On 10 Jun 2005 12:11:30 -0700, "Taylor Kingston"
wrote:



Duncan Oxley wrote:
I want to stay out of this but one small comment:

"Another gaffe that Duncan Oxley pointed out is that Taylor Kingston's
correspondence rating is only 2037" is slightly misleading. I was merely
commenting on the new MSA feature of displaying current correspondence
rating.

Thanks, Duncan.
The reason for my 2037 is simple. In 1985 I gave up correspondence
chess due to the birth of my second daughter. Increased family
responsibilites made it impossible to devote hours each week to postal
chess, so I quit cold turkey, with quite a few unfinished games. Such
games are counted as rated losses, which knocked my final PC rating
down about 250 points. However, anyone who still has an April 1985
Chess Life will find me at #45 among USCF Postal Masters, i.e. in the
top 1%.

I am willing to bet a fairly large amount of money that if we had some
way to check out this story (which unfortunately we do not) we would
find that this is just another lie by Taylor Kingston. Now that we
know him a little better, we know that almost everything he writes is
a lie.

He would have had to lose a very large number of games to drop 250
points just by forfeiting his remaining games.

Even if this highly improbable story turns out to be true, Taylor
Kingston is still a liar. He started this by writing that his Elo
rating was 2300+. Elo ratings were ratings calculated by Professor
Elo. He never calculated correspondence chess ratings and thus
correspondence chess ratings have never been Elo ratings.

Also, correspondence chess players have access to books, computers and
friends who help them with analysis. Many top correspondence players
are not strong over-the-board. Dr. Norman Hornstein of North Carolina
was consistently rated among the top players on the Chess Review list,
yet his over-the-board rating was 1750. Gary Abram was the number one
correspondence player in the US and winner of the Golden Knights, but
his over-the-board rating was 1950. Nobody would claim that even the
number 45 player on the USCF postal list was the equivalent of 2300
over-the-board.

Contrary to what Sloan says, I make no claim that this makes me at
all important, or the equal of GMs Evans or Lombardy as an analyst. I
merely submit that it shows I was not the "weak player" Sloan and Parr
tried to claim. I leave Sloan now to his mendacious contortions and
semantic chaos.

What I wrote was that Taylor Kingston was too weak to see the numerous
subtle errors in the Keres-Botvinnik match which enabled Botvinnik to
win that match 4-0. Does Taylor Kingston seriously dispute that fact?
I am a vastly stronger chess player than Taylor Kingston but I freely
admit that I cannot see the blunders in the Keres-Botvinnik match. I
can just see the one very obvious blunder I have displayed on my
website at http://www.samsloan.com/keres-bo.htm

Tell you what. I will play Taylor Kingston a chess match for one
thousand dollars cash money on the table. No electronic devices and no
going to the restroom. Let us see how strong Taylor Kingston really
is.

Sam Sloan

P.S. you do have to bring photo ID however, to prove that your name
really is Taylor Kingston.