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Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Why is there no…

...up to date annotated correspondence games by titled players?  I Googled “annotated correspondence chess games” and found:

Total Replay by John C.Knudsen which has a bunch of CC games from about 1996 to 2003…nothing recent.
SIM Mike Read which has over 100 of his best/most interesting games from 1978 to 2000 and several are annotated.
Simon Hradecky has a nice site but nothing since 2007
At least Correspondence Chess Database 2011 from Chessbase has over 800,000 games, some of which are annotated.
The answer, of course, is obvious:
A modern CC Master


      Of course, “real” chessplayers don’t care much about correspondence play.  I learned that a long time ago.  I worked on a game in the US Open Correspondence Championship for three years.  I was in the military when it started and it finished up while I was attending college.  It was a really well played game featuring a positional Q-sacrifice and I sent it in to John W. Collins at Al Horowitz’ Chess Review hoping it would get published.  Much to my surprise, it did get published a couple of months later and I was terribly proud to have the game published and annotated by Collins.  Out of about a dozen CC opponents, one saw it and said, “Saw your game.”  Nobody at the local chess club saw it.  So much for that.  And then there was the time I played a correspondence game with Samuel Reshevsky and held him to a draw.  That was back in the 1970s and Reshevsky probably treated it like a simultaneous game, but I did hold him to a draw and that was without computers…didn’t have them then!  He would never play CC today because of engines and all and if I held a GM to a draw in CC play these days everybody would just chalk it up to engine use.  Correspondence players get less respect these days than they ever did and I can't say it's without reason.
       I have been going through Bryce Avery’s History of Correspondence Chess in America off and on since I got it for Christmas last year.  The title is a misnomer because it’s mostly the history of the Correspondence Chess League of America, but there are still some really great games in it, most of them played by no-names.
      In any case, you won’t find many annotated correspondence games by masters these days.  What can they say?  Probably something like I read the other day: “I created and IDeA project with this position…(using) the Default tree shape…after a hour of analysis with six single core Houdini engines…”And that’s how the modern CC Master would annotate a game…not very interesting.

 

 

1 comment:

  1. “I created and IDeA project with this position…(using) the Default tree shape…after a hour of analysis with six single core Houdini engines…” very funny. unfortunately also accurate.

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