Is chess a game of chance?

 

The Sicilian Defense: A Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand Masterclass | DRS with Ash

 

Thinking in Bets – Making smarter decisions when you don’t have all the facts – by Annie Duke

Some Excerpts


CHESS V POKER

- Chess, for all its strategic complexity, isn’t a great model for decision making in life, where most of our decisions involve hidden information and a much greater influence of luck.



- Poker, in contrast, is a game of incomplete information. It is a game of decision making under conditions of uncertainty over time. Valuable information remains hidden. There is always an element of luck in any outcome. You could make the best possible decision at every point and still lose the hand; because you don’t know what new cards will be dealt and revealed. Once the game is finished and you try to learn from the results, separating the quality of your decisions from the influence of luck is difficult.



- Incomplete information poses a challenge not just for split second decision making, but also for learning from past decisions. Imagine my difficulty in trying to figure out if I played my hand correctly when my opponents cards were never revealed for e.g. if the hand concluded after I made a bet and my opponents folded. All I know is that I won the chips. Did I play poorly and get lucky? Or did I play well?



- Life resembles poker, where all the uncertainty gives us the room to deceive ourselves and misinterpret the data.

- Poker gives us the leeway to make mistakes that we never spot because we win the hand anyway and so don’t go looking for them or

- The leeway to do everything right, still lose and treat the losing result as proof that we made a mistake. 

REDEFINING Wrong

- When we think in advance about the chances of alternative outcomes and make a decision based on those chances, it doesn’t automatically make us wrong when things don’t work out. It just means that one event in a set of possible futures occurred.



BACKCASTING AND PRE MORTEM



- Backcasting means working backwards from a positive future.

- When it comes to thinking about the future – stand at the end (the outcome) and look backwards. This is more effective than looking forwards from the beginning.

- i.e. by working backwards from the goal, we plan our decision tree in more depth.

- We imagine we’ve already achieved a positive outcome, holding up a newspaper headline “We’ve Achieved our Goal” Then we think about how we got there.

- Identify the reasons they got there, what events occurred, what decisions were made, what went their way to get to the goal.

- It makes it possible to identify low probability events that must occur to reach the goal You then develop strategies to increase the chances of such events occurring or recognizing the goal is too ambitious.

- You can also develop responses to developments that interfere with reaching the goal and identify inflection points for re-evaluating the plan as the future unfolds.



- Pre mortem means working backwards from a negative future.



- Pre mortem is an investigation into something awful but before it happens.



- Imagine a headline “We failed to reach our Goals” challenges us to think about ways in which things could go wrong.



- People who imagine obstacles in the way of reaching their goals are more likely to achieve success (Research p223)



- A pre mortem helps us to anticipate potential obstacles.



- Come up with ways things can go wrong so that you can plan for them



- The exercise forces everyone to identify potential points of failure without fear of being viewed as a naysayer.





- Imagining both positive and negative futures helps us to build a realistic plan to achieve our goals.

Ye khel kya hai…. by Javed Akhtar

Mere mukhaalif ne chaal chal di hai
Aur ab
Meri chaal ke intezaar mein hai
Magar main kab se
Safed khaanon
Siyaah khaanon mein rakkhe
Kaale safed mohron ko dekhta hoon
Main sochta hoon
Ye mohre kya hain

Agar main samjhoon
Ki ye jo mohre hain
Sirf lakdi ke hain khilone
To jeetna kya hai haarna kya
Na ye zaroori
Na vo aham hai
Agar khushi hai na jeetne ki
Na haarne ka bhi koi gham hai
To khel kya hai
Main sochta hoon
Jo khelna hai
To apne dil mein yaqeen kar lon
Ye mohre sach-much ke baadshah-o-vazeer
Sach-much ke hain piyaade
Aur in kea age hai
Dushmanon ki vo fauj
Rakhti hai jo mujh ko tabaah karne ke
Saare mansoobe
Sab iraade
Magar main aisa jo maan bhi loon
To sochta hoon
Yeh khel kab hai
Ye jang hai jis ko jeetna hai
Ye jang hai jis mein sab hai jaayaz
Koi ye kehta hai jaise mujh se
Ye jang bhi hai
Ye khel bhi hai
Ye jang hai par khiladiyon ki
Ye khel hai jang ki tarah ka
Main sochta hoon
Jo khel hai
Is mein ir tarah ka usool kyon hai
Ki koi mohra rah eke jaaye
Magar jo hai baadshah
Us par kabhi koi aanch bhi na aaye
Vazeer hi ko hai bas ijaazat
Ke jis taraf bhi vo chaahe jaaye

Main sochta hoon
Jo khel hai
Is mein is tarah ka usool kyon hai
Piyaada jab apne ghar se nikle
Palat ke vaapas na aane paaye
Main sochta hoon
Agar yahoo hai usool
To phir usool kya hai
Agar yahi hai ye khel
To phir ye khel kya hai
Main in savaalon se aane kab se ulajh raha hoon
Mere mukhalif ne chaal chal di hai
Aur ab meri chaal ke intezaar mein hai

The English translation is below:
What Game is It?

My opponent has made a move
And now
Awaits mine.
But for ages
I stare at the black and white pieces
That lie on white and black squares
And I think
What are these pieces?

Were I to assume
That these pieces
Are no more than wooden toys
Then what is a victory or a loss?
If in winnings there are no joys
Nor sorrows in losing
What is the game?
I think
If I must play
Then I must believe
That these pieces are indeed king and minister
Indeed these are foot soldiers
And arrayed before them
Is that enemy army
Which harbours all plans evil
All schemes sinister
To destroy me
But were I to believe this
Then is this a game any longer?
This is a war that must be won
A war in which all is fair
It is as if somebody explains:
This is a war
And a game as well
It is a war, but between players
A game between warriors
I think
If it is a game
Then why does it have a rule
That whether a foot solder stays or goes
The one who is king
Must always be protected?
That only the minster has the freedom
To move any which way?

I think
Why does this game
Have a rule
That once a foot solder leaves home
He can never return?
I think
If this is the rule
Then what is a rule?
If this is the game
Then what is the name of the game?
I have been wrestling for ages with these questions
But my opponent has made a move
And awaits mine.

Cricket and Data: Is T20 becoming a game of speed chess?

Jarrod Kimber in Cricinfo


MS Dhoni is facing Karn Sharma in the playoff, not Harbhajan Singh, despite Harbhajan's economy rate of 6.48 in this IPL. Harbhajan has been dropped partly because Rising Pune Supergiant are playing only one left-hander. Dhoni's figures this season are poorer against spin than pace, and when the quicks come on, he gets short balls and full, wide balls, because he doesn't score quickly from those. He then faces Mitchell McClenaghan, not Lasith Malinga, because Dhoni has a better record against Malinga, and because McClenaghan has overs left since he doesn't get used in the middle overs (where he gets smashed for more than 13 an over). Dhoni ends with 40 off 26, because he scores quickly at the death, where his strike rate this season has been 188.

This is what T20 cricket is becoming: a game of speed chess. Think of how far T20 has already come from the first T20 international, a game where players wore comedy wigs and retro kit. Now teams have general managers with business backgrounds and bat-swing gurus are looking for hitting power, teams are flirting with virtual reality, and league cricket - not international - is a driving force for change. And for all the changes and innovations we have already seen, so many more may yet come.

The closer you look at T20, the more problems, inefficiencies and potential innovations you see, and it is what I've been obsessing about at 2am, which has led me to this piece, which is part prediction, part gripe and part prescription for the near future of T20 cricket.


Do risky second runs make sense?

Running between the wickets is such an integral part of the game that it's incredible how little it is analysed. On his blog , Michael Wagener categorises the different kinds of batsmen in Tests not by where they bat in the order but how they go about their innings. His four categories are: defensive, pushers, block-bash and aggressive. Defensive doesn't exist in T20. Pushers do but are often the improvisers and smartest batsmen. Aggressives and block-bashers are the format mainstays.

Wagener uses David Warner as the stereotypical aggressive player. Warner has always been known as a big-hitter, but his running between wickets is just as bullish. He likes to score off every ball; he steals singles, pushes hard to turn ones into twos, and he takes as many chances with his running as he does with his strokeplay.

The stereotypical block-basher is Chris Gayle. There are few players more content with blocking or leaving the ball than Gayle. And while his slow starts sometimes cost his team, when he does stay in for more than 30 balls, he usually more than makes up. But Gayle has been running singles like his hamstring is gone for almost ten years; he doesn't push hard.

Gayle's method makes sense even if he isn't trying to score from every ball like Warner is. In the IPL, 10% of all dismissals are run-outs (just over 7% for openers). Warner is at 6% in his career. Gayle is at 1%; he's had one run-out in 86 IPL innings, meaning he is effectively cancelling out one mode of dismissal. Gayle gives up risky singles for more boundary attempts, which, for him, carry less risk. It is similar to the trend in basketball to move away from the mid-range two-pointers and replace them with three-pointers, because while you might hit them less often, they're worth more.

In the 2016 World T20, most of Gayle's team-mates played that way. West Indies had seven players in the top 25 of batsmen who scored the highest percentage of their runs in boundaries (minimum 50 runs); Gayle and Carlos Brathwaite were ranked two and three. And it raised the question of what batsmen should be expending their energy on: risky second runs, or risky boundary attempts? And instead of turning the strike over to put pressure on the bowler, perhaps big-hitting batsmen should face multiple balls in a row, allowing them to find rhythm and size the bowler up better.



Gayle scampers a quick single. Would the data advocate otherwise? © ICC/Getty



Or: Glenn Maxwell has a strike rate of 264 between overs 13 and 16, higher than any other player in any other period in this year's IPL. If he is facing in the 14th, do you want him taking a risky single and getting a slower batsman on strike, or do you want to bowl a dot and have him face the next ball?

How do fast batsmen run? How productive are coaching methods for running between wickets? Currently coaches are trying to train intent into batsmen, but outside of full match simulations, there seems to be no clear method to turn an average runner into a good one.

How about facing tempo? Some players are happy to stand at the non-striker's end for a long time, while others get frustrated, which often leads to their wickets. More data is needed for this, as wickets are probably falling because a batsman is not letting his partner strike the ball enough, or vice versa. As teams look for one-percenters, running could be one place they find some.

A more context-driven measure for a player's effectiveness

We know how many runs every over is worth on average in T20 and yet we still talk about players' overall strike rates. There are four periods in T20 for which you look at numbers: the Powerplay, the lull from overs 7 to 12, the ramping up between overs 13-16, and the death from 17-20. For most players, their career strike rate or economy rate is defined by what period they appear in the most.

A bowler (many wristspinners, for example) who starts in the seventh over and bowls the majority of his overs during the lull will have a better economy than someone who bowls more in the Powerplay and death. These splits tell us who the best players are, and where players can improve.

For batsmen the most obvious place for improvement is in the lull, where the game drifts. This IPL season Rohit Sharma, Shreyas Iyer and Shikhar Dhawan scored at a run a ball in this period, while Robin Uthappa (207 runs) and Aaron Finch (202) scored at more than two runs a ball.

Almost all batsmen can smash the ball at the death, but the real key is if you can score above the going rate for any specific period consistently. A strike rate of 150 sounds great at the death, but it's lower than the average rate for that period. You only have to check the lull overs to see a bunch of batsmen are going far too slow, ending up with good averages but not adding a lot of extra value.

With something as simple as a plus or minus on your strike rate or economy rate, you could instantly tell which players were playing above or below the average. So instead of a pure strike rate, a figure would be adjusted to each ball of the innings they played (we know how many runs each ball in T20 goes for). On a game-by-game basis it isn't as important, but over a season, or career, you can work out if a player added value or lost it based on their true strike rate or economy rate.


Spotting bowling patterns (or not)

Batsmen have only recently embraced video analysis to determine the patterns of bowlers. Before, they would base it on their experiences, not insights from data. One analyst told me a story of batsmen noticing that Jade Dernbach would almost always follow up being hit for a boundary with a back-of-the-hand slower ball. The analyst thought they figured it out through natural batting intuitions, not through analysis.



Rohit Sharma is one of several batsmen who are too sluggish during the middle overs © BCCI


Bowlers can change, and while it is not definitive, Dernbach's death-bowling economy rate over the last two county seasons is 7.8, which is brilliant, and suggests that it is possible he doesn't follow his old patterns anymore (or he is just prospering among the lower level of players in English domestic cricket).

Something like this was probably on R Ashwin's mind when he said: "six well-constructed bad balls could be the way to go forward in T20 cricket". Ashwin knows that on most occasions bowling six well-grouped offspinners together will allow batsmen to know what he bowls, and he'll go the distance. So what we normally of think of as a good ball is not a good ball in T20, and instead Ashwin might have to "construct" a random pattern of what look like bad balls in order to stay one step ahead of the batsman.
Jasprit Bumrah bowled the penultimate over of the IPL this year and the commentators talked about its quality. When he was hit for six off a half-volley, they mentioned how rarely he misses the yorker. But he also bowled two knee-high full tosses and, as neither went for boundaries, nobody focused on them as mistakes. So Dernbach's best ball is smashed, Bumrah's worst is mishit, and Professor Ashwin's theory might be slightly flawed, but you can see why not letting the batsman know what is coming next is the best option.


Will we see batting cages near the dugout?

The idea that you just go out there and smash your first ball for six isn't quite how T20 is played. Even the most aggressive players generally have a strike rate of less than a run a ball over their first five balls. You have to get your eye in, cricketers are taught; and T20 is still a new invention, so teams and players are working it out. But it still hasn't been drilled into players that every single ball is 0.83% of the innings, and one over to settle in is 5% of your team's quota.

The first team to strike well from ball one will have a huge advantage. Perhaps the best way to try to achieve this is through batting cages, or a fully enclosed batting net on the boundary edge. That way the next batsman in is playing himself in right up to the point he gets to the middle.

It may not be exactly the same as being out in the middle, but it's as close to it as we can currently get. Every analyst, general manager or coach I've talked to is frustrated batsmen don't start quicker, and yet teams still aren't trying to ensure that batsmen feel like they are already in before they walk in.

Balls are also wasted in T20 when batsmen approach milestones. Milestones in cricket have long been millstones around batsmen's necks. Cricket is a weird hybrid of individual skills and battles within a team sport. We see it all the time; the player is smashing the ball and suddenly gets near his milestone and starts chipping it around. Australian players have been encouraged to try and forget about this, but in franchise cricket, where so much of your worth comes down to people remembering how well you did, it's hard for players not to waste a few extra balls when you're in the forties or nineties.


Bat lean, bat efficient

Imran Khan, an analyst for CricViz, looked at the boundary attempts made by batsmen in this IPL. Finch tries to hit a boundary every 1.81 balls and succeeds 45% of the time. Manan Vohra attempts a boundary every 3.44 balls and has a 69% success rate. They are two of the leaders on the metrics of balls per boundary attempt and the success rate of their attempts. But the real eye-catcher is Sunil Narine, second on the list with a 68% success rate from his attempts, and one attempt every 2.16 balls (fifth). There are all sorts of other interesting finds, like the fact that the slog sweep is the shot most likely to produce a boundary, and even that only works 40% of the time.



"Here comes another fiendishly clever bad ball" © BCCI


This is just the beginning for cricket when it comes to measuring the efficiency of batting. At ESPNcricinfo we've been using a batting metric called control stats, to judge whether a batsman was in control of the shot he played (an edge, for example, is not in control). Like CricViz's boundaries attempted, it is recorded by an analyst, and so is subjective.

Other sports use algorithms and technology for this analysis. Basketball has SportsVu cameras above the court and spatiotemporal pattern recognition - a science that provides insights into human movements - to decide the success probability of each shot. The software has essentially worked out all the different kinds of shots and plays in basketball, through algorithms and the footage.

The same could eventually be done for cricket. A slog over midwicket off a tall bowler on a pitch with above-average bounce is probably going to be successful fewer times compared to a straight drive off a half-volley from a shorter, skiddier bowler with mid-on and mid-off up. Spatiotemporal pattern recognition could completely change the way the game is played. We'd get real, objective information on the worth of fielders, wicketkeepers, running between wickets, bowling and batting; information that could provide a huge leap forward for the way T20, and eventually all cricket, is played.


Fielding metrics are going to be important

There is a plan for every ball of a T20 match, yet the game still doesn't really map where fielders stand for each ball. The best way to do it would be an overhead camera that catches all data from the game. Devices such as the Australian-invented Catapult, which players wear between their shoulder blades, give interesting data of player movement and fitness levels, but not fielding maps.

There is no reason that fielding maps can't be more widely used by analysts at the ground, or even if TV companies wake up and start showing live fielding changes in a small box on the screen. Cricket's first data-led analyst, Krishna Tunga (the Bill James to John Buchanan's Billy Beane), has done some work with fielding data But in reality there is very little written or thought about fielding, unless a captain has what we believe to be a shocker. But fields change almost every ball in T20; it is a massive part of the game, and yet how often are fielding strategies part of the reasons teams lose according to experts? A big part of that is the lack of stats and data.

Even in a Test we have no idea if a bowler performs better with three slips and a third man, or two slips and a ring field. Maybe the bowler feels one suits him more, and the captain another. But the best option might never be chosen simply because they don't have actual data to back up their feeling. In T20, we still don't have stats for how a batsman scores against individual fields.

Baseball took years to work out that shifting the field for specific batters was important. Cricket has been doing it since the start, but it's just not noted - there are wagon wheels of innings from the 1800s. If you allied modern technology - a real-time video fielding map, for example - to the ancient wagon wheel, you could actually see where a batsman scored his runs, and whether or not he was exploiting the fields that were set.


The slow ball is important, but how well do we know it?

At the exact time that spinners seem to be getting quicker, fast bowlers are spinning the ball more than ever. Whether it is the standard slower balls that Dwayne Bravo or Thisara Perera bowl, or the fast spinners Mustafizur Rahman does, seam bowling in T20 cricket is more about rotating the seam than keeping it straight.



Statistically, the slog sweep is the shot most likely to produce a boundary © Cricket Australia


And yet for all the slower balls delivered, we still don't have much information on how often they are bowled, or how successful they are. CricViz occasionally tweets about bowlers' records with slower balls. From ball-tracking data they can tell you the percentage of slower balls (classifying everything under 77mph as slow): Bumrah (25%), Lasith Malinga (17%), Mitchell McClenaghan (16%), and Albie Morkel (16%). Because they don't always have access to ball-tracking, and some bowlers who bowl slower balls don't have a top speed much above 77mph, they also use analysts to manually log slower balls. Using that data, we know that Bravo bowls slower balls 34% of the time, and that Malinga's bowling average for slower balls is 8.15 and Kevon Cooper's is 9.76.

Numbers like this will help fans understand the true worth of bowlers like Rajat Bhatia. But at this point we don't even know which batsmen play slower balls well, though it is something we could figure out just by looking at a batsman's strike rate and average against slower balls (which will in future probably be further split between back-of-the-hand, knuckleballs and offcutter slow balls).


Making sense of the data

Match-ups - like pitting a left-arm spinner against a player who struggles against them - are already happening. Some teams go further into individual contests, of players against other players. The problem right now is that the sample sizes are very small. The bowler who delivered the most balls to any one batsman in this year's IPL was Kuldeep Yadav to Warner: just 25 balls.

T20 has many different competitions, all played in completely different conditions, with different players. Baseball match-ups produce bigger samples, but in the IPL there is only one contest that has over 100 balls: Suresh Raina v Harbhajan (which Harbhajan is winning, with an average of 26 and economy of 6.6). So while it is interesting that Ashwin has never taken Virat Kohli's wicket in 97 balls, and that Rohit Sharma has a strike rate of 84 against Ashwin, in the history of the IPL there are only 132 match-ups of more than 50 balls.

The top four bowling strike rates between overs seven and 12 in T20 (minimum 36 balls) over the last couple of years belong to David Willey (208), Sharjeel Khan (190), Gayle (179), and Patrick Kruger (177). One plays the T20 Blast, Big Bash and T20 internationals, another plays the PSL and internationals, the third plays everydamnwhere, and the fourth is a 22-year-old who plays for Knights and Griqualand West in South Africa. This is not like for like.

That doesn't mean there aren't certain trends that are pretty clear across all leagues, but there are league-specific trends. In South Africa, 8% of all Powerplay overs are bowled by spinners. That is less than in England (12%), nowhere near Australia (23%), and not even in the same ballpark, so to speak, as in the Caribbean (35%). So someone picking a South African opening batsman with little experience outside South Africa for the CPL constitutes a huge risk. And even in a league like the BBL, where you are facing more spin at the top of the innings, it is a completely different kind of spinner, on a completely different kind of wicket.

But data is certainly a very good tool, not just in selection, or coaching, but in game situations. A player recently asked me to look into his career stats and see if there were any areas he could work on as he freelances his way around the world. I found that he has an incredible record when he comes in further down the order, and that when he comes in higher, he's not as effective. He turned from a late-order champion to an average middle-overs player. He said that he had been batting higher because he and his most recent coach were worried he was coming in too late. When I looked into the details, there hadn't really been a game where he came in too late; it was just the perception, perhaps, of a player who was watching balls he assumed he could hit for six, and maybe a coach who felt the same.



The game's next big innovations might well emerge from data sets © Getty Images


While most of the pioneering will happen in T20 leagues, international cricket will catch up. Cricket has never been changing faster than it is now. T20 is finding trends and abandoning them quicker than you can say "Sunil Narine, opening batsman".
As the technology, methods and people from T20 end up in international cricket, we will see changes there as well. By recruiting people like Pat Howard (rugby) and Kim Littlejohn (lawn bowls) international cricket has already shown it is open to outside ideas and perspectives. The next big move will be when people from the finance and corporate world, who are starting to take over as decision-makers in franchise cricket, move to international cricket.

We are probably only a few years away from international cricket's first GM who isn't a former player, has come from a non-sporting background, and is calling the shots on how international squads are put together.

The battle to make every last run is no longer just on the field, it's in algorithms and data sets, and cricket's next big change is as likely to come from a laptop as it is a bat.

Cricket: complex, unknowable cricket

 Jon Hotten in Cricinfo

Old Trafford 2005: one in a scarcely imaginable run of four matches carved from gold © Getty Images

Enlarge

This is Martin Amis, writing about chess: "Nowhere in sport, perhaps nowhere in human activity, is the gap between the trier and the expert so astronomical."

Is he right? In the field of human activity, at least, I can think of another arena in which the knowledge gap between amateur and pro is vast - that of theoretical physics. The latest man to try and bridge it is the particle physicist and former keyboard player with D:Ream (best-known hit - "Things Can Only Get Better"), Dr Brian Cox. 

He has a new TV series called The Human Universe, and he kicked it off with an interesting analogy for beginning to understand exactly what theoretical physicists are on about.

"Cricket" he began, is "unfathomable" to those who don't understand it, yet "bewitching" to those that do. "And all of [cricket's] complexity emerged from a fixed set of rules."

He held up the single page of a scorebook on which he'd written down the formula for the Standard Model of Particle Physics and the Theory of Relativity, and then flicked through a copy of the Laws of Cricket. "By this notation at least," he said, "cricket is more complex than the universe."

Maybe that's because Einstein never bothered with an equation to sum the Laws up, yet it's a clever way of illustrating that an understanding of the rules of anything doesn't necessarily lead to an understanding of the subject that those rules govern. To return to chess and Martin Amis, here he is on a match between Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short: "They are trying to hold on to, to brighten and to bring to blossom, a coherent vision which the arrangement of the pieces may or may not contain."

Cricket and chess are superficially simple. Sit someone in front of a chess board and you can explain the basics of the pieces and the moves in a few minutes. Show them a cricket bat and ball and a set of stumps and the idea and aims of the game become apparent. Where the genius lies - and where Cox's analogy holds quite nicely - is in the infinite small variations that these simple structures contain. The complexities mount when the knowledge and ability of the players grows: as Amis said, they are trying to bring about a vision from within the rules that isn't actually there until it happens.

This is obvious in cricket, where the game is built around endless repetitions of the same actions - the ball is bowled, the ball is hit (or not) - which, under different conditions and with various personnel, become increasingly complex as they happen again and again until stories emerge from within them.

The other day I watched a rerun of the 2005 Ashes. Once again, it gripped. Of the 1778 Test marches played before the ones in those series, along came, at random, four in a row that finished in teeth-grinding tension. Taking a wider view, they were barely different from all of the other games of cricket in history: it was simply the appearance of these very tiny complexities, one after the other, that made them what they were.

Sometimes we can feel these patterns emerging, at others we're simply too close to make them out. The brilliance of the design of the game provides a framework that stretches off into the future. We, as players and spectators, are finite, but cricket itself is universal.

Martin Amis was fascinated by chess because he felt it was "unmasterable", and it was, by any individual. "It is a game that's beyond the scope of the human mind," he wrote. And yet the human mind has devised computer programs that are able to analyse any game and beat any player. Theoretically at least, machines have reached "the end" of chess.

Despite the obsession with stats, that fate can't really await cricket. It may not be quite as complex and unknowable as deep space, but it needs a bigger book of Laws. What an invention it is.

------Further Thought by Samir Chopra in Cricinfo

The renewability of cricket

 

The 45-year-old professor, the older version of the once-15-year-old schoolboy, sees a very different game of cricket from his younger counterpart  © Getty Images

Enlarge

My Cordon colleague Jon Hotten writes, in his recent post, "Cricket: complex, unknowable cricket": 

The brilliance of the design of the game provides a framework that stretches off into the future. We, as players and spectators, are finite, but cricket itself is universal.

I think Jon must have meant something other than "universal", because otherwise the contrast made here doesn't work. I suspect he wanted to say something like "cricket is infinitely extensible" or "renewable".

Be that as it may, I want to suggest here that "we, as players and spectators" have a great deal to do with the perceived complexity of cricket. Quite simply, this is because we change over time; we do not bring, to our encounters with the game in the middle, a stable, enduring entity, but one subject constantly to a variety of physical, emotional, psychological, and of course, political variations. This perennially in flux object brings to its viewings of cricket a variety of lenses; and we do not merely perceive, we interpret and contextualise, we filter and sift. (As John Dewey, the great American pragmatist philosopher noted, "Thought is intrinsic to experience.") These interpretations and contextualisations change over time.

The 45-year-old man, the professor, the older version of the once-15-year-old schoolboy, sees a very different game of cricket from his younger counterpart. And as he continues to "grow" and change, he will continue to "see" a different game played out in front of him. He will renew cricket, make it extensible and renewable. The seemingly infinite variations possible in a 30-hour, 450-over encounter between 22 other humans, each playing cricket ever so differently from those that have preceded him, will provide ample fodder for this extensibility and renewability.

A game of cricket exists within a larger symbolic order of meaning. When a young spectator sees men in white pick up bat and ball, he understands their activities within a perceptual framework in which active fantasy and wishful longing play an active part. As he grows, matures, acquires a political and aesthetic sense, and hopefully expands his intellectual, emotional and romantic horizons he will revise this, and come to understand the game differently. He may go on to watch umpteen variations on the fourth-innings chase theme, and each one will be uniquely located within this under-construction framework.

Anna Karenina is a classic precisely because in the face of changing readings it continues to speak to us, across time and space and idiosyncratic translations

Consider, by way of analogy, the reading of the classics, great works of literature, which continue to be read for years and years after their writing. Read Anna Karenina as a youngster, perhaps for a high-school class in literature, well before you have ever dated, or been in a serious romantic relationship; you will experience the heartbreak - and tragedy - of the adults at the centre of its story very differently when, 15 years later, you have acquired a few scars (and perhaps a child) of your own. Of course, Tolstoy's masterwork is a classic precisely because in the face of such changing readings it continues to speak to us, across time and space and idiosyncratic translations. This is why Susan Sontag - like others before her - suggested the classics were worth reading several times over; each reading was likely to be a new one, a co-operative, joint construction of meaning by the reader and the writer.

Cricket's games do not exist in isolation. They are played within larger political and economic realities, ones that affect its spectators and its players; these too change our understanding of the game. The benefactions of empire in the past are now the property of its subjects; witness the turmoil this has caused in our recent relationship to the game. The conflict in the middle can come to be understood very differently in these circumstances. Where the youngster might have seen heroes in the past, he now may see villains.

These remarks above suggest another way in which cricket could continue to renew itself over time: it could be embedded within more cultures and societies; it could be written about, and understood by, a broader cross section of humanity than it has been thus far; the language of description for it could expand beyond its current repertoire. (I have been fortunate enough to talk about cricket in English, Hindi/Urdu, and Punjabi; trust me, the game is viewed very differently through these alternative linguistic lenses.) We might find, too, that the conversations that surround it in new climes and locales enrich our previous understandings of cricket.

Imagine a rich cricket literature in not just English but in other languages too. Who knows what new classics, new understandings of cricket, we might find there?

Why chess is really an extreme sport

The deaths of two players at the Chess Olympiad in Norway shows that it’s time tournaments came with a health warning

• 
• • Stephen Moss
  • theguardian.com, Saturday 16 August 2014 09.00 BST

Chess. 'One false step and you will have lost. This imposes enormous pressure on players.' Photograph: 18percentgrey/Alamy

It seemed to me one of the strangest coincidences of all time: two chess players dying on the same day at the end of the biennial Chess Olympiad in Norway. But when I spoke to a chess-playing friend of mine, he said “Is it really so odd?” There were almost 2,000 players taking part in the event, quite a few of them – especially the men – getting on in years, unfit, sedentary. Healthwise, they were high risk. Are two deaths really so surprising?

My friend is right and wrong at the same time. It is a bizarre coincidence that two players – one from the Seychelles, one from Uzbekistan, the former at the board, the latter in his hotel room after the tournament had ended – should die within hours of each other. That’s why there has been news interest in the case, and why he is wrong in this respect. But he is spot on about the susceptibility of chess players to stress-related conditions. Chess, though the non-player might not believe this, is in many ways an extreme sport.

At the Olympiad, participants were playing a game a day over a fortnight – 11 rounds with just a couple of rest days on which to recuperate. For up to seven hours a day, they would be sitting at the board trying to kill – metaphorically speaking – their opponent, because this is the ultimate game of kill or be killed. In some positions, you can reach a point where both sides are simultaneously within a single move of checkmating the other. One false step and you will have lost. This imposes enormous pressure on players.

These days, some top players use psychologists to help them deal with this stress. They are also paying increasing attention to diet and fitness. I was staying in the same hotel as many of the world’s top players during the great annual tournament at Wijk aan Zee on the Dutch coast in January, and was struck by the regime adopted by Levon Aronian, the Armenian-born world number two, who started each day with a run followed by a healthy breakfast.

These elite players, however, are the exception within the chess world: they have the money and the specialist entourage that allows them to put a high priority on fitness and well-being. They realise that to play top-level chess, you have to be extremely fit and mentally settled. Any physical ailment or mental distraction is likely to stop you playing well. You need to be at the top of your game to perform. In that sense, it is as much a sport as football or rugby; indeed, it has been suggested that in the course of a long chess game a player will lose as much weight as he does during a football match.

Outside the elite – among professional players who are struggling to make a living, or among the hordes of us middle-aged blokes trying to get to grips with this stressful, frustrating, exhausting game – there is far less attention paid to health. Chess clubs often meet in pubs and many players like a pint; the number of huge stomachs on show at any chess tournament is staggering. The game – and I realise this is a wild generalisation, but one based on more than a grain of truth – tends to attract dysfunctional men with peculiar home lives. You can bet their diet will not be balanced; many will be living on bacon and eggs and beer. This is not a recipe for a long, healthy life.

The great Soviet players of the postwar period had the most ridiculous lifestyle: they more or less lived on vodka, cigarettes and chess, and many of them died young. Take Leonid Stein as an example. A three-times champion of the USSR in the 1960s, he dropped dead of a heart attack in 1973 at the age of just 38. Mikhail Tal, world champion in the early 1960s, was dogged by ill health during his career, and died at the age of 55 – a desperate loss to the sport. Vladimir Bagirov, who was world senior champion in 1998, was 63 when he dropped dead at the board while playing in Finland in 2000.

The current crop of top players have learned from the mistakes of their Soviet predecessors, but those outside the world elite haven’t. Too many are overweight, keen to have a drink, too sedentary – and then they try to play this game which makes huge demands on mind and body. I know, because I do it too. I spend a day at work, rush home, bolt down a meal, then go to my chess club and play a three-hour game which often makes me feel ill, especially if I lose. After that, usually around 10.30pm, I go home, go to bed, and frequently fail to sleep as my moves and mistakes revolve around my head.

So next time someone suggests a nice, quiet game of chess, or paints it as an intellectual pursuit played by wimps, tell them they’ve got it all wrong: this is a fight to the finish played in the tensest of circumstances by two players who are physically and mentally living on the edge. We all need to get fitter to play this demanding game, and society should recognise it for what it is – a sport as challenging, dramatic and exciting as any other. Such recognition would be a tribute of sorts to the two players who sadly played their final games in Tromso.

Life in 64 squares - Chess playing village near Thrissur

MINI MURINGATHERI

SHARE  ·   PRINT   ·   T+  

at war:People playing chess at a shed outside Unnikrishnan’s house at Marottichal, near Thrissur. —K.C. Sowmish

Here it is war all day. Kings, queens, knights and soldiers jump and joust to cries of checkmate.

The people of Marottichal, a sleepy village near here, eat, breathe and live chess. When they are not playing, they animatedly discuss their last game threadbare.

The story of these chess-crazy people is soon becoming a movie. August Club , directed by K.B. Venu, is inspired by the village and its chess players. Ananthapadmanabhan, son of the legendary film-maker Padmarajan, has written the script for the movie.

Thilakan, Rima Kallingal, Murali Gopi, Mala Aravindan, KPAC Lalitha and Sukumari act in it, along with the chess-crazy villagers.

It all began when one man named C. Unnikrishnan decided to teach almost everybody in his village how to play the game.

He was inspired by a report he read in a newspaper about the American legend Bobby Fischer, who became the youngest Grandmaster when he was just short of 16.

Soon, Mr. Unnikrishnan, then a 10th standard student, started attending chess coaching classes by “Narayanan Master” at Thalore, his neighbouring village. Equipped with expertise, he went on a mission to popularise the game in his village.

“I started giving free coaching classes in my house. I wanted everybody in my village to learn the game. I have been training young and old chess aspirants for the past 40 years,” he says.

Mr. Unnikrishnan was so good a teacher that it did not take long for the village to not just grasp the nuances but also develop an obsession for the game.

“Chess is my passion. Once I start playing, I forget everything. It’s kind of an addiction,” he says.

Mr. Unnikrishnan runs a restaurant and the people are free to gather there anytime and play chess. Also, in a makeshift shed built outside his house, participants ranging from eight-year-old Aljo to 75-year-old “Dasettan” are seen bent over the chessboard furiously making their moves.

“The players who trained here have won many tournaments. I have trained more than 600 people,” Mr. Unnikrishnan says.

Every waking hour at Marottichal sees scores of people playing chess with passion.

Viswanathan Anand shows the heart of a champion in winning Fifth World Title

They trash-talked him, ridiculed him, and wrote him off. They said he had slowed down, lost his flair and chutzpah, and become conformist and traditional in his play. But Viswanathan Anand took on everything the Russian-Israeli chess mafia and his growing band of critics threw at him and emerged on top yet again on Wednesday, winning the world chess title for the fifth time, and shutting up detractors for now.

For sure, they will carp and crib at Anand's struggle to retain the title, the same way critics put down Sachin Tendulkar when he's going through a lean patch, or plays conservatively. But these two heroes of India have set such stratospheric standards for themselves that any hint of a slowdown or downturn in form is enough for detractors to write finis to their careers.

However, 42 is not 24; even the greatest don't have the same reflexes and mindset they when they push 40 -- much less in the twilight of a career -- that they had in their teens and twenties. But when it comes to the crunch, great champions find a way of winning. The flesh and bones might have sagged a little, but a lifetime of experience and a capacious heart comes into play. That is pretty much what Vishy Anand summoned on Wednesday to win the world title in a tie-breaker after Boris Gelfand, an Israeli challenger from the Russian stable of chess greats, held him to a 6-6 tie in regulation play.

The stakes were enormous. Anand has not been in top form for several months now; he's given up several titles he routinely won on the chess circuit. He's also the happy father of a year-old son who is more important than anything on the board. And to top it all, the Russian chess mafia has long been smarting at the loss of the chess crown to the genial Indian after the Karpov-Kasparov combine dominated the game for decades.

Anand has taken on everything they have fired at him from since 2000, including a divided and discredited world title. But since 2007, he had been the undisputed world champion, defeating the Russian Vladimir Kramnik, whom Moscow regarded as the heir to the two Ks, and the Bulgarian Veselin Topalov in 2010.

In each instance, Anand has had to battle not just his opponent, but also a mighty chess establishment, and sometimes even forces of nature. In 2010, he had to drive from Spain to Bulgaria, a distance of nearly 3000 kms across Europe, after the volcanic ash disrupted flights and the (challenger's) host country refused to delay the start, citing TV rights issues. He got to Sofia just in time -- and went on to win.

This time too, the biases were evident. After the two players were tied 6-6 in regulation play, the Russian news agency Ria Novosti ran a preview that, citing ''Russian pundits,'' said ''Boris Gelfand is the favorite to dethrone India's world champion Viswanathan Anand now their title match in Moscow has gone to a rapid chess tie-break.'' This, despite Anand's well-known prowess in rapid and blitz chess.

So even the most cerebral of all sports was not exempt from mind games. In Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a giant screen installed in his office to follow the live telecast of the games, often conferring with his former cabinet colleague Natan Sharansky, a chess player himself, about the moves. In Moscow, Sergei Smagin, the Moscow chess federation vice-president, described Anand as being "in terrible shape, which forced him not to play to win, but to struggle all match long," demonstrating "a tremendous lack of confidence and lot of mistakes.''

The situation is likely to be the same at a tie-break, giving the Israeli better chances to win provided that he copes with nerves, Smagin added.

Smagin hadn't factored in the heart -- the heart of a champion.

Top Ten Jokes at Edinburgh Fringe This Year

The top 10 festival funnies were judged to be:

1) Nick Helm: "I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves."

2) Tim Vine: "Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels."

3) Hannibal Buress: "People say 'I'm taking it one day at a time'. You know what? So is everybody. That's how time works."

4) Tim Key: "Drive-Thru McDonalds was more expensive than I thought... once you've hired the car..."

5) Matt Kirshen: "I was playing chess with my friend and he said, 'Let's make this interesting'. So we stopped playing chess."

6) Sarah Millican: "My mother told me, you don't have to put anything in your mouth you don't want to. Then she made me eat broccoli, which felt like double standards."

7) Alan Sharp: "I was in a band which we called The Prevention, because we hoped people would say we were better than The Cure."

8) Mark Watson: "Someone asked me recently - what would I rather give up, food or sex. Neither! I'm not falling for that one again, wife."

9) Andrew Lawrence: "I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can't even be bothered to check my OWN voicemails."

10) DeAnne Smith: "My friend died doing what he loved ... Heroin."

26 Feb. 2007, 5.55 am

My dream of the previous morning came true in that at the Bury st. Edmunds Chess tourney Om lost two matches. He won three and drew one to end up with 3 1/2 points. It was a tough tournament for Om as he grappled with the idea of competing with the U10s. Alexander Harris and Alvin Gardener -both Cambridge boys - were the leaders of the group. Om managed to defeat Jessica who had done a Scholar's mate on him at the London Juniors in December. He also drew with Haroon Majed, after having him on the rack, Haroon had beaten Om at the Thetford tournament where he was the champion.

I dont know what is the impact of the other dream about Pinky's mum Puran.

We had a good day at Bury's Culford school, we initially ended up at the back end of the school - the AA guide took us to the wrong gate - and this was a huge property and it took us nearly five minutes of actual driving to get to the front gate of the school. Culford is a very old and posh school with lovely greens and woods and some really breathtaking views. The building where the tourney was held appeared to be an old palace or a manor house. Om asked me a question, 'Why is the stage and the curtains painted witha dark maroon colour?' The event was played in an auditorium that was a nice venue. On the way back I took the B1106 ended up in Thetford, took the A11 and A14 to get back.

Sree announced that they had received the offer of naturalisation in the UK.

I bought a book Bobby Fischer's outrageous moves and a chess recording book for Om.

This morning I dreamt of a situation where Suma and I were both jobless nd were trying to emigrate (probably to the US) and were in a depressed mood - not knowing what to do next.