Sir George Alan Thomas

Historical knowledge and information regarding our great game.
John Townsend
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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by John Townsend » Wed Jan 08, 2014 6:14 pm

Ragozin didn't lose that game. Since you mention it, he did lose his other game to Botvinnik in Round 17.

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Matt Mackenzie
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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by Matt Mackenzie » Wed Jan 08, 2014 7:12 pm

So then, Botvinnik beat a player he was better than. Where exactly is this going??

The fact is that both Botvinnik and Karpov - two of the greatest chess masters we have been privileged to know - have been relentlessly belittled down the years by tawdry hacks whose real agenda often had very little to do with our great game (wrt to the latter, much of what was written about the 1984/85 WC match then and subsequently was a complete disgrace)

There is *no* evidence that anybody "tanked" against Botvinnik in the great 1930s Soviet tournaments - none. Even regarding the vexed question of 1948 and Keres, the "case" is at best highly circumstancial and inconclusive - and can easily be explained in "non-conspiratorial" ways.
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O.G. Urcan
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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by O.G. Urcan » Thu Jan 09, 2014 2:59 am

Leonard Barden wrote:There is no evidence that Stalin personally cared about or played chess. As for his friendship with Krylenko, that didn't prevent K being purged and shot in 1938. The Stalin hiding behind a curtain to watch the games story remains a fiction of Olga Capablanca, for whom Winter seems to have a soft spot.
As for other Russians throwing games to Botvinnik, Moscow 1935 was just as important as Moscow 1936 and there Botvinnik lost twice to compatriots, Kan and Bogatyrchuk.
I completely disagree. While it is no secret that oral history type of accounts require much care, I think Mr Winter's handling of the material he obtained (from a direct - and important - source) was faultless.

- Olimpiu G. Urcan

Philip Adams
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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by Philip Adams » Thu Jan 09, 2014 3:56 pm

Tryfon Gavriel wrote:
Philip Adams wrote:An interesting topic, but I'm not sure it's such a good idea for anyone to be using chessgames.com as a source of accurate historical information.

See for instance this article

http://www.chesscafe.com/urcan/urcan54.htm

which expresses far better than I could why this website is not listed among my 'Favourites'.
Hi Philip

I must say that I find Chessgames.com an invaluable historical resource myself. For example it has actual game notes by Alekhine as part of the interactive replayable game here:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008355

This gives for me a great glimpse into the opening theory, and positional understanding at the time.

There is also a historical tournament index initiative here:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/tournaments

I really think this site has to be given credit for these initiatives from a historical chess perspective.

Best wishes
Tryfon
Well Tryfon, Tim Harding, whose work as a chess-historical researcher is widely respected, has also recently endorsed Urcan’s severe criticism of chessgames.com. (See: http://www.chesscafe.com/kibitz/kibitz212.htm )

chessgames.com was an interesting concept and it does have features that some will find handy, but it could be so, so much better.

Urcan’s devastating critique (http://www.chesscafe.com/urcan/urcan54.htm) alleges that there is a lot of inaccurate dross at chessgames.com, while much of the sound material there is unattributed / plagiarised. I’ve felt the same for some time and I find Urcan’s evidence convincing.

The site needs to go a lot further to ‘clean up its act’ before I could possibly recommend it to any of my fellow club members or students.

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John Upham
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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by John Upham » Thu Jan 09, 2014 4:12 pm

Philip Adams wrote: The site needs to go a lot further to ‘clean up its act’ before I could possibly recommend it to any of my fellow club members or students.
Agreed. I've suggested some corrections to incorrect player attribution and some of these have been followed-up on.

There are more errors no doubt.
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Tryfon Gavriel
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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by Tryfon Gavriel » Fri Jan 10, 2014 12:43 pm

Philip Adams wrote:
Tryfon Gavriel wrote:
Philip Adams wrote:An interesting topic, but I'm not sure it's such a good idea for anyone to be using chessgames.com as a source of accurate historical information.

See for instance this article

http://www.chesscafe.com/urcan/urcan54.htm

which expresses far better than I could why this website is not listed among my 'Favourites'.
Hi Philip

I must say that I find Chessgames.com an invaluable historical resource myself. For example it has actual game notes by Alekhine as part of the interactive replayable game here:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008355

This gives for me a great glimpse into the opening theory, and positional understanding at the time.

There is also a historical tournament index initiative here:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/tournaments

I really think this site has to be given credit for these initiatives from a historical chess perspective.

Best wishes
Tryfon
Well Tryfon, Tim Harding, whose work as a chess-historical researcher is widely respected, has also recently endorsed Urcan’s severe criticism of chessgames.com. (See: http://www.chesscafe.com/kibitz/kibitz212.htm )

chessgames.com was an interesting concept and it does have features that some will find handy, but it could be so, so much better.

Urcan’s devastating critique (http://www.chesscafe.com/urcan/urcan54.htm) alleges that there is a lot of inaccurate dross at chessgames.com, while much of the sound material there is unattributed / plagiarised. I’ve felt the same for some time and I find Urcan’s evidence convincing.

The site needs to go a lot further to ‘clean up its act’ before I could possibly recommend it to any of my fellow club members or students.
I go chessgames.com to check out games from recent and past tournaments. For me personally, I find it a great and fun resource to use.

I like the kibitzing features, game collections and other stuff.

I also really like their player vs player facility

If you go to the front page and type "Alekhine vs Botvinnik" it would result in this:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/ezsearch ... +botvinnik

For me, I find this quite insightful to think that Capablanca never convincingly beat Botvinnik. The one win, I video annotated here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJBlP_mgA2M

My interest is in the "Evolution of style". I need to get the key games where the "new generations" played against the older generations.

Seeing therefore easily key games of say Botvinnik vs Capablanca or Botvinnik vs Alekhine is very helpful for my evolution of chess style series:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL776C6E4E40EDC3E6

I don't just want to know the absolute "classics" like the AVRO 1938 Botvinnik vs Capablanca game but also their other games - they can provide fascinating insights.

If I want to quickly recheck the Moscow tournaments created by Krylenko, one can even use Google and type "Moscow 1936" and get a link to the following:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chesscol ... id=1010012

which is a handy round by round breakdown of this tournament. In fact " suenteus po 147" is one of the more prolific game collectors on the site.

Then if you click into a particular game you can then see the offical Moscow 1936 link which leads here:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=79232

and then filter by particular players to see their games.

For example, I want to analyse any issues with Botvinnik in the Moscow 1936 tournament

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl ... &pid=11207

then filter by "losses" at bottom:

And the only loss is the unfortunate one to Capablanca.

Interesting though if this is applied to Moscow 1935, you get some very interesting Botvinnik losses:

The quick loss vs Kan fascinates me and might be one my next video annotations:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl ... result=2nd

So I using the site to navigate around historical games of interest

Best wishes
Tryfon
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JustinHorton
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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by JustinHorton » Fri Jan 10, 2014 12:58 pm

Philip Adams wrote:Tim Harding, whose work as a chess-historical researcher is widely respected, has also recently endorsed Urcan’s severe criticism of chessgames.com. (See: http://www.chesscafe.com/kibitz/kibitz212.htm )
I wouldn't go quite as far as Tim ("not to follow any links to it") but since I happen to have been writing about the site this week

Wednesday
Thursday
Friday

I have to generally agree. Not because the site doesn't give a damn about inaccuracy, but because it appears to work to a model which guarantees it.

As far as I can see (and I'd be glad to be contradicted) games and notes go online first and problems are sorted out later. This is compounded by

(a) the length of time it takes to get round to doing this, if indeed it ever happens
(b) an apparent belief that it's the readers responsibility to report errors through the site's correction-slip system, and then await action, rather than the site's responsibility to get it right in the first place and correct errors as soon as possible however they are uncovered.

Naturally it doesn't help that they have a close relationship with you-know-who, and their willingness to protect him from criticism is not matched by a similar willingness to address their site's deficiencies.
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Tryfon Gavriel
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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by Tryfon Gavriel » Fri Jan 10, 2014 2:07 pm

JustinHorton wrote:
Philip Adams wrote:Tim Harding, whose work as a chess-historical researcher is widely respected, has also recently endorsed Urcan’s severe criticism of chessgames.com. (See: http://www.chesscafe.com/kibitz/kibitz212.htm )
I wouldn't go quite as far as Tim ("not to follow any links to it") but since I happen to have been writing about the site this week

Wednesday
Thursday
Friday

I have to generally agree. Not because the site doesn't give a damn about inaccuracy, but because it appears to work to a model which guarantees it.

As far as I can see (and I'd be glad to be contradicted) games and notes go online first and problems are sorted out later. This is compounded by

(a) the length of time it takes to get round to doing this, if indeed it ever happens
(b) an apparent belief that it's the readers responsibility to report errors through the site's correction-slip system, and then await action, rather than the site's responsibility to get it right in the first place and correct errors as soon as possible however they are uncovered.

Naturally it doesn't help that they have a close relationship with you-know-who, and their willingness to protect him from criticism is not matched by a similar willingness to address their site's deficiencies.

Have you tried leaving a message about this for Raymond Keene - maybe he is on Facebook. Or just on his page at Chessgames.com - he is a regular kibitzer there.

One thing that concerns me is that you seem to be making an underlying assumption that Kasparov wrote the predecessors series (in its entirety) .

When Kasparov came to london for the book signings, he did mention his "first category analyst" was engine checking as much as possible.

Who's are the notes for this game in the Great Predecessor book?! Who do you think they belong to originally?!

To be blunt, do you sincerely believe the notes in the Great Predecessor series are from Kasparov itself (with respect to the game notes you particularly mention) ?!

Best wishes
Tryfon
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JustinHorton
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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by JustinHorton » Fri Jan 10, 2014 3:01 pm

Tryfon Gavriel wrote:Have you tried leaving a message about this for Raymond Keene - maybe he is on Facebook. Or just on his page at Chessgames.com - he is a regular kibitzer there.
Ray is quite aware of what's going on, thanks. As it happens he deletes queries about it from his Chessgames.com page.
Tryfon Gavriel wrote:One thing that concerns me is that you seem to be making an underlying assumption that Kasparov wrote the predecessors series (in its entirety).


No I don't, and nor is it relevant, the relevant questions being only who the declared authors are (not Ray) and do published pieces seek to pass off the author as Ray (they do).

I don't really propose to say any more about this here, other than that if Ray's various publications wish to give an explanation for the remarkable coincidences of wording I've been detailing, they are welcome to give it, at which point it will be worth commenting on.
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Tryfon Gavriel
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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by Tryfon Gavriel » Fri Jan 10, 2014 3:58 pm

JustinHorton wrote:
Tryfon Gavriel wrote:Have you tried leaving a message about this for Raymond Keene - maybe he is on Facebook. Or just on his page at Chessgames.com - he is a regular kibitzer there.
Ray is quite aware of what's going on, thanks. As it happens he deletes queries about it from his Chessgames.com page.
Tryfon Gavriel wrote:One thing that concerns me is that you seem to be making an underlying assumption that Kasparov wrote the predecessors series (in its entirety).


No I don't, and nor is it relevant, the relevant questions being only who the declared authors are (not Ray) and do published pieces seek to pass off the author as Ray (they do).

I don't really propose to say any more about this here, other than that if Ray's various publications wish to give an explanation for the remarkable coincidences of wording I've been detailing, they are welcome to give it, at which point it will be worth commenting on.

Justin on a kibitzing search I found this of interest:

http://www.chessgames.com/~chessgames.c ... reply15815

"
....Nov-22-12
Premium Chessgames Member chessgames.com: <optimal play: Question please... How do we add "Annotations" to an existing game on CG.com?> Basically, we all add annotations by kibitzing.
A few very special games are annotated by grandmasters (for example, see games annotated by Keene) but this is accomplished by a special arrangement and is not something that the members can do on demand.

If you are a titled player and have annotations that you'd like to donate to the site, contact us by email and we'd be happy to make arrangements as we've done with Keene and others."


Also Keene has written a number of historical chess books in the past:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_nos ... %20history

Is it possible the Great Predecessors books had some contributions from Raymond Keene which would explain things ?! Would they have necessarily wanted to re-annotated from scratch all the historical games features in the series ?!

Also Keene and Kasparov have worked on certain books together in the past e.g.

http://www.amazon.com/Batsford-Chess-Op ... 0713421126

I am pretty sure Eric Schiller has also been annotating games at Chessgames.com
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JustinHorton
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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by JustinHorton » Fri Jan 10, 2014 4:55 pm

As I say, Tryfon, when his editors want to come up with an explanation, you can be sure I'll study it carefully.
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PeterFarr
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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by PeterFarr » Fri Jan 10, 2014 5:16 pm

Tryfon Gavriel wrote:
.....Also Keene and Kasparov have worked on certain books together in the past e.g.

http://www.amazon.com/Batsford-Chess-Op ... 0713421126

I am pretty sure Eric Schiller has also been annotating games at Chessgames.com
I'm afraid this may not be a brilliant example of Kasparov and Keene collaborating, if one is to believe the following from Edward Winter's 'Chess Explorations':-

"C.N. 331 questioned the exact role in Batsford Chess Openings of Garry Kasparov, who was referred to as a co-author. In a letter dated 16 September 1983 (published in C.N. 583) Raymond Keene therefore offered us a copy of Kasparov’s contribution, in return for a cheque for £50 payable to a chess charity. We immediately accepted, but no material was ever provided, and nearly two years elapsed before Mr Keene offered us a refund.

By then the level of Kasparov’s involvement had been confirmed in two letters received from the book’s ‘Research Editor’, Eric Schiller. Although they were published in full (in C.N.s 844 and 870), Mr Schiller made persistent claims that they had been edited or quoted out of context, a falsehood which he continued to propagate even after C.N. 1737 had reproduced his original letters photographically.

C.N.s 507, 583 and 588 also drew attention to Batsford’s misuse of Kasparov’s name in connection with two other books, Fighting Chess and My Games."

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Matt Mackenzie
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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by Matt Mackenzie » Fri Jan 10, 2014 6:20 pm

IIRC citing Kasparov as "author" of "My Games" was especially cheeky - hundreds of scores in the book, and he annotated about a dozen of them :lol:
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Paul McKeown
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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by Paul McKeown » Fri Jan 10, 2014 8:28 pm

Anyone who thinks that chessgames.com is a reliable and quality outlet hasn't the faintest notion what those adjectives mean. Garbage in, processed by a monkey troop of howling eejits, output garbage.

As for Keres, Botvinnik and conspiracy theories. Some people believe in little green men, others have a grasp of mundane reality. It had nothing to do with his nationality, nor his country's painful history, nor his participation in events organised by Germany's gleichgeschalten chess federation. Keres was a great player, but he wasn't World Champion material.

As I often do, I find myself in agreement with Matt, here. Botvinnik and Karpov, both immortal players, have often been traduced. For petty reasons, for political reasons and for cheap tabloid and fact free thrills.

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Re: Sir George Alan Thomas

Post by PeterFarr » Fri Jan 10, 2014 10:07 pm

In "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" - a very entertaining book by the way - Bronstein writes of the drawn 1951 match:

"I have been asked many, many times if I was obliged to lose the 23rd game and if there was a conspiracy against me to to stop me from taking Botvinnik's title. A lot of nonsense has been written about this, The only thing that I am prepared to say about all this controversy is that I was subjected to strong psychological pressure from various sources and it was entirely up to me to yield to that pressure or not. Let's leave it at that.

I had reasons not to become the World Champion as in those times such a title meant that you were entering an official world of chess bureaucracy with many formal obligations. Such a position is not compatible with my character....."

It might also be said that in 1951, Bronstein's Jewishness also didn't conform to the received view of a Soviet man (his wife Tatiana Boleslavskaya alludes to this in the same book).

To me this tends to support Roger's earlier suggestion that Keres and Bronstein could have been made to feel uncomfortable without any direct threat; hence there would be no evidence, but also no necessity to implicate Botvinnik himself.

I tend to agree with Matt and Paul; Botvinnik and Karpov get a raw deal. They rose to the top of chess under the Soviet regime, and thereby became part of the system. Thus they became cartoon 'villains' when pitted against the 'romantic heroes' like Keres, Bronstein, Korchnoi, Kasparov etc.. But it was never that simple.

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