Chess
BY PHILIDOR No. 49. G. GUIDELLI
WHITE (9 men)
t ion to
problem by Sheppard: K–K1°„'' threat P–K8 1 . . Kt–B 1 ch; 2P x K–B2;2P–K8°K; I . . K–K 3;,A Pu in. xt aBm=usKtgA bs ° but
THE CANDIDATES' TOURNAMENT
Now that it is all over and Smyslov has weir:, thus earning the right to play Botvinnik in 19., —was it a satisfactory tournament? Not alla; gether. It produced, of course, some magniflcefe games, and in the end the best player (or °T) of the two best, if we. rate Bronstein his equal) won, but the method of selection was not coil' vincing and the standard of play less high 01 at Zurich. In my view, there should have been e th,eff more players—say 16—or fewer, perhaps 6 vr 8, with every player playing every other four or six times. The trouble with the 10-010,41 Australian tournament was this. At that lei it
is very hard indeed to win, and about 6013,5
cent. of the games were, in fact, draws: th:1 means that it is very difficult to make uP be ground, and 18 rounds is not long enough t°,! sure that the best players will overcome the erli'r of a bad start or a blunder in one particuilli game—and the knowledge of this tends to e11"d their play and make them press for a win ani take unjustified risks. A further bad feature tic Amsterdam was the presence of players with /i chance of winning and who were known to v considerably inferior to the leaders; if it is ae known that A and B are much better tbai„,t and that each will average 75 per cent. a881','„5 him, and it so happens that A scores two 141"1. against him and B two draws in this tournarnecnor this is most unsatisfactory (except perhaPs '11 A). What we want to find out is how the giantie match up to each other, and not to have ii,cr tournament decided by the games against Oa' players.
orls
A 16-player tournament meets these object' re .n one way: with 30 rounds there is much rrl'io time for the best player's superiority to clear itself felt=–Smyslov, in fact, won by two C''of points at Zurich, and no one had any doubt'o, the correctness of the result. A 6-player tourhhe ment with each playing each six times (on t'ri lines of the 1948 tournament) is still better: be only players with a chance of victory need, included, and each can measure his strength iti,ill against each. This would be my choice: 11,..°01 deal with difficulties and how to overcome t" in a subsequent article.
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