On Oct 7, 7:44 am, SBD wrote:

Come on bot, you can dish it out but not take it?

If its edible, it's every man for himself. "Supersize me."


Seriously, what is a "realistic" chess problem? Chess is by nature
abstract, or?

A realistic chess problem is one where I could easily
fool you into thinking it is a position from one of my OTB
games.


You probably never saw the full analysis of such problems because hack
journalists will freely reprint chess problems and their keys, but
rarely spend any time on the analysis required, or even reference the
original source.

That is true; also there is the problem of limited
space in a publication like Chess Life, after allowing
for thirty-odd pages of pure advertising.


There are a whole group of chess problems called
"miniatures" (positions with 7 men or less) and composers still
compose interesting ones today, with whole chess magazines devoted to
this topic alone. Would those be "simple" enough for you? What is
"simple"?

Well, for me a simple position would be K & p vs. K,
where I have to figure out if it is a draw or a win. (And
no fair logging on to the endgame table base Web site.)


Seriously, all swipes aside, a few hours with one book of chess
problem miniatures (many of which you can find for free in pdf form on
the net) might change your mind about chess composition... if not,
more for me.....


In the old days, many problemists made claims that
simply didn't hold up to close scrutiny (i.e. cooks). The
same thing applies to game annotations, which I find
are so full of holes that my computer sometimes can
fall on the floor, laughing. Now they have a tool called
"Freezer" which, as I have read somewhere, can cut
the board down to size so that a chess engine can
more easily handle the necessary calculations, yet the
more complex still remain part assertion, part
speculation. I find these kinds of problems to be of
little value, except perhaps for entertainment.

In studying chess as it is really played, I have found
far too many examples of flawed analysis, flawed
evaluations and flawed thinking. So maybe this is why
I am not into the artificial-looking, ultra-complex style
of chess problems. I could easily "compose" a
multitude of chess problems by altering positions from
my own games or games that I have studied, but it
just seems a bit pointless in the sense that I have an
unfair advantage as the composer; I know what the
solver cannot know, having composed it.

My idea of a chess problem is what I have so often
found in "boring" endgame books, which snatch real
positions from real games, and show how the masters
(famous grandmasters, generally speaking) mucked up a
"simple" win or draw. The fact that such a position was
not artificially composed, but arose in actual play, seems
to somehow connect the "problem" to reality, render it
more relevant to me. Others may in fact like the crazy
artificial-looking positions, but they give me the feeling of
detachment from real chess, or OTB chess.


-- help bot