It is not easy to find sponsors for chess if there is barely anything mentioned in the news about it. Besides if something is written about chess then it is mainly negative. Chess is not anymore a sport. Stinky players are not welcome on EC. Chess-grandmaster falls asleep drunk at the table. Man doesn't survive a game of chess. President of the fide talked to a couple of aliens. Fide president is friends with Saddam Hussein, Kadhafi, Assad,.. Women don't have the brains to play chess. And just recently we could read about female players declare war to Iran for the ridiculous obligation to wear a headscarf and boycot the world-championship.
Bad advertising is also advertising but I have my doubts when it is about chess. If you don't hear anything else about chess then as a parent you would not allow your children to play chess. Chess is of course much more than these incidents. In the previous olympiad we had more tension and drama than in any top-sport see e.g. tiebrake-system decides the olympiad. However nothing about this was mentioned in the media. Even in US nothing was reported while their team won gold. Well almost nothing as the New York Times had a very sad article about it. Instead of congratulations we were able to read how the journalist ridiculed the magnificent performance of the team by insinuating that US bought gold by importing foreign top-players.
It is a missed opportunity to show to the American public that chess can still be exciting and beautiful today. It really isn't very hard for a big newspaper to have a good and easy to understand annotation of a few of their best games. There exists definitely enough stuff to write a good story. Besides there wasn't any lack of drama either. I already mentioned the nerve-racking conclusion of the tie-brake but not less entertaining was the comeback in the game of the strong American grandmaster Samuel Shankland against the strong Indian grandmaster Sethuraman. 11 moves (from 23 till 34) white is completely busted. Some engines even show winning-evaluations for black of 18 points at some point of time but finally white still wins.
A loss instead of the win would've given 16 tie-brake-points less for US if the other results are kept identical. In other words this luck helped US to grab the gold as they only had 9 tie-brake-points more than Ukraine at the end.
At Chess.com Samuel explained that he has saved such bad positions before in his career but never against the caliber of Sethuraman. At some moment you just stop calculating and play a move which doesn't lose on the spot.
In a previous article the sadistic exam I wrote that competitive chess can be emotionally very tough. A well played game can be destroyed by just one stupid move without any chance to recover. However at least as dramatic is not winning a won position because you can't finish off your opponent. Emanuel Lasker told us that the most difficult is to win a won game. Nevertheless it is incomprehensible what happened in my game against Vermaat. 27 moves (from 22 till 49) I have a completely won position but for some reason I can't find the k.o.
After the game the Indian IM Kumar Praveen rushed to me to explain where I missed a win. Not 1 but thousand wins I missed, was my snappy reply. I can't find any standard game in my almost 800 of my personal database where something similar happened to me. How is this possible?
Even so I had practiced tactics the last months a lot. On Chess.com I achieved a tactic-rating of +2600. Next I had won the cup in Deurne which was played just before the open tournament of Gent and at Playchess I won even a couple of blitz-games against grandmasters during the last months. I was confident that I had sufficiently trained myself to perform well in tense situations. On the other hand the best training for standard-chess is still playing standard-chess. If you don't play for more than 3 months any serious games then you get unavoidably a bit rusty. Maybe the best explanation is given on the American chess-blog of Dana Mackenzie: "If there is anything, which even grandmasters, are not able to do very well then it are mating-combinations. That sounds to me a bit too simple so I will devote my next lesson to mating-combinations together with my students.
I found your blog through a comment you posted in chess.com. Good posts especially this one about the difficulty you had in winning a won game. I'm a club player in the 1700 range and would be most interested in reading about your thought processes -- especially during critical moments. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteHow do we recognize a critical moment? At the board we are very often just guessing. This means we spend time looking for something which isn't there while we don't spent enough time at moments there is indeed something under the surface. It is something which I discussed on my Dutch blog more than 3 years ago: http://schaken-brabo.blogspot.be/2013/07/mijn-mooiste-zet.html
ReplyDeleteOf course the stronger you become, the better you get in detecting critical moments but in the end you still rely on intuition instead of some scientific approach.