Psychology

I was reading this interview with Van Wely, a Grand Master and trainer the other day:

Van Wely considers his strongest point also his weakest: “My optimism. And I am a great fighter. Sometimes that’s not wise. I want too much in positions where I should be content with a draw. That way, I could balance my energy better in a tournament.”…

In a New in Chess interview, Van Wely once said that psychology is nonsense and doesn’t count in chess. Dutch FM Dharma Tjiam’s reaction was that Van Wely wanted to avoid tedious questions with this remark. Van Wely laughs. “Did Dharma say that? Yes, I suppose he’s right.” He knows from experience that psychology does count. “You must be able to handle pressure when there is a lot at stake. You must be able to accept defeat. Your irritation level is tested, too. Some players try to con you in all kinds of ways. It’s no fun at the top! We don’t join each other at the bar for a beer, we play at a knife edge. But Dutch top players are good colleagues.” To Van Wely, the most important psychological rule of thumb is: If you keep on believing in yourself and keep on fighting, you can go far.

Dutch IM Joris Brenninkmeijer, a psychologist, thinks it useful for top chess players to pay attention to psychological aspects. He once complained that it is easier to discuss psychology with a piece of dead wood than with Loek van Wely. Loek agrees. But his grin suggests that he does see the importance of psychological matters, it’s just that he does not necessarily want to chat about them with Brenninkmeijer. Van Wely suddenly laughs. Psychology? Yes, he does apply it now and then. In the German club competition he once put a piece en prise after a quiet opening. His opponent thought for half an hour. To one of his opponent’s team mates, Van Wely whispered that he had blundered a piece. As he had expected, the team mate duly told Van Wely’s opponent, who was all the more baffled. As a result, he didn’t dare take the piece and lost the game.

A day or so later, I stumbled upon this story, quoted in Practical Chess Psychology by Avni. It was Tilburg 1993 – several years before the interview above – and Van Wely was playing Morozevich, who tells it thus:

The position was almost equal when Van Wely offered me a draw – but he did it with a very soft voice. There was some doubt in his words and that was the reason I declined his offer. After that he did not make any more good moves and I won easily.

These stories set me thinking about various things.

(1) It would be fair to say that drawing is considered unAustralian in chess. (It certainly used to be) Is there a bridge counterpart? Is it the preempting that Sartaj hates so much? Or some other aspects of style we have here? And is this necessarily bad? Do we really have to think that the score is everything? Or might there be more to the game than the winning of it?

(2) Psychology is really very important in chess. What about bridge? The fact that the rules have slowly, over the decades, attempted to extract all character from the game perhaps means that psychology simply no longer has any part to play. Or maybe that isn’t so at all and it is very much part and parcel of the game. If you do think it is integral to the game, I would like examples of how – and where – and why.

Chess and technology

Imagine, for a moment, that you live in a world where the latest advancement in communication was the ship. Courtesy of that advancement you live only a month’s travel from Europe. On those ships are carried the journals providing news of Australia and Europe to each other. This is your sole contact with the outside world.

For chess, like so much else in the community, the invention of the telegraph had a revolutionary impact. With the exception of the few Australian championship tournaments held prior to the nineteen-twenties, interstate matches using the new invention were the way in which players from different parts of Australia met.

These days, when technology lets the matches be played at close to real time, the conditions of the first match will seem unbelievable. South Australia and Victoria sat down to play against each other on Monday 21 September 1868 at 8pm. Play stopped…

…at 2am with only about 12 moves played. It continued Tuesday 8pm to 2am, Thursday 8pm to 2am and Monday from 8pm. The final game finished on Tuesday 29-9 at 6.30am. (Tony Wright Australian Chess to 1914 section 2)

It was Charlick who instigated the challenge and he who was the last to finish. Melbourne won decisively, 5-1 with one draw. By the time Victoria and NSW first played, two years later in 1870, transmission delays had evidently been sorted out: play took ‘only’ twelve and a half hours. The matches in these early years established without doubt that Victoria was the strongest colony. Only in the 1890s did this begin to change. When in 1894 NSW boasted Wallace, Crane, Jacobsen and Hall on the top four boards, it had its first commanding victory against Victoria. The result was a lot closer next year, Jacobsen absent, but young Crackenthorp making his debut appearance. Nonetheless, NSW had, at last, won two in a row.

Computers, women and things like that.

I must apologise to anybody reading this who HAS to have bridge. I’ve been looking through old files and coming across the odd thing about chess that takes my fancy. I wrote a potted history of Australian chess some years ago and all sorts of interesting bits and pieces didn’t make the cut. This was one of them…

Computers, Women and Things Like That

The machine-age has not conquered, and cannot conquer, chess.
Cecil Purdy 1952

Books like this one always afford a little space to the peripherals of the chess world. Historically both computers and women have been like zoological specimens to the essentially male community. The notion that either might be able to produce a challenger for male supremacy in chess has been treated with reactions ranging between humour and shock.

It was only thirty odd years ago that Basta could indicate just how erratic Hamilton was by pointing out that he was the only Australian champion to lose to a woman. To record the name of the woman who had achieved this unlikely fluke was not warranted. And it was only 45 years ago that Purdy spoke the general mind when he said chess playing machines could not happen.

Since those days computers have come a long way. Purdy’s attitude was not only that of the negative layperson. Programmers also saw believed that however possible it might be to create a strong computer, the resources would never be available for such a frivilous project. So the matter of chess playing computers might have rested there, but for the decision to make chess the great exercise into artificial intelligence. Many millions of dollars and decades later, if the 1997 Kasparov-Deep Blue match is to be the judge, computers are better than human beings. There are all sorts of events that might, if this had been written at a different time, have been historic in a book referring to Australian chess – such as Johansen’s matches against the precursor of Deep Blue where he upheld the honour of human players – but that one match in 1997 has made all such other developments in computer chess irrelevant.

Women have not come quite as far as computers. The world has yet to produce a female player that could challenge to be called the best player in the world. In Judit Polgar, though, it has come close, and Australia’s best player, Rogers, would be feeling very pleased anytime he took a point off this player who has been ranked in the world’s top ten. This might be considered as much of a miracle as the advance of computers over the past twenty years, and without the clout, both financial and intellectual, that was invested in chess computers.

Australia has produced no miracles in women’s chess. Very few women play – one is more likely to find a female in a tournament than a computer, but the odds are not good – and there are no Polgars on the horizon. Nonetheless, some significant advances have recently taken place. The East European migration that has taken place since the break up of the old East Europe political structure, as well as migration from Asian countries like Vietnam, has been an enormous fillip for open chess, but its effect has been even more dramatic for the progress of female players.

It is not so much that suddenly all Australia’s top female players were recent migrants. Of far greater significance is the strength of those players. With one or two possible exceptions whose period was around the turn of the century, for the first time ever Australia has females who can compete with the top players. There is no one who could win the Australian championship without great improvement, but players like Berezina-Feldman and Nutu-Gajic, an Olympiad medal winner before moving to Australia, could hold their own in it. They are classes better than anything Australia has ever produced. If the strongest 1997 lineup – which would contain only those who had moved to Australia since the late 1980s – was matched against its counterpart of twenty years ago, 1977 would not get as much as a draw. Nor would 1987 or 1967.

This does not mean that nothing has happened in women’s chess in Australia during the twentieth century. It does mean that what would be a mole hill in ‘men’s’ chess is a mountain in ‘women’s’. The mountains have been created by two people without whom nothing might exist. When Garry Koshnitsky talked Hordens into opening a chess club around the Depression, it meant that a club now existed which was a magnet to females. Its host, Hordens, was a department store, its facilities were about as fine as could be found in the world, it kept shopping hours. Koshnitsky grabbed the chance he saw and has been a staunch supporter of women’s chess ever since. The immediate consequence in Sydney was a group of capable players, but none that was anywhere near the city’s best.

Koshnitsky’s patrons were grown women, of course, and to create a player of top class it was surely necessary to begin with much younger pupils. That is where the second creator of mountains enters. Evelyn Koshnitsky has made her life’s work the promotion of chess among the young and her special passion has been to get girls to play. First in Sydney and then in Adelaide from the early 1960s when the couple moved there she cajoled, begged and bullied support. Manpower, money, venues – she is an expert at getting what she wants from parents, schools, government, business – whoever might have something of use.

It is really very difficult to impart a sense of the impact of a Koshnitsky. Purdy’s writings live on forever, but a Koshnitsky’s work is not permanent in that sense. It might take the same effort to hold the world junior championships as to write a book, but there is never the same solid consequence to mark the achievement. Paradoxically in the end it is the book, and not the event, that lives. The Bicentennial 1988 World Junior Open and Girls and two Asian Girls championships, were all held in Adelaide at their initiative.

The 1993 Asian Girls’ Under 20 championship

It is impossible to appreciate, looking on at such a tournament, how much goes into it. On this occasion the Koshnitskys had to financially underwrite it themselves, while hoping to get sponsorship. Thirty-eight Asian Federations were invited to send a player. a couple of months went by with only one entry and no sponsorship. Luck turned with an ABC 7.30 report on the Koshes and their fears for the tournament. Donations poured in, and not ony from chess players. But entries were so slow that the proposed venue and accommodation had to be changed – they had been too ambitious. Eventually eight turned up – chaos when one was an unexpected Filipino and tragedy for the Australian who relinquished her place in the tournament for the arrival. Interminable trips to the airport, to motels, to billets, searches for interpreters, how to make things as comfortable as possible for players from such a diverse range of cultures. And then, after many months of this, the tournament begins.

Their sense of optimism and belief in their cause has always been infectious. They are the sort of people who inspire others to do things they might otherwise never have done. And, if it seemed to need something special to get girls to the chess board, they were that something. By the mid 1970s they had a thriving number of girls playing in Adelaide which soon produced a first – one of those mountains, or molehills – when Cathy Depasquale won the South Australian open junior championship. No State junior had ever been won by a female. This feat has since been repeated a few times over the last twenty years, and has often been repeated at State level in younger age divisions.

Probably I am not the only protege of Mrs K to feel guilty that I did not attempt to fulfill the potential others saw in me or make good their investment. But then, none yet has shown by the end of junior ranks anywhere near the potential to make something of chess. At national level no junior female has ever come close to challenging the top junior males. It is easy to see how a handful of newcomers to Australia is such a striking development.

Since her move to Adelaide, Nutu-Gajic has made history by winning the 1995 South Australian championship, the first State Open to be won by a female. The only other woman who has come close to this was also South Australian. Caroline Mayfield, nee Govett, was at her peak in the 1890s and early 1900s. At a time when Handicap tournaments carried a weight no longer so, she came third and then twice first in the Adelaide CC Handicap, at which point it became hers to keep. In 1909 she drew a match against JG Witton. [van Manen ‘An Unknown Queen of Chess’ AWCL Bulletin V2N3 Aug 79 pp37-8 Witton had been a past runnerup in the Victorian championship and had acquitted himself well in his telegraphic interstate appearances, including a win against Spencer Crackenthorp, so drawing with him was a fair result. A 1908 report stated that she was set to win the Adelaide Cup, but the final result is not known. After Houlding’s move from Australia she was recognised as Australia’s best female player. On the only known occasion that she competed in the SA championship, illness forced her withdrawal early in the tournament.

Curiously, two remarkable occurrences in women’s chess have taken place in Australia. Both happened last century. One was the period in the 1890s when women’s chess flourished in Perth. They had their own organisation and in 1893 held a 25 player round robin won by a Mrs Thomas. This was one of the largest all-female tournaments that had ever been played in the world. Even by the standards of the modern period, this was an exceptionally large entry.

The other was right over the other side of Australia in the same period.

——- AAHHHHHHHHHHHH. Back to the present: how intensely irritating. Here the story ends. It appears I never finished it. I’d love to know what comes next. If I come across it in my files I’ll fill it in!

Drug testing in chess and bridge

Controversy hit the Dresden Olympiad towards the end when Ivanchuk refused to take a drugs test.

This press release comes from Chessbase.com

Alexei Shirov: ‘Let us ban FIDE!’
02.12.2008 – “I don’t know how many times I have said to myself,” says the world class GM and world championship runner-up, “that it makes no sense at all to keep getting involved in chess politics and that I should just concentrate on my work. But the recent FIDE ‘developments’ possibly made many late great champions turn in their graves. That means the living chess players should speak out.”

He went on to say: ‘IOC has never guaranteed that chess would become the Olympic sport, so the FIDE policy in licking their posterior is at least questionable. After the success of Intellectual games festival in Beijing it’s time to STOP trying to get into the Olympic movement. I personally feel guilty for participating in the Olympic exhibition in Sydney 2000, but at least then it seemed that the chessplayers were going to be welcome with open heart. As it hasn’t happened we have our way and we cannot lose our best representatives like this.’

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How little has changed since I first investigated the attempts by FIDE and the WBF (World Bridge Federation) to introduce drug testing into their games. Please read on.

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DRUG TESTING IN BRIDGE AND CHESS
(slightly revised from the original published version)

In the 2002 world championships in Montreal, bridge truly joined the world of sport as it ‘stripped’ Hjordis Eythorsdottir of her silver medal for refusing to take a drug test. If you are the typical unpoliticised bridge player who could not care less that this happened and could not even care if drug testing is brought into your local club, well stop right here. But that’s exactly how this whole sorry state of affairs happened in the first place – player apathy. I’m hoping a few people will stay for this story of how drug testing works in bridge, why it is there and what it means for all of us.

I’m guessing that the story starts in the 1970s. Sport was beginning to get big government subsidies in the West, and chess wanted to jump on the band wagon. Naturally, bridge followed. To the uninitiated, this may seem a peculiar struggle.

Scene: pub anywhere in Australia. Group of middle-aged, overweight men light up cigarettes while somebody buys the round. ‘Well, of course it’s sport’, says Joe, pausing to take a drag on his fag. Murmurs of agreement all round, though a couple of those turn into hacking smoker’s coughs. ‘Hope Fred hurries up or we won’t be able to fit in another round before we have to play.’ Beer and fags, dinner and drinks – I don’t know if the average elite sportsperson would recognise the way elite bridge players prepare for bridge.

But still it’s sport! And over the years since the 1970s it has sometimes been, on the back of chess, defined as a sport and given a little money. And then it gets redefined by somebody else.

Somewhere along the track of attempting to make the people giving out the money see chess/bridge as sports, somebody had the idea of doing it through the Olympic Games. Get the IOC to define chess/bridge as a sport and use this to convince governments.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only person to whom this spelt potential disaster. Both chess and bridge have their own Olympiads. Why would we want to join an Olympic movement which is increasingly commercial and corrupt? A movement which has lost its purpose. An organisation so vast that bridge would be completely lost in it. Where bridge would become one of those sports which is ignored save for the potential humorous content. Which sport has the largest number of balding men? We all know the answer to that one.

On top of these general considerations came the burning issue of drug testing. So completely has the Olympic movement lost its way that now the overriding definition of being a sport is drug testing. No drug testing, cannot be a sport. Now that just leaves me gob-smacked.

The implications for bridge cannot be underestimated. What is performance-enhancing in bridge? What is the goal of drug testing in bridge? Never mind anything, the sheer cost involved of hundreds of dollars per test are an issue. Yet bridge, like chess, seems to have jumped on this bandwagon without the slightest consideration of what drug-testing actually means.

In chess, which is about to hold an Olympiad (2002), there is unease at national levels around the world and, needless to say, at a personal level. Already we have seen in the US, I understand, a Supreme Court case which was about the forcible drug testing of children in school chess clubs. This sort of thing is inevitable if the WBF continues to support drug testing. Don’t think that it doesn’t affect you.

‘What’s the problem’ you ask. ‘If you aren’t cheating you have nothing to hide.’ Well, that attitude got Bush started. What makes it particular rot in the context of bridge is that there is not a single drug/substance which definitively enhances the performance of mental tests. There are some which general scientific opinion sides with – glucose is the obvious one. But even if a group of students on glucose counted backwards in groups of 3 more easily than the group not given glucose, it’s a far leap from this to the idea that the performance of a complex bunch of tasks, intellectual and emotional, as bridge is, will be enhanced.

None of this seems to have bothered the WBF in the least. The WBF simply took the path of testing for everything on the IOC list of substances. The consequence of this was that in Montreal the WBF tested for an enormous number of drugs which can be presumed to be non-performance enhancing – maybe even performance damaging – and tested for not so much as one bridge-performance-enhancing drug. How could they, if we don’t know of the existence of any?

I suppose the WBF knows it is in deep water on this one. When I asked it various questions after Montreal regarding the treatment of Hjordis Eythorsdottir and the operation of its drug testing I received the public statement I wanted, but it refused to answer any of my specific questions. This is typical of the way the WBF operates at the top. Actually, it’s a group which will fit in well with the IOC as we understand the reputation of the IOC.

One of the questions I asked was whether it tested for alcohol and marijuana. I was refused an answer!

Eventually, after being unable to find anything on the WBF site or Montreal site guiding competitors to how drug testing would work, I was given an obscure .pdf file address by the WBF Webmaster. Evidently I had to click on the general rules of contest. If you wade through this tedious document, on page 10, buried between ‘official language’ and ‘ethics and deportment’ the following can be found:

6. Doping Regulations
All players are required to accept the regulations determined by the Olympic Movement Anti Doping Code. Details of these can be found at www.olympic.org or by contacting the International Olympic Committee.

How jolly helpful. As it happens I know the Anti-Doping Code off by heart. Well, not quite, so I follow the link. There isn’t actually anything on the Olympic site that I can find on the subject of drug testing, but it does provide a link to www.wada-ama.org This is the beast that has been set up to make sport clean. I believe that it stands for World Anti-Doping Association.

And dealing with it is a bit like dealing with confession as a Roman Catholic. Nobody would dare go to confession without a little sin in hand and WADA ain’t going to believe you if you say your sport’s clean. By definition – by becoming a sport – bridge has to confess its sins. We have to weed out those drug cheats and make examples of them. The notion that they might not exist is simply not to be countenanced.

Eventually one finds one’s way to a long list of substances and ‘methods’. Even if you knew what they all meant, every category concludes with a general coverall ‘and like substances’. A logistical nightmare for a sportsperson.

Back to the alcohol and cannabinoids issue. The wada document says that ’Where the rules of a responsible authority so provide, tests will be conducted….’ The same line is used for both recreational drugs.

Let’s stretch the point and call the WBF a ‘responsible authority’. Presumably there is an onus to reveal whether it is testing for these drugs. But it declined to answer my questions. Presumably, then, competitors were completely in the dark as to whether the use of alcohol or cannabis was legal.

Somebody reading this is jumping up and down. But alcohol and cannabinoids aren’t performance-enhancing for bridge or physical sports. So, why might they be tested at all? The Olympic Games, by the way, tests for cannabis but not alcohol. How tediously predictable. So a drug might be non-performance enhancing and completely legal in your own place of residence and yet make you a drug cheat out there in the spick-and-span world of the Olympic Games.

Well, whoever asked this question – why test non-performance-enhancing drugs – you’ve asked a jolly good one. And the answer is disturbing.

Let me digress, just for a second. The net consequence of the attempts of chess and bridge to become Olympic sports is turning out to have completely the opposite effect. The IOC is in the process of defining them both out of the contest permanently and completely. It hardly had a choice. If the Olympics are a chance to survive they’ve got to make them a sensible size. Not being in the Olympics never did make a sport not a sport, but bridge is going to feel like that is the consequence.

In a way, though, one would assume with a sense of great relief, that this means we can stop the whole senseless drug testing policy. Instead, in the press release I asked the WBF to make, it said the following:

Paris, 10th September 2002
At its Meeting held on Friday 30th August 2002, the Executive Council of the World Bridge Federation resolved to disqualify one of the players in the McConnell Cup. The player was informed that she was not eligible to take her place on the podium, receive a medal nor be entitled to any Master Points.
The WBF wants to remind to those concerned that:
1. The WBF was recognised as an International Sports Federation by the International Olympic Committee in 1999 on condition that it adopts:

a. the Olympic Charter
b. the court of arbitration
c. the anti doping regulations
All of the above have been incorporated into the WBF Constitution and By-laws
2. It is the absolute belief of the WBF that the anti doping regulations are:

a. to protect the players’ health
b. to ensure the integrity of the competition
and would have been enforced anyway even in the absence of IOC recognition.
3. It is recognised that some substances can enhance concentration and stamina at bridge, as well as be also injurious to the person or persons using them
4. The regulations as they are published in the 2002 General Rules of Contest are mandatory for everybody and that the refusal to take a drug test is consequently subject to penalties.

So the WBF has been hoist on its own petard. The WBF can hardly say now that the anti-doping program was to suck up to the IOC and it was going to drop it. Instead this magnificent insistence that it is being done for our own good. Disqualifying a player in Montreal was for her health and for the integrity of the competition. We can’t have players willy-nilly taking non-performance enhancing drugs. It’ll give us a bad name.
To repeat the crux of this statement:
5. It is the absolute belief of the WBF that the anti doping regulations are:

a. to protect the players’ health
b. to ensure the integrity of the competition
and would have been enforced anyway even in the absence of IOC recognition.

Do they really expect us to believe that? And if we believe it, do they really think we’ll accept it? A bit of an invasion of privacy, wouldn’t you say, the WBF deciding what’s good for us.

WBF:
‘It is recognised that some substances can enhance concentration and stamina at bridge, as well as be also injurious to the person or persons using them’

Now guess what substance that would be – try nicotine. There are only three substances I’ve been able to discover that arguably might enhance the playing of bridge. They are glucose, caffeine and nicotine. Of these I’m guessing nicotine is by far and away the most likely to aid performance. And if the smoking of cigarettes were banned within the bridge world, not only would a potentially performance-enhancing drug be eliminated but, shucks, a whole bunch of us would feel better too.

So, why was the smoking of cigarettes not banned at Montreal? Because the WBF has no intention of enforcing their own avowed aims. Attempting to ban the notionally performance-enhancing-bad-for-our-health cigarette would have led to riot and boycott. (end of article)

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I can’t imagine that FIDE and WBF are ever going to conduct actual tests to see what is actually performance enhancing in chess and bridge. Anybody who’s ever smoked a cigarette will know that nicotine is performance enhancing. There is much anecdotal evidence. After the above article first appeared I received an email from somebody who worked designing vessels for the US Navy. He recalled at some point a discussion of whether ashtrays should be provided on the watch. The answer was ‘yes’ not so much because smokers who are allowed to smoke perform better than smokers who aren’t allowed to smoke, but because smokers perform better than non-smokers. By preference the US Navy wanted smokers on their watch.

More recently, and less anecdotally, a test case has been written up here:
Psychoactive Drugs and Pilot Performance: A Comparison of Nicotine, Donepezil, and Alcohol Effects again demonstrating the performance enhancing aspect of nicotine.

Since I wrote that article various things have changed in the WADA list of performance enhancing substances. Even though clearly caffeine is performance enhancing it has been taken off the lists. I wonder if that is the power of lobbyists for the companies who advertise through sport? Selling caffeine based drugs as a socially acceptable performance enhancer has become big business. Cannabis has been banned altogether, even though one assumes it is not performance enhancing for anything unless there is some sort of couch potato endurance test in the Olympics. Nicotine is not even mentioned on the list which can be seen here.

I gather that chess is still using the lot with, according to Ian Rogers, ‘the single exception of the drug I should have been taking 6 years ago but was not allowed to. (The exception was created by Jana Bellin because of me but the damage had already been done and I had to stop playing entirely.)’ How sad is that.

FIDE and WBF: you should hang your heads in shame.