Perhaps most people are preoccupied with the global financial crisis right now, especially with people in the US much more focused on the upcoming US presidential election in November. So, for those who haven’t been following the news in chess closely I would like to bring their kind attention to the current World Chess Championship (2008) match (Bonn, Germany) between two supreme chess grandmasters, Vishwanathan Anand (India) and Vladimir Kramnik (Russia). Technically, Anand (pronounced Aa-nand and not A-naand; well, actually it is more like Aa-nundh) is the current world chess champion, but personally I think that his winning the World Chess Championship Mexico (2007) last year was a somewhat “unsatisfactory” accomplishment, if you will, given that he won the crown by winning a tournament and not a “classical” chess match. I fervently believe that a person should be crowned world chess champion (like Fischer, Kasparov, Capablanca, Kramnik, to name a few) only after he or she has won a “proper” world championship match played under “classical time controls” (remember the Fischer-Spassky match in 1972 and the Kasparov-Kramnik match in 2000?) Without that, the gravitas of the chess crown is somewhat diminished.
So, here is Anand’s chance now to silence his critics, of which there are very few really, once and for all that he is indeed the undisputed world chess champion! And judging by the result of the third game, which he just won in a dramatic fashion (woohoo!), as well as the tremendous amount of home preparation it clearly seems he has done, there is no doubt that he is on a steady path to the crown. In all the first three games, Anand has demonstrated thus far that he is the superior player. Of course, there are nine more games left and the bets are not off by any means. After all, it was Kramnik who beat Kasparov convincingly in 2000 to win the crown.
For analyses of the first two games, click here and here.
Ok, so here is a poll that I invite our readers to participate in. (Obviously, if you choose the “wrong” answer, all your future comments on this blog will be deleted! So, think hard before you vote.)
16 comments
Comments feed for this article
October 18, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Todd Trimble
That third game was great — some real fighting chess!
I will willingly concede that my chess-playing skills are very rusty (I haven’t played a game in years), and you may be right that Anand is the superior player — I wouldn’t know; I don’t read chess news any more. But Kramnik looked pretty good to me in game 3 at one point: just before the big blunder at move 33, he was two (passed) pawns up in material! True, the kingside pawn structure was god-awful, but his chances still looked pretty good to me.
His bishop sac at move 18 was pretty ballsy, you must admit!
October 18, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Vishal Lama
… and you may be right that Anand is the superior player — I wouldn’t know…
Actually, I should have been perhaps careful when I said Anand seems to be the superior player so far. I really meant that it seems he has done his homework very well and more thoroughly than Kramnik! Given the “stratospheric” level at which Anand and Kramnik play, it is almost impossible to say who is the better one. They both have the same temperament (calm, cool and composed), each of them have played close to the ELO 2800 level for years now, and they know each other’s style very well. So, the crucial factor that will determine the eventual winner in this match, I think, is going to be the quality and amount of home preparation that one may have done. In that regard, Anand seems to be somewhat ahead of his opponent.
But, given Kramnik’s profound positional understanding of chess, which I think is better than Anand’s (and even Kasparov’s) and certainly far better than the rest of the other super grandmasters (those with ELO > 2600), Anand has to be very careful in not allowing himself get “trapped” into playing closed positions and fighting positional battles. He must engage Kramnik in open positions and tactical battles that entail lots of calculation over the board. After all, there is no doubt that no active chess player today calculates positions as well as Anand does!
And, indeed, the bishop sac at move 18 was ballsy! Interestingly, it seemed as though in that game for Anand all those moves (till move 18) were part of his home preparation whereas Kramnik it seemed had clearly entered unchartered territory. In fact, super GM Nigel Short (who was Kasparov’s challenger for the world crown in 1993) during the early part of game 3 had declared that the result would either be a draw or 1-0 in favor of Kramnik. Obviously, he too didn’t really know what was happening!
October 19, 2008 at 1:12 am
Henry Wilton
So Kramnik has the most ‘profound positional understanding’ but nobody ‘calculates positions as well as Anand’? I’m confused.
October 19, 2008 at 1:34 am
Todd Trimble
That confusion is understandable! Vishal may be able to articulate it better, but “positional understanding” would refer roughly to a deep intuitive grasp of the long-range strategic underpinnings of a position, typically involving features which are roughly stable until the endgame phase (for example, pawn structure in “closed positions”). Ability to “calculate positions” here refers to the power to analyze complicated tactical considerations, typically over shorter but perhaps more volatile sequences of play, as might happen in “open positions” where the pieces are unimpeded by the pawn structure and can be quickly coordinated for an attack.
October 19, 2008 at 4:47 am
Vishal Lama
Henry,
Todd has pretty much explained what I would have written myself. I will only add the following.
Positional understanding entails knowing intuitively which positions during a game are good and which ones are bad based on a number of factors such as pawn structures, bank rank weaknesses, knight outposts, open files, semi-open files, control of the center, etc. Of course, a skill like that is developed and honed over a period of years and even decades of practice and analyses of positions and does not arise out of some innate ability of a chess player; well, Capablanca might be the only exception!
Calculating ability, on the other hand, determines how deep and how many variations a chess player can work out when presented with a chess position. For instance, if Anand (or even Kramnik, for that matter) were given a board position to examine, say, after the first twenty moves of a game had already been played and asked to find the necessary continuation for white (assuming white had a better position), he would be able to produce not only the best possible continuation for white but he would also be able to produce other “optimal” sequences of moves that would still ensure white a win. Modern day chess programs like Rybka and Shredder are very good – exceedingly good, actually – at this sort of thing. On the other hand, chess programs have a lot to learn about positional chess even today.
Obviously, it would be naive to think that “positional understanding” and “calculating ability” don’t go hand in hand. Those skills certainly feed each other in a chess player. Having said so, chess players do, quite often, have one of those skills developed more than the other.
Perhaps (and I only thought about this now) one may best illustrate what I wrote above by examining a chess program. The ability of a chess program to play good chess rests on two crucial components: its evaluation function and its search algorithm(s). The evaluation function determines the program’s “positional understanding”, if I may say so, and the search algorithm determines its “calculating ability” (that is, how far it can “think”). If the evaluation function is a poor one, then no matter how deep the program calculates moves, it will lose against a good chess player. On the other hand, if the search algorithm is a poor one (calculating only a few moves ahead), then no matter how good the evaluation function is, it will still lose against a good chess player.
October 19, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Henry Wilton
So the distinction is roughly strategy vs tactics? I see. I was confused by your use of the word ‘positional’ to describe both.
October 19, 2008 at 5:11 pm
James Stripes
I’ll take the bait and vote for Kramnik–delete my comments if you will. I checked the results of your poll so far and was horrified at the imbalance.
I’ve been pulling for Kramnik since before he defeated Kasparov in 2000. And, yes, I find his style of chess exciting. I like Vishy too. There is no question after game 3 that his preparation for this match was exceptional.
October 19, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Vishal Lama
So the distinction is roughly strategy vs tactics?
Henry,
‘Roughly‘, yes. And, I am sorry for creating that confusion, though I never really intended to use the word ‘positional’ to describe two different things. (Could you let me know which statement(s) of mine may have led to that confusion?)
James,
Obviously, I have no way of knowing who voted for whom until the person himself or herself tells me. Now that you have told me, maybe I will delete your comments to suppress any kind of dissent!
To be honest, I have been quite surprised myself at the ‘imbalance’ of the poll result thus far.
But, aww… c’mon, you can’t be serious when you say that Kramnik’s chess style is exciting! Kramnik (‘The Iceman’) is quite a defensive player, and a very good one at that, but his style of play doesn’t inspire the ordinary chess player at all. I mean, he is more like a boa constrictor that waits for its prey to come to it, and then once the latter is in its powerful grip, it slowly (but surely) asphyxiates its victim, sucking the precious life out of it!
On the other hand, Anand isn’t nicknamed the ‘Madras Tiger’ for nothing. He has always been an attacking player (with solid defensive abilities), perhaps somewhat tempered now with the advance of age.
(For those who may not know this, Madras is present-day Chennai, where Anand was born and raised.)
October 19, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Henry Wilton
Vishal – my apologies, it wasn’t actually the word ‘positional’, but ‘positional’ and ‘position’. As I quoted above, you contrasted ‘Kramnik’s profound positional understanding’ with the fact that ‘no active chess player today calculates positions as well as Anand does’. I guess the emphasis is on ‘profound… understanding’ as opposed to ‘calculat[ion]‘, but that wasn’t immediately apparent to me.
October 19, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Henry Wilton
Vishal – I should add, the ‘position’ remarks were in the second comment, not in the original post.
October 19, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Todd Trimble
That’s right, and Vishal’s discussion of chess programs exemplifies the difference nicely. The game of Go illustrates some of this difference as well: it is well-known that even the best Go programs are relatively poor in comparison with human masters — the role of “positional understanding”, or deep intuitive judgment (sense, taste) of the essential features and potentialities of a position, is far more pronounced in Go than in chess, and cannot be duplicated by present-day programs. This would be in contrast to the more calculational aspects, as in counting liberties, assessing life-and-death in local battles, and so on.
October 20, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Zak Smith
I like the “position” of Go today. It is hard to debate which game is more strategic and tactical as regards Chess and Go, with the almost obvious victory going to Go. It is sad that my favorite game- chess- is being consumed by computers, and that after a time it seems to be repetetive. It still has much left, especially to lower level players such as myself, but with the focus on computer programs today, it’s hard not to wonder if the world is not “chessed out”. Go, however, will never be fully conquered by computers, in my humble opinion, because sometimes there is just an athstetic nature of the board that “calls” for a stone to be placed in a certain spot, and this without any calculation. Computers will not ever be able to just “look” at something and make decisions.
October 20, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Vishal Lama
Wow! Kramnik just got “burrrnnned” in Game 5, which he resigned in 35 moves! It seems he blundered on move 29 under intense pressure from Anand. Curiously, he repeated the opening (Semi-Slav Meran) of Game 3, which he had lost earlier.
Anand is definitely demonstrating that he’s more prepared than Kramnik is in all aspects of the game including psychology. Seven more games left!
October 20, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Vishal Lama
I just went through Game 5 again, and I must say, “Wow! Stupendous performance by Anand!” Look at Black’s 28…Rc3, wherein Anand sets up a “trap” that Kramnik falls into, the latter only realizing 14 half-moves later that he is doomed. Now, that’s what I called sheer mastery of calculation combined with great positional understanding.
October 21, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Vishal Lama
Kramnik is going through the worst nightmare of his life! Anand just won Game 6. The latter (white) introduced a novelty (it seems) on move nine: 9. h3… Clearly, Anand is playing complete chess! I mean this game was less about tactics and combinations and more about strategy and positional chess. It is difficult to imagine how Kramnik can win three games out of the six remaining ones. Absolutely stupendous performance by Anand!
October 21, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Todd Trimble
Poor Kramnik. Very often I find myself rooting for the underdog, but right now what would be the point — he’s toast. And undoubtedly horribly demoralized.