On Apr 20, 10:33 pm, Rich Hutnik wrote:

Please let me know if you see this doing ANYTHING at all to help chess
in any way.

My initial reaction is that it may not help chess, but it is
unavoidable.

A match between two players, even if not many of the games are draws,
could produce an even result. And when that happens, one _could_ have
it go on indefinitely until someone won a game, but that makes the
world championship hang on a result that might be due to accident.

Having the World Championship being somewhat stable is not a bad
thing, and having one champion instead of two co-champions is also
not a bad thing.

However, in looking at the Wikipedia article on the World
Championship, I see that the next couple of challengers are picked out
in advance.

An unseated Champion's right to a rematch should be in addition to,
not instead of, meeting normal challengers - and normal challengers
should come up through the Candidates' matches in a fair and open
procedure, so that when a new, strong player emerges, he can contend
for the World Championship if he is the best of the other players.
This doesn't seem to be the case at present, and it is a problem.

On another topic - I've seen a posting of yours on the Chess Variant
pages, where you comment negatively on people proposing new solutions
to problems instead of testing them. So you may not be interested, but
I think I've come up with a scheme - this "Dynamic Scoring" thing -

http://www.quadibloc.com/chess/ch0103.htm

that could address draws *even in* situations like the World
Championship match, not just in tournaments.

Recently, there was another posting here about the death of Steinitz;
the article showed how, in addition to suffering from the
psychological pressures associated with Chess, his fate may also have
been partly due to the burden of anti-Semitism to which he was
subjected as well. If Steinitz was the Shusaku of Chess, I am trying
to set the stage for the Go Seigen of Chess - by copying _komidashi_
from Go as best I can.

It may be unfair to pin all the blame on Steinitz, but by advancing
our understanding of Chess, he did make Chess play less flamboyant
than it once was. One way to get chessplayers to play inferior moves
is tighter time controls, but that isn't really what is wanted. We
want flashy, exciting Chess like they had before Steinitz - piece
sacrifices right and left and so on.

If I hadn't heard of komidashi, and its results in practice in Go, I
would still have despaired of coming up with any notion that would
have any possibility of helping with this part of the problem.

John Savard