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E4EC History
The idea of creating an email chess server began early in 2001. A few lines of codes were written to see if it is possible to make email chess easier. Could we establish a club where people can play chess simply by email? I know what huge efforts are needed to maintain an email chess club, but what are the computers for if not to take the hard and regular work from humans?
The club was founded in the middle of 2001, when a few obsessed and curious players were trying to use the system's first facilities. It had no name, and a lot of very useful things were still unsupported. But at least we could make moves. :-)
At the beginning of 2002 the club was deemed ready for the Internet public, most of the basic facilities needed to start and play games were working.
By the end of 2002 much work had been done and the following facilities were supported: the pairing system, PGN and FEN support, time controls, vacation policy, the reminder system, and a lot of other stuff were ready, such as starting games with standard openings, assigning colour during a challenge, friendly games, and the chess problem system, to mention only the major things.
On November 20, 2002 the club got it's final name, E4EC, which stands for E4 Emailchess Club, and e4ec.org became the club's Internet domain.
A few things remain to be completed in 2004. The biggest challenge is to support more types of tournaments.
A few milestones:
| Jan 07, 2003 |
The daily number of moves first raised over 100. |
| Jan 10, 2003 |
The number of players reached 50. |
| May 09, 2003 |
The Hungarian Chess Federation put a link to the club onto its homepage. |
| Jul 22, 2003 |
The daily number of moves first raised over 250. |
| Sep 19, 2003 |
The number of players reached 100, while inactive players are removed. |
| Nov 10, 2003 |
Someone from the Hungarian Chess Federation called me to organize the I. Hungarian E-mail Final in the club. Of course, the request was accepted. |
| Feb 02, 2004 |
The number of moves a day first raised over 500. |
| Aug 27, 2004 |
The number of moves a day first raised over 1,000. |
| May 01, 2005 |
The 10,000th game started. |
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ELO Rating
An ELO rating is the result of statistical calculations designed to measure the playing strength of players. These methods were developed by Arpad Elo and are named after him. The ELO system is in almost universal use and has been further refined by others, notably Glicko, but is still named after its creator.
In devising the ELO scale, some premises were used that are worthy of note. It was decided that a rating of 2000 would be the equivalent to scoring 50% in a US Open Championship. It was also decided that a player's rating would never be negative.
Importantly, the standard deviation was fixed at 200 points. This means that if a player's true strength is 1500, he will score around 68% of his results within the range of 1400 to 1600 (as measured by performance formulae).
Another result of fixing the standard deviation at 200 points is that it also defines playing categories. For example, most International Masters and Grandmasters are in the 2400 - 2600 category, most national masters in the 2200 - 2400 category. Those in the 2000 - 2200 category are called Experts, or Candidate Masters.
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PGN Format
The PGN format is a standard way to describe a chess game.
It contains players' data such as names, ratings, country codes, the date, and site of the game, and contains the moves also that have been taken in the game, and the result of the game also.
The game can be in progress too, in this case its result is "*", later it usually changes to "1-0", "0-1" or "1/2-1/2".
Please find the detailed description of the PGN format here.
The server understands the PGN format, it can send and receive moves in this format.
Many softwares use this format to exchange games, those too which are used by correspondence chess players to play their games, such as ECTool, or Mailchess (more on the Links page).
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