Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 00:32:23 02/07/03
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On February 06, 2003 at 14:08:42, Rolf Tueschen wrote: >But as I said - I wanted to hear from the expertd in CC. To learn about the >possible motivation of such teams like now the DJ one. Do they, these experts >and programmers, see any serious reasons why they should play such strong human >players? Russell, do you believe that they had good psycho analysis about the >players? :) No, I don't think the Junior team had any psycho analysis, but I do believe it is a powerful teaching tool. The famous chess instructor Mark Dvoretsky is said to use such a technique. He had one student who was very talented, but liked to draw his games. Dvoretsky saw this as a flaw in his character. He was not aggressive enough in real life, and so he was not aggressive enough on the chess board. So Dvoretsky told him he could not draw any games, and Dvoretsky worked to change his character. The student was disturbed by this, but in time, he became a much stronger player. I have also heard it said that you can determine more about a person from analyzing one of his games of chess than you can from hours of psycho analysis. I wasn't sure about this until I looked at my own games, and realized that I was much too rebelious in my moves. I would make moves that were not good at all, but I would make them to spite my opponent, to try and thwart his will and impose my own upon the game. If my opponent moved his knight to an outpost, I might capture it with a rook just to "show him who was in control of things," or if my opponent made an unsound sacrifice, I would refuse it, simply to say "See, I don't have to do what you suggest!" (these aren't real examples, but just meant to make a point). Very childish indeed. I realized that I had a bit of this in my character. When someone told me to do something, inside I secretly wanted to rebel and not do what I was told just so I could remain in control of the situation. All of this, from simply looking at how I played chess :) So maybe there is something to learning about a person's character and personality and using it to defeat him. >Thanks especially for your specific American example. We here in Europe, me at >least, never hear about such sport heroes. If you can, feel free to provide many >more such interesting data. No joking. There are probably good books on the subject. But here goes... There was a great baseball player from many decades ago named Ted Williams. He has a few good stories. He played from 1939 to 1960, and took several years away from playing baseball to fight in the war. He was known for being very accurate with his bat, and as a result was an excellent hitter. In 1941, on the last day of the season, the Boston Red Sox had a double header (two games in one day). Ted Williams had a .400 batting average for the season(meaning he got a hit 40% of the time). Only a small number of players had ever finished a season with a .400 batting average, and it had not been done in many years (and has never been done since). The manager of the Red Sox wanted Ted Williams to sit out these last two games to preserve his .400 batting average. If he would have played and had a bad day, his average would have fallen below .400 and he would have lost a nice achievement. Ted Williams refused, and insisted on playing. He went to bat eight times that day, and he got six hits, and raised his batting average to .406! Another story I recall is that Ted Williams claimed that he had such great vision, that he knew exactly where on the baseball his bat made contact with the ball. Everyone was skeptical, since it is very hard for most people to even see the baseball going so fast, and much harder to see it with that level of detail. To prove his claim, Ted Williams took a wooden bat and rubbed a tar-like substance on his bat (rosin mixed with olive oil I belive), so that it would leave a smudge on the baseball when he hit it. He had a pitcher throw to him, and he would hit the ball, and immediately call out where he had made contact with the ball. "Between the official stamp and the laces," he would call out. Another player ran and retrieved the ball, and sure enough, he was correct. They repeated the process many times, and he was said to be correct each time.
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