Since my page on Award Winning Chess Books was last updated May 2009, I added three books that had received awards since then -- Herman Grooten's 'Chess Strategy for Club Players', Eliot Hearst & John Knott's 'Blindfold Chess', and Garry Kasparov's 'Kasparov vs Karpov 1975-1985'. Although the book on 'Blindfold Chess' won the 2009 Cramer Award, I couldn't find a formal announcement for it. Nor could I find any mention of a 2008 Cramer Award.
In the Introduction to the current issue of TWIC, no.829, Mark Crowther offered some thoughts on PGN and on the FIDE rating lists:-
My enjoyment of the Olympiad has somewhat been curtailed by the processes I have created for dealing with the games in this Olympiad. The official site coverage has not been at all bad but the games are capable of some improvement.
I created a master list of players from the chess-results.com list which is the site which has the correct results. However they made life hard by not giving the FIDE ID for the player and not punctuating the players' names. However once I did that I collected the results from there and compared them with the results from the games. I also added board numbers (Match followed by Board) which allowed me to find some incorrect results. I have also created a completely new pair of tags, WhiteFideId and BlackFideId.
The PGN standard is badly in need of some work on it. (FIDE would be the place for such discussions but I would have to think long and hard about contributing if they reelect Ilyumzhinov.) Its simpilicity has made the dissemination of games possible and standard. But additional tags would be helpful. If (as it would have been possible to do because of the way I process games) I had processed games in the past with black and white FideIds in it then the material would have gained a huge amount of value (although even here there are problems as unbelievably FIDE reuse the IDs of dead players, like there aren't enough numbers).
I also want to move to full names, a complex issue, the FIDE rating list, particularly in some areas such as the Indian part of the list, is a mess and as always what do you do about duplicate names? (the many Alexey Ivanovs or other such common name pairs, Hungarian names also seem to have a lot of duplicates).
Anyhow the Olympiad is the place to test some ideas because there is so much material. Comments and errors in the PGN on the website with full names and in this issue with the shortened form, are welcome. I hope to move to a better and more streamlined way of processing games. Anyway I think I made big progress and I hope in the second week I can settle down to enjoy the chess.
The TWIC PGN game scores are used to populate many downstream databases. Another important online resource is Chessgames.com, who had this to say about the Olympics on the same day Crowther made his remarks (from User Profile chessgames.com):-
Sep-27-10: We have software that automatically imports data every several times a day. Sometimes it tries to get the games from the official site, but for some events like the Olympiad we prefer to get the PGN from an indirect source, in this case from The Week in Chess (http://www.chess.co.uk/twic/twic.html). We prefer TWIC over the "real thing" because their version of the PGN is tends to be much more refined, especially when it comes to normalized name spellings, dates, and details like that.
An import nuance to understand is that this software does not recognize what round we are on; it doesn't say "OK, this should be round 9, where are the round 9 games?" It simply takes a gigantic file of PGN and says "OK, which games in here aren't already in the database?" Usually these are the games from the most recent round, but not necessarily -- if some game from round 1 suddenly became available at the end of the event, it would grab that too.
So: if TWIC currently has bad game scores for the early rounds of the Olympiad, and at the same time we embarked on a project to delete the bad games and import from the official site, eventually our import software would identify the erroneous TWIC games we deleted as "new" and end up inserting them all over again. We'd end up with duplicates like crazy (both the wrong scores and the right ones side by side).
Now if TWIC was an unreliable source -- if we weren't sure that they would fix this problem in a timely manner or perhaps not at all -- then I agree we should go elsewhere. But Mark Crowther is immaculate and his fans are quick to alert him to problems. If he hasn't fixed round 1 already I'm sure he'll get to it it soon. When that happens it's just a matter of deleting the aberrant games and then our automatic import script will take care of the rest.
So in short, if we simply wait, this problem is 99% likely to take care of itself and probably within a day or two. If we try too hard to fix it ASAP we could end up ith an even bigger mess on our hands.
As someone who has also grappled with PGN inconsistencies, although not on the scale that these giants do regularly, I wholeheartedly support any effort to improve the PGN standard, whether managed by FIDE or not.
Continuing with Fischer - Geller, Bled 1961, the most interesting position for further analysis is shown in the following diagram. White's last move attacked the d-Pawn for a second time.
Bled 1961
Geller
Fischer
(After 18.Bc1-f4)
Geller played 18...d5. Fischer gave the move a '?' and commented
Loses outright. In the post-mortem Tal tried to hold the game with 18...Rd8 19.Qe2 hxg4; but after 20.hxg4 Black is in virtual zugzwang (*). If 20...Qh7? 21.Bxd6+ wins.
Spending a half page on the same position, Kasparov also gave Geller's move a '?', but for different reasons. After 18...Rd8, he first dismissed Fischer's suggestion, 19.Qe2 hxg4 20.hxg4, with the move 20...f5, eventually arriving at a Queen endgame on move 40. He concluded that 'the win for White is problematic'. He then gave two 'more interesting continuations', 19.Qb3 and 19.g5. On the first move he concluded, 'Black retains drawing chances', and on the second, 'White should win'.
Kasparov's analysis in the Predecessors series, while always impressive, has been dogged by the criticism that it depends too much on the work of computers. I was reminded of this in a comment to my previous post in this series, Fischer Overestimates His Position.
Fischer saw the truth in this game. Dmitry Plisetsky and Kasparov's super computers only show that some truths cannot be proven.
These days you don't need a supercomputer to get an amazingly accurate tactical analysis. I submitted the position after 18.Bf4 Rd8 to two different engines. After Fischer's suggestion 19.Qe2, both found 20...f5 within a few seconds. Likewise, both engines quickly found Kasparov's suggestions 19.Qb3 and 19.g5, and ranked them well ahead of their third choice, 19.Qe2.
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it risks becoming obsolete as computers get faster and as chess playing software becomes stronger. In Rybka 1 - Fischer / Huebner / Kasparov 0, I already discussed one well known position where Kasparov missed the strongest move.
In the position under examination in this post, the engines improve on Kasparov's 19.Qb3 Qf6! 20.Qb6 hxg4 21.Rad1! (leading to 'Black retains drawing chances') with the zwischenzug 20.Qb4, when 20...c5 looks forced, but further weakens the d-Pawn. Only now does White play Kasparov's suggestion 21.Qb6 hxg4. In addition to 22.Rad1, White has 22.h4, stopping all counterplay on the h-file and leading to the win of the exchange. This looks stronger than the positions after 19.g5; we go from 'White should win' to White wins.
Refinements like these don't mean we should just dismiss the analysis in Predecessors. It means we should take the analysis with a grain of salt (like all chess analysis) and use Kasparov's investigations as a map for discovering interesting positions and as a starting point for further analyses. That's exactly what I intend to do with future posts in this series.
***
(*) I'm not sure what Fischer meant by 'virtual zugzwang'. Is it a position that is almost a zugzwang, but not quite?
As a followup to Chess and the Polish Underground, here is the second post in what could turn out to be a series on chess playing statues.
Little Statue in Calgary © Flickr user Jasmine Streisel under Creative Commons.
According to Marching off to Battle in Calgary
It is called "The Winner" by J. Seward Johnson Jr. and was made in 1988. I tried to figure out the position on the board that the subject is staring at but unfortunately the piece has suffered vandalism over the years and many of the chess pieces are missing.
On Chess.com, a Calgary resident attempted to reconstruct the full position: Calgary Chess Statue... Odd Position. Then came Batgirl to the rescue!
In my series on Top eBay Chess Items by Price, when I have a choice of several items to feature I usually favor the most artistic. I'm not sure why this is -- maybe it has something to do with my conviction that the web is a visual medium. The last painting I featured was the post on Fr.Dumar...l?, the next one is 'Antique Painting of Cavaliers Playing Chess by G Appert', pictured below. It sold 'Buy It Now' for US $1,500.
The description said,
This is an absolutely fabulous Antique Painting of Cavaliers Playing Chess by G Appert IN EXCELLENT CONDITION!!! This wonderful painting is a genuine original oil painting by listed artist Georges Appert. It is a superb example depicting a group of conquistadors playing chess. It has a spectacular composition and is extremely well executed. It measures approximately 23" by 27" framed, 17" by 21" site.
Note the use of 'cavaliers' in the title and 'conquistadors' in the description. In many eBay descriptions, the seller guesses at the period covered by the subject matter, e.g. if it's probably English and it looks old, call it 'Victorian'. Since the artist of our featured painting was Georges Appert (French, 1850-1934), I guess that 'cavaliers' is more likely to be correct. The word 'cavalier' also happens to be the French word for the chess Knight, bringing this post full circle.
A couple of months ago, commenting on the game in Symmetry Misjudged, I mentioned,
It is rare for competent correspondence players to blunder, with or without computers. The errors are almost always more subtle, like misjudging long term factors.
Not too long after that, I received my first gift via a blunder in a long, long time (*). Moreover, I'm almost certain that it happened because the game was played on a server that allows the use of computers.
I had White in the position shown in the top diagram. Two Pawns down with a King confined to the corner, my position was hopeless. On several previous moves I had already decided to resign if my opponent (rated around 2200) found what appeared to be the killer move. I hadn't resigned because, since gaining the decisive advantage, he had started moving quickly (sometimes taking only a few minutes to respond) and had played a series of second-rate moves. Even so, he retained a huge advantage and my play was reduced to a desperate search for theoretical draws. I wrote about one of those ideas in the post on R vs. B Plus Knight Pawns.
My last move threatened mate by h2-h3+, but this is easily parried by 46...Re3. After this I still had a few tricks to try -- positions with Rook plus a- & h-Pawn ( or f- & h-Pawn) vs. Rook -- but against correct play none of these would have worked.
The bottom diagram is the same as the top diagram, except the board has been rotated to show Black on the bottom. This is the orientation used by the particular server when entering a move for Black. Here I imagine that my opponent let his engine run until he was convinced that 46...Re3 was by far the best move, then made it. Unfortunately for him, he forgot that Black was moving up the board, first clicked the Rook on e5, then clicked the target square on his own third rank, then quickly clicked SUBMIT.
My first reaction on seeing the move 46...Re6 was to think, 'How can he keep making moves that I haven't considered?' My second reaction was to congratulate myself for not having resigned earlier. My third reaction was to send 47.h3+, after which my opponent promptly resigned. What was that about misjudging long term factors?
The moral of this story is not 'Never resign!'; sometimes it's best to abandon a lost game and use your energy for more fruitful endeavors. The moral is 'Double check your move before you click SUBMIT.' There are few situations more frustrating than throwing away months of good work because of a few careless seconds.
***
(*) In fact it was the second gift in the space of a few weeks, but that's a different story. Does server chess render good players sloppy?
My first task in restarting 18 Memorable Months (August 2009), the most recent post in the series on 18 Memorable Games (January 2008), was to remember why I was doing it in the first place. I often leave myself sticky notes in my posts and the 2008 post was no exception: the purpose of the series is to identify 'differences in opinion between the 11th and the 13th World Champions'. With that in mind, I'll start with a PGN game score showing the punctuation from the game that was no.29 in Fischer's 60 Memorable Games and no.66 in Kasparov's Predecessors IV.
[Event "Bled"]
[Site "?"]
[Date "1961.??.??"]
[Round "6"]
[White "Fischer, R."]
[Black "Geller, E."]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "C72"]
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 d6 5.O-O Bg4 {KAS: '!?'} 6.h3 {FIS: '!'; KAS: '!'} 6...Bh5 7.c3 Qf6 {FIS: '?'; KAS: '?'} 8.g4 {FIS: '!'; KAS: '!'} 8...Bg6 9.d4 {FIS: '!'; KAS: '!'} 9...Bxe4 10.Nbd2 Bg6 11.Bxc6+ bxc6 12.dxe5 {KAS: '!'} 12...dxe5 13.Nxe5 {FIS: '!'; KAS: '!'} 13...Bd6 14.Nxg6 {FIS: '!'; KAS: '!'} 14...Qxg6 15.Re1+ Kf8 16.Nc4 h5 17.Nxd6 cxd6 18.Bf4 d5 {FIS: '?'; KAS: '?'} 19.Qb3 {KAS: '!'} 19...hxg4 20.Qb7 {FIS: '!'; KAS: '!'} 20...gxh3+ 21.Bg3 Rd8 22.Qb4+ 1-0
There's not much difference in opinion on this game, a Fischer steamroller from start to finish. Maybe an engine can find something interesting on the alternatives to 18...d5. I'll look at that in another post.
To play through the complete game, see...
Robert James Fischer vs Efim Geller, Bled 1961
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008405
...on Chessgames.com.
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