A few weeks ago many of the blogs I follow pointed to the official video of GM Carlsen's appearance on the Charlie Rose show. Before I found the time to watch it, the clip had already been taken down. For this present edition of Video Friday, I was pleased to find another copy on Youtube.
Charlie Rose - Magnus Carlsen (26:37) • 'Number 1 ranked chess player in the world'
I wouldn't be surprised to find this copy also disappear, so I watched it immediately.
I would like to take one more point from GM Rowson's discussion of the 'Black Is OK' concept, last seen on this blog in Not Lost at the Outset. I'm going to take it out of context, because the idea stands on its own merit irrespective of Black's initial outlook. Rowson wrote,
I noticed that in many chess positions White seems to be slightly better, doesn't make any mistakes from a human perspective, and then seems to be slightly worse. Those with a logical cast of mind rebel against this idea and suggest that all that this means is that the initial assessment was mistaken. [...] An assessment of 'slightly better' can change from one side to another without the implication that the initial assessment was 'wrong'. The role of the initial assessment was not to be right or wrong in any absolute sense, but to make a good guess. ['Chess for Zebras', p.229]
This reminded me of a beef I've often had when studying games that use the Informant style of annotation: codes rather than words. The assessment sometimes shifts from 'White is better' to 'Black is better' (or vice versa) without any indication of why the shift happened.
Nowadays we rely on a computer evaluation that reduces a complex position to a single number (or two numbers if you also consider the depth of the calculation). An evaluation of a 0.5 advantage for one side gives more information than the phrase 'stands better'. Going further, as I learned recently in A Pawn Equals 200 Rating Points, the 0.5 advantage translates to a 64% chance that the side with the advantage will win the game.
I don't know how much of the Informant code system predated the first publications of the ongoing series. The symbols '!', '?', etc., have been in use for a long time, but what about the rest? Here is an explanation of the system as it appeared in Informant no.1, covering the first half of 1966.
How accurate were those early, pre-engine assessments of 'has the upper hand', 'is slightly better', and so on? How well did those position assessments mesh with move assessments like '!?' and '?!'? I'll take a look at some of these questions in a future post.
For various reasons that I won't bore you with here, I'm not a big fan of Twitter. Even so, I spend a little time on it every week to catch up with a few personalities who occasionally have something interesting to say. One of my favorites is the current president of the European Chess Union (ECU), who can be found here: Silvio Danailov on Twitter. Over the last month or so, he has been tweeting an occasional 'puzzle', usually related to the World Championship. The first one I noted was
Silvio Danailov - 29 Mar: Chess puzzle of the day: Guess who is the most happiest player in the world after today's round in London? Small track: He doesn't play there??
That date marks one of the last rounds of the recent 2013 Candidates Event, specifically Candidates R12 – Kramnik wins, overtakes Carlsen, as Chessbase.com summarized it. A few days later, after Carlsen had won the event, Danailov asked,
Silvio Danailov - 2 Apr: Puzzle of the day: Please name the other two players from London besides Carlsen who ever have qualified for WCC match?
Unlike the previous puzzle (if you're still stumped, the initials of the 'most happiest' player are V.A.), the ECU president provided an answer, probably because he wanted everyone to know that Kramnik wasn't a member of the group. Danailov isn't known for subtlety.
Silvio Danailov - 4 Apr: The right answer of my yesterday puzzle is: Ivanchuk and Gelfand
If you're scratching your head about Ivanchuk, he lost the final match to Ponomariov in the 2001-02 FIDE World Championship. A week later Danailov tweeted,
Silvio Danailov - 13 Apr: Very appropriate day for the puzzle of the weekend: Who is the most privileged top player on the recent chess history? The answer next week.
I'm not sure what he meant by 'appropriate day for the puzzle of the weekend', unless he was referring to Kasparov's 50th birthday on 13 April. The phrase 'recent chess history' is open to interpretation. If this means the last 50 years, I would say Karpov was the most privileged, but I suppose has was taking another swipe at Kramnik.
The next puzzle had the entire chess world puzzled, and still does.
Silvio Danailov - 21 Apr: Puzzle of the week: Why FIDE is on such a rush to organize the match Carlsen - Anand in Chennai without bidding procedure?
My guess was that FIDE wanted Carlsen to withdraw from the match, thereby handing his place to Kramnik. Ilyumzhinov, after all, depends on the Russian Federation to nominate and endorse him before each election, and 2014 will be an election year (during the Olympiad in Norway!). I can think of other, equally outlandish, reasons. A few days later Danailov gave a hint.
Silvio Danailov - 23 Apr: Many interesting theories on my puzzle but so far nobody have a clue. Do you remember the slogan of my ECU electoral campaign? "I know.."??
I doubt that anyone remembers the slogan. What did he know and when did he know it?
Silvio Danailov - 2 May: Puzzle of the week: FIDE WCOC commission will have balls to introduce Sofia Rules in Carlsen - Anand WCC match this year or not?
Re having balls, is there something controversial about the Sofia Rules? They make complete sense to me.
Getting back to the previous tweet, maybe he meant something like, "What evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" Whatever Danailov knows or doesn't know, I hope he keeps tweeting his puzzles. Chess needs more of this sort of entertainment.
Continuing with GM Carlsen's competitive record, while Comparing 'Wonderboy' with TMER, I identified several dozen events that were not yet recorded on my page about Magnus Carlsen's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (2000-). Many of these were obscure team and club tournaments with only sketchy details, so I decided to add only those that were recorded in the last chapter of Agdestein's book 'Wonderboy': the 'Table of Main Results'.
Five years ago to the month, I noted, Over 5.000.000 Served!, on my chess site.
Time marches on and the web never sleeps.
Drummer piece
© Flickr user Esteban Manchado under
Creative Commons.
'Detail of drummer piece (equivalent of Knight) in a jazz-themed chess set in the Jazz Museum in Harlem.'
Even though my online play these days is centered on chess960, I always like to have a few active games of traditional chess. My favorite type of chess tournament is the cup format, which suits any number of participants of any strength.
In cup play, the players are first assigned arbitrarily to a number of preliminary round robins ('all play all'), where the highest scoring players in each section qualify for the next stage. Each round uses the same format until a single winner emerges from the final round. Most players take the event seriously, there are few dropouts, and the competition gets stiffer at each round.
Since 2002, I've played every two years in the IECG/LSS Cup (the IECG eventually became LSS), which uses a four stage format. For the first five tournaments -- 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010 -- I always managed to qualify from the preliminary round to the quarterfinal round, and I should qualify for 2012 as well, barring a last minute accident.
In each of the first three tournaments, I was eliminated in the quarterfinal round. In 2006 (quarterfinal start January 2008), I finished 6th out of seven with a score of +1-4=1, and decided that I had to improve my approach. The steps that I took are documented elsewhere on this blog.
In the 2008 tournament, I qualified for the first time from the quarterfinal to the semifinal round with a score of +3-1=2. There was some luck involved here, because I should have lost a key game: A Few Careless Seconds. I was eliminated in the semifinal round with a respectable score of +2-0=6, a half point away from qualifying for the final.
In the 2010 tournament, I again qualified from the quarterfinal to the semifinal round: this time with a score of +3-0=3, and no luck involved. After five years of playing chess960, I'm finding the opening phase of traditional chess considerably less interesting. It's always based on the same initial moves following the same set of limited ideas. I documented this a few years ago in Differences Between Chess and Chess960. Eventually the opening phase exits theory and the game starts for real -- that's when things really get interesting and that's what keeps me coming back.
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