not that strong, actually. except that its got naka and the blitz world champion, of course. except carlsen, not even all top norwegian bliters are present (agdestein was missing last time i checked.)

<another blitz tournament which everybody here discredit his name for playing>

oh, a good result in the blitz world championship otb would've earned a lot of respect from me; that field was awesome - check out where strong blitz players like svidler, grischuk and mamedyarov placed. a normally strong blitz player like ivanchuk ended in 15th positition.

http://www.chessbase.com/news/2009/...

the 6 who <qualified> to the final placed 3rd (karjakin), 9th (mamedyarov), 11th (gashimov), 14th (bareev), 20th (tkachiev) and 21st (naiditsch).

karjakin and gashimov was 1st and 2nd in the qualifier, well ahead of the rest, mamedyarov and bareev were 3rd and 4th with 13 points, and tkachiev and naiditsch 5th and 7th with 12,5 points. when it really mattered, in the final, everyone but karjakin seemed chanceless to fight for first.

a top 10 finish in this field shows that you're a very strong blitz player, though. both aronian and dominguez failed to do so, aronian possibly not being entirely well, according to the reports.

judging how naka would do based on a play-off where naka wins game one, and pono has to win game two, is pretty pointless.

it's a bit like judging carlsen's final by the two games he played against kosteniuk (1-1).

and moro finished 10th, but he lost 0-2 against naiditsch, who finished next to last.

ledope, rated 3500+ - nakamura is down to 3400-something again. given the "right" (i.e. wrong) opposition, few seem able to maintain icc ratings much above 3500 - and a 3500-rated player like dominguez finished in 13th place in moscow, with more points up to the winner than down the the bottom-finisher kosteniuk.

i doubt whether your "best" score is 3550 or 3750 says much about how you would do in a real tournament, where you get new opponents all the time. anyone who sets out to "beat a record" on icc, does so by playing lots and lots of games against the same player - game after game after game. what does that eventually tell? how your strength is compared to the few players you "use" to win your rating points. not how you compare to all the others.

nakamura play for fun at icc, unlike andrino and depressnyak who play blitz for setting record at icc. that means he really dont care if hes rating dip low at one moment and peak high the other moment.

That's a good point, and this is probably the <major> difference between the way online rating and fide ratings works. I'm not an ICC member but as I understood it, they have there the 5-minute format, where u get random opponents, and the max rating there never even came close to the ridiculous 3000+ range we see in ICC blitz.

Still with all the differences between online blitz and OTB blitz (including this pick and choose thing), I think that the real difference between online blitz and OTB is the <time controls>.

Online blitz is almost always played with 3 0 time controls. One of the reasons for that is probably that with longer time controls the chances of meeting cheaters gets bigger.

The thing is that while 3 0 time controls are called "blitz" on the chess servers, it's <not really blitz>. The chances of running out of time in clearly winning/drawable positions is significant, and 3 minutes is really a short time. I would call it bullet-blitz ("bulitz"?).

I think that with those 3 0 time controls Naka is really a monster (I saw some of his games vs Grischuk and Rybka), and if the 3 0 time controls were to be used in the real OTB WC blitz, I would have definitely put Naka among the top 3 favorites, with very good winning chances.

But 3 2 time controls are a totally different story: You never run out of time there in clearly winning/drawable positions (unless you are a really bad blitz player). That is really "fast chess" where player's real chess level counts, as we could see from the final rankings of the last blitz WC.

A great blitz player is a great blitz player, whether he's on the ICC or OTB...I really don't think the formats are that different, except maybe for the 'mousespeed' factor

<and a 3500-rated player like dominguez finished in 13th place in moscow>

He also won the world blitz last year.

Really? In my own experience I find them to be wildly different. On time controls without an increment, it often becomes a ludicrous game of premove.

And I have to strongly agree with <metatron2>'s posts regarding the time controls. Shorter than 5 0, is really not blitz as far as I'm concerned, it's bullet, and the nature of the game becomes completely different. I frankly don't even see the point in such chess - I occasionally get my kicks out of playing it with the sole intention of flagging my opponent just to prove how idiotic such a time control is. I do this by keeping a slight time buffer and complicating wherever possible, even at the cost of significant material. I had a 'great' game just the other day where I eventually won with vs. .

True...You do have 'premove' on the ICC...But you can also 'premove' in OTB blitz (remember the brutal Krush-Zatonskih blitz playoff, that decided the US Championship last year?

Although, if you 'premove' in OTB blitz, you have to move the piece you touch...On the ICC there isn't really touch move...

<I eventually won with vs. .>

Wow, strong endgame player! :)

ok i accept the online chess is a trash, anyways nakamura happen to have this record while having fun.

I did, and found that he freely admits online bullet is completely different game from OTB chess, and that is actually one of main attractions of bullet chess. You can play bullet without being too serious, and still sometimes produce most interesting combinations.

His book tells you how important premove is, how you can win mouse-war in the endgame, and also how you can get away with playing "bizarre" openings such as 1. h4, 1...g5 stuff in bullet.

Well, like I said, the common time controls on the web are 3 0, mainly because of cheating. Looking at the lists here: http://staff.cs.utu.fi/~juhkivij/ch... I does not seem like the leading GMs bother to play formats other then the common 3 0 blitz format, and the few of them that did bother, didn't do it for long.

So Naka's ranking in those other formats is no indication to his blitz strength compared with the big guns, since they simply don't play there. Do you really think Naka would be #1 in 45-minutes time controls if the elite players bothered to play there? I mean this is close to classical time controls, where Naka is very far from the top 10.

And besides, having the #1 record in some format doesn't mean one is the best player there, you need to look at the average performance over time . But that's not the main point here.

<riverbeast: I just wonder how big a difference it really is in the long run>

Well 3 0 and 4 2 time controls are totally different type of games, so the difference between them doesn't change over time.

Looking at ICC current top blitz list we see one "Quang Liem Le" at the #1 spot, who is this? and on the #13 spot some player with 2347 elo. I never saw such players even qualify to real OTB blitz championship, the weakest players that qualify there (not pre-invited) are strong 2600 players, and they usually finish at the bottom of the table. So the current ICC #1 "blitz" player is not even expected to qualify OTB blitz championship (not to mention #13 Alexander Bortnik with elo=2347), and if he did qualify he would have ended at the bottom.

The thing is that when reaching critical positions in a 3 0 game, one usually can't afford taking a serious thinking since even if he can calculate a winning or drawing variation, most chances are that he will run out of time before converting it. So the nature of this game is to play reasonable moves fast enough, taking advantage of obvious blunders of your opponent, or try to hold on long enough to flag your opponent if you blunder yourself. In other words a <Bullet like> superficial way. That is clearly not the case with 4 2 time controls.