The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

General discussions about ratings.
andrew martin

The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by andrew martin » Tue Apr 22, 2008 4:59 pm

There is absolutely no doubt that these games CANNOT be graded and this should start now.

The same is true of ALL correspondance chess games; regrettably that game has been ruined by cheats.

I hope all those players who advocate adjournments are reading this , because unfortunately adjourning the game today is the same as cheating.

Does this sound over the top ? Very rigourous,strong action is needed by the ECF board to bring chess in this country up to scratch.

Please support this suggestion with your own action, by words and in your leagues.We cannot allow computer cheats to gain any sort of upper hand.

Andrew

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Re: The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by Chris Majer » Tue Apr 22, 2008 10:45 pm

Andrew wries
There is absolutely no doubt that these games CANNOT be graded and this should start now.
Council debated the issue of grading adjudicated games a year ago (see elsewhere on this forum) and decided that they should. I don't see a reason to reopen the debate unless something has changed, I'm not aware of anything that has.
I hope all those players who advocate adjournments are reading this , because unfortunately adjourning the game today is the same as cheating.
How can it be legal to study with the aid of a computer the games of ones opponent at the starting position. But, after play has been suspended in accordance with the rules of the competition, it's cheating to use the computer to look at the position from which the game will resume.

The leagues are autonomous and will do what they want. The ECF shouldn't interfere with their autonomy. Any Grading Manger who thinks that they can enforce such a policy is merely being foolish. The event will merely tell him - yes all of my games were play to finish on the night.
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andrew martin

Re: The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by andrew martin » Wed Apr 23, 2008 8:13 am

Sorry, your reply makes no sense to me at all, apart from to say that Council made a wrong decision.

Again, this is a simple matter of understanding, underlining how much we need to rethink what is happening in English Chess.

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Re: The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by Chris Majer » Wed Apr 23, 2008 10:46 pm

Sorry, your reply makes no sense to me at all, apart from to say that Council made a wrong decision.

Again, this is a simple matter of understanding, underlining how much we need to rethink what is happening in English Chess.
Andrew I think we will have to differ on this topic.
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Re: The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by Nigel Wright » Thu Apr 24, 2008 1:45 am

Seems to be a lot of that flying about these days... :?
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Re: The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by Greg Breed » Thu Apr 24, 2008 2:47 pm

I think I've said it before and i'll repeat it here. The local league that I help to run has had this question put to them. In short they want adjourned and adjudicated games graded. Their argument is:
"they did all of the work getting to the position at hand and for reasons often beyond their control, were unable to finish on the night."
I sympathise with them, but i would still prefer 'on-the-night finishes'.
In any case, if one player can analyse the game then surely the other one can too. It's not ethical, but at least it's unbiased.
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Re: The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by Paolo Casaschi » Thu Jan 08, 2009 9:04 am

Analyzing adjourned games with external help (friends, books and so on) has been a common practice at any level (every world championship match had players with teams helping them with analysis of adjourned games). In fact, it is highly educational to analyze your own adjounred game with a player stronger than you, you learn a lot! Now people use computers, but the principle is the same.
To my knowledge, this practice has never been forbidden by FIDE rules.

If an adjourned game is played by the rules (allowing the external help at adjournment stage) then it should be rated.
In fact, the rating system does not actually want to measure your chess skills, rather it measures the probability of you winning a game with a given opponent. If you are better than other o analyze adjourned games, why should not that count in predicting the outcome of the game?

What bothers my of your proposal is that you seem to be concerned by rating implications of using external help during adjournement, more than by the external help itself. If you dont like the idea of using external help during adjournement, then you should not play games with adjournement!

Technically, your proposal has another problem... you would need to stop rating ALL games that are played with a timing that could lead to adjournment, also the one that actually end before the adjournment takes place. If you instead allow rating for games ending before the adjournment, you risk that your (cheating opponent) on a totally lost position at move 10 will drag you to adjournment just to avod the game to be rated and lose points.

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Re: The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by Roger de Coverly » Thu Jan 08, 2009 9:32 am

I do not think there is any ECF proposal on the table to ditch the grading of adjudicated or adjourned games. The manager of coaching was writing in a personal capacity. It's only a relative handful of evening leagues that retain either practice.

I think the ECF should have a policy to phase out adjudications though. In order to do this, they could try a proposal which should have been adopted 50 years ago - namely to double the minimum number of moves before adjudication from 30 to 60. This would make adjudication a "solution" to the problem of running out of time to complete the game to a high standard rather than a safe haven for players incompetent at late middle games and endings.

Evening leagues usually only have a maximum of about 3 hours at their disposal. So the issue arises as to whether you try to squeeze a whole game into that period ( qp finishes) or half a game (adjudication, adjournment). Historically the half game option was preferred. These days, strong players at least don't have a problem with playing 60 moves at almost a minute a move, so the qp option is preferred.

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Re: The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by John Upham » Thu Jan 08, 2009 9:48 am

I believe it is crystal clear that adjudicated games should not be rated.

Let us say I was attempting to solve a mathematical (or some other) problem but had only got half-way to the solution as my lack of technique let me down. I decided to give up and allow the examiner / adjudicator to decide if I knew how to solve it. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't.

Nobody likes to convert a won position into a drawn or a lost one, but if ones poor clock management or poor endgame technique causes this to happen then so be it : OTB chess is a practical game.

We've all seen players fall apart short of time and we've all seen players thrive short of time : again all interesting aspects of OTB chess.

We've already discussed the Barden method elsewhere in this forum : in effect "Stop playing in case you screw it up" : make your own judgment on the ethics of this approach.

It is worth restating FIDE law of chess 1.1 :
The game of chess is played between two opponents who move their pieces alternately on a square board called a `chessboard`.
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Re: The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by John Saunders » Thu Jan 08, 2009 12:20 pm

Andrew - to answer your original question, yes, I'm afraid you do sound rather over the top! To me, anyway... we all have different opinions. I don't think the argument is as clear-cut as you suggest.

I think it is absurd to brand the long-accepted practice of adjournment analysis as 'cheating' simply because people now use computers. In fact, you can argue that the use of computers makes things more equitable. In the olden days, Russian GMs could leave their adjourned positions in the hands of their highly-qualified seconds (or phone them through to the Moscow Central Chess Club), and then relax for a bit before being given the resultant analysis and resuming the game. Their less favoured opponents would usually have to do the analysis themselves and tire themselves out in the process. These days, you have your computer to analyse on and I have mine. Rather more fair, I would say. Maybe some strong players don't like adjournments because it is no longer quite so easy to outplay weaker players in the second session.

The other point I would make about adjournments is that, however accurate or protracted one's adjournment analysis, in real life the unexpected usually seems to happen very quickly after resumption. On one occasion I had an adjourned game which was resumed six months (!) after the first session. Despite the time lag, during which I had done some extensive work on the position and asked my titled club mates to help, the position on the board after a couple of moves was one I hadn't considered at all so most of the work I had done was useless (not all of it, of course: I had at least a deep understanding of certain positions which might subsequently arise).

I don't play much these days but when I did, I quite liked adjournments as it gave you the chance to recharge your batteries and think about the next phase of the game. I think you'll find that a lot of older players might prefer adjournments in conjunction with slower time limits rather than a 40-move thrash followed by a QP finish. Personally, though I publicly support the so-called 'classical' time control (40/2, 20/1, all/15mins or a similar incremental time control) for professional/top-level chess, I personally find a seven-hour session very tiring indeed as an old-timer. Being ground into the floor over seven hours by the likes of Colin McNab or Joe Gallagher on the Saturday of a 4NCL weekend was a contributory factor to my packing it in! I'm not advocating a change to the 4NCL rules, just pointing out that age and energy and motivation are additional factors that need to be taken into account. We're not all youngsters who enjoy playing internet blitz and fast time controls in general. All ages and tastes need to be catered for so we should pause for thought before resorting to making rules that apply rigidly to all levels of chess.

I'm not advocating adjournments for FIDE-rated or top-level competitions but I think they may still have a place in leagues where the players are generally in favour of them and where a change of culture might lead to fewer players taking part. Of course, this can be very difficult to ascertain, particularly as a change to QP might lead to an influx of new players who hate adjournments. However, I'm not keen on the recent fashion for rule-changing in chess and I'm agin any dogmatic, hard-and-fast rule change which might unduly affect chess at the local level. I suspect that, as time goes on, as players used to QP finishes gradually outnumber the old guard, adjournments in local chess will simply wither on the vine and disappear anyway. If you are really against adjournment, get elected to your local league committee and get it voted out.

Nobody likes adjudication. I used to be an adjudicator: I quite enjoyed adjudicating other people's games but hated having my own adjudicated! Roger's idea (raising the minimum number of moves played to 60) has some merit but, again, might not find favour with older players in certain clubs and leagues. Should it be outlawed by withdrawing the right to being graded? Again, I would be reluctant to legislate it out of existence without taking into account club and league feelings on the subject. Like adjournment, it will probably die of natural causes soon enough.

FIDE have done enough damage recently with their draconian default time and mobile phone legislation - let's not make it worse at the national level. I suggest we try not to be too dogmatic and leave a bit of leeway for local organiser discretion.
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Re: The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by E Michael White » Thu Jan 08, 2009 8:59 pm

John

In the non-chess sense your posting today
John Upham wrote:Let us say I was attempting to solve a mathematical (or some other) problem but had only got half-way to the solution as my lack of technique let me down. I decided to give up and allow the examiner / adjudicator to decide if I knew how to solve it. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't.
conflicts with your reference of yesterday
John Upham wrote: my DPhil (1991) title evolved to be

"Monte Carlo Simulation of Cluster Ion Peak Shapes"
as Monte Carlo gives overview understanding without full theoretical solution.

Maybe such a DPhil should be completed under QPF rules.

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Re: The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by Justin Hadi » Thu Jan 08, 2009 11:40 pm

That is brilliant.

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Re: The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by Richard Bates » Fri Jan 09, 2009 8:02 am

Well I personally favour adjournments in International tournaments, but not in League chess :?

To say that it is "cheating" to use a computer for an adjournment is, IMO, a dubious argument. It is no more cheating than getting help from team mates or utilising the assistance of an endgame book. My objection in league chess is based purely on the practicalities of returning at a later date to finish a game which may only last a few moves - arguably however computers should make this less likely because there are less likely to be "frivolous" adjournments and opponents will be more likely to resign in advance.

Chess is a poorer world without adjournments because, combined with the speeding up of time limits at the latter part of the game, the endgame has been reduced to a purely technical and instinctive exercise and one of the richest areas of the game has been lost to many.

Endgame analysis has been reduced to a purely theoretical exercise, with little direct relevance to the game itself, to be engaged in only by those with a specific love of the endgame and with time on their hands. This is because whereas opening and middlegame analysis will be utilised in many future games, endgames are often unique, and are anyway rare. It is ironic that the one area of the game where computers are arguably at their weakest (outside of tablebase positions) is the one area that has been arguably killed off by fear of what their influence could do.

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Re: The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by John Upham » Fri Jan 09, 2009 8:25 am

E Michael White wrote: Maybe such a DPhil should be completed under QPF rules.
Maybe, for some, life in general would be better conducted with a QPF.

Could we nominate some candidates? 8)
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Re: The grading of adjourned/adjudicted games

Post by John Upham » Fri Jan 09, 2009 8:57 am

Richard Bates wrote:Well I personally favour adjournments in International tournaments, but not in League chess :?
In the leagues that I compete in, we have some fine individuals who are serial adjourners. They exercise "their right" to adjourn but are unable to supply the required three optional dates for resumption. In itself, this is a rule transgression but few people realise this. I make a point of insisting on the dates before play commences. This normally has the desired effect of causing sufficient angst that they cave-in and agree to play a G90 time control.

Amongst the serial adjourners are those who habitually adjourn a lost or worst position and then find themselves "unable" to agree a resumption date. The victim attempts to provide more and more possible dates only to be told that these are not suitable. Eventually the victim gives up and agrees a draw in a won or strong position. :twisted:

These are the practices that some people seek to preserve including those who no longer play but spend their leisure time attending committee meetings in damp church halls. :roll:
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