From: jc79+@andrew.cmu.edu (John Anthony Chanak)
Newsgroups: rec.games.chess
Subject: ICS news/Blitz Tournament #2
Date: 15 Sep 92 20:24:19 GMT
Organization: Senior, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA


*****************************************************************************
*                                                                           *
*                SECOND VALKYRIES BLITZ TOURNAMENT FRIDAY                   *
*                                                                           *
*      register by e-mail, to chess@valkyries.andrew.cmu.edu.               *
*    remember to mention the tournament and your ICS id in the message.     *
*                                                                           *
*        Use "help tourney" to see players as they are registered.          *
*                                                                           *
*****************************************************************************

The tournament is at 6:00 EDT, 22:00 GMT, Friday, Sept 18.  Please show
up a few minutes early so we can be sure everything is in order.

This will be a 10 minute per player tournament, just like last week.  We
hope to have pairing software ready by that time to make things go a
little quicker between rounds.

We are only accepting registered players for this tournament, so if you
want to play in it and haven't registered, you need to become registered
for ICS use as well.

The ratings server is now located at valkyries, which has resulted in
drastically reducing network delays caused by the poor ratings server
connection.

We plan on making this another 5 round tournament.  If there are too
many people, we may go to 6 rounds, but we are going to try real hard to
keep it to 5.  5 rounds reveals an optimal 32 people playing.  If we do
not have 32 people registered by friday afternoon, we *might* accept
people on-line like last week. We are estimating 2 hrs 30 minutes
running time for the tournament.  (5 rounds)

In other ICS news.... Moving the ratings server to valkyries caused two
different ratings faults.  We lost all the new registrations and games
played last thursday (Sept 10).  More recently, we lost all the games
played between 2:00 p.m. (Sept 14) and 2:00 a.m. (Sept 15) local times. 
We managed to recover most of the games lost in the second outage. 
(Games involving newly registered people were not recovered)  We have
discovered the reason for both the faults, and the same problem will not
occur again.  As a result of this, new registrations have been lost.  If
your new ICS account has been lost, please register with us again.  If
you heve rating points that were lost/gained by the ratings server
problems, we're sorry, but we cannot change your ratings.

Yet more ICS news....

The bug which forbade taking a pawn en passant to get out of check has
been fixed.  If anyone has any further problem with this, feel free to
let me know about it.

New ICS commands ....

->  A new command "players" has been added to facilitate finding an opponent.
    "help players" for full details.  We welcome feadback on this feature, or
    any other feature you would like to see added to the chess server.

->  A new command, "kibitz", has been added to assist in match discussions.
    "help kibitz" for full details.

The following are the summaries of these commands.  We will be compiling
a list of all the available commands and placing it for anonymous ftp
sometime in the future.

*****

Command : kibitz
Args    : <msg>

     Send the message <msg> to all the people playing in or observing the game
that you are currently playing or observing.  Toggling the flag "quiet"  (see
"help quiet") will keep you from receiving these messages.  Please use this 
form of communication whenever appropriate instead of "shout".  Like shout,
this command is only available to registered players.


Command :  players
Args    :  <rating window>

This command produces a list of players who are currently logged on 
and open to matches.  This command is useful for finding opponents 
when there are many people logged on. Players that are involved in 
games or not accepting match requests are omitted.

An optional argument may be provided that uses a "rating window"
to filter the original list to players closer to your own rating.

For example, if you provide a rating window of 100, the list will
be limited to players rated within 100 points of you.

(If by chance your standard and blitz ratings differ, the window
is defined by [l - rw, h + rw] where h and l are your higher and lower
ratings, and rw is the rating window you supply)

The default value for the rating window is infinity 
(no filtering based on rating).

*****

We have seen interest in ICS increase quite drastically in the past few
weeks, and we hope this trend continues.  The current configuration
allows more than 200 players at a time, so there is definitely more room
to grow.  

These two new commands were added at the request of players, for the
most part.  If you have any suggestions for ICS, feel free to let us
know about them.  

Have fun... play chess...

-John Chanak
aka "MataPato"
Newsgroups: rec.games.chess