Bilbao 2014: Wrapping Up
In the last post I mentioned the so-called 10,000 hour rule, and a couple of weeks ago it was the Dunning-Kruger effect that made an appearance. Today's topic from the broader world of ideas is the peak-end rule, according to which an event is not emotionally evaluated in retrospect as the sum or average of its emotional moments, but rather by the feelings at the event's peak (whether positive or negative) and at its end. Applied to chess, a mediocre tournament might be remembered well if we win a beautiful game along the way and finish with a win. Conversely, a tournament that went well but finished with a painful and unnecessary loss might always be remembered afterwards with bitterness - even though the same results played in a different order might have led us to remember it fondly.
Why do I bring this up? If you followed the finale of the Grand Slam Masters, you can probably guess. Viswanathan Anand led from start to finish, was +3 after four rounds and looked to be in great shape heading into his match with Magnus Carlsen - especially as the latter's form has been relatively spotty of late. Anand drew in round five and clinched overall tournament victory, but in the last round lost to Levon Aronian. Anand still won the tournament and gained points, and his form this year gives him grounds for confidence against Carlsen. But this last round loss can't feel good, especially as his final official game before the world championship match. He lost to someone he used to struggle mightily against but against whom he had recently turned the tables, and lost some ground on the rating list too. Hopefully this doesn't harm his confidence too much going into the match, but we shall see!
In the other game, Francisco Vallejo Pons obtained his first win over the event, defeating Ruslan Ponomariov to catch up to him. Final scores: Anand 11, Aronian 10, Ponomariov & Vallejo 5. (This is on Bilbao's 3-1-0 scoring; in "real" scoring it's Anand & Aronian with 4/6, Ponomariov & Vallejo with 2.)
In the concurrent and co-located European Club Cup, the SOCAR team "from" Azerbaijan won the event with a perfect 7-0 team score. In the last round, their win occurred only thanks to that famous Azeri Veselin Topalov, who gradually defeated Peter Svidler in an opposite-colored bishop ending. Topalov himself (who is of course Bulgarian, not Azeri) had a great tournament and finished with an individual rating of 2799.5, which will be rounded up to 2800 at the end of the month. It's not his first time there, but it's impressive to see him reclaim that rating after a couple of years of indifferent results. Aside from the Candidates' tournament, Topalov has been playing very well lately. Maybe catching Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana is asking too much of him, but he is at #3 in the world now and showing glimpses of his former glory.
Speaking of Caruana, he finished strongly and concluded the event with another 7.5 points (which will be rounded up to +8) and will have an amazing, official rating of 2844 in a couple of weeks. Other big ratings winners are Anish Giri, who gained more than 10 points and hopped up to #7 in the world, and Hou Yifan, whose performance in the women's section has brought her up to 2673, just two points behind the newly retired Judit Polgar. Not too shabby! A good result in next month's women's world championship knockout tournament could very easily install her at #1 on the women's list, and a great result could have her tickling the 2700 barrier. As with Anand, we will see....
Reader Comments (6)
I see your line of reasoning, but last-round games with tournament victory already in the bag are always a bit tricky. For example, this year in Wijk aan Zee Aronian himself lost against van Wely, 2011 (last time he dominated Dortmund) Kramnik lost against Nakamura. One thing is for sure: such a situation doesn't arise in WCh matches. BTW there is a certain chance that Anand will play in the German Bundesliga (18/19 October), his opponents could be Eljanov and Melkumyan.
To me it seems that Topalov didn't gradually win an opposite-colored bishop endgame, but Svidler abruptly lost. The key moment seems to be 50.-d5? when 50.-Be3+ would have kept the passed a-pawn under control (source: chess24 live commentary). Topalov's teammate Radjabov had already tweeted "Totally safe today, 6 draws. We are 2014 European Club Cup Champions!".
[DM: Just because such last round letdowns may be relatively common doesn't mean that the peak-end rule doesn't come into play.
As for the Svidler-Topalov game, I haven't looked at it closely, but as a conceptual matter one can say of any decisive result that it was abruptly lost. Even if we can't identify the moment, there's always some point at which it was drawn the move before and winning/losing the move after.]
I can't see anything unusual in sports clubs having most or all players foreign. That's the norm in most team sports, isn't it? A sports club is a commercial organisation whose purpose is to get the best players it can afford. Look at football: are any Barcelona players Catalan? If they are, how many? Are Real Madrid players predominantly Spanish?
Anand's win against Aronian was particularly mysterious since it appeared he rejected a few clear drawing lines before he got into trouble (possibly by missing - at some point - Aronian's idea with Qb8). Of course, we can doubt that the Ragozin will even make an appearance in Sochi, but the loss was not really down to the opening.
[DM: You mean "loss" in the opening sentence, I presume. About the Ragozin, I wonder: it very much fits with what Anand generally likes to do and what Carlsen doesn't; namely, head for very concrete play, so although the rule of thumb that what a world championship aspirant plays just before a match is not what he'll play in the match makes sense, it's not quite an absolute rule.]
This is purely my impression, but Anand often seems weakest when he has to go in for concrete but unattractive lines; he refuses "computerlike" options. Aronian - more even than the younger GMs and like Topalov - is very "computerlike" and willing to enter ugly unattractive lines if he does not see the refutation and believes they are "correct".
[DM: That's an interesting observation, and you may be right. I've always thought about Anand as a defender as having a strong preference for clarity. That may be similar to your view but not identical to it.]
Reportedly, Hou Yifan has decided not to play in the knock-out tournament.
1) If she won it, then she would play a match against Humpy Koneru.
2) If she did not win, then she would play a match against its winner.
So I suppose that the incentive of the prize money and another match with
Humpy Koneru was not enough to motivate Hou Yifan to participate in what
she believes is a too random way of determining a women's world champion.
[DM: I expect that the word "random" is the key, and she doesn't feel like being a victim of the process's randomness - especially after her early ouster from the last k.o. Given the dominance she has shown the last few years over all the other women not named "Judit Polgar" it's probably the best decision for her brand. It may also be a savvy "statement", if it inclines FIDE to scrap the knockout events, as doing so only increases her lock on the title.]
I've enjoyed the recent blogs posts tying into psychology, Mr. DM! They help the blog live up to its name -- "The Chess mind." :)
[DM: You're welcome!]
While chess has received lots of academic attention from psychologists, most of it has focused on the cognitive side of the game -- including learning, expertise (e.g.. the classical studies of De Groot and his successors), pattern recognition, memory, and so on. The competitive aspects and subjective experiences have received far less academic attention.
"Reportedly, Hou Yifan has decided not to play in the knock-out tournament"
No one will play in it since it won't be held, I suppose. It should have started in a couple of weeks but no venue or sponsor seems to have been found and now it's much too late for that anyway. Just remains to be seen for how long FIDE will keep the players in the dark, I guess they must all have declined a few invitations in October.