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Great Shatranj. Great Shatranj. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

💡📝Joe Joyce wrote on Sun, Apr 26, 2009 11:47 PM UTC:

Larry, Mats, thanks for your comments. You bring up a lot of topics. First, some statistics: of 10 games completed, 8 were won by resignation, one by time, in 33 moves [although the position was very poor for the loser - it appeared a resignation around turn 40 was clearly possible], and one by mate - with a breakaway Minister and High Priestess literally cornering the king, in 69 moves. The resignations lasted from 11 to 79 turns. So, for all games, # turns/game = 11, 20, 21, 33, 43, 45, 49, 50, 69, 79.

While it's not a huge sample, it looks like hundred-turn game would exist, but be rare, and if the numbers hold approximately true, most games will end within around 50 turns or so. I don't know the numbers, but isn't this fairly close to FIDE norms, at most a bit longer, not a lot?

Hey, Larry, has it occurred to you that you might just play a pretty good game of shortrange? Being a Jetan master and all? ;-) You came out of that slightly premature attack very well, and our game right now is almost at a standstill. We've achieved a balance of forces across most of the board. But the final battle is not even showing an outline yet; it's just the first faint stirring of pieces, with no form or center.

And this speaks to both Mats comment about the appeal of the game being its slowness and your comment about having a chance to recover. A so-far common pattern in these games is that many show a major battle involving, and costing, about half the pieces per side, occurring early midgame. Then the 2 sides re-group, and often a final key battle is fought, with one side generally coming out of that the clear winner. The short games are when one side is clearly losing after the initial battle, and resigns. [Or when one side gets blitzed by the other through differential skill in handling these almost familiar but rather tricky pieces.] The 40-50 turn games are when one side has either lost the 2nd battle, or never got its pieces together enough after the first battle to fight effectively. I suspect the longer the game the better the players are, or at least they're very evenly matched, at whatever skill level.