On Apr 21, 12:16 pm, Rob wrote:
On Apr 20, 11:33 pm, Rich Hutnik wrote:

This headline was around 1990 or so in the NY Times. Can someone
please argue that having the world champion retaining their title
because the tournament ended on a draw does anything to increase
interest in chess and improve its viability?

Please let me know if you see this doing ANYTHING at all to help chess
in any way. Ok, maybe draws aren't the problem, but are they part of
the solution?

- Rich

"Retails"? What does that mean? Was the title for sale?

Should be Retains (typo). But, in terms of the champ, it means they
sell out their competitive spirit to fight for wins, along with their
principles. They RETAIL it :-)

- Rich

On Apr 21, 8:00 pm, Quadibloc wrote:
On Apr 21, 10:16 am, Rob wrote:

On Apr 20, 11:33 pm, Rich Hutnik wrote:

This headline was around 1990 or so in the NY Times. Can someone
please argue that having the world champion retaining their title
because the tournament ended on a draw does anything to increase
interest in chess and improve its viability?

Please let me know if you see this doing ANYTHING at all to help chess
in any way. Ok, maybe draws aren't the problem, but are they part of
the solution?
"Retails"? What does that mean? Was the title for sale?

I don't see that spelling error anywhere. It was always "retains".
Retain means keep.

John Savard

First message on my part had that typo. Someone else must of fixed it
in a reply. Probably Kasparov Retailing the title would do more for
enhancing chess than him retaining it on a draw :-)

- Rich

On Apr 21, 8:15 pm, Quadibloc wrote:
On Apr 20, 10:33 pm, Rich Hutnik wrote:
My initial reaction is that it may not help chess, but it is
unavoidable.

I think as was posted, the world championship is treated as personal
property, not a measure of greatness, and this hurts the game.

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.

I think maybe it has to do more with Grand Chess by Sammy I displayed
that. I also had suggested that the chess variant community break
their variants down into different components so people can test them,
and an experiential approach be used more. I am in favor of people
proposing new solutions, but I also would like to see new solutions
tried and adopted. What you did see with the likes of Braves Chess
was my issue with someone labelling a universal solution for draws, as
a chess variant, than a rules patch. I also think if someone devises
a new game piece, they should label it as a piece.

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.

I scanned it quickly. I am up for anything that will improve chess as
a game AND as a sport. I believe the Chess AS A SPORT side has a lot
of work. Chess the game is far better off.

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.

As a game gets analyzed to death, this happens. One interesting study
into chess at the highest level is the play "The French Defense",
which is actually an interesting psychological school. Is it that
they hypermodern school got slapped down by rigidly sound play that we
got away from wild excesses?

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.

I would need to study more. I am not familiar with that.

- Rich

"Rich Hutnik" wrote in message
...
On Apr 21, 6:43 pm, "David Kane" wrote:
When you are designing a competition (or anything), there are a number
of objectives. You'd want it to be credible (i.e. identifies the more
deserving player) and exciting, but there are also logistical considerations
(competition can't last forever because there are costs of holding the
competition etc.) So it is a tradeoff. Accepting that, say 1%, of the
time the competition may not be decisive is very minor and is a defensible
choice.

The problem, as I've said, is that in a short match, the tied match
possibility is not at all small. That's a real problem, and can be reasonably
addressed by various tie-breaks. Unfortunately, the real world is
going the other way - matches are getting shorter thereby increasing the
champion's advantage.

Of course, for various reasons, we've seen the prestige of the
WC devalued greatly over the past decades.

How many other games or sports have 24 or more games in their
championship series to determine who the world champ is?

You are out of date. Matches haven't been that long for quite a while.

If 24 games is not enough, how many is enough? Are people supposed to
play 50 games? When you happen to add time control to chess, and have
a world champion, you turn chess as a game, into a sport. Since this
is the case, is it not important to see what other sports do?

And exactly how is more games going to make a difference if the
defending champion just has to draw to retain their title? Are we
supposed to wait for game 37 so that he bungles?

You are confusing different issues. A match could be tied even
if there are no draws.

You are also inconsistent. Longer matches are more likely to be
decisive than shorter ones. Personally I think ~24 games is reasonable,
but I'd add to it a reasonable tie-break in order to
get the probability of a tied match down to the ~1% level.
On the other hand, I am not knowledgeable about the economic
factors involved in organizing a chess match .

Note that FIDE at one time had a knockout world championship,
designed to be dramatic. The problem was that it had very
little credibility - in part because the real world champion
didn't participate, but also because the results were perceived
as random. I think a meaningful match can be dramatic
even if it is long. But there are always tradeoffs.

Rich Hutnik wrote:
This headline was around 1990 or so in the NY Times. Can someone
please argue that having the world champion retaining their title
because the tournament ended on a draw does anything to increase
interest in chess and improve its viability?

In those days, the championship was decided by a one-on-one match, not
a tournament. It seems reasonable that, if nobody can beat the
champion, the champion retains his title. I agree that it's not an
ideal situation but what else could be done?

Tie-breaks are all very well but it seems a bit fatuous to have the
world champion of the next three or four years decided by a blitz game
or something like that. For some of the championship matches in the
past, they played until a winner emerged (say, first to win six games)
but that led to the infamous 1984/5 Karpov-Kasparov match that was
terminated without result after 48 games. The idea of joint champions
is vaguely appealing until you start wondering how the next
championship will be decided.


Dave.

--
David Richerby Mentholated Happy Chicken (TM):
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ it's like a farm animal that makes
your troubles melt away but it's
invigorating!

On Apr 21, 9:34 pm, Rich Hutnik wrote:

I scanned it quickly. I am up for anything that will improve chess as
a game AND as a sport. I believe the Chess AS A SPORT side has a lot
of work. Chess the game is far better off.

I'd class the opening book as part of Chess the game; but that problem
is "easy" to fix - switch to Capablanca chess and so on and so forth.

Is it that
they hypermodern school got slapped down by rigidly sound play that we
got away from wild excesses?

The Chess of the Romantic period, such as La Bourdonnais-MacDonnell,
or Anderssen-Kieseritzky, where games could involve such things as the
sacrifice of the Queen and both Rooks to force checkmate, did get
slapped down by rigidly sound play.

Hypermodern chess - the invention of Nimzowitsch - had to do with
things like controlling the center with pieces, including the
fianchetto of the Bishop (B-N2), rather than the usual P-K4, P-Q4 Pawn
advance. It never really caught on, but it still has some lasting
influence - it remains recognized as a valid way to exert some control
over the center in some situations, but not as unconditionally better
than the traditional way. The chess of Petrosian has been cited as
showing a significant hypermodern influence.

I would need to study more. I am not familiar with that.

I'm not too familiar with Go myself, but I had been doing some web
searching to learn some basic facts about it. I created a page about
Go that brought together information on how the rules were different
in China and Korea that was scattered in other places:

http://www.quadibloc.com/other/bo0101.htm

and in that effort, I found out that because Go is scored by the
number of points on the board that you surround, with the player with
the higher score winning the game, it's possible to tweak the scoring
easily, just as it's possible to give handicaps of a few extra stones
to start with.

This is different from Chess, where checkmate is all or nothing - and
pawn odds or Knight odds seriously distort the game.

Because Go had a problem with dull, defensive play - the first player
could always win by a few points at the end - an offset of a few
points, komidashi, was brought in, and it did an excellent job of
curing the problem. That's why I tried to figure out if it could be
adapted to the very different situation in Chess.

How can we give a small, controllable, advantage to Black to
compensate for White having the first move - and make it harder for
the game to end in a draw - which are the things that komidashi did in
Go?

Scoring stalemate as a partial win means that fewer games would end in
a draw; since komidashi made OTB draws impossible by including an odd
half-stone as an offset, I also included bare King - and even
perpetual check.

Giving Black a small advantage inspired me to think of scoring draws
and checkmates the old way, equally for both players, but scoring the
partial victories with a bias towards Black, with the bias being
highest for the least of the forms of victory.

Giving Black no advantage, though, for a draw seemed to me to be a way
to encourage Black to play more aggressively; having that advantage
taper off as the game became more decisive might encourage White, in
turn, to also play more aggressively.

I can't guarantee it would work, and the scheme of points would
doubtless need tweaking through experience, but it seemed to me to be
a simple and direct way to encourage more dynamic play, unlike
anything I had heard of before.

John Savard

On Apr 21, 7:29 pm, "J.D. Walker" wrote:
I like the idea of giving White .45 of
the point and Black .55 of the point.

That is one way of modifying Chess, and it might encourage White to
play for the win, since then, if by doing so he took chances, so that
his chance of winning compared to Black's was not so large, getting
away from Black's extra fraction of a point for the draw would offset
that.

My "Dynamic Scoring" idea takes that one step further, as well as
partly turning it inside-out. Instead of having White encouraged to
play to win, and Black encouraged to play to draw, I wanted to
encourage *both* players to play to win.

Also, I wanted to make draws less likely. Giving both players 1/3 of a
point for a draw has been proposed for that - but that has its own
problems.

So I came up with what I describe on

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

where I let people win a few points with stalemate, bare King, or even
perpetual check, and give Black extra points for those, but not for a
draw, so that Black is encouraged to try to win something, and White
is encouraged to go all the way for checkmate.

John Savard

Quadibloc wrote:
On Apr 21, 7:29 pm, "J.D. Walker" wrote:
I like the idea of giving White .45 of
the point and Black .55 of the point.

That is one way of modifying Chess, and it might encourage White to
play for the win, since then, if by doing so he took chances, so that
his chance of winning compared to Black's was not so large, getting
away from Black's extra fraction of a point for the draw would offset
that.

My "Dynamic Scoring" idea takes that one step further, as well as
partly turning it inside-out. Instead of having White encouraged to
play to win, and Black encouraged to play to draw, I wanted to
encourage *both* players to play to win.

Also, I wanted to make draws less likely. Giving both players 1/3 of a
point for a draw has been proposed for that - but that has its own
problems.

I have no problem with fighting draws. To me, they are good chess.

So I came up with what I describe on

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

where I let people win a few points with stalemate, bare King, or even
perpetual check, and give Black extra points for those, but not for a
draw, so that Black is encouraged to try to win something, and White
is encouraged to go all the way for checkmate.

I prefer the concept of keeping it simple.
--

"Do that which is right..."

Rev. J.D. Walker

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 06:22:50 -0700, "J.D. Walker"
wrote:

..
I prefer the concept of keeping it simple.


Your way also has the advantage of not obsoleting all those studies
and compositions in which the draw plays a part.

Giving Black a small *scoring* bonus for attaining a draw isn't much
more complicated than using tie-break points for titles, trophies, or
qualifications.

On Apr 22, 7:22*am, "J.D. Walker" wrote:

I have no problem with fighting draws. *To me, they are good chess.

Fighting draws can indeed be very good chess. Since the "expected
value" of chess seems to be less than a forced win for White, it seems
reasonable that a draw is less likely to contain a blunder by one
player than a win.

But the problem I'm trying to solve isn't to get Grandmasters to play
better chess. They're Grandmasters, and they _are_ playing Grandmaster-
level chess. It isn't broken, so I can't fix it.

Non-fighting draws can be addressed by various stratagems (i.e. 1/3 -
1/3) but they lead to certain complications of another kind that I'm
unprepared to address.

The problem I'm trying to solve, thus, isn't non-fighting draws, nor
is it inferior play. Instead, I am looking at what I think is a larger
perceived problem; that Chess isn't as popular as it was in the grand
old days before Steinitz, because the players know too much about
positional play, so fireworks like Queen sacrifices don't happen as
often.

So my ambitions here can be criticized as meretricious. I'm trying to
make Chess seem exciting not just to those who can savor advanced
positional play, but instead to bring back excitement even a
woodpusher can appreciate.

Getting even a small fraction of a point on the scoreboard is
something that's worth sacrificing a Queen for - and this is why I'm
trying to narrow down the range of draws, so that while defensive play
can still protect one against checkmate, it still doesn't fully
deprive one's opponent of valuable things to do - either gaining a
minor victory, or preventing you from obtaining one.

John Savard