Chess Masters: the Endgame

[Geoff Chandler]

Yes F+1 = Kasparov's predecessors.

Watched it. Yes. Position to recall was easier but still a very good show by the player who got it.

Anand - Carlsen Game 9 2013 World Chess Ch.

2bq1rk1/2n2ppp/r7/p2pP1P1/1ppP1P2/P1P3N1/R5BP/2Q2RK1 w - - 0 20

White to play their 20th move. I never recognised the game, despite the 2013 clue from Magnus. but I may have declared who v who and the event without any 2013 who v who clue had they used the final position. It's the game Carlsen won without moving his d8 Queen. He got another on b1 and it only made one move. It's a fairly famous final position.

2bqnrk1/5p1p/5PpQ/3pP1P1/2pP1R2/2P5/6BP/4qNK1 w - - 2 29

https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1737896

Not too fond of them using a freestyle game but have noticed after 15+ moves it can be impossible to detect if a position started off freestyle.

[Roland Kensdale]

Where do you put the 16 pawns, Geoff? Are they on the starting position? And where do you start the knight?

The letter that comes next is 'F'.

F+1=MGP

F, K completes a famous series

[Roger de Coverly]

was surprised some competitors got the pawn formation so wrong

I did wonder whether that demonstrated a training method that could be used to assess a player's weak areas. Show them a moderately normal position and see whether they could reproduce it. Those at sea with the pawn structure might need to work on that aspect of their game.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Kel has been worse in two Eliminator games in a row and survived. I am not sure if that means he should no longer be considered one of the favourites, but it is interesting seeing the various weaknesses the remaining players have.

I failed badly at the reconstruction puzzle in the sense that I managed to get all the pieces in the right place but then realised I had used two minutes to do so... Oops. I am glad they used a different position.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

The person putting the Lichess studies up seems to have stopped. Hope Episodes 5 and 6 will be up there soon. That way I can actually see what happened in the team game (the TV show itself is hopeless for that).

https://lichess.org/study/by/chessmastersanon

[Alistair Campbell]

This week was similar to episode 3 as expected but with, I agree, a significantly easier position to recall. Nevertheless Thalia performed impressively.

I tried the puzzle this time – although not under exam conditions.

My technique (for what it’s worth) was as follows.

Count the number of pieces for each side.
Identify those which were missing.
Look at the king/rook combinations.
Assess whether the pieces are on starting/sensible/odd squares. Where are they?
What is the pawn structure for each side?
(In this case I probably looked at the structures in chunks – the missing pawn(s), the white chain, the black chain, the king-sides and so on.
A quick revision – giving possibly up to ten things to remember?

Overall this took about 55 seconds.

It was helpful that pre-knowledge was useful in several aspects in this position.

I note that the incorrectly placed pieces in the competitors’ attempts were either missing altogether, or on an adjacent square to the correct one. Had Deema got the first pawn on the correct square she would presumably got another 6 or so correct.

On the team chess, I’ve never played doubles tennis seriously – is it helpful to have the same strengths (and presumably the same weaknesses)? I didn’t notice the continuity error (but I pay little attention to the commentary anyway.) The need to step backwards and forwards from the board continues to trouble me – it must make it more of an athletic contest.

I imagine that Fischerandom is something where you can be pretty error prone for the first few games but you soon get the hang of it. But wasn’t there a double-check at the end there? That might have merited more elucidating comment.

And I note the appropriation of “in no particular order”. Is David auditioning for Strictly?

Maybe this belongs on the pedants’ thread but I would have said “the 3 strongest players from each heat”. Is that wrong?

[Roger de Coverly]

On the team chess, I’ve never played doubles tennis seriously – is it helpful to have the same strengths (and presumably the same weaknesses)?

In the purer forms of this variant, no consultation is allowed. The London Chess Classic runs an annual pro-am event with periodic limited consultation.That can be combinations of CM/FM with IM/GM which is a different ball game.

If there's unlimited consulation why wouldn't the stronger player take over and dictate the moves and plans? I suppose in the TV show, it's not really known who is the stronger player. It's against the clock, so there could come a point when there was no time for discussion. I had the impression that Thalia was controlling Monday's team match.

Back in the 1960s, the BBC's Third Programme (later Radio 3) put chess on the radio. One of the things they broadcast were consultation games. Another was refusal chess. An anthology of the transcripts was a Penguin paperback "Chess Treasury of the Air".

[Mark Hannon]

I was thinking in the 2 player consultation game it would be best to just have the stronger player choose all the moves, the consultation just wastes time and gives your teams ideas away to the opponents.
Kel was lucky to win the play off game as he’d chosen the move to get the Queen trapped in the team game.
The second group of six have seemed much stronger than the first group of six.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

On reflection, the Howell-Mathurin pairing is growing on me. Mathurin will always be annoying and bombastic and OTT, but David works well as a sensible foil to that. And I do like the psychology elements that are coming out now. The identification of Kel rubbing the back of his head as a "comfort" tell.

Does anyone here pay attention to their opponent's body language during a game, or is it only the obvious that you look for. Does anyone look for subtle aspects of feelings about the game in progress, and feed that back into your play? This applies both to people you know well, and someone you are playing for the first time.

[Roger de Coverly]

Does anyone here pay attention to their opponent's body language during a game, or is it only the obvious that you look for. Does anyone look for subtle aspects of feelings about the game in progress, and feed that back into your play? This applies both to people you know well, and someone you are playing for the first time.

You get people who try to play in an intimidating manner. That's moving very quickly and bashing the clock in a hurry. It's a telltale sign that they don't like their position when it stops. Otherwise concentrating on the board and ignoring the opponent is to be recommended.

[Alistair Campbell]

If there's unlimited consultation why wouldn't the stronger player take over and dictate the moves and plans?

Wasn't there a consultation game as part of the Channel 4 coverage of the Short/Kasparov match in 1993?

The ungraded Short and Kasparov against the commentary team of Speelman, Forbes and others. (King? Keene??). Did I imagine Carol Vorderman making the moves? I remember the suggestion that if things got down to the wire they'd just leave it to Speelman to decide on the moves.

[Geoff Chandler]

Hi Alastair,

It was Speelman, Keene, King and Forbes v Kasparov and Short

https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1289856

[LawrenceCooper]

The person putting the Lichess studies up seems to have stopped. Hope Episodes 5 and 6 will be up there soon. That way I can actually see what happened in the team game (the TV show itself is hopeless for that).

https://lichess.org/study/by/chessmastersanon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frhWPdR ... jl&index=5

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Thank you for the link to Thalia's recap of episodes 5 and 6.

From that, it is clear that in the consultation game, Black (Thalia and Richie) won an exchange by trapping an errant White rook on c5. At that point, they were the exchange up for a pawn. But they later went astray, lost another pawn, and gave the exchange back to go into an ending a pawn down. But the blunder by Kel to lose the queen came just a few moves later.

You can understand why the focus of the 'highlights' for the programme was on the loss of the queen, but was it really beyond those crafting the narrative to not (a) completely omit the mutual exchange 'sacrifices'; (b) if omitting them, to not show positions on the board where you can see that the exchange had been lost by one side?

Without an engine, it is beyond my capability to assess how bad the original loss of the exchange was, or how necessary it was to give it back. Thalia does look at some engine lines, but only a few, and it is still not entirely clear. Might be interesting to get a final verdict on that. Albeit, it is really (to use Nick Ivell's phrase) 'just' a skittles game, where time trouble really accounts for the mistakes on one level (weak play by the players on another level).

For the programme, it provided the requisite drama. The way the players consulted was interesting, but also suffered a bit from being edited and also for showing the relatively low strength of the contestants as chess players (i.e. not scintillating analysis, but then I don't suppose any of us would do brilliantly in those circumstances: "play the check" - "take the knight" - "move, move, time!").

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

Does anyone here pay attention to their opponent's body language during a game, or is it only the obvious that you look for. Does anyone look for subtle aspects of feelings about the game in progress, and feed that back into your play? This applies both to people you know well, and someone you are playing for the first time.

I'm not sure it counts as body language, but I was once playing Steve Berry and heading for a loss in the endgame where I was a pawn down with no compensation. I was thinking about whether I should just give up when he suddenly became completely rigid and when I glanced up at him he was shielding his face with his hands and his ears had gone bright red! I realised that he might have seen something that I hadn't so I gave it another look, paying attention to possible 1-movers, and, sure enough, he'd left a simple knight fork on that left me a piece for a pawn up. I duly played this but was too inept to convert the position to a win and we agreed a draw about 20 moves later.