Nick wrote:

"Ian Hurley" wrote in message
...
Is it just me, or are the majority of people who play on ICC
unbelievably rude?

Dear Mr Hurley,

I also have found some players (though not quite 'the majority') at ICC to
be rude enough to the point where I have become hardly surprised by any of
their misbehaviour.

If you beat them, they abuse you verbally.
If they beat you, they gloat and remark on your poor strength.

My advice would be to add those abusive players to your 'censored' list
and your 'no play' list more promptly than you seem to have been doing.

If you are playing a clearly weaker player than yourself, then you should try
to keep in mind that some of his inappropriate verbal responses might well be
influenced by his sincere lack of comprehension of the game that's being played.
In my experience, most of my clearly weaker opponents seem to have quite
unrealistic expectations about their chances of success in our games, which
are based on their misunderstandings about chess. For instance, some of my
opponents have deliberately gone into theoretically clearly losing endgames
because they had mistakenly believed that those endgames were easily drawn.
And then sometimes they have become abusive after I declined their draw offers.
That does not excuse their misbehaviour, but it may help to explain it.

I have encountered dozens and dozens of players like this.
It doesn't seem to be a problem on the Chessbase server, or any
other chess server I've played on.

For whatever it's worth, I have observed that my opponents in Go
almost always behave well or at least with civility.

Has anyone else noticed this?

My hypothesis is that there already are at least some latent anti-social
tendencies among many chess-players. The impersonal nature of 'virtual chess'
may tend to encourage those anti-social tendencies to emerge with a lower risk
than in 'real life' of having to face any adverse consequences.

In face-to-face chess games, however, even some once bitter wartime enemies
could still find a way to treat each other with civility and sportsmanship.
Here's an excerpt from a wartime memoir by Siegfried Knappe, a Wehrmacht
officer who became a prisoner-of-war in the Soviet Union after the Second
World War:

"We staged a bridge or chess tournament in the camp every few months.
Although our chess tournaments were limited to the camp, so many nationalities
were represented that we called them international tournaments. A tournament
took several days, and each 'nation' sent its best players. A Hungarian oberst
(colonel) and I played the final game in tournaments many times, and I was chess
champion at Krasnogorsk (prisoner-of-war camp) during my whole time there.
The Russians helped organise these tournaments, because they loved chess and
they wanted to keep us occupied. When an important Russian visitor came to
visit the camp from Moscow, they would ask me to play a game of chess with him
if they knew he was a chess player, as many Russians were. I always got some
extra cigarettes and a cup of good tea for doing that, and it was usually
quite friendly (only one of them became angry and abusive when I beat him."
--Siegfried Knappe (Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936-1949, p. 317)

--Nick

Hard, 'Nicky-buoy' - yo'sure yo's gotten the lifetime right of this
12yr. olde, 'sugar-cum - daddy' - 'ZZ', Reich-Stormennfocker?..