In article <FYGdndgD_tFwd37anZ2dnUVZ_oytnZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
David Kane <davidekane@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
[3-point wins in football:]
> [...] And it has also not produced
>any cheating - the original weak argument put forth against changing
>the scoring in chess.
I agree that it's a weak argument, but it's a step too far
to say it has produced no cheating. There is a *lot* of money in
top-level football, and there have certainly been allegations of
match-fixing, betting scams, etc., some of which have led to court
cases.
>I am actually curious what changes the altered scoring had on
>soccer. Are you aware of any analyses?
Well, I'm not. But there do seem to be a lot of matches
decided in the last minute or two of extra time ....
[...]
>If alternate scoring eliminates the GM draw, and makes chess games,
>on average, more combative and more interesting, what is the downside?
Lot of "if"s there. Draws, GM or otherwise, in matches are
completely unaffected by [sane] alternate scoring schemes, and in
tournaments no-one is going to win the event just by drawing, so you
are talking about draws taken for other reasons -- perhaps because
the game really is utterly dead, perhaps because the players want a
break from a pretty strenuous activity, perhaps because the result
is, or is thought to be, irrelevant. Alternate scoring does not
affect the first of these; if it affects the second, its effect is
to make players play when more exhausted; and it may make the third
less likely, but it does not affect the situation where one player
needs only a draw to guarantee the win, or a title norm, or even
where several players are tied for the lead.
As for more combative/interesting, it could equally have the
opposite effect. If the stronger player has more to lose by merely
drawing, the weaker player has more incentive to stodge the game up.
The "downside" is merely that chess becomes, like football,
a non-zero-sum game. This mucks up a fair chunk of game theory.
Whether this is im****tant depends on whether you are a theorist ....
>The fundamental mystery of chess is why such a
>popular game has so little attention paid to its best
>players. The answer, I think, is that the best
>players are playing in competitions in which
>draw-producing play and strategies based
>on drawing rule.
I think you think wrong. I think the reason is that no-one
outside the top players understands well enough in real time what
is going on. You can watch a football match, and you can see that
the score is 3-2 to the Reds, but the Blues have the ball and are
attacking. You don't need any expertise at all to understand that;
and you need very little to appreciate the skills involved in an
accurate pass, a successful tackle, a good save, and so on. So
billions of people can watch the World Cup final and follow the
action live.
Try that with chess. It's like watching paint dry, until
there is a time scramble. Only expert players have any idea at all
what is happening. Many games are resigned when a club player would
still have no idea what is happening. I can play through a game
between [say] Anand and Kramnik, but the only way to understand what
has happened is to have annotations, preferably provided by the
players themselves, constructed hours or days after the game has
happened. There have been valiant attempts -- the BBC had excellent
coverage of the Kasparov-Short match, for example -- but they really
can't compete with live coverage of football, golf, cricket, ....
You would get more "action" from 5-minute chess, but then you would
have even fewer prospects of getting any appreciation of what is
happening in real time. Chess is to be played, not watched.
We can all agree that a 12-move draw is not usually a very
exciting game of chess, and that such draws should be discouraged.
But I'd be quite surprised if many people give up chess because of
them. You seem to me to be barking up the wrong tree.
--
Andy Walker
Nottingham
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