Comments by judgmentality

In the rules section, I specify that pawns can only promote to Kings or Ubi-Ubi's, and I briefly discuss the fate of supernumerary kings. In this game it's frequently desirable to have more than one king. In most cases, as in variants such as 'Kings or Lemmings?' by Ingo Althofer, and 'Time Travel Chess' by Gary Gifford, multiple kings are disadvantageous (at least prior to the endgame) because any king may be checkmated (and in 'Time Travel Chess' there are more perils than just fear of checkmate). The situation in Ibu Ibu Chess is a bit more analagous to the 'adventitious kings' in Tamerlane Chess.

In my rules, I don't address the question of what would happen under the scenario you pose, i.e., to the pawns on the entourage squares if a king goes to the seventh rank.

Now I shall.

These pawns do promote too, automatically.

If your king moves to the seventh rank and both eighth rank entourage squares are empty, you can specify whether you want two additional kings, an additional king and a Ubi Ubi or two Ubi Ubis. Promoting to a king not only removes the immediate threat of checkmate (before your opponent can checkmate you, he will have to capture your additional kings), but also may create the possibility of moving one to the seventh rank, creating additional new promotions!

I think that's all very much in the spirit of this game.

Thank you, Sam, for your excellent questions.

I am just going to post this preset here for now, but will post it formally some time in the next week (you are certainly free to do that now, Gary, if you want, but I want to tinker with the showpiece function and maybe try to get the notation to be a little less cumbersome before I post it myself).

http://play.chessvariants.org/pbm/play.php?game%3DThree+Elephant+Chess%26settings%3DThree+Elephant+Chess

Wow, USA took 3rd. That's a big result! Congratulations to Nakamura! 

And kudos to Armenia and China! Very exciting results. That's great! 

Can you update us on the women's teams too?

There is (what I consider) a disturbing phenomenon I've been discussing with Gary Gifford (in our game notes here) who doesn't appear to share my view that the phenomenon is disturbing. The phenomenon affects professional FIDE chess, but it attaches itself to any chess variant (FIDE Chess being one) where white has first move advantage in that White should have better chances, all other things being equal (players being equal). In FIDE chess, I believe white wins on average 53% or so of the time. But Black's winning percentage is much less given that a large percentile of games end in draws. In the professional FIDE chess circles, there is a tendency for grandmasters to draw on particular occasions because it's safer to avoid losing, and this makes it less sporting for the entire chess community. Which means, ultimately, less money for professional chess players, so it's a practice that comes back to bite them.

This sort of conversation will be familiar to many who follow professional FIDE Chess. I propose that more fighting and probably more precise and accurate chess play would come from a different point system that rewarded winning more and punished drawing more, while acknowledging White's advantage (in variants that don't attempt to provide balance as with Balanced Marseillais and Extra Move Chess).

Here is one proposal:

Black Win: 4 points

White Win: 3 points

Draw for Black: 2 points.

Draw for White: 1 point.

Loss: Zero point(s).

This system is modelled a little bit on NFL football's point system where a touchdown is 6 points, with field goal 3 points, extra point 1, safety 2 points, etc. One can arrive at the same score through differing achievements.

Someone who wins as black and then loses with white will have the same score as someone who wins with white and then draws with white.

I don't just want this to be an idle discussion though for the sake of discussion. I want this conversation starter to be considered also as a proposition, a proposal. I want us to set the example for the chess world by implementing this point system (or a similar one which takes into account the same issues) in our next chessvariants.org tournament.

On the upside for the Ukraine: Looks like Ukrainian women's team took
first place this year! Last year, it was China's women's team that came
in first, as I recall.

******The perenially thoughtful and constructive Joe Joyce offers me these comments:

Read your comment about points scoring - think you'll run into a tough sell on that.

[Okay, you're about to hit the Rock of Gibralter while paragliding; that's my real suspicion, but we'll see. Two suggestions on that:

* Run a new-scoring variants tourney. Tempt by letting each player pick a game for the tourney, maybe.

* Recalculate game courier tourneys 1 & 2, and compare them with the actual results. See how close they are - the closer the better for your purposes, possibly.

* You may have created CV Power Ratings. I'd like to see T #1 & #2 both ways, side by side. Show the validity of your method.

* Luck. [you can stick some of this in a comment if you want]

******Paragliding into the Rock of Gibraltar. Hehe. Nice metaphor.

I totally agree with you, Gary.

I still think that maybe only users should be able to leave comments. This would give more people an incentive to join this site and actively partake of its benefits and it wouldn't allow anonymous people to spam the comments sections as easily as they sometimes do now.

That's just an idea, and it's meant as a bit of an aside.

Mainly, I want to write in support of what Gary is saying here, as a chess editor. I want to suggest that we re-program the comments section so that anyone who wants to leave a comment has to construct at least a five word sentence (has to write at least five words) about why they felt the way they did about any given variant. We can make it so that when you click on the send button for comments, we will politely and kindly ask for a small comment about why they felt the way they did about a variant. This will be helpful to everybody. The current system involves some counterproductive activity, in which we editors have to check all the anonymous messages where someone did nothing but rate a game without any explanation and then people, including variant authors and inventors, have to read through these anonymous comments most likely without any gain of insight or understanding or common feeling.

This happened to me twice yesterday and just now, and it made me want to go back and write in support of Gary's valuable suggestion.

Charles, your use of the phrase 'double move' to connote two entirely different things in adjacent sentences potentially leads to confusion.

You won't mind, I presume, if I change the phrase, 'Pawns inherit the FIDE double move...' to read, 'FIDE initial two step move...'?

We might then leave the next sentence intact or optionally substitute 'A wazir spending five turns...' for 'A Wazir spending five double moves...'

Please let me know whether you would approve either or perhaps both of these minor editorial changes.

Gary, I want to thank you for all of your comments and input.

You have inspired me to continue probing this issue, but with a little more depth. Your application to the Fischer - Spassky championship is pretty interesting as it decreases the proportion of the overall winning percentage significantly for Fischer, and as you pointed out to me privately, would have had Spassky tied at a certain juncture when he was behind in that match (under the point system they were utilizing at the time). None of this is meant to take away any of Fischer's achievement in that match, but only to apply a different dimension and allow for another perspective.

Above all, you have made it clear that my initial proposal has one, maybe two, highly significant omissions. So you have significantly helped me to clarify my proposal.

One of the omissions concerns the type of tournament for which this point system is appropriate. It would be, exactly as Gary says, 'grossly unfair' to implement this point system in a swiss system tournament. Such a system is, as Gary says, appropriate to a 'round robin' and might also make world championship matches more exciting if applied to them.

The second omission may concern ratings and how they are calculated and whether this point system would impact that. I don't know anything about how ratings are calculated and shall defer to Gary who is probably much more knowledgeable on the subject, having been a tournament director. Joe Joyce gives me hope though when he suggests that what I've 'invented' is what he refers to as 'power ratings.' (I think that was the phrase used). An entirely separate category of rating, appropriate to the point system.

Measuring the relative worth of players can be done in different ways. Please see some of chessmetrician Jeff Sonas's work on this subject. My point system is not sophisticated enough to address this issue. Perhaps Mr. Sonas will want to investigate this (maybe he already has).

The separate debate about the relative merits and demerits of White's first move is something that I'm also inspired to delve into more deeply, so thank you for the intriguing reference to Adorjan's book. Do you happen to know what Adorjan's career average as Black vs. White was? As you say, the statistics can't disprove the thesis. Another interesting approach comes from a comment Kasparov made in his second-to-last CD on the Najdorf (part of an ongoing series) in which he describes the Najdorf as an opening which gives Black a chance, not just to equalize, but to win, from the start. It might possibly be interesting to compare the winning percentages Fischer and Kasparov enjoyed with the Black pieces while playing the Najdorf to the winning percentages they enjoyed playing against the Najdorf as White. Again, that could be misleading since both were without peer in their knowledge of that opening.

Bent Larsen, one of my favorite players, an adherent of Nimzovich and enthusiast of the Alekhine Defense, noted in his most famous collection of games, that he happened to have among them more wins with Black than White. I mentioned Bent's use of the Alekhine Defense because of the interesting hypermodern strategy that defense implies, which encourages a focus on the weakening effects of white's first move ('every pawn move exposes a weakness' is a fairly standard chess maxim). Bent Larsen suffered some notorious failures in chess, but he also enjoyed some wild successes.

Like Derek Nalls, my starting point for this discussion is the weight of statistical analysis leading me to pose an ideal standard model. I don't think it's a resolved controversy. How can we prove that White in FIDE Chess is not, in fact, in a state of zugzwang? I would like to hear more about this. We can not rely solely on the rich heritage of accumulated human knowledge because computers have recently shown that human knowledge of FIDE chess is relatively insubstantial. Computer scientists demonstrated this when they beat a world champion (Bent Larsen, by the way, was the first grandmaster to lose to a computer!) and began exceeding humans in ratings. We must now turn to the statistical analyses of computer vs. computer games, but that might be misleading too, since we have every reason to believe that even more superior computers will surpass the ones we currently have. What is needed is a mathematically precise theory of chess that proves decisively the relative winning chances of both sides and that is not quite here yet. I'm open to hearing more about this from Derek, if he has more evidence for me.

The point system I propose is not necessarily geared towards resolving this interesting debate!

It is primarily intended to encourage professional and serious chessplayers to be less willing to compromise the highest standards of gameplay for the sake of winning half a point here and there. It is meant to extract excellence, but it is a very imprecise attempt at helping us describe the actual situation relative to the first and second players. I admit its extreme inadequacy and welcome a more vigorous, precise and knowledgeable analysis of that situation. Such an analysis may lead to a differing proposal for a point system, based on our current knowledge of the game, something perhaps more likely to bring out the most excellent gameplay possible.

The alternate point system's attempt to provide greater balance to an apparently imbalanced system is a secondary effect for me and one that requires a much deeper investigation.

My initial suggestion to Gary was to make draws equivalent to losses, as a way to encourage both sides to always seek the most winning lines. Upon reflection, I decided that it would probably be more fair to award a draw a point, so that it is still much more desirable to win, but draws won't be so heavily penalized. If a draw were worth zero points, it would still not be equivalent to a loss, for the sake of tournament (or match) strategy, since draws would involve neither player gaining a point and losses would involve one player gaining three or four points and the other player gaining zero points. On the chessvariants yahoogroup this morning, John Kipling Lewis commented that he prefers draws be made equivalent to losses. 'Draw is the new loss' in this proposal. Another interesting experiment. I fear that quality of game play could suffer if the draw incentive were virtually removed in this way, but I welcome and encourage other people to weigh in on this aspect of the alternate point system.

There is something in particular about the proposal I made here which seems to me not quite right and that is the fact that Black would gain twice as much from a draw as White, giving Black greater incentive to draw (as Gary pointed out). Black would still have even more incentive to win, and you could argue, perhaps successfully, that Black already has incentive to draw, simply because of his presumptive disadvantage in the opening. Most theorists appear to believe (Kasparov's comment in his Najdorf series notwithstanding) that Black should strive to equalize in the opening and only after Black achieves equality can Black seek to win.

Under this theory, White has to fail to maintain the initiative for Black to have a chance at winning. The onus is on White to prove that he can't win. This is the crux, it seems to me, of Reuben Fine's thesis in his Ideas Behind the Chess Openings, a book former world postal chess champion Hans Berliner commends in Berliner's The System (as opposed to Nimzovich's more famous book My System). If this theory turns out to be the correct approach, then rewarding Black more than White for drawing shouldn't affect the gameplay negatively. It would still be questionable whether a draw for Black should be worth twice as much as for White, when a win for Black is not worth twice as much. A smaller increment of reward for Black, such as .25 points, would complicate this point system, but might be more appropriate. Especially since a win for Black should be much harder for Black to pull off (than obtaining a draw, so that the ratio expressed by the proportions of White to Black draws as opposed to White to Black wins seem off-balanced).

I'll admit: I added the extra point for a Black draw impulsively because it seemed to me at the time that if we are going to say that a Black win is worth one point more than a White win, it must be just to say that a Black draw is worth one point more than a White draw. It may be that we should just say that all draws are worth one point regardless of color while retaining the extra point for a Black win.

It would be interesting to conduct a poll: In this alternate point system awarding three points for a White win and four points for a Black win, should draws be worth one point for either player? Or no points for either player? Or two points for black and one point for white? Or some other, more, incremental difference?

Again, I welcome feedback, and reiterate that this is intended not just as discussion, but as a serious proposal (one that I'm willing to amend as the facts and opinions come in).

Well, I feel that I may have derailed Gary's initial intent by mentioning my own pet idea about linking ratings to users. I think I have some fairly good reasons for that, so I think I will reintroduce the topic at a later date when I have time to marshall my arguments.

Could we just consider the merits of Gary's proposal instead of mine? Gary's proposal is simply that rating a game should require a comment, placing no restrictions on who can rate and who can comment.

If I read him correctly: Gary seems to be introducing a further idea which is the compromise: If you're going to rate a game below 'average' you should at least have to say something about why. Could we at least agree on this compromise proposal? It's one thing to have a free forum in the interest of encouraging people to use this site, but it's another thing to be sensitive of the inventors' hard work and effort and realize that this too is something we should be trying to encourage. The current comment system is not always very encouraging and could be dispiriting. I know of at least one fantastic chess variants designer who is very disgruntled with this site because of all the arbitrary negative comments some of his work has garnered.

I really think it's fair to ask people to take a moment to think about why they're making a judgement if they care to be doing that. Because judgements can be very significant things, I think.

Personally, I think the 'say at least 5 words' if you're going to rate a game is still a good one. In a different thread, I suggested de-linking ratings from comments. Just for purposes of greater organization. It's one thing if you want to go to a website and make general comments and ask general questions, as we encourage people to do on the 'rules of chess' area and another if you want to offer a judgement as to the quality of a game. One may wish to drop by and say, 'The inventor of this variant was my great uncle, etc.' That's of topical interest and doesn't run the same risks as the rating system. It's another thing if you want to say, 'I dislike/like this variant because...' It's the latter subset of remarks that concern me because they reflect on how people will regard the quality of this website.

I think the best way of handling the situation would be to re-program our comments section so that if you click on a rating, a new screen comes up with a different message for each comment. If you click on 'Excellent' The screen could have the message. 'Great! Please say 5 words or more why you liked it.' If 'Poor' -- 'Please say 5 words or more about what you didn't like about this game or how you think it might be improved.' Etc.

'Maybe the real solution is to financially reward wins better than 2 draws.

What do you think?'

Yes, Chris, I agree, I mean, let's get real here. Money is a major factor for most professional chessplayers in determining the kind of play they will execute. Many chess spectators want to think everything a grandmaster does should be for the love of what they do. Maybe that's one reason why we don't have much of a sustainable professional chessplaying community in the United States. Financial rewards matter, as in any sport, whether you disperse them directly or indirectly. Tal's anecdote is about play being rewarded directly, for each game. My point system would have the same effect, but indirectly, insofar as the winners have to wait until the end of the tournament to be rewarded. Same thing though.

Even among amateurs, the financial incentives for playing in amateur tournaments can be a critical factor in determining how they will play the game. It's reflected in the point rewards system.

There are some major professional tournaments where additional factors are directly rewarded. I can't think of them off the top of my head. The effect is similar to contracts in football where players will be rewarded additional money for rushing so many yards or scoring so many touchdowns. Can you tell I'm a football fanatic? Baseball too.

Yes, David, a voluntary, opt-in system like that sounds very reasonable and
accomodating to all sides in this discussion and would be a huge
improvement. Very thoughtful proposal.