On Oct 7, 8:04 am, SBD wrote:

Some have compared chess composition and play as similar to
choreographed martial arts on the stage or screen to the bar brawl.

This is very good. In my experience, some OTB games
can be compared to a bar brawl, both in quality and style
of play. The outcome is not always a perfect measure
of skill, but luck plays a big role (did that bottle over the
head knock him out, or just make him angrier?).

In the movies, martial arts are often ridiculous, one
guy chops, the other blocks, the first guy kicks, the
second backs up -- as if taking turns as in chess. And
some problems are like this, pieces having been added
everywhere for no other purpose than to confuse the
issue so it will be tougher to solve, just as more
opponents are added in a scene to make the hero look
more impressive; but in reality, nobody would even try
to fight so many men without an uzi or flamethrower.


Like all human comparisons, you can argue back and forth on the merits
of each.

No you can't. Yes you can. Can not. Can so!


In the end, though, it seems to me that certain players - who already
have ELO envy of seemingly everyone around them

Ad hominem projections reveal something, but
I'm not sure what, exactly. It's like one of those
crazy chess problems where pieces are all over
the place, yet there is purported to be a forced
mate in six -- and only one!


- are dismissive of
problems without ever having tried the experience, or try to see why a
series of Umnov maneuvers

Needs explanation; many readers will have no idea
what the writer is trying to say here, for Umnov is not
a famous grandmaster. Maybe this was tossed out
to try and impress somebody, but who? (Only about
four people on the whole internet may know this guy,
Umnov.)


provide beauty and interest to a problem. I
still find Evans comment about endgame composers being relatively weak
players a sign of snobbery - who cares if they even played the game at
all? Isn't the chess what is important? And what is a "weak player?"
Sigh.....


To GM Evans, a weak player is any player who does
not sport the letters "GM" in front of his name. What I
found amusing was the fact that when Bobby Fischer
wrote a letter in a huff over LE's published criticism of
his match "demands", instead of rebuffing the loon by
pointing out that his answer was not an endorsement
of any particular move, he just cowed down and took a
verbal lashing instead. Far from operating on any real
principles, the man seemed to go more by butt-sniffing,
by who was the alpha-dog chess player -- and by golly,
there was no question of that. But moreover, all the
letters tend to be from far lesser players, and here the
GM takes a rather arrogant tack, often as not, falling
back on his own title as support for the arrogance, as
when he proudly proclaims that he does not easily
suffer (other) fools. But getting into a huff over a few
weak players making use of Chessmaster to "cook"
his published analysis only serves to reveal who the
real fool is; what do you expect weak players to do:
write in with corrections based upon analysis which
they have "checked" by asking their chess-playing
buddies to look it over for mistakes, knowing that an
arrogant snob will ridicule them for having even dared
to try and poke holes? It boggles the mind.


-- help bot