(1) Way to go, Ted Castro! I hope you aren’t too disappointed by losing your last match. I can give you nineteen thousand reasons not to be disappointed.
(2) The commentators pointed this out, so I will too: You never saw so many relaxed, happy faces before the last round of a chess tournament. Although there was so much money at stake, everybody who was still playing was already guaranteed of making a bundle. Hikaru Nakamura and Le Quang Liem were guaranteed $50,000 for second in the Open section. Ted Castro and his opponent, P.P. Prachura, were guaranteed $19,000 for second in the under-2200 section. At that point it’s like playing with house money. You’ve already had the best tournament of your life, and you have a 50 percent chance of doubling your income at no risk. Who wouldn’t be happy?
(3) Speaking of the commentators, I give them two thumbs up. Specifically the thumbs up go to Robert Hess and Lawrence Trent. Robert was so much better than I’ve seen him before that I was amazed. Previously I saw him commenting on the U.S. Championship, I think, with Jennifer Shahade, and it seemed as if they were both half-asleep. This time Robert was awake and on point, with lots of energy and good observations. I always like Trent, but he’s got to cut it out with the puns. I mean, we all get it. P.P.’s name sounds pretty silly if you’re in kindergarten. We’re not in kindergarten any more.
I’m not sold yet on the third commentator, Tania Sachdev. I can’t say why exactly. I’d have to watch the tape and think about it, but I’d just say that it seems as if she’s trying too hard.
(4) It was really cool to see the games of 1200 players and 1600 players being given the same treatment by the commentators as the games of the grandmasters. That, of course, is intentional; it’s the whole point of the Millionaire Chess concept.
(5) Bizarre fact, also pointed out by Hess. At the same time as the playoffs were going on, the Open section was still playing its Rounds 8 and 9. You had Fabiano Caruana, Wesley So, Gata Kamsky, and Luke McShane playing on the top two boards — and absolutely no one cared. Well, the players cared, obviously, and there was still a $10,000 fifth prize to play for… but the players who weren’t in the playoff might as well have been invisible on the broadcast, except for one bizarre moment when Kamsky came barging in for some unknown reason. Maybe to protest the lack of TV coverage?
(6) The move of the day came in the first game of the match between Holden Hernandez and Marcin Tazbir for the top prize in the 2400-2549 rating group. First of all, let me just pause to let that sink in. We have two grandmasters playing for a class prize. How sick is that? That shows you how strong this tournament was.
Anyway, they got to this position, with Hernandez (playing Black) to move. Can you see what he did?
Black to move.
FEN: 6k1/1bpp2pp/1p6/3PnP2/1PP2R1P/r3q1P1/2Q3BK/7N b – – 0 1
(7) The missed opportunity of the day — well, there were lots of candidates, but this one stands out for me. Third game of the match between Farai Mandizha and Kaiqi Yang for top under-2400. It’s a 15-minute game. Mandizha, as White, has been suffering the whole game, but he has stirred up a little counterplay. Suddenly Yang gives him an unbelievable gift.
Black to move.
FEN: 1k6/6R1/2P5/p3p3/3r2P1/2KB2r1/P1P5/8 b – – 0 1
Black played 1. … R4xg4?? Can you see how White should capitalize on this mistake?
With less than a minute on his clock, Mandizha couldn’t figure it out and he played 2. Rb7+?? He eventually drew, but he could have won in this position, and it was arguably his last chance to win the match. They proceeded to draw two more games and then Yang won game 6 and the match.
The answer is 2. c7+! If 2. … Kc8 3. Rxg4 Rxg4 the bishop is unpinned and White wins with 4. Bf5+. Or if 2. … Kb7 3. c8Q+! once again forces Black’s king to the bad c8 square. Obviously the players must have missed one of those two possibilities. Looking at their faces after the game, it was clear that Yang knew he had dodged a bullet. I’m not sure whether Mandizha realized he had missed a win, but I’m sure that somebody told him pretty soon.
(8) There’s a little bit more on the controversy over the 9-move draw in the Nakamura-McShane game. First, I agree that the no-short-draws clause only forbade agreeing to a draw before move 30, not playing to a draw by threefold repetition. So you can’t say that Nakamura and McShane broke the contract.
The new wrinkle is that David Smerdon posted a mathematical analysis of what Nakamura and McShane should have done as rational economic agents — taking all questions of morality, sportsmanship, etc. out of the picture. He concluded that because the prize fund was so hugely skewed towards first-place winners, they both made the wrong decision economically. It’s pretty simple, especially for Nakamura. If he plays on, he has let’s say a 33 percent chance of winning the game and making the playoffs. By agreeing to a draw, he put himself in the position of having to win a nine-man playoff just to get to the “real” playoffs. He has only an 11 percent chance of winning that playoff. Even if you think Hikaru was the strongest of the nine, still his chances might be, say, 20 percent at best. (He was, in fact, pretty lucky to beat Wesley S0.) In any case, he had better odds if he kept playing against McShane. I’m not sure that the case is so clear-cut for McShane; his chances were pretty low either way.
Smerdon’s conclusion is that Maurice Ashley, the organizer, has done the right thing by making such huge prizes for first place. But the players haven’t caught up. Nakamura was still in the frame of mind for most tournaments he plays in, where the difference in prize money between first and second is too small to justify taking a chance. If he had rationally worked out his odds in this case, he would have seen that the prize money made it worth taking a risk.
I don’t completely agree with Smerdon’s conclusion. One of his commenters pointed out the problem — people don’t act as rational economic agents. Especially under tournament pressure. You see it a lot on game shows. Suppose you’ve won $500,000 on a game show and now you have to choose between taking the money or flipping a coin for $2,000,000. But if you lose the coin flip you get nothing.
Economic theory says you should flip the coin. But there’s no way I would do it. I have $500,000 in my pocket, a ton of money, and the additional million and a half just isn’t worth that much to me. I can’t even conceive of what I would do with it. The biggest consideration for me is that I don’t want to give away the half-million I’ve already won and end up with nothing.
So I think a realistic economic analysis would have to take into account risk aversion and it would have to take into account that the second half-million means much less to me than the first half-million, the third half-million means less than the second, and so on.
(9) Would I ever want to play in the Millionaire Chess tournament? I think the answer is no, although it was fun to watch. I still hate the idea that you play seven games of classical chess just to win $16,000 (talking about the open section now; other sections proportionately less) and then you play rapid and blitz playoffs to win $84,000. This sends the message that 25-minute chess is five times more important than classical chess. I do not agree.
Nevertheless, Maurice Ashley’s tournament format is great for TV, and that is a big part of his scheme. If we could ever, somehow, persuade a network like ESPN to broadcast the Millionaire Chess tournament, what a game-changer that would be.
(10) Speaking of mainstream sports, the title of this post is stolen brazenly from Peter King’s column that appears on the Sports Illustrated website every Monday during the football season. It always ends with a section called “10 Things I Think I Think.”
Answer to quiz: Hernandez won with the queen sacrifice 1. … Qxf4! Tazbir resigned, but the rest of the combination goes 2. gf Ng4+ 3. Kg1 Ra1+ 4. Bf1 Rxf1+! 5. Kxf1 Ne3+ and Black wins the queen and ends up a piece ahead.
