English Chess

I wonder what it is that makes English such good correspondence chess players? It must not have escaped your attention that England is the most represented country on page 1 of the site, with most of the players inside the top 10 - pretty good for one of the smallest countries in the world.

And, yet, not the strongest chess playing nation by quite a way (I think they rank around 20th in the world) so it must be something to do with the style of play employed by our guys that transfers so well to this format.

Or it could be to do with the fact that we're over represented on the site. Lies, damned lies and statistics, my friend.

Looking at the player tables, 30% of the players on the site are English and only 23% of the top 30. If anything, it indicates that English people are worse at correspondence chess than other nationalities. 😉

Originally posted by Tyrannosauruschex
I wonder what it is that makes English such good correspondence chess players? It must not have escaped your attention that England is the most represented country on page 1 of the site, with most of the players inside the top 10 - pretty good for one of the smallest countries in the world.

And, yet, not the strongest chess playing nation by qu ...[text shortened]... mething to do with the style of play employed by our guys that transfers so well to this format.

Actually all the good players are Russian who fly an English flag
to lull their oppoents into a false sense of security.

...and it's not just English chess. Three of the top eleven (to include me for the moment) play in the same local league in Liverpool. We should start a Clan 😛 But there's part of an answer - it's word of mouth that brought us here 🙂

Originally posted by Tyrannosauruschex
I wonder what it is that makes English such good correspondence chess players? It must not have escaped your attention that England is the most represented country on page 1 of the site, with most of the players inside the top 10 - pretty good for one of the smallest countries in the world.

And, yet, not the strongest chess playing nation by qu ...[text shortened]... mething to do with the style of play employed by our guys that transfers so well to this format.

Originally posted by Schumi
Looking at the player tables, 30% of the players on the site are English and only 23% of the top 30. If anything, it indicates that English people are worse at correspondence chess than other nationalities. 😉

I recently took up Correspondence Chess on the ICCF, and looking at their top 20-30 on the rating list, the Germans make a surprisingly strong showing!

Originally posted by peacedog
How do you go about seeing stats about members nationality on RHP?.

Seems to me that Scotland also has a large representation here, considering the size of of the population and the lack of interest from the general public(there was no mention in the newspapers that I saw of Rowson’s achievements at the British Championships a few years ago for example).

>However, there are a lot of players who fly a flag of a country other than their own. Some fly the flag of their counrty of origin, not where they live. Others fly a different flag just to disguise where they are or just to be different. So there's no accurate way to tell where a player is unless you ask directly, but there's no way to trust the answer.
>I have tried to play players flying as many different flags as possible. So far I'm up to 215 flags, but my guess is that about 5-10% of players are flying false flags.

Here's a link to a page that lists all the International Correspondence Chess Federation champions, both men and women:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_chess#ICCF_World_Champions

There are no champions from England, and indeed, the UK. Five out of the 21 men, and three of the eight women, hail from the USSR, the leading nation. In addition, the current women's champion is from Russia. The first correspondence chess champion was the Australian Cecil Purdy.