Anand is new WC

[Tom O'Donnell]

Re: Anand is new WC

Very well put, Nicolas. The resistance to much needed chance is what turns a WC match into a drawfest of the dullest proportions. I do believe that at some point, hopefully very near, the top level players themselves, tiring of the computer engine aspect to chess, will enact the change to chess960 (or FischerRandom). ...

This leads to a very interesting question. On the one hand I tend to agree with the camp that computers definitely help weaker players more than stronger ones and that therefore the best players should do better in a game with no opening preparation such as chess960. On the other hand, perhaps they would no longer be the best players since their ratings now are based in part on the quality of their opening preparation and intelligent use of computers. Perhaps someone outside of the top-10 might be the best at chess960, though I would be amazed if it were someone outside of the 2700 club.

[Brad Thomson]

Re: Anand is new WC

Who knows who the best chess players will be if you take memory for opening sequences out of the game? In fact there may be many very strong players we don't even know who would move to the top if they did not have to remember openings. I am not convinced that they would necessarily be in the GM club let alone the 2700+ club. There could be chess geniuses out there with no ability to remember openings, or no desire to bother.

[Nicolas Haynes]

Re: Anand is new WC

What about the match sponsors?

That's exactly the point. Professional chess players are notorious for complaining about playing conditions, the lack of money in the game and the lack of respect that they receive in certain areas (IE North America). I'm not singling them out because people in most professions will find similar complaints about whatever they do as well.

However, most of the money in chess comes from wealthy chess enthusiasts and their businesses, national governments and so on. It is not coming from other professional chess players. There are many reasons why they fund chess, but I'm certain that we can all agree that anybody that is going to put up hundreds of thousands of dollars for a chess match is doing so under the hope that the people that they are playing will play exciting, hard fought chess. Sometimes the sponsors make it explicit and enforce conditions such as anti-draw rules to enforce this, sometimes they do not.

Therefore, if you care about top level chess and attracting sponsorship money, it is difficult not to view this match as an unmitigated disaster. Why on earth would a wealthy person want to pay anybody, even if they are the best players in the world, a huge amount of money to play a bunch of short draws? It's not my money, but if it were I would never sponsor a chess event again unless I knew or had somehow enforced the fact that the people I was paying would be earning or deserve the money that I was putting forward. In this case maybe they deserved it because of the fact that one was the world champion and the other earned the right to challenge them. They did not deserve the money based on their performance in the match.

They don't owe any of us anything, but they owe quite a bit to the sponsor of the match.

I don't care what your profession is, whether you are a plumber, a doctor or a professional chess player. You put in a crappy effort at your job, you should be disciplined, maybe your salary should go down, and it can have a negative impact on the public perception of the value of the job that you do. None of this is counter intuitive, and none of this is unfair.

Anand and Gelfand are both incredibly talented and very hard workers who deserve not to be judged on the basis of one match or one chess game. They both have a great body of work, but by the same token I think that this match will and should have a negative impact on that and on attracting sponsors for future matches. Despite my negative opinion of this match, it is important to remember that all of us have and will be making mistakes and not applying the best efforts all of the time at our jobs, and we should not be judging anybody else with more stringent criteria then we would apply to ourselves.

[Tom O'Donnell]

Re: Anand is new WC

Who knows who the best chess players will be if you take memory for opening sequences out of the game? In fact there may be many very strong players we don't even know who would move to the top if they did not have to remember openings. I am not convinced that they would necessarily be in the GM club let alone the 2700+ club. There could be chess geniuses out there with no ability to remember openings, or no desire to bother.

I think that's highly unlikely. The best players are not simply the best parrots; their breadth and depth of knowledge is greatest but they are also the best analysts and calculators. My suspicion is that in general the difference between say the typical 2550 and 2350 would be greater, not less, if opening knowledge no longer existed. Why? Because on balance the difference between my play over the first 10 moves is going to be much closer to the 2550s than over say moves 31-40. Standard opening schemes and plans help weaker players much more than stronger players.

My guess is that a typical tournament in chess960 will see more upsets but in general the better players will win more games as people will no longer be able to play Exchange Slavs and the like to try and make fightless draws. Incidentally I personally prefer allowing the players to alternate placing pieces since: 1) that gives Black more winning chances, and; 2) the positions are likely to be asymmetrical which gives the better player better winning chances and drops the draw rate.

[Brad Thomson]

Re: Anand is new WC

I like the idea of alternative placements as well, you could actually see players in time trouble before the board is even set up. :)

[Alan Baljeu]

Re: Anand is new WC

I'm all for Chess960 events, but I think I'm in a very small minority.

As for a 2550 vs 2350 matchup, if they might play a Sveshnikov, both sides are playing not just grandmaster moves, but the accumulated wisdom of the ages from the world's greatest players and their computers. So the first 15-20 moves are 3200elo strength, and the position is balanced. Then the master starts playing at 2350 and the GM at 2550 and the GM will slowly gain the edge. But, can the edge be found before a drawish position arrives? If they played without an opening book, the GM would have an extra 15 moves to push his skill into an advantage.

Same for 2800 vs 2730, mostly it's drawn games but an extra 15 moves of putting that 70 elo skill to use, or an extra 15 moves of misplaying the opening can create unbalanced positions out of the opening.

[Ben Daswani]

Re: Anand is new WC

What about the match sponsors?

the players' commitment to match sponsors is to play

if a sponsor is unhappy with the players' performances, its recourse is to sponsor less in the future, not to whinge

the players have no obligation to anyone to play a certain style/calibre of chess

[Laurentiu Grigorescu]

Re: Anand is new WC

I believe that at faster time controls everybody makes more mistakes and the play becomes speculative - it is harder to refute a wrong plan then when playing at classical time controls. The four rapid games did not show a particular "touch" that can be remembered (like Carlsen-Topalov type of attack this year), or a complex end game played precisely. It appeared to be four grinding down contests - but I might be wrong, that's why I asked for opinions.

[Kevin Pacey]

Re: Anand is new WC

The rules of standard chess are periodically changed after a number of centuries go by. Is such a time really now due?

One question is, is standard chess really that played out yet when there is no as yet time-tested consensus by experts on what the best openings are, if one were to ask for say the five best defences/variations against White's five best opening moves/variations [edit: I think almost all top opening theoreticians have agreed for decades that 1.e4, 1.d4, 1.c4, 1.Nf3 and 1.g3 are White's best five first moves, though many might not weight 1.g3 as being as good as say 1.Nf3]? Also, there are countless sidelines and deviant openings that can be played at least on occasion.

As far as the latest world championship is concerned, I think the world's top players may have too much respect for each other, or at least not enough will to play out dull positions until hopelessly drawn, to at least test the opponent's stamina. I seem to recall Fischer winning a dull endgame by playing on and on in a match game against Geller, until the latter hallucinated and made an 'unbelievable' one move blunder ('Fischer fever'?).

If computer analysis poses such a worrying threat to players involved in top matches, chess960 is one possible replacement for standard chess, but we might wish to first wait until we see if the entertainment value of standard chess is going to more and more often decline the way it did in this match.

If we wish to try to improve the entertainment value of chess in other ways, besides making, say, chess960, the new standard, we might add a doubling cube like in Backgammon as a feature of match play, so that when offered the cube, a player must either accept a doubling of the value of the current match game (say from one point to 2 points) or else concede to losing it at its current value (say one point). This form of chess, when played at 5 minutes for stakes, was going on between some people I knew that lived in Toronto back in the 1980s. They refered to it as 'Contra', which is what they said when they offered an opponent the doubling cube [edit: Note that this borrows an element from Backgammon that doesn't involve any luck].

[David Ottosen]

Re: Anand is new WC

the players' commitment to match sponsors is to play

if a sponsor is unhappy with the players' performances, its recourse is to sponsor less in the future, not to whinge

the players have no obligation to anyone to play a certain style/calibre of chess

Congratulations, you've won the argument, and have earned valuable points for the future.

[Erik Malmsten]

Re: Anand is new WC

As Hal pointed out earlier, Anand's "decision" to hold his fire until the tiebreaks cost him roughly $250,000 if my arithmetic is correct. (The split of the roughly $2.5 million purse would have been 60/40 if the classic games decided versus 55/45 in the rapidplay tiebreaks.)

Reducing the prizefund was an interesting idea, but perhaps didn't go far enough as pressure to reduce draws. I wonder if the fund was reduced $200,000 per draw would freak out the players to play double-edge positions. Also interesting is the idea to not allow verbal draw agreements before the time control, although the players could eaily foil this with 3-fold repetition. A more acceptable spirit would be endgame draws, fighting on with a slight edge, a battle of theory. Intense mental activity over a long period of time looks like they're giving their best to try to win. Presently, an exertion-free book draw is worth just as much.

But I also wonder about getting value for money applied to sports such as baseball pitchers being paid per strike, football receivers per catch, hockey goalies per save?