Did You Know That People Still Play Chess By POSTCARDS?

Postcards & Mail Postcard chat!
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Wednesday, November 1, 2023 - 11:05 (UTC -5)

Hi, Lynn:

We always report our Receive Date and the Postmark Date for each move.

If the postmark is unreadable or missing, we accept the player’s “Send Date” as written on the postcard. If the postmark is readable, that Postmark Date prevails. So it behooves us to know how our local postal service handles the mail so that there are no delays or differences between the day that we are mailing and when the postal service postmarks. That may even mean we must hand-deliver the postcard to our local post office and ask for the postcard to be hand-canceled and perhaps even take a photo of it with our phone.

Here in the USA, most Federal Holidays, e.g., the annual Presidents Day holiday in February, are “observed” on a Monday. That means no postal service. Our regular postal service is Monday through Saturday, inclusive, except Federal Holidays.

Let’s say you prepare a postcard to send a move on Saturday morning of Presidents Day Weekend and your Reflection Time for this move has been one day. If you don’t get to your local post office by closing time, perhaps 13:00 local time, that postcard is going to sit somewhere in the postal service until it gets processed and postmarked the following Tuesday. The correspondence chess rules say that your Reflection Time for this move is actually now four days instead of the one you thought you’ve spent and you just have to live with that. Most players are on the ball and make sure that their Send Dates match their Postmark Dates most of the time.

Your Move,

Michael

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23

The greatest benefit of correspondence chess is that when my game inevitably goes to &@$#%, it’s much less dramatic to flip over the postcard than it is to flip over a chess board.

24

There used to be a ton of play by mail games, and although it isn’t with postcards, I still play one!

It’s a wrestling game, called the Imaginary Wrestling Association (IWA.) You create a wrestler and their persona, send in your “moves”, pick what other players to go up against, and then get the results every three weeks. You can win titles, real life prizes, and it’s just a lot of fun.

I am not really a fan of actual wrestling, but as someone who loves a full mailbox and strategy games, it is great, and there is a strong community to this very day. In fact, the current three week cycle ends this week, so I’ll have the results in the mail in about a week and a half :blush:!

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25

Wrestling by mail, now that I did not know. Very interesting!

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26

I used to play a lot of correspondence chess and so did my late husband. He was a grandmaster and played worldwide for many years, including in the final of the World Championship against Joop van Oosterom.

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