From: anw@maths.nott.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker)
Newsgroups: rec.games.chess
Subject: Re: Best player never to win the World Championship
Date: 12 Nov 92 18:19:15 GMT
Reply-To: anw@maths.nott.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker)
Organization: Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.

In article <1992Nov10.233834.22767@midway.uchicago.edu>
hau4@midway.uchicago.edu writes:

	[Quite a lot.  Obviously my attempts at irony have defeated him;
sorry!  Over in the UK, we regard emoticons as a last resort.]

[Tal]
>He BEAT the strongest players. He CRUSHED the next-strongest (like the young
>Bobby Fischer).

	True.  With hindsight, we know that even the *very* strongest players
can lose their way in a morass of complications, and there are a number of
strong players who do consistently well by creating such complications.
But the '50s were an era of "power chess" [vide especially Smyslov's games],
and there was a prevailing opinion that Tal would eventually come unstuck
against one of the "logicians".

>Perhaps it was not known at the time. Yet, it is undisputable that Tal was
>severely handicapped by his illness.

	Just so.  *At the time* Tal was expected to retain his title.

>>			 B was now too old to regain his title.
>You are funny. One year, he can't lose to Tal; the next year, he's too old
>to beat him, even if Tal is ill? Come on...

	Just so.  Perceptions are highly coloured by current events, they
can swing very rapidly, and they are often self-fulfilling with hindsight.
Take, for example, the first Karpov-Kasparov match.  I think the *general*
view was that Kas was favourite, though perhaps not strongly so.  When Kar
went 5-0 up, what did people *then* think?  I suspect that if Kar had taken
one of the chances he had to clinch things reasonably quickly, we would
have thought of Kas as just an upstart, no doubt quite good, but nowhere
near the class of Kar;  *and* that opinion would have been to some extent
self-fulfilling, Kas would have suffered a very serious dent to his ego,
from which he *might* not have recovered [compare Taimanov, post-Fischer].
We *currently* think of Kas as much stronger than Kar -- what would we have
thought if Kar had managed to save that last game to regain his title?

	In the Botvinnik-Tal case, the general opinion as I recall it was
that BT1 had shown, to our surprise, that T *could* outcombine B, whose age
was thought to have been showing.  BT2 was then a further surprise, because
T couldn't do it again.  Tal's health problems may have been well-known to
some, but the effect on his play was not clear to the public at large.

>I appreciate that you are sa fair to Petrosian as not to claim that you
>would have beaten him with knight odds.

	Well, he wasn't a woman [:-)].  No, contrariwise, I personally
always thought that P had a bad press.  But he *did* have a bad press,
and if you read the letters pages of the time in "Chess" and other
magazines, you will find some highly colourful abuse.  PS1 was widely
expected to be almost a walkover.

>I advise you to take a look at Kasparov's tournament record. Then you'll
>understand the meaning of his ~2800 rating. Barring an illness or some
>other catastrophe, S|T beating K would be the biggest WC upset ever.

	I understand K's record perfectly well.  But whoever wins S|T will
be the Candidate *on merit*, having beaten, against the odds, several other
of the world's strongest players, and not even K will be able to take the
match lightly.  Like you, I *expect* K to win, based on current information.
But he is not perfect, and I can certainly invent scenarios in which Short
[say] perhaps manages to disrupt one of K's favourite openings, and perhaps
flukily gets a lead.  Perhaps then K would react badly ["How can I lose to
this patzer?"], lash out blindly and go from bad to worse?  Unlikely?  Yes.
Clutching at straws?  Perhaps.  But not *so* impossible.  After the match,
if the impossible happens, you can rest assured that there will be plenty
of reasons for it that we all might have spotted earlier [but didn't].

-- 
Andy Walker, Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.
anw@maths.nott.ac.uk
Newsgroups: rec.games.chess