The Chess Mind

Some, like GMs Alexander Grischuk and Vladislav Tkachiev, have subscribed to that point of view for years, but most have taken the balanced view that both forms have their place. In the latest issue of Chess Today, however, GM Alex Baburin seems to moving into the Grischuk & Tkachiev camp:

The more I watch this tournament in Nice, the more I tend to agree with Grischuk & Co that classical chess is dead and that the way forward is rapid chess, blitz and, well, blindfold chess! Every day there are lots of interesting games played in the Amber tournament. Sure, there are mistakes, but sometimes they make games more entertaining and the shorter time control certainly encourages daring chess – like Ivanchuk's 14.Qxe6+!! idea from round 4. Would he have played it in a game with a longer time control? Maybe not – the shock value of this move is greatly enhanced in rapid chess.

I think this is a good argument (or rather, an enthymeme) for keeping rapid games around, but it's a bad argument for the Grischuk position unless it's only the values of blitz/rapid/blindfold that are relevant. But why think that? Deep ideas will be lost - does anyone think Kasparov's double rook sac against Topalov or Shirov's ...Bh3 would occur in G/30? Endgame play will deteriorate as well, as will principled attempts to refute moves like Ivanchuk's Qxe6. Excitement is good, but so is depth.

Readers?

I responded to this in the comments section of this post, but it seems interesting enough to merit its own discussion. So here is Bernard Kobes' comment:

Kudos to Karjakin for playing on as long as he did. I hate the notion that this is in some way disrespectful -especially in a rapid game! No doubt it is perceived as disrespectful, and perception makes it so. But to some degree this is a convention, and it's bad for chess because it makes top-level games less accessible to lower-rated players. You should not be reinforcing the convention.

To which I reply:

Hi Bernard,

Whether I should or not depends on both objective and subjective factors. Since I think this convention is a good thing, it's subjectively proper that I reinforce it. As for the objective propriety, that depends on the truth of the matter. Is the claim that that top-level games are less accessible to lower-rated players by virtue of "premature" resignations good evidence, if true, that the convention is a poor one?

To this I have doubts on many levels. First, unless every game goes until mate, there may always be some lower-rated player who doesn't "get it". Unless you want to do away with resignation altogether, there are going to be boundary problems here.

Second, even if we can find some reasonable approximate threshold (e.g. the "average" club player - approximately 1500), I think that this particular game easily satisfied that standard. Even if the 1500 couldn't beat Kasparov with White, there's nothing conceptually difficult about White's task.

Third, eliminating (relatively early?) resignations may be bad pedagogy for lower-rated players. One learns better when motivated by curiosity than when spoonfed. Some spoonfeeding is ok, and that's what the 20,000 beginners' books on the market by Reinfeld, Horowitz, Chernev, Pandolfini and so on are for.

Fourth, how does knowing how to win an ending with a huge material advantage make GM play more accessible? The part of the game that makes it GM play has to do with the adventures surrounding 14.Qxe6, not the trivial remainder that would have ensued.

Fifth, even if it would be a good idea from the pedagogy/accessibility standpoint for GMs to continue playing positions out, that's not the only value worth considering. Why should the players have to waste their time and energy on a game that is de facto over in the absence of a natural disaster, heart attack, stroke, criminal act or divine intervention? It's also an aesthetic blight. Playing the game until mate could take 40 or 50 moves, if Black attempts to put up "quality" resistance. That would turn this mini-masterpiece into something akin to a quarter and a half of a great basketball game followed by two and a half quarters of garbage time. The amateur, like most basketball fans, will simply change the channel.

Three final comments. First, even if the convention should be changed, Karjakin's action is still disrespectful, given its existence. (Or if one thinks that in this particular case it was justified even given the convention, substitute a different case of your own choosing.) Second, the "rapid" element doesn't seem to be relevant - Ivanchuk had three times as much time as Karjakin, and there were increments as well. Finally, going back to a point I made earlier, one of the things I did as a kid was to play out positions where one side resigned. Generally it was pretty obvious, but occasionally I learned something, and it's very unlikely that I would have learned it had it been given in the text. Chess strength is a skill, and solving problems for oneself, or at least trying to, is the best way to improve.

As fantastic as Ivanchuk's 14.Qxe6!! really is, it's possibly not quite as original an idea as one might think, for three reasons.

The first is that it was discovered in home prep and not over the board - unlike his famous Qg7!! against Shirov. (This game is linked below.) To my mind, this isn't a blemish, but there are some who find themselves less inclined to rate a game highly when significant portions of it are the product of home analysis. A notable example is game 10 of the Kasparov-Anand match, where Kasparov won with a stupendous torrent of sacrifices that not only won the game, but went a long way towards winning the match as well thanks to the big chance of momentum. Another example, albeit on a smaller scale, comes from the USCL 2007 Game of the Year countdown. On its merits, the game Martinez-Zilberstein is arguably the cleanest and most brilliant of the contenders. The key tactical ideas had been discovered beforehand, though, and in an online poll for the GOTY it seems to have received a bit less credit than I think it would have, had Martinez found all the moves over the board (or at least not admitted he hadn't).

The second is that 14.Qxe6 is discovered by chess engines; not right away, but it doesn't take them hours, either. I don't know if Ivanchuk found it or his computers did, but supposing it was Rybka or Fritz, should the game be valued less highly?

Third, while I can't think of any similar sacrifices, the position after the sac does remind me of a position that arose in a famous Elephant Gambit game between Tal and Lutikov. (A side note about Lutikov: he's probably best known, for those who know him at all, for this game. As usual with those who get "posterized", that's a bit of bad luck. He's a GM, and one with an impressive 5-2 career advantage over Tal in decisive games.) Suppose Ivanchuk drew subconscious inspiration from that game. Would it count against the brilliance and originality of his idea?

By all means, readers, let me know your opinions. For your entertainment, you can replay all the games mentioned above here (except for the Ivanchuk-Karjakin game, which is here).

...would have been today.

With several tips of the hat to Chess Today, here are some more articles on Fischer you might want to check out:

GM Jonathan Speelman (Guardian)
GM Matanovic for the Chess Informant

Also, there's a Fischer Memorial. Needless to say, it's not in the United States. Lest you think this has to do with (understandable) scruples about Fischer's vile anti-American and anti-Jewish rants, let me remind you that we haven't had any memorial events for Morphy or Fine, either, on the national level. (There have been a couple of fairly big events commemorating Reshevsky, though I don't know the degree to which the USCF was involved.) No, the event will take place in Villa Martelli, Argentina from March 11-19. I suspect that most of the players in the tournament were born after Fischer won the world championship in 1972, but there is one participant who not only lived in Fischer's era, he played in it, too. In fact, he played Fischer himself three times.

That player is GM Oscar Panno, who was for a time in the 1950s (and during a nice run in 1978) one of the best players in the world. Born in 1935, he won the World Junior championship in 1953, became a GM in 1955 and a Candidate a year later. He played three games, as noted above, with Fischer, and each is noteworthy in its own way.

The first, a draw in the 1958 Portoroz Interzonal, is noteworthy in part because of the event, and in part because he drew!

The second game, from Buenos Aires 1970, is noteworthy - and famous - because of Fischer's beautiful concluding combination in a King's Indian Attack.

Finally, the third game is noteworthy for its startling brevity. Played in the last round of the 1970 Interzonal in Palma de Mallorca, Panno became Fischer's 7th consecutive victim (Fischer went on to win thirteen more games in a row!) in a game that went 1.c4 Resigns. Black did not forfeit; he resigned. (Panno refused to play in protest for Fischer's various reschedulings, but rather than let his flag fall he actually resigned the game 52 minutes in.)

You can replay all three games here.

Right here. (HT: Brian Karen)

I find his comments about playing long series with computers interesting - he does it to develop his mental toughness. As for Grischuk breaking his ICC blitz record, allegedly with Rauf Mamedov's help, I can't comment, but I do have something to say about his criticism of Nicholas Nip. Nip is the San Francisco youngster who broke Nakamura's record for the youngest-ever American master, and apparently he gained a lot of the needed points in rated matches (rather than tournaments). Not knowing the principals, I can't offer any judgments about whether the matches were on the up-and-up, but I can't see anything wrong with using matches to boost one's rating - as long as the games are real.

Matches are the classic chess confrontation. While a handful of chess tournaments remain famous to this day (Hastings 1895, New York 1924, Zurich 1953 and a very few others), chess fans remember many of the epic matches in history (Fischer-Spassky, just about all of Karpov's world championship matches, ditto for Kasparov, Alekhine's great upset of Capablanca in 1927, Tal's win over Botvinnik in 1960, Fischer's 6-0 sweeps against Taimanov and Larsen, and so on). Many players consider it the truest test of strength, and so it's not surprising that amateurs want to try their hand at that discipline.

Further, it's simply a practical expedient. When I was growing up, I lived in an area where there was approximately one tournament every other month, and I'd only get to play opponents near my rating in the last two rounds. I could - and often did - go 4.5/5 but only gain a handful of points. So in the early months of 1984, when I was close to master (my rating was 2184), I played a series of rated matches - both to get my rating over 2200 as soon as possible and for the training. It's far more interesting and useful to play a series of games with a tough opponent who has been preparing for you than the occasional odd game with said opponent.

So if Nakamura's only concern is that Nip used matches, I say he should not only not complain about it, he should consider following suit. His current FIDE rating is 2686, 14 points from the "magic" 2700 barrier. Rather than playing in a handful of round-robin events during the year, having to hope he's in good form, not nicked for draws by "ordinary" GMs significantly lower-rated than he is, etc., he might look for a quality match opponent to expedite his path to the elite circuit.