Some of your may remember the great DKos Chess Tournament in the summer of 2009. I didn't win. That was when I joined chess.com. It was one of the sites where the tourney was hosted. I have been there every since. Many of us joined a group there called Kossacks. The group has been inactive since the tourney two summers ago. A couple of weeks ago, rhutcheson ,one of our members, left a message asking if anyone was interested in playing a match against another team. A few of us were and long story Bulgaria challenged us, he accepted, and the last I looked at there were 13 Bulgarians lined up against 4 Kossacks. So here I am, riding through the night and ringing my bell. THE BULGARIANS ARE COMING !!! THE BULGARIANS ARE COMING !!! HELP !!!
Now the big difference between the tourney two summers ago is that the tourney was played in the live chess format and the upcoming match will be in the online format. Live chess is played in real time. Online chess is not . Online chess is digital correspondence chess. Players will have 3 days, 72 hours, from the time of your opponent's move to make your move or forfeit the game. Tournaments are also played in the online format. The problem with playing tournaments and matches in the live format is that you have to have the opponents online at the same time, a logistical nightmare and I'm sure that is the reason we've never had a second one. But playing a match in the online format is easy as pie. The chess.com servers do all the work. In a team match our highest rated player is matched against their highest. Second highest to their second highest ect. If you are new to chess.com and are not rated yet you will start at the default rating of 1200. You will play your opponent two games one at a time, once as white, once as black. You get 1 point for a win, .5 for a draw. You don't get Jack for a loss. Your score will be added to your team's score. When all games are done the team with the highest score wins. These matches can last weeks or even months. So if you can play chess and are willing to give us a hand we would sure appreciate it. The match will start as soon as we think we have as many players as we're going to get. You can join chess.com for free. Join the Kossacks if you are not already a member. Join our match, Bulgaria vs Kossacks. You will only be committing to making one move every three days although you can move as soon as your opponent moves, you don't have to wait three days. Chess.com will send you an email when it is your move. The bad news is that I am the worst player on the team (so far) and have a bad match up. My rating is currently 1246 against my opponent's 1731. Other than me the rest of the team is matching up pretty good.The good news is that our top player is a FIDE Master. If you can play chess, or think you can, please join us. Help us hold off the Bulgarian horde. By the way I am in some other groups that play team matches and I have played against the Bulgarians before. They are good. One last thing. In one of my other groups we were in the middle of a match playing Egypt during the uprising. They pulled the plug on the web and the Egyptians were offline for several days, forfeited the match after three days. But chess.com did the right thing when they came back online after they had their revolution and reset the games so we could play it out. People from all over the world play here so we leave our politics at the door. But still, you can send messages to your opponent and God only knows what he went through the days he was offline. I felt I should say something, but what? I decided on a simple message: Egypt 1 Mubarak 0. He replied : ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Egypt win Mubarak lose.
Thanks for reading.