Is Adorjan OK?

After the series on Practical Evaluation, what's next? One idea comes from the last post in that series, A Pawn Equals 200 Rating Points, where I estimated,

The value of the first move is 40 rating points (1/5 of a Pawn). Going back to the table from 'Chess Ratings' (rating expectancies vs. differences), a difference of 40 rating points gives the higher rated player a little less than a 0.56 chance of winning the game. This means a 56% expected score for White, and a 44% expected score for Black, which is close to the result derived from databases of historical master-level games.

How does that square with the 'Black Is OK' books by GM Andras Adorjan? Here are the publication dates and titles of the three books in the series:-

• 1988: 'Black Is OK!'
• 2004: 'Black Is Still OK!'
• 2005: 'Black Is OK Forever!'

I once reviewed the last title, Black Is OK Forever!, and have since acquired the first two titles, so I'm ready to roll.

Practical Evaluation

It's time to wrap up this series on 'Engine Evaluation' and 'Material Imbalances'. Here are the posts to date:-

• 2012-12-13: Engine Evaluation
• 2013-01-15: Kaufman's Material Imbalances • Kaufman 1999
• 2013-01-22: Notes on Material Imbalances
• 2013-01-29: Soltis on Kaufman's Material Imbalances
• 2013-02-07: One Imbalance Leads to Another • Kaufman 2003
• 2013-02-14: Piece Values Are Relative • Soltis on Spielmann
• 2013-02-19: A Pawn Equals 200 Rating Points

For more on 'Engine Evaluation', see Evaluation on chessprogramming.wikispaces.com; a site search on 'evaluation' also yields many other useful pages. In several games I've already used the knowledge acquired -- especially with regard to a more accurate evaluation of Rook vs. minor piece exchanges -- and am certain that my understanding of chess has deepened noticeably.

All TMERs Converted

Taking a break from the Carlsen series (where the previous post was Carlsen TMER TWIC Refs) I went back to the About to Tripod conversions and finished converting everything I intended to do for Chess History on the Web : Support material. The last two TMERs were

• Ponomariov's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record, and
• Staunton's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record

Not only did I add the two new pages to my Chess History index, I also tweaked the other six TMERs linked from that page to make them all consistent. Then I altered links to point to the converted material from the 'career' page on my World Chess Championship site : Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Records.

Sources of Inspiration

The topic I had planned for today's blog post crashed and burned just after takeoff. Since damage repair will take some time, I had to scramble to find another topic. My first idea was a topic I've had on the backburner for a few months, but it turned out to be too heavy for the time I still had available. My second idea, another backburner topic, was to analyze the chess links I collected during the full year 2012.

I spend some time every day, totaling a few hours each week, going through various web based resources keeping up with chess news and reading posts of interest on the various chess blogs I follow. Anything of particular interest gets bookmarked and added to an archive of links that dates back ten years or so. In 2012 I bookmarked nearly 1200 web pages.

I isolated the 2012 portion of the archive, loaded it into a database, and ran various queries against it. The 1200 links represented 243 different domains, 79 of them with more than one link. These don't include World Championship or chess960 links, which I split off early in the process and handle separately for my other blogs. Of the 243 different domains, the ten resources I found most useful in 2012 are shown in the following list. (The list has 12 domains because of a tied count on the last item.)

• 106 www.chessbase.com
• 99 www.chessvibes.com
• 72 www.uschess.org
• 59 www.google.com [search on a topical chess phrase]
• 40 groups.google.com [mainly rec.games.chess]
• 39 www.fide.com
• 35 main.uschess.org
• 35 www.chessblog.com
• 33 tartajubow.blogspot.com
• 31 blog.chess.com
• 31 www.chessdom.com
• 31 www.whychess.org

Not surprisingly, the news resources Chessbase and Chessvibes head the list. Chessbase covers all of the most important news items, while Chessvibes typically has many comments from informed chess fans. The two USchess.org domains are a mixture of U.S. chess news items (both www.- and main.-) and the members-only forum (www.-). The Chess.com count would be higher if it included the www.chess.com resource, while Whychess.org would be higher if it included Whychess.com (I had never noticed before this exercise that there were two Whychess domains).

The blogs I bookmarked most frequently were Chessblog.com and Tartajubow.blogspot.com. The first is Alexandra Kosteniuk's blog and the second is by a blogger who prefers to remain anonymous ('Tartajubow') and who has many of the same chess interests that I do: correspondence play, engines, and history. After these two, the blogs I bookmarked the most were:-

• 19 kevinspraggett.blogspot.com
• 17 chessexpress.blogspot.com
• 16 streathambrixtonchess.blogspot.com
• 14 stevegiddinschessblog.blogspot.com
• 12 jimwestonchess.blogspot.com

I also bookmarked nearly 20 pages on my own CFAA blog, but this was mainly to flag actions, like follow-ups, for a later time. Looks like I might need an even bigger backburner.

Chess for Preschoolers

Project 366 2012 - 286/366: Chess tournament © Flickr user Rrrodrigo under Creative Commons.

The caption said, 'Otwarte Mistrzostwa Malopolski Przedszkolaków w Szachach', which Google translates as 'Open championship of Malopolska chess preschoolers'.

Putting Faces to Names

Remember this list of Chinese players from my post Putting Names to Numbers, where I identified world top-100 players? China (CHN):-

• 14: 2752 Wang Hao
• 33: 2709 Ding Liren
• 46: 2702 Wang Yue
• 60: 2688 Yu Yangyi
• 73: 2675 Bu Xiangzhi
• 74: 2674 Li Chao b

The first number is the player's world rank as of 1 January 2013. Can you match the name of the star to his face in the following composite image?

Sources: All images from Wikipedia

For the solution, see the comments to this post. For more photos, use Google Images.

A Pawn Equals 200 Rating Points

Continuing the discussion of Kaufman's Material Imbalances, there are two methods of estimating the value of an imbalance in chess. The first method that all chess players learn is the 1/3/5/9 scale, where the unit is the value of a Pawn. Kaufman frequently resorts to another method, estimating an imbalance in terms of a rating difference. For example, here's a passage from 'The Evaluation of Material Imbalances':-

In case you are wondering what the study showed the rating equivalent of a Pawn to be, I must point out that it is a tricky question. The problem is that when one side is up in material, sometimes it's because he's just outplayed his opponent, but other times it's because the opponent has sacrificed the material for some compensation.

If we make the fair but arbitrary assumption that on average the player who is behind in material has 50% compensation for it, then the rating value of a Pawn (without compensation) works out to about 200 points. In other words, if you outrate your opponent by 200 points but blunder away a Pawn for nothing in the middlegame, the chances should be equal.

In other words, a Pawn is equivalent to a 200 point rating difference. In my page on Chess Ratings, I copy a well known table that equates a 200 point difference to a 0.76, i.e. 76%, chance of winning. To keep it simple, we can round this to 75% for easier mental calculation. The Kaufman paragraph that I just quoted is followed by a discussion of the value of a tempo.

Statistics show that in (international) master play White is worth about 40 rating points; since White's advantage is a half tempo, that means a tempo is worth about 80 points in the opening position. Gambit theory suggests that at the start a Pawn is worth between two and three tempi, so if we use 2 1/2 times 80 we get the same 200 figure.

That squares nicely with a calculation from Kaufman's later article, the one I discussed in One Imbalance Leads to Another. Here a tempo is defined in terms of a Pawn.

• 0.4 - Value of a tempo
• 0.2 - Value of first move

As a practical example, consider the following;

Black(!) to move

This diagram is not the result of 1.e4 e5, but rather 1.e3 e5 2.e4. White started with a first move advantage of 0.2 (of a Pawn), then squandered a tempo to lose 0.4, giving him a net result of -0.2, i.e. 0.2 for Black. A lost tempo on White's second move means the first move advantage passes to Black -- exactly what we expect to happen.

***

Later: Another practical example is to combine the observation

• 0.2 - Value of first move [as a fraction of a Pawn]

with

• A Pawn Equals 200 Rating Points

This implies that the value of the first move is 40 rating points (1/5 of a Pawn). Going back to the table from 'Chess Ratings' (rating expectancies vs. differences), a difference of 40 rating points gives the higher rated player a little less than a 0.56 chance of winning the game. This means a 56% expected score for White, and a 44% expected score for Black, which is close to the result derived from databases of historical master-level games.