{"id":965,"date":"2010-12-22T13:00:16","date_gmt":"2010-12-22T21:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=965"},"modified":"2010-12-22T13:00:16","modified_gmt":"2010-12-22T21:00:16","slug":"nemeses-and-punching-bags","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=965","title":{"rendered":"Nemeses and punching bags"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The U.S. Chess Federation keeps upgerading the quality of its member statistics. The latest goodie is a &#8220;Game Statistics&#8221; page, which lets you see things like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Your overall won-loss record since 1991.<\/li>\n<li>Your won-loss against each 100-point rating tier.<\/li>\n<li>Your won-loss record year by year.<\/li>\n<li>Your top 30 opponents &#8212; not by rating, but by the number of times you have played them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I think the last feature is my favorite one, because it&#8217;s a trip down memory lane. Here are the four people I have played the most times (since 1991):<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Michael Aigner &#8212; 11 times<\/li>\n<li>Juan Diego Perea &#8212; 6 times<\/li>\n<li>Ilan Benjamin &#8212; 5 times<\/li>\n<li>William D. Pace, Jr. &#8212; 5 times<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>The first three names were no big surprise; I&#8217;ve <a href=\"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=736\" target=\"_blank\">mentioned previously <\/a>in this blog how many times I have played Michael (and how sorry my results have been). But the fourth name was a real surprise. William Pace was a class-A player back in Ohio, and I have to admit that I barely remember him. I moved away from Ohio in 1996, and he moved away in 1997, to Arizona.<\/p>\n<p>Not only can you look up this stuff for yourself, you can look it up for other people! This makes it possible to play an interesting game, which I&#8217;ll call &#8220;Going Up the Ladder.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As noted before, Michael Aigner is my toughest opponent; my lifetime record against him is +2 -8 =1. But who is Michael&#8217;s nemesis? Answer: Ricardo de Guzman. They have played <em>thirty-five<\/em> times, and Michael has won <em>one<\/em> of them (+1 -25 =9). That&#8217;s just sick. If I played one guy 35 times and had only one win, I think I would take up another game.<\/p>\n<p>All right, then, who is de Guzman&#8217;s nemesis? Well, de Guzman doesn&#8217;t lose much, and in fact there is only one player (among his 30 most frequently played opponents) against whom he has a losing record: Alex Yermolinsky (+2 -4 = 2). I&#8217;m not sure you can call that a nemesis. Given that Yermo has outrated him by 2oo points or so every time they&#8217;ve played, I&#8217;d say that de Guzman has done pretty darned well against him. Probably a better nemesis would be Yian Liou, who has an even record against de Guzman (+4 -4 =5) in spited of being rated much lower.<\/p>\n<p>Nevertheless, let&#8217;s keep going with Yermolinsky. Who is hardest person for Yermo to beat? Answer: Jaan Ehlvest (+1 -4 = 5). The toughest out for Ehlvest? Assuming we are only considering Americans, the answer is Gata Kamsky (+0 -2 = 5). And finally, who is Kamsky&#8217;s biggest nemesis in the U.S.?<\/p>\n<p>Ha! Trick question! <em>Kamsky does not lose to American players.<\/em> Yeah, there&#8217;s a guy named Nakamura, but they have drawn all four of their games.<\/p>\n<p>We can also reverse the direction. In &#8220;Down the Ladder,&#8221; you look for the people who are your personal punching bags. There tends to be a problem with people who have quit the game, so I have excluded people who have not played in the last 12 months.<\/p>\n<p>My most co-operative opponent: Jim Parker (peak rating 1690), +3 -0 =0. However, this does not include Santa Cruz Cups 1-3, which were not rated. (Cups 4 and 5 were.) If you include those tournaments, my record against Jim goes to +6 -0 =0.<\/p>\n<p>Jim&#8217;s best punching bag: Ted Belanoff (peak rating 2032), +4 -0 =0. This is pretty amazing, since Belanoff is now rated so much higher than Jim! Presumably Jim&#8217;s four wins came when Ted was rated a lot lower.<\/p>\n<p>Ted Belanoff&#8217;s favorite opponent: Kyle Shin (peak rating 2095), + 6 -1 = 0. We&#8217;re still going up the rating scale rather than down! These are both scholastic players, and again it&#8217;s reasonable to think that Belanoff&#8217;s wins came when Shin was just starting out.<\/p>\n<p>Kyle Shin&#8217;s favorite opponent: Kesav Viswanadha (peak rating 2006), +4 -0 = 0.<\/p>\n<p>Kesav Viswanadha&#8217;s favorite opponent: Thadeus Frei (peak rating 1903), +3 -0 =0.<\/p>\n<p>After Thadeus, the exercise starts to lose its point, because he hasn&#8217;t scored three tournament wins against anybody yet. Probably he would want me to mention that he has two wins in two games against Cailen Melville, but I&#8217;ll stop here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The U.S. Chess Federation keeps upgerading the quality of its member statistics. The latest goodie is a &#8220;Game Statistics&#8221; page, which lets you see things like this: Your overall won-loss record since 1991. Your won-loss against each 100-point rating tier. Your won-loss record year by year. Your top 30 opponents &#8212; not by rating, but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18,171,12],"tags":[1587,1588,684,1208,618,1586],"class_list":["post-965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chess-life","category-ruminations","category-tournaments","tag-alex-yermolinsky","tag-banging-head-against-wall","tag-gata-kamsky","tag-jaan-ehlvest","tag-michael-aigner","tag-ricardo-de-guzman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}