Monday, September 27, 2010

The polemics - Part 2

Some narrow-minded user calling herself (?) Annie K. (Annie Kappel, allegedly from Israel) wrote:

Why doesn't this crowd seem to notice a simple point that's been waving in their faces and screaming all along?
Um, did not practice and train constantly with computers as today's chess professionals do.
Professional players today have probably analyzed thousands of games during the course of their careers - postmortems of their own games, historical games, latest theory lines, anything interesting, etc. etc...
. Of course.
What do you expect them to do, FORGET everything they learned throughout the years, while playing a correspondence game?
They don't have to - and don't need to - "cheat" to remember optimal lines even 20-30 moves into a game - and once a less professional opponent "blunders" (relatively speaking, that is, makes a suboptimal move), the way to exploit that, and from there on, is often obvious.
Isn't that, uh, self-evident?

None of that makes comparison of pre-comp CC players with players who spent their whole careers analyzing with computers, and learning from them, valid.

This is utter nonsense. Moves appearing in theory are cut from testing ofcourse. Moreover, centaur databases aren't allowed on Chess.com. The idea that modern players play more in computer-style naturally is sheer blether spread by cheaters and their apologists. Just baseless and futile attempt to dishonest CC benchmarks data as obsolete. "Modern correspondence games" can't be used ofcourse, because honest play can't be proven, but it doesn't matter, because the ancient ones are still relevant and will be relevant forever, at least until somebody proves opposite and replaces them. OTB data don't show such trend, so there is no reason to expect it in CC, unless cheating takes place. The fact is that ICCF stopped producing new correspondence chessplayers in early 90' and started producing monkeys, so the opposite is true: there aren't strong experienced correspondence players around anymore.

Btw., article about Yelena Dembo coming soon ;o)

4 comments:

  1. Polar Bear, I assume you're allowed to post your suspicions here about players who are still active on chess.com. I'd be curious to know what your opinions are of the current top 2.

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  2. Sorry anonymous: no comment. I promised myself i won't post names of active players and my opinions about them until the end of year 2010. I have decided to give the staff of Chess.com some time to deal with them. They have finally made serious effort during last month and i hope they will continue.

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  3. Well, it's almost the end of 2010. I'm interested to see if you decide to break your silence on this issue. Chess.com did seem to bolster its efforts on bannings for awhile, but it seems like its decreased in the last month or so. One of the top 2 has left though, but the replacement would of course be of interest as well.

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  4. Well, it is already April 2011, and nothing..... Has Martin Zeman (who knows everything about cheating in chess) lost his touch?

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