Author: Komputer Korner
Date: 18:45:48 05/17/05
It is incredible that once a dishonest or false idea takes hold in the marketplace, how very difficult it is to overturn it. Once it becomes a sacred cow, most people just accept it on faith. Thus unfortunately is the case with backsolving. Let us suppose that you have either bought, inherited or downloaded an electronic openings book without any annotations. How are you going to know what lines will be in your repertoire/ After soul searching and examining lots of the opening lines, and other advice, you decide to play lines that fit your style. However within these lines there are many options at each move node. Let us say that you have one important position with 4 move choices at the 4th move. How are you going to get these multi move choices annotated so that you will know which lines to memorize for (over the board) or which lines to play for internet or correspondence chess. If you can't afford GM or IM analysis of your repertoire and don't trust your own analysis, you are left with either having an engine analyze the opening nodes or you backsolve. If you backsolve you are forced to put in a lot of extra move lines because backsolving depends on an ending result or an evaluation far up the tree(deep into the game). So if you are a committed backsolver, you accept this and you search for a lot of GM games in your specialty opening repertoire to add to your opening book. You will have to add an evaluation to the end of each one of these lines and then you backsolve. However, there is an average of 3 positions in every GM game where the assessment of the game is overturned (in other words, the assessment goes from advantage from one side to the other or an equal position goes into an advantage to one side or Vice Versa). This means that you are never sure that the result really represents the value of the opening node line that you want to have annotated and that backsolving indeed gives you as it backs up the result evaluation to the opening node position. So you cheat a bit; you don't put the complete GM games. You put in the 1st 30 moves or so and then have an engine evaluate the final positions after 30 moves or wherever the engines give a definite advantage to one side and then backsolve again. There is a separate problem with equal and unclear positions but more on that later. However, you wasted engine midnight analysis sessions on the 30th move analysis which you probably will never get to play as your opponent will have veered off on another line far sooner. The point is that backsolving is doing its annotation work (on positions that you have your engine analyze) far up the tree (beyond the 30th move) on positions that you will never encounter. Even if you back that up and only analyze positions after the 20th move and then backsolve you will still never encounter those positions in a real game. Opening study really means opening study. It doesn't mean ending study. It doesn't mean mid game study. Of course you should do some of those as well but only after you have a solid repertoire. You are far better off putting your engines to work on that 4th move (in other words study openings the old fashioned way). Now for the unclear lines that the backsolvers 30th move analysis showed that I promised to talk about earlier. These lines represent a special problem. If you backsolve them, then you haven't really accomplished anything because the opening node that is the ultimate target of your backsolving has your 4 opening choices without any annotations before you started backsolving. Having no annotations is really the fact that you don't know what is going on therefore they are unclear. So let us say that 2 of the lines are backsolved to be unclear and one line was large advantage for one side and the other line was backsolved to be equal. So the only one we haven't talked about is the equal line. It has the same problem as the unclear line. Since most games have 3 position overturns as explained above you are not really sure whether the line was always equal from the 4th move on or else it became an advantage and then was turned back into equality because of mistakes. if every game was played perfectly, then backsolving would be worth it. However that is not the case. So to sum up, put your effort into evaluating opening positions and opening strategies and traps. There is no magic bullet that will solve chess and backsolving doesn't solve anything.
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