to put a huge effort initially to overcome the inertial advantage of TCEC
2) You would have to do it purely out of love for the competition itself for a while, because it will take a while to get followers.

Something Thoresen did that was smart was to get followers on social media.

I also did a big tournament years ago called "The Battle of the Crowns" and enjoyed doing it. But I discovered (as you did) that it is a lot of work and you can't make everybody happy.

All that having been said, thank you for an interesting and high quality tournament.

Thanks for your comments.

Like you also said, it requires a lot of effort and time. And due to personal problems I've no time right now. Maybe I'll try again at some point in time but right now I've much more important issues to take care of. Thanks for watching.

If anyone is interested in downloading all the games played at YLCET feel free to download them here:

https://ufile.io/cre0r

Dear David,

I respect your decision though I think is a loss to the chess community.

Thank you for all your effort.

Best regards,
Koh, Kah Huat

Yes it's unfortunate but such is life. Too bad there wasn't more interest.

Strange that you say "15 viewers": entire TCEC was watching you. Perhaps, you mean 15 viewers that are logged in via Twitch? You should watch your web servers' connections instead.

What happened to that rule, which must be acknowledged when registering?