What constitutes a mistake?

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Chris Rice
Posts: 3417
Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 5:17 am

What constitutes a mistake?

Post by Chris Rice » Tue Sep 02, 2014 7:12 am

I thought Jacob Aagard's latest blog entry concerning his chat with Boris Gelfand was very interesting:

A few words about mistakes

This will hopefully be a short post, as I am rather exhausted, suffering from a cold and four hours of rook and knight vs. rook and knight endgame analysis with Boris Gelfand.

In the cause of events we talked about one of the recurring topics – what constitutes a mistake.
I wrote about this already in Excelling at Chess published back in 2001 and although I cannot remember the words I used, I do not think there was any noticeable difference between what Boris said and what I wrote back then; maybe with the exception that Boris phrased it a bit more accurately.
A mistake is a move that makes your task more difficult.

It is that simple.

The topic came up when I said at one point that I thought that one move he made was maybe not a mistake anyway, if White was able to hold the draw no matter what. I meant this in the objective sense, in which we often use ?!, ? and ??. I have to admit that in my annotations I have a strong tendency to go for ? only in the situations where the objective evaluation of the position is significantly changed. This means after analysis and engine assistance.

But this of course does not tell us anything about how many good moves we still have to find in order to win the game.

In Excelling at Chess I told the story of how a friend of mine was three pawns up and later on complained of how he missed the win when he was one pawn up. It is of course an extreme example, but this is essentially what we are talking about. It is not important if the engine can find a win, but if you can find it at the board; and how easy/difficult it is to do so.

The same with equal positions. There are equal positions that are comfortable, promising and depressing. I know which ones I prefer.

The morale of all of this is that when you analyse your games and think about your play after the game, do not complain that you are not as strong as the engines; instead understand where you needed the engines help to prove your point and where you did not. Obviously this is only relevant if you want to improve your results. Otherwise ignore and continue with your Internet blitz games!

http://www.qualitychess.co.uk/blog/?cat=12

Arshad Ali
Posts: 704
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2010 12:27 pm

Re: What constitutes a mistake?

Post by Arshad Ali » Tue Sep 02, 2014 2:58 pm

A mistake is a move that makes your task more difficult.
Makes sense to me. Nunn is careful to explain that he uses "?" to mean a move that changes the objective evaluation of a position (from won to drawn, from drawn to lost) and "!" to mean the only move that leaves the evaluation of a position intact (I'm citing from memory so perhaps I've not got it right). But this is of scant utility to a human player like myself. A move that makes the task more difficult for me personally is a mistake for me, though it might not be for a stronger player or chess engine. In this sense, "good" moves and "bad" moves take on a very subjective hue.

Niall Doran
Posts: 255
Joined: Thu Mar 24, 2011 7:36 pm

Re: What constitutes a mistake?

Post by Niall Doran » Wed Sep 03, 2014 10:24 am

@Arshad Ali

You're probably referring to the Nunn convention, developped by John Nunn and used only for endgames.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_anno ... Convention