The Chess Mind

Fans of his opening work and readers of Chess Today will be familiar with GM Mikhail Golubev. A recent and fairly extended interview with him can be found starting on this page, but here I'll draw your attention to something he said near the very end:

[Question:] I practically never saw nice websites for those who may wish to learn how to play chess from the complete zero level...

[Golubev's Reply:] Personally, I prefer, for example, to analyse some Fischer Attack game with a novelty around the move 20. I like to annotate games. Also to annotate them in the "Informator style", without any words - in such way I annotated games for Informator and New in Chess in the pre-computer era. With some ideas and, not too often, decent quality. But I am afraid that nowadays it is possible to teach [a] monkey how to push a few buttons inside the Rybka or Fritz interface, and the result will be of [...] better quality than these old notes of mine... I see that explaining computer’s variations becomes a larger and larger part of the annotator’s work. This trend is not new, but it started to really disturb me only recently, right now I am still not sure what to do about that. Nothing dramatic, in any case. [Emphasis added.]

Ah, those darned monkeys! In truth, the monkeys won't replace the GMs. They really just exist online in the form of 1300s berating the grandmasters they're watching for missing some "obvious" move found by their quad-cores running Rybka; those of us who want to learn will read what strong analysts have to say. We might check their analysis with the computer, but whatever we come to understand almost always results from the text, not the printout.

Here's a question (by email) from Brett Thomas-DeJongh:

For example, when I listen to chess.fm live broadcasts I sometimes hear things like, "Well, we'll leave that up to the theoreticians." I always thought that the people who make the theory are the Super-GMs trotting out the novelties in top tournaments. We hear about Bobby Fischer being a theoretician of the King's Indian, Geller revolutionizing it, etc. Also, when we hear that Topalov played Nxf7 in the Moscow variation against Kramnik, Cheparinov had analyzed this sacrifice to move 40.

Are there other theoreticians besides the top OTB players? Are top correspondence players the real theoreticians? And last, are there any theoreticians who are not above a certain ELO, say 2600?

We should distinguish between theory and theoreticians. Theory is the product of all chess players' work. It's not only the games of super- or even regular GMs that count, but those of any competent players (both OTB and correspondence) whose games reach the databases, that define a certain position as "theory". That's probably the most general sense. In a more specialized sense, "theory" is what gets written about by "theoreticians", and in this case it's generally NOT the super-GMs who count. Who are the theoreticians? Here's the answer. Do you have an opening book? Look at the front cover. If you see a name on it, then congratulations: you've just identified one!

That's really all there is to it. If someone writes an opening book, then presto! - he or she is a theoretician. Likewise if someone writes an article on an opening in a magazine or journal, or discusses an opening in an online source (even in a blog, for instance). There's really nothing more mysterious than that. In fact, it's generally not GMs who are considered "theoreticians", even if it's their games that are most prominent in pushing theory along. It's generally the scribblers a few notches lower, whose main claim to fame is their writing on openings, who get that moniker. (Examples: Richard Palliser, a 2406 FIDE player who seems to publish a new opening book every week; and in the avant-garde department, Stefan Bücker, a German FM known for his development and advocacy of some mighty peculiar-looking ideas and his editorship of Kaissiber.)

As you may all remember, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov lost, and quickly, to Igor Kurnosov in a late round of the recently finished Aeroflot Open in Moscow. After the game - at the end of it, really - Mamedyarov, bothered by the conjunction of Kurnosov's leaving the board after practically every move and his coming back to make crushing moves. Mamedyarov resigned after Kurnosov's 21st move, filed a protest over his opponent's behavior, and then withdrew from the tournament.

As I argued here (and others, including Kurnosov (here), have similarly argued), Mamedyarov's case for his opponent's cheating isn't very impressive on the face of it. (That doesn't mean that Kurnosov's behavior couldn't have aroused suspicion, only that his performance in the game (a) fell short of a Rybka standard and (b) didn't require Rybka either, but was well within the competence of a 2600-level grandmaster.) Ideally, that would be the end of the cheating allegation, and then discussion can move on to appropriate measures that allow players to roam around and smoke their lungs out while ensuring that they can't readily cheat.

Unfortunately, this was not the end, and Mamedyarov has released another open letter. You can check the link just given, but here's the gist:

In round 2 vs. Onischuk, Kurnosov responded to a novelty by making 15 Rybka moves, winning beautifully.

In round 4, vs. Moiseenko, he again responds strongly to a novelty with 14 Rybka moves, but this time the opponent's position was too solid and the game was drawn.

In round 6, we have the Mamedyarov game, again featuring Kurnosov playing Rybka's moves.

In round 8, now under heavy scrutiny thanks to Mamedyarov's allegations, he played poorly and got crushed.

The conclusion of his argument is that "this is [a] clear indication that Kurnosov used a computer program, leaving the tournament hall practically after every move".

Well, no, this doesn't follow at all. As already mentioned, his argument concerning his own game is very poor, and the inference he drew about round 8 is really preposterous. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that Kurnosov is innocent. His name has been dragged through the mud in a very public way, and now he's supposed to play at full strength, with confidence and complete concentration? Not very likely. Not only will he be emotionally affected, but now he can't even engage in his usual smoking routine because now it will continue to raise the suspicion. So what does he do? If he goes to smoke, he has to worry what others will think, and if he doesn't, his mind won't work the way he expects it to. If anything, his lousy round eight performance might be counter-evidence: if Kurnosov was such a brazen cheater (cheating every single move in all [but only?] his Black games, then even if he couldn't use Rybka, he'd at least be strongly motivated to play well to keep up appearances. And he is a 2600, for goodness' sake!

I'm not impressed by the round 6 or round 8 parts of his case, but how about rounds 2 and 4? (And why not rounds 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9?) First of all, Mamedyarov's claim that Kurnosov always went with Rybka's first choice is simply wrong, or at least I wasn't able to reproduce Mamedyarov's results. Further, many of the moves in question were fairly obvious. Some were components of a straightforward plan, some moves were obvious (e.g. recaptures) and some were elements in a tactical sequence. Out of the 29 post-novelty moves in the two games, only one - 21...Qf5 in the round 2 game - strikes me as even a candidate.

I can understand Mamedyarov's frustration in the situation, and I also get the tendency to dig in and retrench when criticized, as has happened since his initial salvo. But I don't find his argument any more plausible this time around, and I hope he'll drop the accusations (at least in the absence of far more impressive evidence than he has offered so far) as soon as possible.

I've already given and annotated Mamedyarov-Kurnosov; here are the three further games Mamedyarov refers to.

HT: Harris Nizel

That's the question GM Genna Sosonko raises in the newest New In Chess Yearbook (#90). What does he mean, and what is his conclusion?

He doesn't offer a definition, but from his examples one gets a clear enough picture of what he has in mind. Theorem-chess, we might say, is a way of approaching the problems in a game as a series of formulae to solve: by playing this or that opening (for Black) and exchanging pieces x, y and z, even at the cost of a pawn, I achieve such-and-such an ending (e.g. with opposite-colored bishops), force the White pawns on the right squares, and draw in my sleep. It's an approach I sometimes call "recipe chess", and it's one I've used at certain times, and have seen in some of Kramnik's and Anand's draws with Black (examples: Kramnik's 6th game vs. Topalov in their match and Anand's draw with Gelfand in the second cycle of Mexico City).

There's something very seductive about this approach. Much of theory - in junk openings especially, but in serious openings too - attempts to structure series of moves into wholes - recipes (or formulas, or "theorems") - allowing Black to achieve a technically drawn or White a technically won position. And given many of Sosonko's examples (very good ones, at that) you might think he's advocating it as well. At the end of the day, though, he's not - or at least not without very heavy reservations. Here are the final paragraphs of his essay (p. 26):

I am not without sin in this respect. [DM: Playing lines where Black is worse and has to suffer a bit trying to hold one of these formula draws.] For a very long time I considered the position after 1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.c4 c5 to be almost equal and I analysed it time and again, trying to keep slightly inferior endgames upright. In my results I alternated a string of draws with the occasional defeat.

I quit playing the line when I read a comment by the great Aaron Nimzowitsch. In a complex position he was trying to find the best move, calculating several lines over and over again until he said to himself: 'Quit! A chess game is a struggle, not a theorem'.

This looks like a repudiation of especially the modern theoretical approach, but Sosonko takes a step back in his final comment.

Although the ever-present computer has made certain corrections to this definition, I strongly believe these words should not be forgotten, even in our days.

I believe this strikes the right balance. Qua chess players, we should know as much as possible, but we must know that there are things we don't (and maybe can't) know, too. Chess is a struggle!