FICS statistics
I have always missed some detailed statistics for games played on FICS. Ever since playing on Playchess.com. That's because they have a very nice graphical interface, and detailed statistics. But for 29 euros a year, they'd better call it Paychess.com.

So, I was busy all weekend doing my own statistics for FICS. It all started with an article by Ed Collins, "Why I don't pay for internet chess", which is BTW a very interesting read. He said there that he doesn't see a reason why people would want to email themselves the games played on the server. And then I thought: why, of course there is a reason: I play on different computers (at least 3) and it's cumbersome to merge 3 different databases with games, if I use Babaschess's autosave feature. I'm better off having FICS send me my games by email, and then I have all of them in the same place, regardless where I play the games.

So now FICS is gmailing my games, and I wrote som Python scripts to retrieve the games from there, and generate some statistics, which I've put online here.

A few remarks: I've always known I suck at chess, now I know exactly how much. And if I manage to fully automate the process, and write the part of the script that uploads the statistics, and schedule it to run, say, every midnight, then I can track my progress (well, it's regress, to be more precise) without any effort.

My rating is going south fast - 72% of the time. But that's not the greatest of the problems. It seems I'm not getting to play strong players on FICS. On Playchess, if I accepted a 1800+ rated player's seek, he / she didnt abort on the first move. On FICS, this happens a lot. It's like having the door slammed right in front of you. As my statistics show it, the highest rated player I played was 1607.

Oh, and I'm sure playing without increment 60% of the time is a recipe for disaster. Oh well. But it's addictive.

(There are some issues with generating the statistics when stored / resumed / resigning stored games come into play, I'll have to figure those out. In the meantime, I just hope that little blue line will one day start to go upwards, too...)

Comments, email are welcome.
- posted by Időbeosztás-guru @ 12:27 AM