Driven to bad behaviour

Brazil is in 'mourning'. First there was Barricello. Now Massa has joined the pantheon of fallen idols. Still - we should not commit the sin of worshipping at the feet of idols of any description should we? Let me clarify why Brazil is up in arms with an extract from the Daily Express, thus:

"‘DIRTY, thieving cheats’ are words echoing around Formula One after Ferrari dragged the sport into disrepute at the German Grand Prix here. Fernando Alonso’s victory appeared to be ordered via a coded radio message, with Felipe Massa slowing down a lap later to let his team-mate pass and go on to win. The Italian team were fined $100,000 immediately, but there will be further sanctions as the matter was referred to the FIA World Motorsport Council.".

The two naughty boys were certainly given a good 'spanking' in the post-race press conference, thus, from the Daily Telegraph:

"The duo attempted to explain away what had unfolded, but failed to convince the sceptical press, and they clearly cut no ice with the stewards later given their fine. Eddie Jordan, the BBC pundit, said that it was "unlawful", before adding: "It is cheating and the two cars should be excluded."

Here are a few of the questions they were bombarded with and their unconvincing replies.

* Via a coded message it appears we've witnessed a clear case of team orders being handed out. To Fernando, do you feel embarrassed about taking such a win, and to Felipe do you feel angry about having to give up such a win?

Massa: "For sure, you always want to win. That's always what we're working for. For sure we don't have team orders, so we just need to do the race that we can and if you see that you cannot do the race that you can, you need to think about the team. I think that's the most important thing."

Alonso: "Yeah, same. What's important is the team result, so I'm happy."

*The reality is, though, you couldn't beat him on the track, so you had to get the team to do it for you.

Alonso: "If that's your opinion."

*He had to give you this win, didn't he, Fernando?

Alonso: "No."

*Fernando, why can't you just be honest with us for once and just admit this win was handed to you on a plate today?

Alonso: "I was competitive on Friday, first position. I finished second in qualifying by 12 centimetres, I heard yesterday. Today I think we scored the fastest lap of the race, so overall I don't think I was very slow this weekend."

*Felipe, Rubens (Barrichello) damaged his image a lot in Brazil when he did what you did today. Until now you had the support of the country. Aren't you worried that now after you did what Rubens did you have deeply damaged your image in Brazil?

Massa: "For sure not. I'm very professional and I've showed in my career how professional I am. You are professional as well, you work for a company. I believe you are doing what you have to do, so I'm professional and today I showed how professional I am. That's it."

And so to the point of my post. Massa refers to professional behaviour in terms of conformity to the terms of his contract. But you then have to ask - If he was not sure what he might be asked to do, why did he take the job? Oh, money again, I see. Not just sufficient money for him and his family to live on - but 'loadsamoney'.

We might also ask about how it is that so many 'professionals kick the football upstairs rather than take responsibility for their actions? This includes the soldiers tainted by the 'events' in the Guantanamo Bay prison who exonerated themselves by saying that they 'only acted under orders'. You could argue that torturing people was not in the contract - so they were placed in a situation that could not have been foreseen. This argument has a certain amount of force. Do we not always invest a certain amount of trust in the organisation that we are about to be employed by? And are we not entitled so to do?

Principled Behaviour and 'A Step Too Far'

I think we are all entitled to have certain expections of professional people, whether they be solicitors (translation - lawyers), bankers, teachers whatever. Unfortunately they are all subject to pressures diverse, likewise the organisations that employ them. So let's put ourselves on the spot, let's see how well we do when we, ourselves, are in a tricky situation.

For the purposes of the exercise let's suppose that you are not Ferrari or the CIA - but a 'higher authority for chess'. Your responsibilty? Teaching the rules of chess to a nine year-old. Here is what 'Tim D' asked on Yahoo Answers:

"I'm a fairly experienced player, and my 9-year-old son is just learning the game. I'm not sure what I should do when I play him. Should I purposely make mistakes and help him to learn how to identify and respond to my mistakes? Or should I just play my game, and teach him why I make each move and what my strategy was?".

'Old Cynic' responded by saying "playing properly is the best way, don't insult someone's intelligence by allowing them to win. But a 9 year old may be different. A child can get annoyed if they don't taste victory at least some of the time, so maybe you could mix it up. Slip an occasional hung piece and see if he takes it.".

In this situation there is a real dilemma of course. Being honest and playing honestly on the one hand - but thereby taking the risk of putting the youngster off the game for good and all. This is all very different from the real life dilemmas experienced by the professionals mentioned above - but I would say that we ALL need to live life with the aim of high-principled behaviour, inasmuch as our own personal limitations allow us. Surely this includes the concept of helping others (as I discuss in a post in my blog at Toad Tryouts).

I rather like Deena's ''answer. She talks about her Daddy teaching her chess, so I assume she's a youngster too (they rightly talk about words of wisdom from the mouth of a child). One of her suggestions is to "make some mistakes and talk through them on how you could've made a better move". Precisely so! If we use our 'smarts' we can often circumnavigate all sorts of problems (such as those experienced by Massa et al?).

Here's my take. First suggestion is to explain the scenario to the child - perhaps a game which is for teaching purposes only. In this case you would carefully explain that you will be allowed to suggest a few candidate moves for the child to think about and to either choose from - or come up with another of their own. We often forget to explain situations clearly to children (and dogs too, incidentally!) in advance. It sometimes seems as if we don't talk to them at all these days but that's another story.

"This is what we are going to do now - is that OK with you? How about we have a game where we are not bothered about winning. Or a game where we try to explain to the other person the moves we are thinking about?". This might well elicit a negative response - which probably means you have neglected to explain WHY you have made the suggestion (you should have said that you want him/her to become a good chessplayer or some such).

Ann Wamack

I think that one of the best answers given to Tim D's question was given by Ann Wamack (a freelance writer for 'Chess Right' which offers traditional and decorative chess sets, as well as chess boards and other chess equipment for sale), thus:

"In my experience, the important factor is going to be whether or not the boy has fun playing chess. If he gets all stressed out every time you two play, he isn't going to remember whether or not he won. The important thing is going to be that he remembered having fun with it. Strategies and moves come with experience. So play often, and keep the emphasis on fun, sportsmanship, and bonding. The strategies and analysis will come in their own time."

You may be interested in one of the reasons she provides for taking up the game in one of her articles, thus:

"The benefits of playing chess are not confined to school age children. In this Information Age, we are all bombarded continuously with incoming information of all types from many sources, some more credible than others. Data that used to take substantial commitments of time and specialized skill to dig out is now available in a fraction of a second from an Internet search on a home computer. The ability to analyze and manage multiple considerations is a skill that can make the difference between responding with agility to new situations and becoming paralyzed with information overload. These torrents of information, whether the subject is managing your business or monitoring family health options, must be met with critical thinking to sort out the useful information from the spurious. Then, the new data needs to be adapted into our current plan, as appropriate. Nowhere are these skills (critical thinking, analysis, managing multiple considerations, adapting to new data, decision making, and planning / thinking ahead) better honed than from engaging in regular games of chess."

Less than saint-like behaviour

Here is Paul Hoffman's confession of an isolated instance of the type of pressure that results in less than saint-like behaviour. His book "King's Gambit" (from which this extract is taken) is one of the best 'chess reads' around and the extract here shows how is prepared, in exemplary manner, to bare his soul for our edification.

I do feel a little ungracious in presenting this particular page when I have his whole book to choose from! As I say, the one thing that shines through in all his writing is Hoffman's honesty and integrity. It can usefully be contrasted with the unseemly comments of certain racing drivers as illustrated above.

More bad behaviour (and an interesting blog to discover) is on display in my post 'A Chess Journey'.

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Manage your own Opening Repertoire

What I have been looking for is an easy way to visualise and to keep track of the opening moves that I tend to use the most. In this context I am not looking for other chessplayer's games in databases, nor am I particularly interested in the facility to use chess engines. Of course the sheer variety of chess software is somewhat overwhelming - but here I present the fruits of my labours. At least two of the freeware listing webpages that I came across in my journey are worth a mention - the Nørresundby Chess Club's En Passant and also James Kearman's site.

I began with CDB - "a powerful positionally categorically based tool for abnormally browsing, annotating, and analyzing chess". CDB was written by Peter Klausler which "does not seem to have a limit on the number of games that can be contained in a database. CDB will also convert any CBF-format Chessbase files you download to PGN format" - but is no longer supported. The above En Passant site also has the Traveller Chess font required for the program.

I was intrigued to find that it was able to show a list of openings in the form of a tree diagram, though I later found what I thought to be a slightly better version at 'Chess Age'. This one has opening titles too - the image here shows the 'Bogolyubov Variation'.

For me, a tree diagram would be a great way to show my own personal openings repertoire - assuming that I could create one for me personally. Chess Age utilises a read-only on-line system - basically just a glossary of openings. I should also point out that I am not after the 'normal' tree diagrams which appear in many programs such as ChessBase (these are in the form of a table and don't look like a tree with branches at all - and the data relates to move ratings as determined by a chess engine).

Nor am I, in this particular context, looking for ways to explore variations on-line such as the excellent 365chess or the Chess ECO Database. These are both very useful and interesting ways to explore opening theory in their own right of course.

I finally came across what I was looking for in the form of Stefan Renzewitz's Chess Position Trainer (CPT) program which can be downloaded from here. The site describes it as being 'both free and priceless at the same time' which seems fair comment to me. The PDF file 'Manual for Chess Position Trainer 3.2' also promises me that I can "learn from every game that I play (eg when playing on ICC), because the key information is no longer more than one click away - defeat your laziness! CPT will show you right away the novelties of your games which are not yet covered by your repertoire and you can even right away train exactly those positions where you missed the right move.".

And, yes, it does have the facility to 'grow' a tree as is shown in this screen shot (fudged a little to show the tree to best effect).

His project is ongoing and he is clearly committed to the whole project. This is clearly indicated by his latest post (about the statistical module) in the (English) forum - it is dated 9. July 2010 08:20 ie pretty recent.

A useful repertoire of basic openings to start with is the 'ECO-Repertoire by Prof. Dr. Dialetis' which can be downloaded here - which you will then be able to customise later to suit your own opening repertoire.


Features (site glossary)

# Very intuitive and customizable user-interface accompanied by a printable 65 page manual.
# Import or enter your chess opening repertoire and manage it with ease.
# Use more than 70 training options just for the chess opening alone - unbeatable capabilities.
# Use the applied flash-card concept making chess training more efficient and fun.
# Train your own repertoire blindfolded - no other chess software let you do that.
# Special functions - running your (internet) chess games against your repertoire, backsolving.

More details for advanced users

More advanced users can explore the idea of "creating a ‘Tactics’ repertoire for training using CPT". In this case you will need a program such as 'Chess Assistant Light' available here or here to manage the necessary files. CAL has a 15,000 games per database limit which is not a problem with CPT. Why? Because CPT only needs to hold specific positions and variations related to your own personal repertoire.

In fact the CAL program is useful in its own right, thus:

"Chess Assistant Light is software used for managing chess games and databases, playing chess on the Internet, viewing electronic texts, studying openings, analyzing games, playing chess against the computer."

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Have the engines killed ROTW matches?

This post was prompted by my reading 'Kasparov Against The World' (KATW). It was described by by Jon Edwards as "A day to day account of his 1999 internet match against the 'The Rest of the World' (ROTW) team, consisting of some 7 million people (according to the organisers Microsoft). One book, one game. Kasparov suggests that it may be the greatest game ever played. It's an exciting game and did much to promote chess world-wide.". The fact that its 202 pages are devoted to a single chess game is, not surprisingly, a record. Jon offers interactive moves for the game and analysis as well as links to all of the games that were referenced in the book.

You don't need to invest in the KATW book itself to find out why Jon is so taken with it - just refer to the links at the end of this post or Jon's links given above (but if you do happen to want to buy the book, you can use the Amazon shopping cart in the right-hand column of this blog). Quite apart from anything else, the game generated a novelty introduced by one of the members of the ROTW (15 year old Irina Krush) on move ten and which was, in itself, a valuable contribution to opening theory.





Here is the position in question - can you find Black's perhaps clumsy-looking, but nevertheless very effective, innovation?

(Solution below)






KATW is like a diary, so you hear about the other things that went on in Kasparov's life during the game - no need for a chess board because a diagram is shown for each move.

Kasparov talks about his appearance in the book, saying that GM Eduard Gufeld told him (in 1978 apparently) "Garry, how can you play the Caro-Kann? You look like one of the Mafiosi - you must play the Sicilian!".

Ah, so that's the reason for him always playing this opening!




Have the engines killed ROTW matches?

All of the players were allowed to use computer programs of their choice. This was in 1999, so perhaps the programs were weaker than they are today - and different computers were capable of coming up with different answers. These days it feels as if computers have all the answers (though I confess to not having much experience of them myself). Having read the book, it occurred to me that this type of ROTW match could not be played in the same way today - it would simply be a match between computers. If a chess engine is left to run overnight it is difficult for me to conceive that a human player would easily be able to discount the analysis it produces. In 1999 it was still worth checking the computer variations to see if it had gone astray.

Once again it seems that we can't discuss chess without also mentioning computers. At this point it is worth mentioning that one of the first computer pioneers, Konrad Zuse, was born exactly one hundred years ago (on June 22nd, 1910). He is commemorated in an article by Frederic Friedel in Chessbase. The article ends with a glimpse into the future - 2030 to be precise - when we will apparently be able to upload the contents of our brains to a computer! We are told that "Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have become involved in this project" ie the "merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence". I'll leave you to dwell on that while I attempt to get back on topic.

One of the ways in which computers have made us chessplayers 'redundant' is the appearance of tablebases. These are "generated by retrograde analysis, working backwards from a checkmated position and have completely solved chess positions with six or fewer pieces (including the two kings)."(Wiki). As I understand it (Page 159 of KATW) you can use a tablebase in the following way. Suppose that towards the end of the middle game you find that your variations all lead to positions with a king, queen and pawn against a king and queen. It is very difficult to see which of these will be draws and which will be wins, but a tablebase can tell you for sure - and then you will know which variations to examine more closely.

Who actually played the moves?

It was fascinating to read Kasparov's KATW book in which he appears to have sufficient nous to know when to reject moves found by a computer (Deep Junior). He even had an expert whose presence on his team depended solely on his ability to know when to accept or reject particular computer moves. It seems strange to then ask the computer to check the proposed move, even though it wasn't even in the computer output list of candidate moves!

In his book, Kasparov had, what I believe to be, a very difficult task. He wanted to show the gory details of how he arrived at his moves (including help from his advisers, chess engines and tablebase) - whilst making it clear that the game was his, that he 'owned' the moves that were actually made. Was he merely a co-ordinator in the same way that Irina Krush (more about her below) co-ordinated the ROTW team? I think he proved the case for saying that he was the 'creator' - but I'm not sure it will be possible for world champions in future ROTW matches to do the same (which is little disconcerting to say the least). It seems to me that their ideas will become completely subservient to massively powerful computers that will become available to everyone and their dog. It just seems to be a question of who can get hold of the better software! Or seconds! One of the attractions of chess is it's 'pure' nature, the idea that you put yourself on the line, that you are testing yourself and you alone.

Now let's move on to the psychology of playing chess by 'committee' - with all the attendant paraphenalia of who, if anyone, is in charge. And why should we let that patzer in the corner have one vote when the GM over there only gets one vote too - is democracy really a valid paradigm in all situations? Kasparov insisted on various operating procedures before agreeing to get involved - but even he could not anticipate all the issues that came crawling out from under the woodwork (for both sides)! Incidentally, because team members will not wish to present anything less than perfect lines to their fellows for fear of losing face - there is a big incentive to use chess engines. Individual correspondence games do not have this 'group dynamic'. As far as I am concerned, I trust my opponents when they promise not to use input from a machine/consultant. Anyway, I simply don't care if my opponent is feeding me computer moves.
 
IM Irina Krush


The system as described in KATW seemed to be a reasonable compromise, a sort of 'modified democracy'. And here is the chairman of the committee, IM Irina Krush (FIDE 2476). This is Michael Nielsen's version of what she accomplished:

"Fifteen years old (as she was in 1999 but the picture is more recent), Krush had recently become the US Women’s chess champion. Although not as highly rated as two of the other World Team advisors, or as some of the grandmasters offering advice to the World Team, Krush was certainly in the international elite of junior chess players.

Unlike her expert peers, Krush focused considerable time and attention on the World Team’s game forum. Shrugging off flames and personal insults, she worked to extract the best ideas and analysis from the forum, as well as building up a network of strong chess-playing correspondents, including some of the grandmasters now offering advice.

Simultaneously, Krush built a publicly accessible analysis tree, showing possible moves and countermoves, and containing the best arguments and refutations for different lines of play, both from the game forum, and from her correspondence with others, including the GM school. This analysis tree enabled the World Team to focus its attention much more effectively, and served as a reference point for discussion, for further analysis, and for voting.

As the game went on, Krush’s role on the World Team gradually became more and more pivotal, despite the fact that according to their relative rankings, Kasparov would ordinarily have beaten Krush easily, unless he made a major blunder.".

Other sites report that "In addition to discovering a new move, Krush displayed great patience, tact, and generosity while participating in the bulletin board discussion of the game.".

STOP PRESS!
Irina Krush US Women's Champion 2010
Full report at Chessbase

Conclusion

Well, we know that chess is warfare in miniature - so success at chess depends on the same qualities that result in victory on the battlefield. We may list, for example, such things as strong leadership (in this instance, Irina Krush), a well thought out strategy (her analysis tree described above) and, last but not least, the fighting qualities of the whole army (the ROTW team participated with enthusiasm and dedication, incentivised by playing Kasparov).

Finally, I do feel that, for matches where people play chess as a group, it is vitally important to have an easy- to-visualise and efficient system for proposing, recording and locating variations - possibly a tailor-made online system. Please refer to my post "Cemetary walks / Openings Indexes" to give you an idea of what I mean.

My interest in ROTW games was further enhanced by my participation in a similar type of game at ChessWorld. In this case 277 members of the club are playing against one of our stronger members, Michael Dellman. I must say that I have gained a lot from the experience. The dodgy variations I have submitted to the forum have been gently corrected - which has given me a little more confidence in my game ie not all my ideas are completely crazy!

If this post has sparked your own interest in playing such a match, just click on the ChessWorld ad at the bottom left of this post to see what it is all about (initially as a non-paying guest).

Links

The Salon article is a nice place to start - here

Game moves and comments - here

Michael Neilsen's post (excellent blog) - here

Wikipedia's take on the match - here

Time magazine article - here

ROWT analysis and ideas as it occurred during the match - here

Controversy over a missing email (various links too) - here

Hot water for the organiser (MicroSoft) - here

Deep analysis of a critical moment in the game - here

Shirky's article - here

Solution - 10...Qe6

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