There are two main reasons for in-person tournaments. The first is socialization, and the second is cheating.
... telltale sign was that it was an adult player that rose quickly, which rarely happens.
DH, who doesn’t at all enjoy socializing, particularly enjoys the deep analyses required for correspondence chess, with games that typically stretch over months. He worked his way up the Oz rankings of the correspondence chess section on chess.com and just joined the US group where he debuted at number 1 in the rankings.
WRT chess within the broader context of life and earlier posts about memorisation vs analysis, it’s interesting to note that these facets are mirrored in his radiology profession. In tutorials, many young trainees just want to get through a lot of cases and be given the diagnosis for each so that they can develop their pattern recognition skills, whereas DH has a thorough knowledge of anatomy and pathophysiology, so when he sees a ‘soft sign’ indicating the possibility of a disease condition (including incidental finding(s)), he is able to apply extensive reasoning to look for other soft signs to determine disease from artifacts (which abound in diagnostic imaging). He gets a lot of specific requests for his ‘second opinion’ for cases when life or death hang on diagnostic accuracy. A person with great integrity who would never stoop to cheating.
