Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

******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.

Oh, btw, it may be that a lot of serious-minded people have delved into
this issue more deeply than me and I admit I didn't do any research
before laying my idea down for you here. There may be some who have
developed alternate point systems for chess that are more elaborate and
justified. I'd appreciate if anyone wants to throw those down here too,
though I think mine may have a simplicity and merit all its own. Then
again, it's very possible that someone else has proposed the exact same
point system. Any help here will be appreciated!

Grandmaster Adorjan wrote 2 books on the subject of black's supposed
disadvantage due to the first move initiative. The first, 'Black is
Okay!' (published by Batsford in 1988), it is a book dedicated to proving
that Black has his full share of chances.  The second, recently published,
'Black is Still Okay' has the same objective and offers more proof.  I
have a copy of the first book and must agree with the grandmaster.

Adorjan's premise, is that “The tale of White's advantage is a delusion,
belief in it is based on mass psychosis.”

And I believe the current point scoring system is fine.  If your opponent
is 2200 rated and you are 1500 rated... I believe that you having white is
not going to be of much help.

A new scoring system would be grossly unfair as well.  For there would be
rounds inwhich players advance and neeed that extra point fraction offered
by a black win (under the new system).  Yet they are assigned the white
pieces worth less if they win.  Terrible.

Also, there is the ratings factor... now a win against Player X with Black
should get me more rating points than would a win against Player X with me
as White.  In effect, we'd need a black piece rating and a white piece
rating.  Again, Terrible in my opinion.

To offset the small white initiative, change not the point system, instead
increase your own playing strength.

A lengthy e-mail I received prompted me to add the following, in relation
to my previous comment.

When I used the word 'terrible' is was not meant to be directed at
Jeremy Good's proposal in and of itself, but rather to situations which
would result by applying that system to a Swiss type event.  These are
extremely popular because they can accommadate large numbers of players in
a relatively small number of rounds.  

From the several USCF Swiss tournaments I've directed and played in, I
cannot remotely imagine the new point system as being satisfactory to the
majority of players [of the Swiss System]... primarily because a player
can lose an event,simply because he (or she) won with white pieces in the 
last round.....and I contend that that is terrible.

However, what I did not point out was that for a Match between 2 players
Jeremy's idea seems interesting.  In fact, I think I will calculate the
Fischer-Spassky 1972 match using the Jeremy method, to see what result we
get.

Anyway I think Jeremy Good's new point system idea is fine for Matches
and for this type of event:

Round-Robbin 'Double-Game' --  where everyone plays everyone, once with
black and once with white... such events are very rare due to time
available.

So, I apologize if it seemed I was attacking Jeremy's proposed system. 
What I really meant was it could result in terrible situations in Swiss
System events.

It is almost unbelievable to me that anyone knowledgeable, especially GM Adorjan, can be arrogant and insulting enough to think virtually all of the rest of us (whom I regard as knowledgeable ... to varying degrees) are believing a 'delusion' and suffering from 'mass psychosis'.

The first-move-of-the-game advantage for white in Chess with a white-black turn order is well-established statistically over a vast number of games at the highest levels of tournament competition. Furthermore, you had better believe that all of the players, whether assigned white or black, were trying their hardest to win. They would never have reached tournament levels in Chess in the first place with the defeatist attitude, 'Damn! I'm playing black. I might as well give-up or only try for a draw at most'.

By the way, the high complexity of the game and the great impact a mere 50 ELO points can make in your chances for victory are totally seperate issues from white's advantage. Most of us do not need to write 2 books if our goal is only to say something ridiculously stupid that defies proven facts. It is wise not to uncritically believe everything you read.

I calculated the score from Fischer vs. Spassky, 1972 Chess World
Championship using the following Jeremy Good proposal:

Black Win: 4 points,
White Win: 3 points
Draw for Black: 2 points.
Draw for White: 1 point.
Loss: Zero point(s). 

Reults:
Fischer: 41    Spassky:  30     (Jeremy's system)
Fischer: 12.5  Spassky:   8.5  (Original system) 

Of course, White players would likely be less willing to draw knowing that
they are effectively going down a point... but black would be very happy to
play for a draw.

I briefly discussed this information with a near master friend of mine
moments ago.  He likes Jeremy's idea and mention that similar proposals
have been made before.  He also sees that the Swiss System is not a valid
platform for the new point system.

Best regards to all...

In response to Derek Nalls' comment: Derek -you make good points... but I
don't think Adjoran's intentions are to insult... but just to convey his
idea that a pygmallion effect is going on (in his opinion).   Statistical
results do not disprove that such an effect is not at work... the
subconcious is powerful.  

You also write, 'It is wise not to uncritically believe everything you
read.'  I agree.

i think it could at the very least be stated that, in general black and
white play differently from one another.

one way of alleviating this 'problem' - without the use of simultaneous
movement, or in always allowing black 'one last move' - in a given game,
would be to have a chess variant such that the two sides are for all
intents and purposes identically placed at setup, yet the 'black' side
has one piece 'pre-moved' in some kind of logical, standard manner. this
might make up for any real or imagined imbalance.

for example, if you applied this idea to FIDE chess, you could have black
begin with 'king's pawn at 4' (rather than 2) as part and parcel of the
opening setup, yet white would move first.

Andy, thank you for considering this issue, but why wouldn't that be exactly equivalent to the situation as is, except with colors reversed? Am I missing something here? Maybe it would help overcome the irrational fear people have because of the stigma they attach to the black pieces? After all, if orange is the new pink, why can't black be the new white?

Another creative approach, one that Gary Gifford tried out with me, is Betza's Black Ghost. Gary thinks that variant favors Black, but maybe if the Black Ghost (capturable but non-capturing) moved like a pawn instead of teletransported and started out on one of White's central squares (c4, d4, e4 or f4) it might have more life to it (if Gary's right that it does favor black, as I suspect he may be.)

'Statistical results do not disprove that such an effect is not at work
... the subconcious is powerful.'
______________________________

Yes, you make a worthy point but ...

The first-move-of-the-game advantage for white is real- NOT merely an
imaginary, psychosomatic condition suffered by black.

Everyone (except a certain GM) can see and feel it when they play.  White
controls the tempo the first and most important time in the game. 
Moreover, there is no assurance that black will get to control the tempo
an equal number of times.  Does anyone contend that the tempo is trivial?

White chooses and dictates the opening that black must defend against and
so, shapes the entire game.  White acts and black reacts as it must ...
repeatedly.  If black does not defend soundly, the advantage of white
increases further which will give white opportunities to increase it even
further and will probably, eventually lead to black's loss of the game.

Although chess is intractable, some trivial games similar to chess with
fewer pieces and small boards have been demonstrated to have greater (if
not absolute) first-move-of-the-game advantages for white than chess via
powerful computers.  So, the applicability of this concept to chess
variants with the white-black turn order has been tentatively established-
zugzwang-for-white, badly designed games being the important exception.

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).

Derek - you wrote, in part: 

'White chooses and dictates the opening that black must defend against
and
so, shapes the entire game.  White acts and black reacts as it must ...
repeatedly.'

Really?  So, when white plays 1.e4 what is it exactly that Black has to
play?  e5, c5, a6, Nf6, d6, something else?  I see no such control you
describe by white.  I do think you are imagining something here. 

In a tournament game my 200 point higher-rated white-pieced opponent
played 1. e4... I did not feel the least bit controlled.  I responded
1.... Nf6 (my very first Alekhine Defense in a tournament.  Guess what
Derek? I won, with black.  A fluke?  No, I win with black quite often.  As
Dennis Monokroussos has stated, 'what matters is that you have a good feel
for the initiative. If you do and you know what you're doing in a given
opening, then you will often find ways to seize the initiative, regardless
of the opening.'

Jeremy, you are quite welcome for my brief comments.  And I thank you for
your interesting 'article.'  On a somewhat related note, I think it
would be interesting if players had 3 ratings calculted for Western Chess.
 Overall Rating, Black Rating, and White Rating.  It would be interesting
to see what players had for a rating when given the 'initiative of
white.'  Could a 2000 rated player (white rating) have a black rating of
only 1800?  I doubt that.  If a player excelled at the French Defense as
black, would that player likely have a higher black rating?  Seems
logical.   When I played in the 9 round World Open in 1980, for example, I
started all my Black defenses with e6 (going into French Defense
patterns).... I lost no games with Black pieces (all wins, except 1 draw),
and had one loss when playing White (a gruelling 7 hour long game), and one
draw as white.  Anyway, I would have emerged with a higher black rating. 
Of course, if I was worried about White's 'initiative' I'd likely not
have done as well with black.

In regard to your question about Adorjan's black/white results.  No, I do
not know what they are.  But, I do know that Adorjan was qualifier for the
Chess World Championship Candidates in 1980... unfortunately for him, he
was eliminated by Huebner.

Interested players can read about Adorjan and view many of his games
(including many fantastic wins with black pieces) at this site:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=14589

Interestingly eenough, I bought a copy of 'The Life and Games of Mikhail
Tal' (Hope I spelled his name correctly).

He claimed he played in a Tournament where for a win a player received 60
Francs, for a draw for a draw, a player only got 25 francs, and even got
a
consolation of 10 francs for losing.

He commented in his book at how much more intense the battles were
because
you were rewarded less for 2 draws than one win.  He also claimed that
there was a lot more games that ended decisively.  I have since lost this
book.  If anyone out there still has it, check it out.  

Maybe the real solution is to financially reward wins better than 2
draws.
 What do you think?

• White makes a move.
• Black then decides whether he wants to play with the white or black pieces.
• The came then continues as normal (with the possibility of the players swapping seats).

Any other opinions on using the pie rule in FIDE Chess?

Edit: I note that the Pie Rule does nothing to discourage Black from playing to draw. My answer to the draw problem is to make it so both players get 0 points (instead of half a point) in a drawn game; both players lose. Or have it so that the player with more material on the board wins .75 points after a three-fold repetition/50 moves without capture/insufficient mating material position. We can also consider the Ko rule for chess: You can not repeat a position on the board that has been already played.

'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.