USCL 2007 Game of the Year #9: Friedel-Serper
Twelve down, eight to go.
The latest game to get eliminated in the U.S. Chess League's Game of the Year contest for 2007 is Josh Friedel's week 9 win over Gregory Serper, a funny game where Serper kept pushing the pawns in front of his king until he got mated. I'll cover this game in some detail on my ChessVideos show next week, together with the 8th place game, but for now you can read the judges' comments and replay the game here.
Let me add in passing that I'm apparently leading an informal judges contest, where the goal (unknown to the judges beforehand) is to have one's picks as close to the actual results as possible. This "contest" strikes me as entirely pointless at best, if only because USCL commish Greg Shahade instructed us to judge the games according to whatever criteria we wanted, making things such that there is no "right" placement for any of the games. So I'm pointing this out only because the contest's inventor, USCL blogger Arun Sharma, seems to be slightly annoyed that he's not in the lead. (Here's the link with the judges' standings after GOTY #10; my lead has increased because I picked Friedel-Serper for 9th place, while Sharma - already six points back - did not.)
(In fairness to Sharma, who isn't an official judge and whose guesses don't count, the contest is unfair to him, unless his calculations take the following reasoning into account. The point is that my guesses "skew" the results in my favor while his don't. Suppose everyone but me and Sharma vote a game for 10th place, while I put it in 5th and he puts it in 15th. To evaluate which of us is closer to the norm, either both our votes should count or neither should. Either way, the game would end up with an average rating of 10th place and we'd be equally wrong. With my vote counting but not his, however, I'm closer, as the average with my vote only is a 9th place rating - I'm two places closer.)
The latest game to get eliminated in the U.S. Chess League's Game of the Year contest for 2007 is Josh Friedel's week 9 win over Gregory Serper, a funny game where Serper kept pushing the pawns in front of his king until he got mated. I'll cover this game in some detail on my ChessVideos show next week, together with the 8th place game, but for now you can read the judges' comments and replay the game here.
Let me add in passing that I'm apparently leading an informal judges contest, where the goal (unknown to the judges beforehand) is to have one's picks as close to the actual results as possible. This "contest" strikes me as entirely pointless at best, if only because USCL commish Greg Shahade instructed us to judge the games according to whatever criteria we wanted, making things such that there is no "right" placement for any of the games. So I'm pointing this out only because the contest's inventor, USCL blogger Arun Sharma, seems to be slightly annoyed that he's not in the lead. (Here's the link with the judges' standings after GOTY #10; my lead has increased because I picked Friedel-Serper for 9th place, while Sharma - already six points back - did not.)
(In fairness to Sharma, who isn't an official judge and whose guesses don't count, the contest is unfair to him, unless his calculations take the following reasoning into account. The point is that my guesses "skew" the results in my favor while his don't. Suppose everyone but me and Sharma vote a game for 10th place, while I put it in 5th and he puts it in 15th. To evaluate which of us is closer to the norm, either both our votes should count or neither should. Either way, the game would end up with an average rating of 10th place and we'd be equally wrong. With my vote counting but not his, however, I'm closer, as the average with my vote only is a 9th place rating - I'm two places closer.)
Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on
Sunday March 23, 2008 at 7:05am
Greg, as usual, wants any kind of reasonable material for the website that he can have during the off-season as it's obviously very difficult to keep people interested in the league at this duration and keeping the website fresh with new links can accomplish that to some degree and so this contest seemed like a reasonable thing to do. I should point out that it really was mosly inspired by a few fans and one of your fellow judges, FM Adamson, who had repeatedly been inquiring as to who the "best judge" is, and so we figured why not give them a reasonable way to measure that (describing me as the "inventor" might not be entirely accurate, even though I did come up with the scoring system).
As for me being annoyed about not leading, well like most things in the league, that's far more Greg's doing than my own Obviously just giving the standings with no commentary isn't likely to be very interesting to the readers. But making comments which might be viewed by some as controversial (and might create some discussion/publicity) about how upset I am that I'm not winning and things of that nature is far more to Greg's liking than just giving the simple standings. Clearly I don't really care that I'm not winning :)
As to the contest being unfair, I do think I mentioned that inequity when I first started listing the standings for this contest. It was actually Greg's suggestion that I not list my and FM Bournival's rankings along side those of the actual judges since we were at that inherent disadvantage (originally I had planned to but due to that and since this was a "judges contest" I decided to just list those at the bottom). For awhile I wasn't going to list them at all, but decided no harm to list our numbers (again more material, another reason why he told me to bash the judges at every opportunity during my "critiques").
In any case, to more important matters, been enjoying the videos of these games for sure, hope they keep up. You definitely have enlightened me into a lot of things about these games which I definitely never realized when I was judging these games for GOTW or GOTY.
Making "judge the judges" into a competition doesn't really seem analogous to me to filling out an NCAA bracket. (Not that you necessarily claimed it was.) Instead, why not have a reader competition to guess the winners of the real competition - for GOTY, not J(udge)OTY? It would be a good way to keep interest going during the off-season, especially if some prizes (e.g. team gear) are offered the winners.
As for bashing the judges, I want combat pay - this was a volunteer operation on my part! Maybe Shabalov deserves it for the bizarre nicknames, Adamson for helping create this competition, and Jennifer if one believes in guilt by association. I can't speak for Young's crimes against humanity, not knowing him, but I'm innocent, I tells ya - at least as a USCL judge.
As for having a readers contest for picking the order, that was actually something we strongly considered both at the beginning and when there were ten games left (with some grand prize to anyone get it exactly, though since we're on the subject of March Madness, the odds of getting it exactly with all twenty isn't much larger in magnitude than a perfect March Madness bracket, not something to worry about, but with ten left not impossible I suppose). Again, we strongly considered doing it for exactly the reason you state, for keeping up interest, just based on everything that would have been involved in doing it it didn't seem to be worthwhile on the whole (length being a large issue as this contest is more than 5 months). Not to say I think it's a bad idea, I'd really like to do it in the future, probably just needs some modifications in the way it's done.
In regards to bashing the judges, if you want combat pay, again you should go to the source -- Greg! As I've mentioned, it's at his beckoning that that's happening. I think I've reasonably fair in dishing out the punishment as equitably as I can amongst all of you, though obviously the judges whose rankings I happen to find most distasteful will likely get the biggest brunt of it. I could stop of course, but I have a feeling if I did, I'd get fired far quicker than any of you GOTY judges might be!