Author: Robert Hollay
Date: 11:25:54 07/15/05
It's July. The holiday season. I decided to visit P.M., who lives in a near town, 23 km-s from me. He's 31 years old, single. It was very hard to persuade him to this interview. He's a very withdrawn and humble man, doesn't like popularity. He asked me to keep his name secret... The text of the interview: (sorry for the spelling mistakes, I'm not a native speaker of English) R.H.: When you started playing computer chess? P.M.: I was 13 when my elder brother gave me his Commodore64. From the beginning I was only interested in chess games. At that time I was belonging to the second class of the primary school. After one month of practice I easily thrashed chess programs like Grandmaster or Colossus 4.0. RH: Of course you regularly won games against your pals as well... PM: I never had pals. RH: Ehmm ... I see... PM: At the age of 21, when I had finished the fourth class of the primary school, Daddy bought me a PC! Grandma installed Windows 95 on it. I obtained as many chess programs as I could and began playing chess. Very soon I was able to beat them all, systematically. RH: Didn't you try to make money of your talent? PM: Money means nothing to me. I'm playing chess against comps only for fun. RH: But what do you live on? PM: We live on my Granny's pension. RH: Do you have any girl-friends? PM: Well ... there used to be one ... Julia. We got on well together. Several times she came up to my room, and she used to play chess amazingly well! Julia had got a laptop, which she usually brought along with her. I was very excited when she showed me her laptop the first time, because I had never seen a laptop before. At first, Julia played a game against Little Goliath on my PC. Then I played on her laptop. After that we connected our machines into a network, and was playing human vs. human matches until dawn. We had a very good time. Sometimes she couldn't carry along the laptop with her. If so, she took my PC and played alone on it. Julia was an excellent player... RH: ...did you break off your relationship? PM: Yes. Julia preferred longer games, whereas I liked blitz or bullet time controls better. Finally, Julia found a guy who had a top performance PC, and she went off with him. RH: Do you have a chess partner nowadays to playing with? PM: No, I'm playing alone on my PC. Sometimes I'm watching engine vs. engine matches to get inspiration for my own games. Recently, Grandma has installed Arena GUI for me with the strongest engines. I'm playing a lot against each of them. RH: Are they really strong? PM: Not for me. For example, of 100 games Crafty can only draw 1-2 games against me. Shredder 9 is much better, it can score 3 of 100 (on average). RH: Huh, your ELO rating must be very high! PM: Where is it raining? RH. Never mind. I was told (unofficial sources) that you had tested Hydra. Is that true? PM: Yes. The Hydra team asked me if I could help him to test Hydra. They were very anxious about the match against Adams. I played 10 games against Hydra, and I won 8 of 10. Hydra drew 1 game, because it succeeded to build a totally closed position in the opening, and I couldn't break through without sacrificing my queen. And finally, it won 1 game because I gave it a queen advantage. I lost that game on time. After the match I gave the Hydra team some good advices on how to improve it's playing strength. They were very thankful. RH: My last question. Are you visiting CCC now and then? PM: No, but I've heard of the Carpathian Cricket Club many nice things already. Please give my kind regards to the members! I promise to visit them if I get to Denmark.
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