OTB AND CC PLAYERS – A COMPARISON

When chess is played by correspondence, one can think of it like an OTB game that is adjourned after every move. A player analyses the extant position in the quietness of his home and without the pressures of the ticking seconds, and after convincing himself of the correctness of the move, plays it. Till the 1990s all OTB games played beyond a certain time control were adjourned and the player was required to analyse the position.

The reader is requested to refer the chapter The Art of Analysis by Paul Keres in the book, The Art of the Middle Game by Keres and Kotov. I give three interesting positions

i) Diagram 1: Szapiel - Keres, Bad Salzbrunn 1950.

Diagram 1

White to play 41st move

ii) Diagram 2: Fairhurst - Keres, Hastings 1954/55.

Diagram 2

White to play 36th move.

iii) Diagram 3: Rejfir - Keres, Moscow Olympiad, 1956.

Diagram 3

White to play 41st move. It is interesting to note that though the adjourned analysis in each case was extremely complicated, Keres' opponents proved more or less his equal as far as analysing the adjourned position is concerned. I have deliberately chosen examples where the players are not so well-known, though they all were certainly good OTB players (otherwise they would not be playing at all). Readers who have not seen these positions from the Keres-Kotov book would do well to try their hand at analysing these positions.

Secondly, let us consider the analysis by world-class OTB GMs, of only two positions which prove my point.

i) Diagram 4: Gelfand - Karpov. Game 7, Candidates Match, 1995, Sanghinagar, India. White to play 61st move.

Diagram 4

ii) Diagram 5: Piket - Nunn, Wijk aan Zee, 1990. Position after Black's 33rd move (…fxg2). The study of these two positions contain the most complex/difficult analysis I have seen and shows the ingenuity/depth of the human mind.

Diagram 5

Karpov's and Gelfand's team independently analysed the adjouned position of Diagram 4 and spent 150 man-hours at the task without coming to a firm conclusion whether the position is a win for Black or whether White can draw with best play, though to an average person like me it appears as an ordinary B and P ending.

The point I want to stress is GMs are all outstanding at analysis.

Thirdly, let us consider players who have achieved outstanding success at correspondence chess. The foremost is Hans Berliner whose score of 94 wins, 1 loss and 10 draws (till 2002) at correspondence chess is unlikely to be ever bettered. In OTB play he was successful to a moderate extent and afterwards abandoned OTB to concentrate on correspondence chess. The same is true of almost all CC players i.e. they start out as moderately successful at OTB and then abandon it to concentrate on correspondence chess. Of course, preoccupation with professional life is no doubt responsible for this, but this cannot be the case in every instance. Keres abandoned correspondence chess to concentrate on OTB chess and Sloth (Ex-champ. of correspondence chess) wanted to become an IM (in OTB chess) after winning Correspondence World. Championship. If there are any exceptions, they are Ulf Andersson, Lothar Schmidt, Ragozin and O'Kelly who were all OTB GMs and their analytical ability later enabled them to become one of the best in correspondence play. All other world-class correspondence players play OTB chess (when they do play) at a level at most upto 2400 ELO. I could ascertain after searching Mega Database 2000 for the names appearing in the book ICCF Gold on pages 350-352.

England's J. Penrose would have possibly become OTB GM had he continued to play OTB in 1970s. The highest ELO Rating (till 1999) that both Timmerman and Mrs. Olita Rause could each ever achieve was 2360 while van Oosterom abandoned OTB play in 1960 and Tunc Hamarat's name does not appear at all in Mega Database 2000. After searching for the names appearing on pages 356-357 of ICCF Gold, I could find only 6/7 players who ever played OTB chess at a level exceeding 2400 ELO and all these 227 players are ICCF Correspondence Grandmasters, who naturally are outstanding at analysis. Of course, they could not be dependent on the computer for analysis because of the horizon effect (Computer programs can look into positions only up to a maximum depth. If there is a strong move available beyond the horizon, the computer misses it.) but on their own ability.

Consider the position after Black's 36th move between two world-class CC players

Diagram 6

Interested readers can analyse this position and if they can find the next 7 White and Black moves, they can be sure they are first-class analysts.(Details in the next issue.)

Fourthly, let me state two more relevant points. The following position (Diagram 7) was adjourned in OTB play with White to play 41st move.

Diagram 7

White's sealed move was 41.Ke3 which Black could not know and yet Black's second - a player of master category(not GM level) - analysed the adjourned position up to move 81 as a win for Black and ....astonishingly the game finished on move 81 exactly as per the analysis. When I first read this, I was stunned to realise the extent to which analysis can be achieved. Furthermore, according to this person, he was not a strong OTB player, but good at analysis.

Exactly similarly both Fischer and Taimanov independently analysed an adjourned position for 17 forced moves as a win for Fischer in one of the 1971 Candidates Games.

I requested an IM title holder (OTB) who had played several times in National ‘A’ Championships and whose ELO rating exceeded 2400 at one time, to solve the 3-movers published in my articles published in AICCF Bulletins. His solving timing (in minutes) were 8, 20, 40, 10, 10 and 10 for Nov 2003 problems and 10, 22, 5, 6, 30, 6, 10, 45, 10, 8, 35, 60 and 9 for the problems in Feb 2004 issue and he managed to solve all correctly. He informed me he had no interest either in solving 3 movers or in correspondence chess, but he was doing so only at my request. Allowing a further upward margin of 200 ELO points, a 2600+ GM (OTB) must be not only a world-class analyst (see analysis of games in Informators) but naturally must also be a world-class correspondence player.

So, the conclusion to which I have come is:
1) Players who are world-class at correspondence chess need not necessarily be ‘very good’ OTB players (i.e. exceeding 2400 ELO) and
2) Any strong OTB GM (2600+ ELO) can become a world-class correspondence player only if he decides to spare the energy required to analyse each individual game for several months.

I hope I have not been too harsh on CC players. I only wanted to give a balanced view of what appears to be the truth.

Moves 41 to 81 form Diagram 7 and other details will be printed in the next Bulletin. In the meantime please send me your comments about the article and analysis of the positions at the postal/email address given at the beginning of the article.