The 28th World Senior Chess Championships (http://www.wscc2018.european-chessacademy.com/index.php/en/) began today in Maribor, Slovenia. The USA contingent is being led by FM Nathan Resika (2124), number 49 on the list of entrants in the 50+ tournament. Michael A. Gilbert (1921) and unrated David Jones are also playing in the section. Leonid Bondar (1931) and Mariano Acosta (1721) are playing in the 65+ section. There are no USA women participating in the two sections only for women.
In the first round GM Henrik “Polar Bear” Danielsen (2504) of Iceland
was paired with Antonio Lopez Pereyra (2066), from Spain. GM Danielsen left the Polar Bear in Iceland so his opponent moved his f-pawn on move one! The opening turned into a Leningrad Dutch.
Lopez Pereyra was no doubt left dazed and confused.
Todaze lesson is to DEFEND YOUR PIECES! Everyone who knows me is more than a little aware that the first thing I teach is: 1) Why did my opponent make that move? 2) What move do I want, or need, to make? 3) AM I LEAVING ANYTHING EN PRISE?
GM Karen Movsziszian (2513) of Armenia faced Andres Belmont Hernandez (2080), of Mexico, with the game transposing after the third move into a Bird!
The following article appeared in the venerable New York Times after the last post was composed, and posted, as if by synchronicity…
After getting to know a little about me a fellow in Louisville, Kentucky, Rick Rothenberg, from Indiana, said I reminded him of another Southerner he had known earlier. Rick said, “The man was so Southern he would not even go out of the house if the wind was blowing from the north!”
Reading the New South
A group of forward-thinking, upstart journals and websites are exploding the stereotypes so many attach to this place and its people.
By Margaret Renkl
Contributing opinion writer
Sept. 17, 2018
Some of Lyndsey Gilpin’s collection of books on the South.CreditCreditAndrew Spear for The New York Times
NASHVILLE — I was a graduate student in Philadelphia when James Watt, the former Secretary of the Interior of the United States, came to campus in 1984. Mr. Watt’s brief tenure in federal office was characterized by an almost cartoonish villainy. Rolling Stone magazine called his attitude toward the environment a “rip-and-ruin view of our natural resources, land, water, parks and wilderness.” That night Watt argued for letting each state set its own air- and water-safety standards, a position that makes no sense if you’re aware that rivers and winds don’t respect state borders.
During the Q. and A., I took my turn at the microphone to make this point. “Sir,” I said, “I’m from Alabama.” Instantly that giant audience of Pennsylvanians broke into laughter. Who was this cracker daring to voice an opinion about federal environmental policy?
Well, that was 1984, you’re probably thinking. Today we don’t judge people by their accents any more than we judge them by their skin color. People know better now.
Except they don’t. The political polarization of our own day means that a region like the South, a red voting bloc in national elections, is a source of continual liberal ridicule, no matter the subject. In June I wrote about the transcendently beautiful Mobile-Tensaw Delta, one of the most ecologically diverse places in the country. When I posted the link on Facebook with a note about its magic, someone commented, “Except that it’s in Alabama.” As though nothing in the whole state could possibly have any value at all.
As stereotypes go, this one surely doesn’t rank among the top 10 most objectionable human prejudices, but it stings even so. Fortunately there is plenty of on-the-ground proof to counter it. Among the most important is a raft of publications, many so new they’re still on shaky financial footing, that aim to convey the genuine complexities of the modern American South. They are planted in the South and created by Southerners, people who love this place but who nevertheless see it all too truly.
Unlike lifestyle glossies like Southern Living and Garden & Gun (which is assiduously apolitical, despite what its name might suggest), these publications blast past sweet-tea-and-moonshine preconceptions to convey the nuances of a region where people are rarely as ornery and dumb as they’re held to be in the national imagination.
The oldest of them is the Oxford American, founded in Oxford, Miss., but now based in Conway, Ark., which was first launched in 1992. (A print quarterly, it has foundered a number of times over the years, ceasing publication until new funding arrived, which somehow always has.) In many ways, it set the tone for all the publications that followed, celebrating the artistic innovations of the region but refusing to gloss over its manifold shortcomings.
The latest issue includes a nonfiction report by Kelsey Norris on a Nashville oral-history project focusing on the descendants of slaves; Beth Macy’s profile of the Appalachian playwright and novelist Robert Gipe; “Bikers,” a poem by the Virginia native Kate Daniels about her brothers (“What foreign lives they lived / With their deer hunts, and their / Love of speed, and their boring jobs / In factories”) and a short story by David Wesley Williams about a hitchhiker stuck in West Memphis, Ark. The story is called “Stay Away From Places With Directions in Their Names.”
The tagline for Facing South, an online publication of the progressive Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, N.C., is “A Voice for a Changing South.” The site focuses on politics, history and human rights, with recent articles on voting rights during Reconstruction, South Carolina’s present refusal to evacuate convicts in advance of Hurricane Florence and delays in compensation for people sickened by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Scalawag, another nonprofit publication out of Durham, also reports regional politics with a progressive eye, though it covers regional art and literature, too, and includes a section titled, simply, “Witness.” The magazine, which is published online and in print, fosters “critical conversations about the many Souths where we live, love and struggle” and aims to empower “activists, artists and writers to reckon with Southern realities as they are, rather than as they seem to be.” Recent stories confront toxic masculinity, explain how to fight racism through the auspices of craft beer, collect a range of Latinx poetry from around the American South, and report on Syrian cuisine in small-town Georgia.
The Southern Foodways Alliance, based in Oxford, Miss., publishes a print quarterly called Gravy. Despite its name, the journal does more than report on cuisine, continuing the work of the alliance itself by showcasing, through food, “a South that is constantly evolving, accommodating new immigrants, adopting new traditions and lovingly maintaining old ones.” The latest issue includes an article on “The Queer Pleasures of Tammy Wynette’s Cooking” by Mayukh Sen and a profile by Osayi Endolyn of Joe Stinchcomb, an African-American bartender who invented five new cocktails, to celebrate Black History Month. The drinks had names like “Blood on the Leaves” and “(I’m Not Your) Negroni,” and they definitely raised some hackles down there in Mississippi.
For anyone still hoping to define Southern literature, storySouth is an online literary journal based in Greensboro, N.C. It publishes “the best fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry that writers from the New South have to offer,” according to its website. Subjects that seem to play into regional stereotypes can be found there at times. The current issue features a poem called “Roadkill” by Megan Blankenship and one by William Woolfitt called “Grassy Branch Pentecostal Church, Face of Christ on Tin,” for example. But read the poems: This is not your unlamented Agrarian’s Southern literature.
Perhaps the liveliest of the whole bunch is an absolutely wonderful online publication called The Bitter Southerner, an irreverent Atlanta-based site that truly covers the cultural waterfront, celebrating the lunacy of genuine homegrown geniuses, lifting up the unsung heroes of the region, and peeking behind the veil of great cultural institutions, and all while holding power to account in a part of the world where power has too often lost its uneducated mind.
But it’s the newest of these publications that most often captures my own attention these days. Southerly began in late 2016 as a weekly newsletter of investigative journalism, plus curated links to “News Flying Under the Radar” by other journalists around the region. Until this summer, when it received a grant from Solutions Journalism Network, it was funded entirely by Patreon subscribers, who monthly contribute an average of five dollars each through an online portal. Those supporters are still crucial to its survival. Lyndsey Gilpin — the magazine’s founder, editor and publisher — is a Northwestern University-trained journalist based in her hometown, Louisville, Ky., and her weekly reports from impoverished and often oppressed corners of the South have given a microphone to people whose voices are rarely heard in conversations about climate change, environmental exploitation or economic disparity.
Lyndsey Gilpin, founder of Southerly, an online magazine, near her home in Louisville, Ky.CreditAndrew Spear for The New York Times
In July, Southerly grew into a full-fledged “independent media organization” that “covers the intersection of ecology, justice and culture in the American South,” according to its new website, and already it is taking no prisoners. The site — in partnership with The Montgomery Advertiser and Scalawag — launched with a four-part series on the breakout of tropical diseases in the rural South owing to failing sewage infrastructure. On Sept. 22, Southerly will convene a public discussion in Hayneville, Ala., about poverty-related illnesses and how communities can address the governmental crisis that spawned them.
Southerly’s mission statement sets out some uncompromising goals: “This region stands to bear the brunt and lose the most from the effects of climate change. It is experiencing massive economic shifts from a changing energy industry. The South is the fastest urbanizing area of the United States, but it is also the most economically distressed. Southerners deserve a publication that covers the nuances of their environment, history and communities without being condescending or stereotypical, without parachuting in from large metropolitan areas. The rest of the world deserves to know about the creative ways communities here are adapting to these changes, and the challenges that come with that.”
You could almost call it a mission statement for celebrating — and transforming — the South itself.
In an earlier post (https://xpertchesslessons.wordpress.com/2018/08/03/winning/) I posited improving Chess by devaluing the draw to 1/4 point for each player. Lowering the value of a draw would obviously increase the value of a win. Winning is the point of any game, is it not?
The recently completed US Masters in Greensboro, North Carolina, using the traditional one point for a win and one half point for a draw, ended with four main score groups:
6 1/2
GM JOHN MICHAEL BURKE
GM JEFFERY XIONG
GM EVGENY POSTNY
IM DJURABEK KHAMRAKULOV
GM YURI GONZALEZ VIDAL
GM SERGEY ERENBURG
GM TIMUR GAREYEV
GM HOVHANNES GABUZYAN
6
GM ALONSO ZAPATA
GM SERGEI AZAROV
GM SAMUEL SEVIAN
GM NICLAS HUSCHENBETH
GM VLADIMIR BELOUS
GM ALEKSANDR LENDERMAN
IM MICHAEL W BROWN
GM MAGESH CHANDRAN PANCHANATHAN
5 1/2
IM JUSTIN J SARKAR
GM KAMIL DRAGUN
IM GUILLERMO VAZQUEZ
GM JULIO C SADORRA
GM CARLOS ANTONIO HEVIA ALEJANO
5
FM JUSTIN WANG
GM ALEXANDER SHABALOV
FM ANDREW ZHANG HONG
IM KEVIN WANG
IM ERIK SANTARIUS
GM JOEL BENJAMIN
FM HANS NIEMANN
IM ADVAIT PATEL
GM DMITRY GUREVICH
GM ELSHAN MORADIABADI
GM JULIO J BECERRA
FM BRANDON JACOBSON
IM FARAI MANDIZHA
IM MICHAEL LEE
GM ISAN ORTIZ SUAREZ
GM ANDREY STUKOPIN
GM MICHAEL A ROHDE
GM BRYAN G SMITH
If the tournament had ended with exactly the same individual game results the outcome would have been entirely different. Before you leave comments and/or send emails, please consider I am aware altering the distribution of points would, most probably, have ensured many of the results would have been much different because players would be FORCED to alter the way they play. There would have been more fighting Chess since a win would be worth much more than the method currently in use. How many players would opt for any bye in any round? How many would take a 1/4 point bye in the final round?
This is how the tournament would have ended using the new method of 1/4 point for a draw:
GM TIMUR GAREYEV 6 1/4
IM MICHAEL W BROWN 6
GM JOHN MICHAEL BURKE 5 3/4
GM JEFFERY XIONG
GM HOVHANNES GABUZYAN
GM ALONSO ZAPATA 5 1/2
GM SERGEI AZAROV
GM MAGESH CHANDRAN PANCHANATHAN
GM EVGENY POSTNY 5 1/4
IM DJURABEK KHAMRAKULOV
GM YURI GONZALEZ VIDAL
GM SERGEY ERENBURG
IM JUSTIN J SARKAR (Includes last round 1/4 bye)
GM KAMIL DRAGUN
GM SAMUEL SEVIAN 5
GM NICLAS HUSCHENBETH
FM BRANDON JACOBSON
IM FARAI MANDIZHA
IM GUILLERMO VAZQUEZ 4 3/4
GM JULIO C SADORRA
GM CARLOS ANTONIO HEVIA ALEJANO
GM ALEKSANDR LENDERMAN 4 1/2
GM ALEXANDER SHABALOV
FM ANDREW ZHANG HONG
IM MICHAEL LEE
IM ATULYA ARYA SHETTY 4 1/4
IM SHIYAM THAVANDIRAN
IM ERIK SANTARIUS 4
GM JOEL BENJAMIN
FM HANS NIEMANN
IM ADVAIT PATEL
GM DMITRY GUREVICH
GM ISAN ORTIZ SUAREZ
GM ANDREY STUKOPIN
GM MICHAEL A ROHDE
GM BRYAN G SMITH
It is more than a little obvious devaluing the draw would put a premium on WINNING! Players would no longer be willing to “settle” for a draw. Players would be forced to stop playing for a draw and stop considering splitting the point, which is the point. Who knows, maybe players would become more like Victor Korchnoi and play slightly “dubious” opening moves intentionally in hopes of creating problems for the opponent right from the beginning of the game. Maybe an opening like the King’s Gambit would make a return.
This departure from what has become ‘normal’ would infuse the staid game of Chess with new enthusiasm. Gone would be the short draws that have become all too common. “Buddy-buddy” draws and group hugs would become a thing of the past, which is where they belong.
A total of ELEVEN moves were “played” in this game by both players. Under the format used in this tournament it is a pity these “players” were unable to “call it in.” The time used to “play” this “game” could have been spent much more productively in the bar. THIS IS NOT CHESS! This so-called “game” is one of the main reasons Chess has never become popular in America. Most of the world wants a winner, not a drawer!
Many years ago NM Neal Harris beat the Legendary Georgia Ironman for the second time in the exact same variation. The Ironman, who was none too pleased, said, “That Neal…he ain’t nothing but an ol’ swindler!” We have all laughed about it since then, and I have been known to address my friend Neal as “Ol’ Swindler”, which invariably brings out a smile from the Ol’ Swindler. Today the ol’ dog proved he still has some bite!
This afternoon as fire raged on every board at the Sinquefield Cup, with GM Maurice displaying histrionics that would make Tom Cruise proud, and Jen and Ben talking excitedly when given the chance, with even the usually calm and understated Yaz getting in on the act, especially when Hikaru Nakamura eschewed the opportunity to put Darth Topalov out of his misery with 21…Bxf2+, I was following the game between Neal and Kazim Gulamali at the US Masters along with the coverage from St. Louis.
Neal is a fellow Senior who happens to be against Senior tournaments. We have agreed to disagree on the matter. Knowing Kazim from the time he was a child put me in a tough position. It is one of those situations where one might hope for a great game that turns out to be a draw. Then there is David Spinks, who said, “You gotta pull for SOMEBODY!” I admit that when the Ol’ Swindler obtained an advantage my heart was with him. “Come on Neal, push that pawn to e2!” I exclaimed as he missed chance after chance to do just that. Nevertheless, Neal found a way to win. Congratulations my friend! NC obtained a modicum of revenge for the loss to the Atlanta Kings earlier this week.
Damir Studen and Daniel Gurevich, two young players from Atlanta, Georgia, USA, both scored 5.5 points out of 9 rounds at the recent US Masters in Greensboro, North Carolina. That put both of them in the fourth score group, in a tie for 12-21 out of 79 players. They were the lowest rated, by far, players in the score group. For both of these young men (Damir was born in 1989 and Daniel in 1997) this can be considered a breakout event. Damir has previously won the state championship of Georgia, while Daniel won the top section of the 2009 Super Nationals in Nashville, so both have known success. Both would agree the US Masters is on another level entirely.
Damir won 3, drew 5, and lost one. Daniel won 5, drew one, and lost 3. Damir had a performance rating of 2560, while Daniel’s PR was 2544. Damir faced four GM’s, with two wins and two draws. Daniel played five GM’s, winning two, while losing three. Damir played his usual solid, steady game and was consistent throughout the event, with draws interspersed with wins until winning back to back in rounds seven and eight. Daniel lost two of his first three, won four of the next five, with the other game being drawn. He won three in a row in rounds 6-8. Damir earned 48 rating points to move to 2384. Daniel garnered 51 rating points, with his rating increasing to 2344. The two had three common opponents. They both drew with IM John Cox of England. Damir drew with GM Alex Fishbein while Daniel won. Damir also drew with GM Georg Meier, while Daniel lost his game with Meier in the last round.
What I want to do is contrast the performance of these two young turks with that of some of the older players, the wily ol’ veterans. I have read analytical books on baseball by writers such as Bill James and his Baseball Abstracts over the last thirty plus years. The study of baseball statistics is called “sabermetrics.” One of the things I have learned is the smaller the sample size, the less trustworthy the results. With that caveat I can tell you this sample size would be considered small in any study, but it is all I have with which to work. To make it even smaller, I will throw out one of the games. I do that because organizers continue the nonsensical practice of having an odd number of rounds, which puts one half of the field at a disadvantage by having to play the Black pieces an extra time. Both Damir and Daniel each played White four times while having the Black pieces five times, which makes their individual results even more spectacular!
I wanted to know if their success can be attributed to youthful exuberance, and if so, to what extent. For this study I decided to contrast the performance rating of the first four rounds with that of the last four rounds. To do so I would have to eliminate the 5th round entirely, which would leave each player with an equal number of times playing the White and Black pieces. I also needed to use only those who played all nine games, for obvious reasons. GM Larry Kaufman had a good result considering he is older than me by a few years. It boggles my mind how he can play at such a level. But Larry did take two half-point byes, which would skew the results to a point of being meaningless.
I decided to find matching pairs, like Damir and Daniel in order to increase the sample size. The two players I found to contrast with D & D were GM Alonso Zapata, now living in Atlanta, and GM Michael Rohde, who used to visit and play when his parents lived in Atlanta. Alonso was born in 1958 and Michael 1959, making both of them eligible to play in the US Senior. Because they are several decades older I believe it makes for a fine contrast of youth versus age.
This is the PR for all nine rounds for each of them, with all numbers rounded off:
Zapata 2619
Studen 2560
Gurevich 2544
Rohde 2467
Added together and averaged we have a PR for Zapata & Rohde of 2543, and for D&D it is 2552, which is close.
Now let us look at the PR for each for only the first four rounds:
Zapata 2789
Studen 2683
Gurevich 2395
Rhode 2320
And for the last four rounds:
Gurevich 2712
Studen 2576
Rohde 2543
Zapata 2444
Combine each of the two sets and average them for the first four rounds and we get:
D & D 2539
Z & R 2555
This means they played about the same chess during the first four rounds. Now we look at the last four rounds:
D&D 2644
Z & R 2494
The two young men obviously played much stronger chess in the later stages of the long tournament.
I considered using GM John Federowicz as he was also born in 1958, like GM Zapata, but rejected him because he had taken a half point bye in the fifth round. Since he did play the first, and last, four rounds, I would like to mention his tournament. John, one of the most gracious players I have encountered through the years, won his first two games, but those were the only games he won. He drew his next two, took a half point bye, lost in round 6 to GM Meier, drew in round seven, lost again in the penultimate round, and finally drew in the last round. This adds up to an even tournament. The Fed’s PR for the tournament was 2451. For the first four rounds was 2663; for the last four, 2239. If John were combined with either Alonso or Michael it would have been an even more dramatic decline. Combined, The Fed and The Zap would have had a PR of 2726 for the first four rounds. It would have dropped precipitously to only 2342 for the last four rounds. Rohde and the Fed would be 2491 for the first four rounds, and 2391 for the last four.
I stand in awe while applauding these two young men from my home city, Damir Studen, who earned an IM norm, and Daniel Gurevich, on such an excellent tournament.
Armchair Warrior 