6 Dec 2012

Intimidated by higher ranking of opponent?

Lately I don't play chess at all, but when I do I like to win (Doh!). My chess knowledge and playing skill are very weak so I'm ranked pretty low on the FICS.

Thanks to my FICS formula I don't have to play with players that are unbeatable for me. To make progress I just can't play only with weaker players (and I'm not referring to rating progress, but rather skill progress) so my formula (you can check it issuing "vars whp" on the server)  allows for chess players with rating difference of less then 200 points (it's ratingdiff<200) to play with me. I'm ashamed to admit, but even that 200 points is intimidating for me when I play with stronger players. Luckily I'm not the only one as there are many chess players answering "yes" to Do you get psyched out by rating? question on chess.com forums.

Easiest solution is just not to know rating of your opponent so to succour my (and probably some of your) weak psyche and relieve the tension that n-hundred points of Glicko rating poses on our games I'll hide rating information from chessboard in Tonic. Of course it will be optional.

29 Nov 2012

Tonic drops support for ICC

Since ICC doesn't allow guest logins for a long time (one of posters in forum thread about fairness of chess servers on forumrybka.net states that it had happened August 2006)  and I don't have any interest in ICC I decided to delete all files related to it from Tonic's project. This deletion will help make Tonic's download file smaller and will make interface for login a little simpler.

Tonic's code is still in kenai.com git repo, but I'm going to make mirrors of it at Sourceforge and Github since kenai is going to be shut down at some point in the future in favor of java.net.

I've got even less time, but I've got big hunger for coding and I'll do my best to make a release soon. Nothing big, just some cosmetic changes and smaller download files.