The Breakthrough to Cynicism

This post is prompted by encountering posts in a newsgroup on Chess
discussing the question of somehow revitalizing Chess.

A lot of Chess games are draws, and quite a bit of book knowledge of
openings is needed to play Chess competitively. These things can be
perceived as problems.

If Capablanca Chess is not the answer, why not something inspired by
Pocket Knight Chess?

I've been thinking of these issues myself, and on my web site I've
tried to put forwards solutions that might be more palatable than
those previously advanced. I've been examining how _komida****_ was
successful in addressing a draw problem in Go, and I've been looking
at the history of the two-move and three-move restrictions in Checkers
for parallels.

In one thread in which I was a participant, someone posed the question
of why Checkers players in the English-speaking world hadn't adopted
the _obvious_ remedy of abandoning their antiquated and insular form
of Checkers for the modern international standard, played on the 10 by
10 board with different capturing rules - which has had no need of
even a two-move restriction?

Well, upon reflection, I've come up with the obvious answer.

Why would people who have spent a lot of time and effort learning how
to play Checkers as it is simply abandon that investment to move to a
different pond in which they would be the new frogs on the block?

This is why, when a problem with Checkers became inescapably manifest
after the Wyllie-Martins match of 1863, the remedy that was chosen was
not switching to Polish Checkers. Instead, the remedy that was chosen
was the one that involved the *least change* to the game, to maximize
the relevance of the skills of those who were at the top of the
existing Checkers world. This even explains why the switch to eleven-
man ballot, which involves a slightly larger change, is being
resisted.

And that made perfect sense, since they were the only ones with a
problem. Ordinary duffers could still play Checkers the old way
without fear of it being a futile pursuit in the sense of tic-tac-toe.
And, for a while, there was the option of learning to play Camelot
well instead of learning to play Checkers well, although its inventor,
George Swinnerton Parker, was not born until 1867, four years after
the Wyllie-Martins match.

That option could be said to have ended in 1986, when Inside Moves
went off the market... but there are still those who suggest the
possibility of a revival.

If switching from Checkers to Chess is a big jump, switching from
Chess to Go is a bigger one still that hardly bears considering, even
if Go seems to be thriving.

In any case, the case of Checkers confirms strongly my intuition that:

- For a new game to get recognition enough so that people pay
attention to who its world champion might be is extremely difficult;
and

- A reform to an old game to reduce draws and make its upper-level
competitive activity more exciting should be one which involves the
minimum of change, maximizing the relevancy of the existing skills of
the game's current masters.

John Savard