Author: Louis Fagliano
Date: 11:12:37 04/24/02
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On April 24, 2002 at 13:53:08, Torstein Hall wrote: >On April 24, 2002 at 10:31:58, Louis Fagliano wrote: > >> >>It's impossible to play error free chess and lose. It's the nature of the game >>that, in a loss, the loser MUST have made at least one that, under intense >>scrutiny, deserves a question mark. In other words, I'm saying that the opening >>position is not a forced win for White! > >That we do not know for 100% sure! HeHe No, we don't know for sure, of course, but I'm making my assuption on the fact that in actual play symmetrical positions are very often drawish and the opening position is certainly symmetrical. > >> >>That's why I don't consider a game to have been annotated properly if the >>annotator does not identify at least one move for the losing side in a game that >>ended decisively with a question mark. To me, that means the annotator doesn't >>know where the loser went wrong. > >And this I think is quite common not to know where a game went wrong. Sometimes >for the lack of time and/or skill to analyse the game. And sometimes I think it >is very difficult to pin point the error in a game. It can be a sequence of >moves together that do not fit so well with the demands of the position, but its >hard to give any of them a question mark as bad per se. > >Torstein Yes, it can be very difficult to annotate certain games. But if you run across a game like you describe above, where it's a sequence of moves together that do not fit so well with the demands of the position, you can give each move in the sequence a "?!" meaning that it doesn't lose but there was a better alternative. There's a pattern to this. It seems that very often in these types of games, the sequence of "?!'s" occur in the early middlegame just after leaving opening theory. If the annotator can identify good alternatives to the "?!'s" then not only is it what I consider a well-annotated game, but opening theory can be extended and improved upon, too. That is the challenge. Good luck all you would-be annotators! Of course it doesn't hurt to have Fritz or Junior running in the background of a game you have opened up in ChessBase 8.0!
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