August 2004 Archives

What does the increasing popularity of online chess mean for OTB (over-the-board) chess? This one is discussed often, but there's no way to prove anything. Between playing against their PCs and online chess, many players first encounter serious chess thanks to the computer, and many then go on to seek out OTB chess. By "serious" I mean tournaments, ratings, openings, all those things a majority of the world's oft-cited 400 million chessplayers don't know anything about. For most of those millions chess is just another board game, if perhaps one they understand has a serious side.

Anyone out there go from online chess to OTB chess instead of the other way around? I know from various posts on the Ninja message boards that this is not unusual, especially among the youth crowd. Most who go from offline to online play feel they are different games. If you started online, what encouraged you to play your first OTB tournament? Can exclusively online play create a strong player? Most find it hard to concentrate enough playing online (or against a program) to see the improvement you get OTB, but I'm speaking as an old fogey of 35. Most online players only play blitz, and that's not going to create a Master. Why do you/don't you play OTB/online?

Back with another revisiting of recent posts and your comments.

Regarding this much-commented entry on computer opening books, I got an e-mail from a man who knows, Chrilly Donninger. He came to fame as the programmer of Nimzo and is now running the hardward-based Hydra chess project (formerly Brutus).

His machine just beat the elite program Shredder convincingly in a match. In that great report Donninger makes the points he made in his e-mail: Hydra uses a drastically truncated book, going out on its own after move 10 in most cases. He explains "It is just to set the program on the right track. No special book tricks, play just the main line." That's certainly a good start. A rumor on the computer chess streets said that the well-funded Hydra team in the UAE prepared for the match by meticulously going through the Shredder book looking for weaknesses, a la Kasparov. But looking for weak spots up to move ten wouldn't be useful enough to bother with, although you could certainly find lines your opponent isn't comfortable with. More relevant is that Shredder is a commercially available program, making it relatively easy to prepare for if you want.

Regardless of rumors, Hydra outplayed Shredder even when it wasn't winning out of the opening as in the first few games. It is safe to postulate that Hydra, running on as many cards as it did in Abu Dhabi, is the strongest chess machine extant. It would be interesting to let it play a few hundred games to see if it can even lose to a PC program, and I assume the Hydra team has done that and more.

I'm up to my eyeballs in chess programmers these days. Friend and former KasparovChess Online colleague Shay Bushinsky is in town on vacation with his family. Shay, together with Amir Ban, is half of the Israeli programming team behind the current computer world champion Junior. He's enthusiastic about the next version of Junior, number nine, number nine, number nine...

And with that tip of the hat to Mel Brooks... Oh what the hell, it's Friday. http://www.lovechess.nl/

(WARNING! Only for those not offended by erotic virtual marble statuary.)

Now you can get screwed on the board and over the board at the same time. Next up, an S&M version so you can get your ass whipped and kicked simultaneously. FIDE may sue the makers on the grounds that it's THEIR job to do this to chess. Okay, your turn with the bad jokes. Keep it clean, kids. No points for the obvious bishop jabs.

If I'm not answering the phone it's because my new computer arrived today and I'm neck-deep in getting it ready to take over from my old workhorse desktop. The new one is a custom-made machine built by Monarch PC. It's based on an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ processor. Combined with two 10,000 rpm hard drives in a RAID array and 2GB of RAM, it might even give Fritz a chance to beat me in blitz. Cough cough.

It's not as if most people really need a new computer these days. I bought my last one, an Athlon 1800+, over two years ago and it is still fine for 90% of common tasks. Surfing the web or opening Word in two seconds instead of four isn't a reason to drop a few grand on a new box. Unfortunately, chess and video work aren't common tasks, but they take up a lot of my time. Both crave CPU speed and the new hard drives will be handy for pushing around giant video files of the sort I'll be working on for ChessBase video materials.

As expected, Fritz and Co have more than doubled their node count on the new machine. That means the same quality in half the time or significantly better quality in the same time. A ChessBase search through three million games for Karpov's collected efforts returns its 3300 results in around two seconds instead of the old twenty. Trivial, but satisfying. I've no interest in matching my computer chessplayers against others online. These results can be worked out with a formula for the most part. More practical is cutting the filtering and encoding of a 30-minute video from 40 minutes to under 10. And did I mention the silent case? No more aircraft carrier behind my desk. Yay.

I'm back home in humid New York after a week in the California sun. While staying at Mom's without my beloved TCM, I was left watching the 2004 Olympic Games all night. I really have to agree with the current Olympic ban on mind sports. Having chess, or bridge, or checkers, in the Olympics would be ridiculous.

Perhaps it would be only slightly more ridiculous than shooting, which requires great physical control but is basically tool using. But I'm a purist. "Race walking" is also stupid as an Olympic sport. Getting from point A to point B faster than everyone else is the ideal. Adding artificial limitations (one foot on the ground at all times) is bizarre. If walking can be a sport the sack race could be next. (Any swimming event other than freestyle has similar problems, but at least you can clearly tell what they are doing.)

Not that chess isn't a sport in its own right. Physical conditioning can be important and there can be great physical stress during a game. Notice the "can be." Also, a sport that allows the players to agree to short draws is about as contrary to the Olympic ideal as I can imagine. If chess were put in the Games you would never see it. The IOC wants attractive games to market. Presenting chess on TV requires a tremendous amound of expertise.

Kasparov vs X3D Fritz did okay on ESPN, but heavily hyped man-machine matches are a different breed. In the Olympics you'd be lucky hear about the chess results, and that only in countries that win the medals. We already have the spectacular Chess Olympiad. It would be great if the IOC would sanction the Mind Sports Olympiad in some way shape or form.

The Scotsman newspaper, home of the well-known chess column by John Henderson, has an interesting if typically hyperbolic article on new UK champ Jonathan Rowson. His battles at the board are accompanied by a life-long battle against diabetes. Perhaps a sponsorship from Snickers is on the way? I've been watching the Olympics while in California for my sister's wedding reception. Gold medal winning American swimmer Gary Hall also has diabetes.

The latest Fischer fun is that he might not be able to marry the Japanese woman he hopes will save him from deportation unless he has a valid passport, which he doesn't, which is why he was detained in the first place! His intended bride to be, Miyoko Watai, said she wouldn't mind even if this only a desperate gambit by Fischer. Continuing the plague of chess analogies, she is quoted as follows by the NY Times:

Then comes this report, in which Watai denies the rumors that Fischer has a wife and child in the Philippines. Maybe it would help if Fischer buddy and exploiter GM Eugenio Torre would stop petitioning the Philippine government to grant Fischer asylum based on his having a wife and child there...

The ongoing Hydra-Shredder match is the latest example of why it's nonsense to use unregulated opening books in computer chess events. Instead of learning about the relative strengths of the top programs and hardware, we get the computers leaving their books in a position either very advantageous for one side or, just as bad, that one side doesn't understand at all.

The first two games of this match in Abu Dhabi saw Shredder in horrible positions (for a computer) before it even started thinking for itself. Sacrificing a pawn for initiative is suicide against a super-computer, even if you're one yourself. Limiting book usage in comp-human matches is inevitable as storage capacity increases, but you can't expect a machine to reinvent the openings every time out against GM with knowledge.

I can't see a reason to use them at all in comp-comp play. What's the point of using a human book expert to bring your creation to move 22? If they actually started working on opening algorithms and tested them against each other, comps might have an impact on the openings like they have had on the endgame. (I doubt that, but the idea is there.) One counter-argument I have heard is that the games would be boring, with lots of tedious symmetrical play. To that I'll add that the games would also be less "normal" and less useful to humans. Okay, then maybe you aren't playing good chess, figure it out! Give'em a Reuben Fine book and teach them to play the openings. The happy medium is to use balloted openings, sometimes called Nunn matches. Programmers still need to use standard openings to test their creations and so are playing "real" chess.

Other items on computer opening books.

Two Colorado politicians were ensnared by the dark right-hand corner square mafia this month. That's the title Dutch author and chessplayer Tim Krabbe once bestowed on those who, infernally, set up chess boards turned 90 degrees in the public view. Just about every chess board you see in an advertisement or TV show has a dark square in the right-hand corner. (Absolutely don't go to Tim's website unless you have nothing to do for the next many hours. Diary items 30, 51, and 83 have to do with the DRHCS Mafia.)

This story in a Colorado newspaper is written by a US Master. It tells of how four senatorial candidates played their favorite game against a reporter. Two chose chess and both were photographed with the board turned sideways. (Apparently the reporter didn't notice either.)

Many casual players don't know the en passant rule, or have trouble remembering where to put the king and queen. "Light on right" isn't that hard, but we've all seen this gaffe. I recently saw it in an old episode of The Simpsons, usually a very savvy show with this sort of detail. You'd think with a 50/50 chance they'd do better. Far more annoying is how in just about every movie and TV chess scene "check" is spoken aloud and is clearly meant to be devastating. The Bogo-Indian must be very popular in Hollywood.

Quick, in which country will Kasparov, Anand, and Karpov be playing next week? We're back with another edition of "great events with zero PR." That country is Brazil, but Kasparov won't be playing Anand and Karpov. As part of the Sao Paulo 450th anniversary festivities, a rapid tournament will pair the best of Brazil against Anand and Karpov in a rapid chess double round robin. Milos, Vescovi, Leitao, and token Chilean Morovic round out the field of the four-day "Desafio de Xadrez" event. It begins on August 20 and ends on the 23rd.

The day before that begins there is a giant simul with ten titled players. On the 21st Kasparov will give a 20-board simul at the Morumbi Hilton site, but he's not playing in the rapid. After the simul there is a launch event for the Portuguese edition of the second volume of his Predecessors series. Most of this I learned from this official event page, the only info I could find on it after Garry told me there was a rapid tournament with Anand and Karpov at the same time as his simul. I've got some info from the organizers so we'll be covering this event daily at ChessBase.com.

Another interesting thing is that the organizers seem to be selling spots for the Kasparov simul. Usually these all go to celebrities, government officials, local players and juniors, and other people the organizers want to favor or use for publicity. I'm sure most spots were reserved for those ends, but it's still strange to see an online sign-up request form with a $500 registration fee! A few days later Kasparov will be giving lectures on strategy at a management event. "Part I: Don't get involved in dot-com bubble."

The Olympics are underway in Athens, Greece. Chess is, as ever, absent, in line with an Olympic commission suggestion to prohibit mind sports a few years ago. Ilyumzhinov scored a coup in 2000 by wrangling an exhibition match at the Sydney Olympics. Anand and Shirov drew two rapid games played at the Olympic Village. Chess has made it to the Olympics in one way, however, thanks to the Cubans. According to one report on the Olympic village in Athens: "The largest banner in the village is the one of Fidel Castro hanging on the Cuban dorm. It covers almost the full side of a building. Castro is playing chess in the poster." There's a tiny pic here. There's also one of Che Guevara at a chessboard. According to a Mexican newspaper the Castro photo is of him playing in the record-setting Havana simultaneous in 2002. The Olympic Committee has told the Cubans to take down the banners.

You'd hope that with chess definitively out of the Games, FIDE (and a few national federations) would dump the idiotic drug-testing they still have written into the rules of official events, although I'm not sure they are actually testing anymore. Were players tested in the Libya KO?

USCF executive director Bill Goichberg commented on the subject for an article in the Pittsburgh Trib today.

Of course there is exactly such a thing. The 8th Mind Sports Olympiad starts on August 19th in Manchester! The idea sprang from the fertile mind of David Levy, who is still the organizer. Bill may have had something under the actual Olympic banner in mind.

Don't ask me, that's what they call it over there. That's the jinx or curse or karma that has kept a Scotsman from winning the British Championship since Combe did it in 1946. Even having the tournament in Scotland last year didn't help. This year, however, Jonathan Rowson is one of the top seeds and has a half-point lead with one round to play. He got a nice pairing against a FIDE Master in the final round, albeit with black.

This year saw the British Ch become the British instead of the Commonwealth Ch after the "Indian takeaway" of the last two years ruffled feathers. Top Brits Adams and Short still aren't playing. Maybe if Rowson wins they'll make it English-only next year. (Rowson won Hastings, too.) There was a brief sensation this year as Georgian-born Ketevan Arakhamia-Grant took the lead for a moment. She's a woman and plays for Scotland, but two consecutive losses have put her out of the running. Have there been any female national champions other than Judit Polgar? [Andy McFarland points out that Victoria Cmilyte won the open Lithuanian championship. It was in 2000 and she was only 16 at the time and rated just 2329. Quite a feat, although she tied for first with five other players in a massive Swiss. Interview with her from 2000.]

Being a national champion is prestigious, but few elite players bother because of poor conditions (small prize funds) in most countries. They also worry about losing precious rating points to the non-elite players they will face. Boo-hoo. That changed in the USA when the AF4C took over, although right now the USA doesn't have anyone in the world's top 40 to worry about rating or conflicting invitations to gravy-train European invitationals.

It's a credit to Yasser Seirawan that he played in the US Ch and on the Olympiad teams when he was a WCh Candidate and World Cup player in the 80s, when US Ch conditions were often quite poor. And how about Joel Benjamin's 21-consecutive US Ch appearances! Of course this is what we should hope for, but it's not always what we get.

I can see why Anand doesn't play in the insanely long Indian championship (he'd score +18 or so), but why not the Olympiad team? [Rimfaxe gives a link to an interview that confirms Anand will play in the 2004 Olympiad after an absence of 12 years.] Many of the top Russians don't play in their championship, although this year they are trying to organize a "super-final" that will include Kramnik, Kasparov, Svidler, et al. Do your country's best players play for your country?

Why is it so many of my stories about chess federations include the phrase "I'm not making this up"? First, the backstory. As mentioned in these pages here and later here, the United States Chess Federation was planning to move from New Windsor, New York to the town of Crossville, Tennessee. That was before the financial scandal, near bankruptcy, and an almost entirely new USCF board and leadership.

Now the village, sorry, city, of Crossville is threatening to sue the USCF for breach of contract. The Crossville law firm of Looney & Looney (really, I'm not making this up) has sent a very thorough and forceful letter to the USCF. (See below) If the USCF follows through and moves to Crossville it sounds like all will be forgiven. The USCF has asked them for an accounting of Crossville's expenses, perhaps hoping to arrange a settlement. This letter is only the first shot in what could be a protracted negotiation.

Apart from the seriousness of the subject, the timing is also ugly. The USCF was hoping to put on a happy face and roll out good news at their meeting at the US Open this week.

On July 31 in Dortmund, GM Joel Lautier, the president of the Association of Chess Professionals, gave a statement to the press. It announced the creation of the ACP Tour, a grand prix of events culminating in a Masters event toward the end of 2005.

The goal is a very good one and it's not without precedent. There has long been a grand prix of established events in the USA. The main advantages are 1) it co-opts established events instead of conflicting with them and 2) it doesn't need a pile of money to start out. It's a math formula applied to existing events, not new events that need money. Only the concluding Masters event will need sponsorship. Technically, they don't even need an event's participation to count it as an ACP Tour event. But it could quickly become a hot ticket, especially since open events will be included.

That last is no small thing. Bringing in some new blood is critical to put a fire to the feet of the big guns who have grown complacent. Not that I think the top ten are overrated, but they are definitely underworked. (At least at the board. They study like madmen.) I hope the ACP formula is aggressive enough to encourage some of the elite to play in open events the way tennis players on the cusp scramble to play in smaller events to gain enough points to make the ATP final. The hypothetical list of players who would qualify for the final based on the first half of 2004 results is interesting: (in order of points) Anand, Rublevsky, Kramnik, Leko, Mamedyarov, Kasparov, Grischuk and Short.

The crucial thing is to heavily reward winning events and winning games. Years of being rewarded for cautious seconds or thirds has made it possible to win a cautious first. Let's hope appearance fees and rating obsessions are out and winning is in.

Remember when the construction of "Chess City" in Kalmykia for the 1998 Elista Olympiad was going to make FIDE president Ilyumzhinov's fiefdom the global capital of chess? Me neither, but that's what he said. Now Ilyumzhinov is saying it again about a different city. On a recent trip to the Arab Emirates city of Dubai, he announced plans for an International Chess City.

This is just another example of how this FIDE administration is making ilfe very difficult for chess humorists everywhere. How can you parody something so goofy? The obvious jokes about inviting Bobby Fischer to take up residence in the rook-shaped house of his teenage dreams have already been made. With so many to choose from I can't decide which of these phrases from the article is the funniest. You decide:

1) "the King and Minister towers will be categorized as seven-star"
2) "some other 500 million lovers of the game will have the chance to follow the excitement via interactive electronic screens"
3) "After much deliberation"

Everyone's favorite science-fiction website, FIDE.com, recently posted Word documents related to the 2005 unification match between Garry Kasparov and new FIDE world champion Rustam Kasimdzhanov. (Couldn't they find a photo of Kasparov from the last 10 years?) Bidding for sponsorship of the match ends September 15.

It's hard to judge the market interest. The stakes are high, and Kasimdzhanov proved himself by beating Adams, Topalov, Grischuk, and Ivanchuk in Tripoli. But the Unknown Uzbekistani will still be a huge underdog against Kasparov. Last week's suicide bombings in Tashkent don't augur well for local sponsorship, but dictator Karimov is far from predictable. Kasimdzhanov is contractually obligated to play and I doubt Kasparov will hold out for big bucks here when what he really wants is a shot at Kramnik/Leko. The 12-game Kasparov-Kasimdzhanov match is very tentatively scheduled for January, 2005.

Drug testing the players isn't mentioned in the match regulations, but paying for it is in the sponsorship bidding form. Was there drug testing in Tripoli? I don't recall hearing anything about it. A section in the bidding document asks whether or not visas will be guaranteed for players' delegations, guests, and journalists. Better late than never!

Former US Champion GM Alex Yermolinsky added some needed perspective to our discussion of the perceived problem of too many short draws at the top level. A shout-out to my Contra Costa roots..

Now you can see why I want GM Yermolinsky to annotate for Ninja. Sane, perceptive, Oakland A's fan, cute as a button. What's not to like? Must read: The Road to Chess Improvement

The two most reasonable and practical ideas I know of, neither of them at all new: 1) Minimum move rule. 40-50 moves are not too much to ask at a professional event. (If the players are paying an entry fee they have no obligation to entertain and can do what they like. 2) .4 points for a draw with white, .6 for a draw with black. Both can be done by the organizers without messing with rating formulas. Neither force players to be wildly aggressive or treat draws as the disease instead of a symptom. The second item would eliminate the logjam of ties and the need for trigonometric tiebreak formulas, or at least make them required far less often.

The worry is that it would give black draw odds in a final-round game between two tied players at the top of the standings. I don't think that's necessarily bad. Most top players already try only for a draw with black anyway, so it can't get worse from that perspective.

When an article about chess appears in the mainstream press, fans are usually so excited that they don't really mind that there is nothing new for them in the article. Occasionally an "outsider" author will cast new light on an old subject, but more often it's conventional wisdom with information gleaned from a few chess sites and a few cliches tossed in.

One positive is that most non-chess journalists have both knowledge of the trade and experienced editors. While this rarely results in fact-checking, it usually means they go after primary sources and interviews, something most chess writers never bother to do. Today's article in the once-prestigious American magazine The New Republic is a good example of the breed.

Titled "The Game of Dictators," it rehashes what most of us already know about Kirsan Ilyumzhinov and the debacle around his selection of Libya as the host nation for the 2004 world championship. (A story pursued closely here. Search for "Libya".) The piece includes useful comments from Israeli GM Emil Sutovsky (perhaps contacted by the author because of Emil's contributions here while the scandal was unfolding) and US FIDE delegate Bill Kelleher. I wrote in to correct a few factual errors in the piece and they made the corrections and responded with commendable velocity.

My letter also included several expansions and interpretations of items in the article. Most serious is the author's statement that interest in chess in the West, particularly in the USA, has waned since the end of the cold war. No supporting evidence for this is given, because there isn't any. Chess is more popular than ever in the US. I doubt they will publish it, but my letter is below.

In the tradition of my beloved Slashdot's "Slashback", these sections will update past items and highlight useful reader comments. I'm also changing DD policy to not opening external links in a new browser. You can do that yourself by right-clicking a link and selecting 'Open in New Window'.

Fischer. The latest on Fischer's detention in Japan has him filing for asylum there (odd since he's been going on about how it's such a horrible, USA-Jew-controlled place). Several reports mention how Fischer's anti-Jewish and Holocaust-denying rants may hurt his chances on various legal fronts.

Legal eagle Rob Huntington points out that "Asylum is for refugees who are defined (in the Geneva Convention) as those 'unwilling or unable to return home due to a well-founded fear of persecution on account of their race, creed, political opinion, membership in a particular social group.'"

Fischer apparently doesn't qualify. Serbia-Montenegro has offered to take him, but only if the USA and Japan agree to it. You can read Fischer's side of things (many, many things) here.

SEC. Stock Exchange Chess and the draw problem ("problem"?) has stirred much debate. Yes, draws are a part of chess. But 25-move draws with all the pieces on the board will destroy the game as a sport. If you can win tournaments by only playing hard in one or two games, something has gone very wrong and the rules need to be changed. Is it unfair to blame the players for exploiting the rules in order to do less work? Perhaps. Would you pay admission (or sponsorship) to a chess event (online or in person) knowing that it could end in 30 minutes and 14 moves? (Kasparov-Kramnik, London 2000. Twice.)

National Public Radio (NPR) interviewed Garry Kasparov yesterday and the audio stream is available online. They called Kasparov at his annual training camp in Croatia for the five-minute interview. They started with Fischer, but, refreshingly, quickly moved on to talk about Kasparov's Predecessors book series and its other subjects.

Oddly, Petrosian is singled out for discussion by interviewer Scott Simon. (Who starts out the piece by calling Fischer a "genius, and also a bit of a jerk.") Kasparov does a good job of explaining Petrosian's style in layman's terms, comparing him to a baseline tennis player who never rushed the net. His relationship with Botvinnik was also mentioned. Interesting stuff, if not revelatory for those who know the basics about the champions.