About the Author

About the Author

Bughouse with pminear World Open 2002
pminear v RFrancisco, me v Danny Rohde-- I'm in the maroon cap...

If you require an assessment of my competency to teach you atomic from the pages that I've authored, here is my atomic auto-biography. I first learned atomic in 1998 on MEWIS. I began out as a 1700 and eventually reached atomic master level / atomic grandmaster level on 01-Oct-2000 -- here are the logs of the news items from MEWIS regarding each accomplishment:

315 (Sun, Oct 01) Chronatog (2358) is now AM!
NEWS 315 (Sun, Oct 01) Chronatog (2358) is now AM!
Playing black in his promotion game (number 150) against pminear, Chronatog has
\ reached the Atomic rating 2358, which gave him the AM title. Well done! :-)
\ The MEWIS Rating Daemon.

316 (Sun, Oct 01) Chronatog (2407) is now AGM!
NEWS 316 (Sun, Oct 01) Chronatog (2407) is now AGM!
Playing white in his promotion game (number 165) against Helenep, Chronatog has
\ reached the Atomic rating 2407, which gave him the AGM title. Well done!
\ :-) The MEWIS Rating Daemon.

MEWIS: Atomic 2296 32.1 146 52 3 201 2422 (01-Oct-00)

And since I had to go to the birthplace of atomic to play some atomic there to see how I'd compare up against some of the better players there, I found something out -- it's very hard to even find an opponent to play, much less gain points off them -- so few people rarely play there if at all these days.

GICS: Atomic 2177 144.5 32 0 0 32 2177 (23-Jul-02)

Of course, I was instrumental in helping bring atomic to USCL. All the whining for years finally paid off as atomic was finally added to USCL (now GCS) and of those years, I hit my peak atomic-playing years. That time was also when I began writing the first version of those atomic-pages.

(As Moon): Atomic 2606 128.9 832 311 45 1188 2625 (02-Dec-2002)
(As Angel): Atomic 2444 105.9 714 299 39 1052 2520 (03-Oct-2002)

Since DAV(*) was both the main programmer for USCL and FICS at the time, it wasn't too long afterwards that we saw atomic finally added to FICS. Since I had retired as Chronatog at the time, I decided to make a new duplicate account for the express purpose of playing atomic on FICS to check it out. Unfortunately, I got caught but my time as Wuf on FICS was surely unparalleled. If you would like to see the log in which I got banned, it is available here.

FICS (Wuf - final rating): Atomic 2513 93.5 65 1 0 66
FICS (Chronatog): Atomic 2222 109.0 365 151 21 537 2372 (11-May-2003)

If all this hasn't convinced you so far, maybe this tidbit will. Since 2000, on every SINGLE server that has ever offered an atomic grandmaster title, I have achieved the required 2400+ rating and games requirement and gained the AGM title on all those servers. The current count stands at 5 of those smaller servers over the years.

I believe that this makes me, without reservation qualified to teach you, dear reader, about atomic and its grand legacy. There were no official world championships but I don't think it'd be too far off the mark to say that I was World Champion in 2002. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I've played several of the top atomic players during my time period (including some of the golden era players) and I prefer the old times to today's time. I no longer desire to play atomic as a rated game anymore due to that distaste. But for those of you that haven't played during the old days, I invite you to go ahead and learn atomic!