What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

[Paul Bonham]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

Brilliancy and strategy prizes are fine, but unfortunately it takes some co-operation by the opponent(s) to win one. Especially if most opponents make the type of poor mistake(s) that turn a potential gem into a dime-a-dozen collect-the-material-and-win-fest. So, making the only prizes available brialliancy and strategy ones can easily be seen as unfair to the strongest/highest point-gathering players, who have to hope for quality opposition in as many of their games as possible.

I respectfully disagree with your first statement, to a certain extent. If you don't know your opponent, whether s/he is tactical or positional, whether s/he defends rather than attacks, then you are playing the board. Some players might even take this idea to an extreme: even if they DO know their opponent, they will still play the board, computer-like, trying to find at all times simply the strongest move. But in any event, I would think that playing the board occurs far more than playing the opponent. So if you play a move that is meant to induce a mistake from your opponent, because you know that your opponent tends to such a mistake, then yes you are right, this won't win any brilliancy or strategy prize. A judge looking over your game, not even knowing the participants, will obviously not pick up on such a psychological ploy. Let me ask you, Kevin, how often do you do this in tournament play? In match play, I could see this happening more often, but in tournament play, not nearly so often.

If every player is most often playing the board, looking for the strongest move in a given position, then every player has equal possibility of finding a brilliancy or of formulating an effective long-term strategy. If a Master is playing a Class B player, the Master may find such a brilliancy or strategy very early on in the game, because the Class B player is likely to present the Master with the opportunity for it very early on (by playing a move that induces a specific weakness or even a long-term liability). I would tend to think that mis-matches are MORE likely to produce brilliancy prizes or strategy prizes.

I've thought many times about whether chess is on the verge of dying out, and I've sort of re-assured myself that it won't happen for a while, at least in my lifetime. There are threats (playing programs, databases, deeper and deeper theory), but after a while I concluded that chess is being potentially exhausted at a rate less alarming than I once thought it was. In addition, as was once explained to me, electrons can pass only so quickly for purposes of computating, and that puts an upper limit on how fast chess playing computer technology will get (not that we are close to that yet).

Garry Kasparov: "With the supremacy of the chess machines now apparent and the contest of "Man vs. Machine" a thing of the past, perhaps it is time to return to the goals that made computer chess so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. Playing better chess was a problem they wanted to solve, yes, and it has been solved. But there were other goals as well: to develop a program that played chess by thinking like a human, perhaps even by learning the game as a human does. Surely this would be a far more fruitful avenue of investigation than creating, as we are doing, ever-faster algorithms to run on ever-faster hardware."

It's not how fast chess playing technology will get, it's how effectively will it learn like we learn. Neural network chess engines seem to me to be the wave of the future in this regard, and an area I am actively working on in my spare time, among other similar projects.

There are only so many quality (2400+) games played per year, and much theory, even if it exists, is duplicated stuff, or it is lost in old books and people's notes scattered around the globe, beyond the reach of those who might try to compile it perfectly.

Garry Kasparov again: "The availability of millions of games at one's fingertips in a database is also making the game's best players younger and younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves used to take many years, a process indicative of Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 hours to become an expert" theory as expounded in his recent book "Outliers". ... Today's teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess information and making full use of the superiority of the young mind to retain it all."

Kasparov in his day was the undisputed King of opening theory. He knows of what he speaks. A lot of his wins over the years occurred in the opening phase because of his superior knowledge / memorization. Whatever tactics came later were more often than not born out of some advantage he won in the opening.

In any case, chess960 has so many possibilities (barring some starting positions that are considered fairly uninteresting - including the current standard starting position:)) that making an ECO for it is impossible - a huge database might be feasible, but who would memorize it, unless, as Kasparov has suggested, make a given chess960 starting position the standard for every ten years or so, so that pros can study it and evolve theory (ouch).

Actually, he suggested 1 year per opening, an interesting idea, but not one I'm in favor of. Why make "research" and/or access to it's products the criterion for success or failure in chess? Why not do the work in your head over the board, from as early on as possible? Chess isn't meant to be one big giant database. The more we make it so, the more we take away from the game.

[Paul Bonham]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

No player I know of reads ECO cover to cover.

But the truly serious players DO know their favorite openings, as both White and Black, effectively "cover to cover" (an unsuitable metaphor in the Internet age).

Most players soon get past losing in the first 12 moves, if I am to take you literally. They may get a slightly worse position, but that is not why they lose. It is mainly tactical and (less so, perhaps) positional blunders.

Remember that we are discussing newbies who are just joining the club or tournament scene. The ones who have never studied chess openings, i.e. the vast majority of them, are going to realize fairly quickly that their losses are occurring in the openings. The question then becomes will they be interested enough to study the openings to make themselves a better player, or will they realize: "that 7-year-old Timmy has stored in his little head FAR more openings and is continuing to add to that knowledge every day, and what the hell, I have better things to do with my weekends anyway, so screw this".

If we want to expand the base, we want to retain even these newbies. Their potential is summed up as: they might never learn openings as well as Timmy and might never progress beyond a Class B player. So should we just let them disappear? Not if we want to grow the base. So.... let's take the opening knowledge out of the equation and make chess a game of creativity and ideas. I know that's hard to swallow for players like you, Kevin, who have invested so much in openings, so I don't expect to ever have your agreement on this.

Class players can still win class prizes, so that's some satisfaction enough for many, if they have no great ambition to improve quickly. Not to mention the other possible satisfactions of chess (e.g. the odd interesting game, for them; the feel of battle; getting away from the home life a bit), and the social stuff before and after games.

Players who get frustrated (with poor results and stymied chess ambitions) that leave organized chess quickly may be a normal aspect of the turnover for a sporting/gaming organization like the CFC. It's up to the CFC to do a better job of bringing in more new members to replace those who 'wash out'.

With a view like this, your 11-point plan is doomed not to failure but to mediocrity. The number of people who are not in organized chess right now but who could be enticed to view a weekend of chess as a means to its own end are too few to justify the effort to recruit them. But if you find a way to keep more of the ones who give it a try, make them feel more a part of it than as a footstool to the success of others, the base can both grow and be more involved.

[Paul Bonham]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

For your information, if you lose your games in the first 12 moves, that has very little to do with ECO. It is simply because you are a very weak player. Hard truth to face but nonetheless inevitable.
If the game would start in the middlegame or in the endgame, you would most certainly lose even faster!
Trying to change the nature of the game to fit your disabilities would not do you any good either. Unless you manage to take away every little bit of thinking out of it (you'd have to be smart for that...) your attitude condemns you to mediocrity at best.

We are talking here about newbies just joining the tournament or club chess scene. The vast majority of them are chess hobbyists who have never studied openings. So when they begin playing serious matches, they lose in the openings even if they manage to hang on and play for 50 more moves. They eventually realize that success in chess first and foremost requires opening knowledge. That's when they either decide they like chess enough to stick it out and accept mediocrity because they are so behind in opening knowledge, or they decide to walk out and never come back. Most of them decide the latter.

Opening line memorization isn't necessarily thinking. Taking out opening line memorization (by providing chess960 events) isn't taking thinking out of it, it's putting thinking INTO it. DUH!

[Paul Bonham]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

There is time and place for specific solutions.

In other words: TRUST ME, I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING.

I've already popped the air out of that balloon.

[Paul Bonham]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

From the moment when the average-joe start considering its pastime as a source of income and stop playing for the pleasure he gets out of it, then opposite results than those seeked are bound to happen.

The international success of poker refutes this argument. Poker is all about making money, and there are plenty of average joe's and average jane's willing to put money into it even if their skill levels are low. This is because there is a decent chance they can come out ahead, and even if they play 9 events and miss the money each time, they play the 10th one because the chance is greater than zero that they could finish high enough to wipe out all their previous losses.

Chess without class prizes would not have this greater than zero chance for players of low skill. Then you are left with only those who derive pleasure from spending whole weekends getting beat up playing chess, a very small group indeed.

[Paul Bonham]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

Now who's jumping to conclusions :)? Are you sure you didn't want to totally eliminate class prizes :)?

Class prizes may be required at the moment, to avoid SHRINKING the base, in North America.

You can eliminate them (say if you email all North American organizers, and they listen - already a bit of a fantasy from Mars :)). What will probably happen, after the blood bath of exiting class players, is you can impose what you think works elsewhere, and hope it works here. Good luck.

Jean is null on specifics, but it's quite plain to me what he wants. He wants to be Canada's professor emeritus of chess. He wants to write books, tour the country winning prize money at Open tournaments without class prizes, and educate the masses, preferably at taxpayer expense so that he doesn't have to do the work of booking the gigs. The state sets it all up for him. Plus the occassional international trip, all expenses paid.

He doesn't care if his audiences are small, just as long as he's on a regular stipend and he gets introduced to applause everywhere he goes. Maybe we could even give him a title, "Dr. Jean Hebert".

[Paul Bonham]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

Do not flatter yourself. I made no such point and any point of agreement between your "views" and mine would be pure coincidence based on opposite reasons.



Well lets look at some facts. "Tour du Québec" (FQE Grand Prix so to speak) sponsored (10,000$), Championnat ouvert du Saguenay 2010 in April, heavyly sponsored (prize fund over 5,000$ for about probably 60-75 players), Championnat ouvert de Lanaudière 2010 coming up later in April, prize fund over 5,000$, very sponsored. The FQE's junior championships and Quebec Open will be sponsored this year (for the first time, in a "bad economy"...). In short, almost all major events in Québec this year have found sponsorship and some on a rather impressive scale. Congratulations on the people responsible for that, namely FQE president Marc Poulin, tournament organizers Éric Gravel, Patrice Gérard, and Ronald Thibault (I forgot to mention the "ch. ouvert de Montmagny" which was also sponsored) and others.
Even in difficult economic times, some businesses do well and sponsorship continues and sometimes activities requiring relatively smaller amounts of sponsorship have better chances...

This came up in one of our threads of last summer. Lots of sponsorship in Quebec, it seems, and comparitively nil sponsorship everywhere else in Canada. Could it possibly be that the sponsors in Quebec are receiving TAX BREAKS for their sponsorship? So that in effect they are gaining money, not losing it, money that comes from the Quebec public, 95% of whom couldn't give a French fart about chess, but are forced to pay for it anyway?

If that's not the case, then Jean, you who claim to want the best for chess in all of Canada, why aren't you lecturing all organizers across Canada how to get the kind of sponsorship Quebec is getting? Why aren't you actively helping them do it?

[Paul Bonham]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

After 40+ years of involvement im just about every aspect of the game at every level I can at least claim to be slightly less ignorant than most. Following your line is pure stupidity.

On your part however I can hardly understand that while admitting freely several times to have absolutely no first hand knowledge on the people and topics discussed here, you are still determined to prove it convincingly and to keep pollutting this message board with uninformed and disrespectful posts.

I am only disrespectful of those who are disrespectful of others, especially when it's not justified. Your attack on Hal Bond of last summer has still not resulted in an apology, which Hal Bond himself has not demanded, but nevertheless would be appropriate. What goes around comes around.

You are a fake, a pretender, trying to con the people that you have their best interest at heart. You say you have ideas on growing chess in Canada, and when Kevin presses you for specifics, you say this isn't the time for specifics. Why don't you run for office and tell the voters that they'll have to wait until they elect you before you tell them what you're going to do?

[Carl Bilodeau]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

This came up in one of our threads of last summer. Lots of sponsorship in Quebec, it seems, and comparitively nil sponsorship everywhere else in Canada. Could it possibly be that the sponsors in Quebec are receiving TAX BREAKS for their sponsorship? So that in effect they are gaining money, not losing it, money that comes from the Quebec public, 95% of whom couldn't give a French fart about chess, but are forced to pay for it anyway?

If that's not the case, then Jean, you who claim to want the best for chess in all of Canada, why aren't you lecturing all organizers across Canada how to get the kind of sponsorship Quebec is getting? Why aren't you actively helping them do it?

The sponsors for chess tournaments do not receive public money. The system is identical to the rest of Canada for sponsorship.

In fact there was no sponsorship in Quebec two years ago. Then Jean started his HPE free French Newsletter. 1500 people read it every week. With all the SPECIFICS he gaves he drastically changed the mentalities. He could not change the mentality of everybody but at least he convinced most of the organizers and hundreads of players.

Today we have elite players in our tournaments so we know our kids can play against stronger players which they could not do two years ago. The FQE leadership, following the HPE critics, gave their seat to a new dynamic team that now seems to follow Jean's guidelines.

As a result of all this we now have private sponsors in Montreal, Saguenay, Lanaudière, Quebec city, which was not there before at all. Jean's experience has been communicated to the community. The communicty is informed of what is done in Quebec and elsewhere and can compare. HPE lead to a LOT of talking on French Chesstalk (there was a thread created by readers on French Chesstalk for most of the HPE editions) for two years and now no more talking, silence and many results. People seems to know what to do now to get success. But there has been a lot, very lot of talking about the many subjects Jean brought, before we got the results.

In the next few months, Saguenay which is far away from Montreal offers 5555.55$. Lanaudière 5000$, Mauricie 12000$, Quebec city 2000$ and none of these are the FQE public tournaments. We now have Long games tournaments for our kids, one having 10000$ in Prizes from private sponsors (the prizes can be spend on books, teachers, and chess tools). In the past we would get only one long game tournament for kids in a year or none. Now we have many bigs ones.

Elite players which used to be ridiculised all over French Chesstalk (like some of you are doing here today) have now more respect and most of the organizers understand the necessity to pay them to come in our tournaments. The Elite players feel the respect and they come.

In this new context, it is in my opinion much more interesting to open a Chess club in Quebec than it used to be. Myself, I want to open one with my kids in the next two years in a city that has no chess club to bring more people to the boards. I want my kids to manage the club, it will be a good experience for them.

So you should continue to talk with Jean but with a little more of respect. He is not always right but he is more than anybodyelse here anyway. I don't think he can bring such success in the rest of Canada without an English Newsletter. If he had such an english Newsletter, people could read him everyweek without reading you and all the peoples that made Chess in Canada a non success. Knowing that english readers read his newsletter, Jean would talk about Chess in Canada, with a lot of critics, even more every week.

If a volunteer could offer his assistance to translate HPE you would have nothing to loose and everything to gain.

In the last HPE monday Jean said he was taking the plane on wednesday february 10 for Europe where he will try to do a GM norm. Please, those who respect him, have a kind word for him to make sure he does not play with a bad taste in his mouth from the Chesstalk writing of this week. Being a GM he will be even more credible for the community.

What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents? My answer is: An english HPE and a lot of talking for two years to EDUCATE the community like it has been done in Quebec.

Carl

[Kevin Pacey]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

I respectfully disagree with your first statement, to a certain extent. If you don't know your opponent, whether s/he is tactical or positional, whether s/he defends rather than attacks, then you are playing the board. Some players might even take this idea to an extreme: even if they DO know their opponent, they will still play the board, computer-like, trying to find at all times simply the strongest move. But in any event, I would think that playing the board occurs far more than playing the opponent. So if you play a move that is meant to induce a mistake from your opponent, because you know that your opponent tends to such a mistake, then yes you are right, this won't win any brilliancy or strategy prize. A judge looking over your game, not even knowing the participants, will obviously not pick up on such a psychological ploy. Let me ask you, Kevin, how often do you do this in tournament play? In match play, I could see this happening more often, but in tournament play, not nearly so often.

If every player is most often playing the board, looking for the strongest move in a given position, then every player has equal possibility of finding a brilliancy or of formulating an effective long-term strategy. If a Master is playing a Class B player, the Master may find such a brilliancy or strategy very early on in the game, because the Class B player is likely to present the Master with the opportunity for it very early on (by playing a move that induces a specific weakness or even a long-term liability). I would tend to think that mis-matches are MORE likely to produce brilliancy prizes or strategy prizes.

This may be nice reasoning, in theory, but what I am saying is that in practice people (even fairly-decently rated ones) simply make [often dumb] mistakes, even out of the blue. For example, I can't count the number of times I've sat at the board wondering how I can win a dull drawish position, and my opponent has incredibly blundered out of the blue. I did nothing to provoke it; I did not consciously set the cheapest of tactical/positional traps (another argument against prizes being solely brilliancy/strategy ones is that some players, one they are being to lose, might deliberately make bad moves so as to reduce their current opponent's chances of winning a prize, instead of them).

Sorry, there's just too many games when a silk purse can't be made out of a sow's ear.

Garry Kasparov: "With the supremacy of the chess machines now apparent and the contest of "Man vs. Machine" a thing of the past, perhaps it is time to return to the goals that made computer chess so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. Playing better chess was a problem they wanted to solve, yes, and it has been solved. But there were other goals as well: to develop a program that played chess by thinking like a human, perhaps even by learning the game as a human does. Surely this would be a far more fruitful avenue of investigation than creating, as we are doing, ever-faster algorithms to run on ever-faster hardware."

It's not how fast chess playing technology will get, it's how effectively will it learn like we learn. Neural network chess engines seem to me to be the wave of the future in this regard, and an area I am actively working on in my spare time, among other similar projects.

Interesting, though I was refering to the threat of a playing computer program [nearly] solving chess, which I am not so afraid of now. Since computers can only get so fast, at least in theory, the only way would be with some unimaginably clever/long algorithm, perhaps.

Garry Kasparov again: "The availability of millions of games at one's fingertips in a database is also making the game's best players younger and younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves used to take many years, a process indicative of Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 hours to become an expert" theory as expounded in his recent book "Outliers". ... Today's teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess information and making full use of the superiority of the young mind to retain it all."

Kasparov in his day was the undisputed King of opening theory. He knows of what he speaks. A lot of his wins over the years occurred in the opening phase because of his superior knowledge / memorization. Whatever tactics came later were more often than not born out of some advantage he won in the opening.

Kasparov is given to hyperbole, so I take everything he has said with a grain of salt. To gave a (perhaps unfair) example, he once predicted the 1.e4 c6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 dxe4 4.Nxe4 Nd7 Caro-Kann would soon be shown to be refuted by 5.Ng5. For a while it looked like he might be right. But then Black learned the correct resources that were available to the second player in the opening.

A (really unfair but tragi-comic, for Kasparov/humanity) sequel was that Kasparov eventually played the Black side of this variation against Deep Blue in the final decisive game of their match. Kasparov fell into a known opening 'trap' early on, allowing the machine to sac a piece for great compensation early on.

Demoralized, or not accustomed to defending such a position, he failed to resist well and lost horribly. To be kind, perhaps he deliberately allowed the 'trap', thinking the computer would not dare to sac, or perhaps he made a finger-slip and played ...h6 at the wrong turn than he intended. Afterwards some thought Kasparov may have been set up to believe the machine would not sac, but this is speculation. IBM acted selfishly and refused to participate in the re-match that was supposed to occur.

[Kevin Pacey]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

But the truly serious players DO know their favorite openings, as both White and Black, effectively "cover to cover" (an unsuitable metaphor in the Internet age).

These 'serious players' are mostly beyond the level of opposition faced by the newbies etc. type of player that you are concerned about. If they lose because of the opening, it is because they are not familiar with standard traps that could be detected on their own, without a trap book, if a lower-level class player had tactical competence. As I said, studying tactics and learning to understanding the game is the main ticket for class players to advance.

Remember that we are discussing newbies who are just joining the club or tournament scene. The ones who have never studied chess openings, i.e. the vast majority of them, are going to realize fairly quickly that their losses are occurring in the openings. The question then becomes will they be interested enough to study the openings to make themselves a better player, or will they realize: "that 7-year-old Timmy has stored in his little head FAR more openings and is continuing to add to that knowledge every day, and what the hell, I have better things to do with my weekends anyway, so screw this".

If we want to expand the base, we want to retain even these newbies. Their potential is summed up as: they might never learn openings as well as Timmy and might never progress beyond a Class B player. So should we just let them disappear? Not if we want to grow the base. So.... let's take the opening knowledge out of the equation and make chess a game of creativity and ideas. I know that's hard to swallow for players like you, Kevin, who have invested so much in openings, so I don't expect to ever have your agreement on this.

You're putting too much emphasis on knowledge of opening theory, in my opinion. When in comes to choice of opening, wisdom and efficient study are possible, even at duffer level. Play the White side of an Anti-Sicilian, especially against people you suspect know theory better than you, for example, rather than going into an open Sicilian you haven't studied and practiced in offhand games. Or play flank openings. As Black avoid the Sicilian and double king pawn, and play the Caro, Offbeat Frenches with less theory, or play the Rat (Modern defence), to name a few Black options. Don't stick your head in the lion's den without preparation first.

If newbies don't know any better, usually they are advised by a kindly stronger player sooner or later. They want to play a Najdorf like Fischer. They insist. No wonder they lose to booked-up kids. Sheesh.

With a view like this [the CFC should replace players who 'wash-out' after becoming quickly frustrated, not try to woo them back], your 11-point plan is doomed not to failure but to mediocrity. The number of people who are not in organized chess right now but who could be enticed to view a weekend of chess as a means to its own end are too few to justify the effort to recruit them. But if you find a way to keep more of the ones who give it a try, make them feel more a part of it than as a footstool to the success of others, the base can both grow and be more involved.

Sorry, but chess, like a sport, is a game of winners and losers. There may be no way to sugar-coat it without changing the game beyond recognition, and that might easily become like a mad experiment gone horribly wrong.
The CFC can try to retain more newbies by getting into a position to offer better services (e.g. a server), helping organizers grow a bigger selection of events with more and more prizes, recruiting more newbies so that they have more players at their level to play against, and so on (anything not too radical with unpredictable consequences). Retaining newbies is nice, but sometimes there's no stopping quitters. Replace them at a rate faster than they leave, and the CFC will finally have success.

[Paul Bonham]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

Now who's jumping to conclusions :)? Are you sure you didn't want to totally eliminate class prizes :)?

Class prizes may be required at the moment, to avoid SHRINKING the base, in North America.

You can eliminate them (say if you email all North American organizers, and they listen - already a bit of a fantasy from Mars :)). What will probably happen, after the blood bath of exiting class players, is you can impose what you think works elsewhere, and hope it works here. Good luck.

Kevin, according to Carl Bilodeau, everything you seek from Jean including specifics on how to nurture Canada's chess talent and how to grow private sponsorship of chess in Canada, is contained in his monthly HPE newsletter.

http://www.chesstalk.info/forum/show...9461#post19461

I'd like to hear your take on this, preferably after you've had his newsletters translated and can fathom his "specifics". All other organizers in Canada should do this as well, everything you're doing now is wrong and only Jean Hebert has the answers and the guidance you need.

Or so we are told....

[Kevin Pacey]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

Kevin, according to Carl Bilodeau, everything you seek from Jean including specifics on how to nurture Canada's chess talent and how to grow private sponsorship of chess in Canada, is contained in his monthly HPE newsletter.

http://www.chesstalk.info/forum/show...9461#post19461

I'd like to hear your take on this, preferably after you've had his newsletters translated and can fathom his "specifics". All other organizers in Canada should do this as well, everything you're doing now is wrong and only Jean Hebert has the answers and the guidance you need.

Or so we are told....

I don't subscribe to Jean's newsletter, but perhaps someone would be kind enough to post more of the specific details Carl/you refer to on (English) chesstalk, for the benefit of all readers. Anyway, Jean seemed to not want to pursue the 'eliminate class prizes' issue further, which is a main thing he referred to, besides the sponsorship issue and his less specific guidelines, and wishes, on this message board, as far as I recall.

I've been told the annual Pro-Am in Guelph does without 'class prizes' (except for books and entries to future event(s)) in it's bottom section(s)). The top section has cash prizes, but I understand Hal keeps a good % of the entry fees for his service as TD/organizer. Maybe it works for Hal because his is the only tournament for miles around, and he is the only one willing to be an organizer in the area. Evidently the players don't mind much. Perhaps a week-long event in Guelph with similiar prize structure would not be so well attended. Anyway, that's what I've heard.

[Bob Gillanders]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

I've been told the annual Pro-Am in Guelph does without 'class prizes' (except for books and entries to future event(s)) in it's bottom section(s)). The top section has cash prizes, but I understand Hal keeps a good % of the entry fees for his service as TD/organizer. Maybe it works for Hal because his is the only tournament for miles around, and he is the only one willing to be an organizer in the area. Evidently the players don't mind much. Perhaps a week-long event in Guelph with similiar prize structure would not be so well attended. Anyway, that's what I've heard.

Kevin, you have been misinformed. There are 3 major chess centres in the immediate area, Kitchener, Guelph, and Hamilton. Each one holds regular weekend swisses, all well attended.

Guelph ProAm format
- cash prizes for open section, trophies for class sections.
- lower entry fee for class sections.
- Hal's fee for TD, don't know, that's his business.

Kitchener & Hamilton - cash prizes for all sections.

There are a lot of overlap of players, with a good draw of Toronto players too. I hope that will set the record straight.:)

[Paul Bonham]

Re: What can Canada do to nurture its chess talents?

Interesting, though I was refering to the threat of a playing computer program [nearly] solving chess, which I am not so afraid of now. Since computers can only get so fast, at least in theory, the only way would be with some unimaginably clever/long algorithm, perhaps.

A more likely scenario is that eventually all computer chess programs beyond a certain strength and playing at a long enough time control will invariable play each other to a draw, because they will be good enough to avoid any mistake large enough to cause forced loss of the game.

I believe this will happen, and perhaps not too far off. I do wonder what the time control would have to be.

If and when it does, we will finally be able to say that best play leads to a draw, and that anything but a draw is not best play.