Correspondence Chess

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The chess world has a new Women's Champion! Zhu Chen (China) defeated
17 year old Alexandra Kosteniuk (Russia) in the final round of the
FIDE Knockout Tournament in Moscow. She succeeds Xie Jun (China), who
declined to play this year.

Vassily Ivanchuk (Ukraine) defeated defending FIDE champion
Viswanathan Anand (India) +1-0=3 in the men's semifinal round,
thereby avoiding the need for a playoff. 18 year old Ruslan
Ponomariov (Ukraine) defeated Peter Svidler (Russia) by the same
score. The men's final starts 17 January 2002, also in Moscow.

The women's title was decided in the second playoff round. The
players contested two blitz games with 5 minutes per player plus 10
seconds added to the clock after each move. Zhu Chen won both games.

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In sharp contrast to the playoff games of a FIDE world championship,
the ICCF World Correspondence Championship moves at a different pace.
These tournaments take years before a winner is determined.

For some time now I've had a list of the correspondent champions on
my world championship site under 'Other World Champions'. The list
started with the great Australian Cecil (C.J.S.) Purdy, winner of the
1st event which ran from 1950 to 1953, and ended with Gert Timmerman
of the Netherlands, winner of the 15th event (1996-), which has not
yet officially completed.

Since my list hardly did justice to the topic, I decided earlier this
year to expand the section by including crosstables and game scores
for the events. You probably know that game scores and crosstables,
as public records of a sporting event, are not protected by copyright.

My first problem was where to get this info? The best single
reference is an out of print book, available only from used book
sources...

'The Games of the World Correspondence Chess Championships I-X' by
Tim Harding
http://www.bookfinder.com/?author=harding&title=correspondence+chess

...In addition to a complete record of the finals, Harding's book has
crosstables for the preliminary events. Tackling the preliminaries
was, however, too ambitious for a first effort. I'm a firm believer
in taking a project one step at a time.

For the 11th through 14th events, I found crosstables and some game
scores in various chess periodicals. A crosstable without game scores
is just a two dimensional list. The games are the true record of any
chess competition, but, for obvious reasons, the thought of entering
over a thousand game scores did not appeal to me. I looked for
another solution and didn't have to look very far. The same Tim
Harding has a well known web site...

Chess Mail
http://www.chessmail.com/

...which offers a CD full of game scores for correspondence chess...

Chess Mail: MegaCorr-2 CD-ROM information
http://www.chessmail.com/mega2cd.html

...'Database with 350,000+ CC games and much more'. This looked like
the right place to find what I was looking for. I decided that:-

1) if the game scores exist in digital format, they are certainly on
this compilation; and
2) if I couldn't find them here, I would enter them myself.

Credit card in hand, I opened the Chess Mail page to order the CD --
'Basic price: IR£33 (Euros 42.00), or US$39.00 or UK£ (sterling)
27.00. [...] Order MegaCorr2 today: now includes free airmail p&p!' --
but quickly ran into a problem.

There was no indication that the ordering process was secure. Like
most people, I don't like transmitting credit card information over
the Internet in clear text. The site provides an order form in PDF
format and a fax number, but I can't remember the last time I used my
printer. It's covered with dust. I decided not to order and set the
project aside.

Some time later the Chess Cafe newsletter 'This Week at
ChessCafe.com' announced the same CD as a 'Special of the Week'...

'This database contains a splendid collection of 357,218
correspondence chess games, of which approximately 30,000 are
annotated, some in detail, others lightly. Photos of most of the
strongest CC-players from the last few years, various photographs,
buttons, covers from Chess Mail issues, cross-tables from CC-
tournaments, Harding's ChessCafe.com Kibitzer columns (1-55),
tournament books from several classic CC-tournaments (in PDF format),
interviews, short biographies of CC-players and many, many more
things make this one of the great correspondence database and
informational packages ever produced. The suggested retail price for
the Mega Corr2 CD is $39, but this week, October 17-24, as the
ChessCafe.com Special of the Week, you can get it for the low price
of $32.00, a savings of $7!'

...and I jumped at the opportunity. The Chess Cafe store is operated
by the Yahoo store service, where I knew I could trust my credit card
info to be handled as confidentially as possible. A note that 'all
Mega Corr2 CDs will be shipped from Ireland' offered some hope that I
would also save a little money on shipping. After all, I live in a
country which is another member of the EU.

My enthusiasm waned when I reached the Chess Cafe order page. It
mentioned that 'Shipping and tax may be added to your order. For
terms, see the Info page'. The Info page, however, said absolutely
nothing about shipping and tax. I quickly discovered that, based on
my shipping address, I was an 'international' customer, subject to a
fixed shipping fee of $14.95. This is fair for orders shipped from
the United States to Europe, or vice versa, but is unfair for an item
shipped from one part of Europe to another. I made a mental note that
this would probably be my last order to the Chess Cafe, and finished
the checkout process.

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A week or so later the CD arrived. I was pleased to discover that all
games from ICCF finals 1-14 were in the games database. An
introductory page headed 'Who made this CD', included the following
copyright notice...

'Copyright © Tim Harding, 1996-2001 [...] The PGN and Chessbase
formatted chess games in the databases on this CD are excluded from
this prohibition, but annotations by Tim Harding remain his
copyright.'

...This was in line with my understanding of copyright law applied to
game scores, so I had a green light for my little project. I located
the PGN game scores for the 14 events on the CD, extracted them,
removed the annotations, and formatted the files to suit my own
taste. After this I built crosstables from the game files, checked
them against my sources, including Harding's book, and incorporated
them into my site. The results are at...

World Chess Championship : Correspondence Chess
http://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/wcc-corr.htm

...I'll update it as other finals are completed. In addition to the
14 finals on the MegaCorr2 CD, the official ICCF site at...

ICCF website
http://www.iccf.com/

...lists results in progress for the 15th and 16th finals; the 16th,
17th, 19th, and 20th 3/4-finals; and the 20th through 25th
semifinals. This leads to a few obvious questions -- What is a 3/4
final? And what happened to the 18th? -- but I haven't yet found the
time to investigate further.

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Let's take a short look at the MegaCorr2 CD. A directory listing
says 'Volume [MEGACORR2] created: 2001-May-04'. The CD is structured
as a web site, where the entry page is a file named 'CLICK ME.HTM' in
the root directory. The page says 'Welcome to the Mega Corr2 database
and CD Web : Edited by International Master (ICCF), Tim Harding'.

A click on the MegaCorr2 logo opens a frame set, where the top frame
is a navigation bar which appears on all pages. The navigation bar
links to sections called [Book Reviews], [CC Info], [Database], [The
Kibitzer], [Magazine], [Players], [Tournaments], and [eXtras].

The heading on [Book Reviews] is 'John Elburg's Chessbookreviews
Homepage'. I'd seen Elburg's work before, and although the content is
interesting, a spelling (and grammar) checker would be advisable. The
second paragraph on the page is a good example. 'You can tip me on
new books, give tips to improve my pages, answer question like: "How
can I improve these pages more to satisfy your nead in finding the
best book for this moment?", get attention for your own work all by
mailing to a special mailadress: booktips'. It takes a little thought
to understand the sense of that.

[CC Info] is full of links on correspondence chess topics. Along with
the external links to iccf.com and chessmail.com that I've already
mentioned, another excellent resource is...

John Knudsen's correspondencechess.com
http://www.correspondencechess.com/

The [Database] section is headed 'Information about the database on
this CD-ROM'. This means the 357,218 correspondence chess games, of
course. If you're a novice to chess databases, you'll find a lot of
useful tips on chess data here.

[The Kibitzer] 'is a monthly column that Tim Harding writes for Hanon
Russell's website, The Chess Cafe'. It lists 55 articles written by
Harding through December 2000. In my opinion, the Chess Cafe
columnists are among the best chess writers on the Internet, and
Harding is one of the best of the Chess Cafe columnists.

The [Magazine] is Chess Mail. 'Tim Harding has created Chess Mail, an
international magazine with readers in over 55 countries, and he has
edited it since its launch in 1996. On this CD you can read in Adobe
PDF format all the back issues from the start until the end of volume
4 (year 2000). [...] Our online edition is free and complementary to
our printed edition, which has largely different content.' The Adobe
Acrobat Reader required to read the files can be found elsewhere on
the CD.

Never having seen Chess Mail before, I clicked through a few issues.
They are full of interviews, ICCF info, and annotated games between
the world's strongest correspondence players. The home page
www.chessmail.com currently proclaims 'Our 50th number is out now!
Chess Mail 8/2001'.

[Players] is an 'Index to interviews & photos : On this CD we have
links to our past interviews (PDF format) and some photographs. If a
name is highlighted, it links to an interview or profile, or an issue
of the magazine with a relevant article about that player'. The page
also links to lists of ICCF titled players as well as the 'five
greatest cc players of all time'. No, I'm not going to reveal their
identities here.

[Tournaments] offers crosstables for events like the World
Championship, the European Championship, and the ICCF World Cup. The
World Championship covers the same finals -- 1st through 14th -- that
I had just prepared for my site. To give you an idea about the
quality of the work, I found only one discrepancy while working with
Harding's material. The Watzl - Collins game from the 1st final is
listed in Harding's book as a draw, but the game score on the CD is a
win for the American. The crosstable on the CD agrees with the game
score.

[eXtras] 'links to miscellaneous information pages' on the CD. Among
many other resources, these include a bibliography, a 1996 interview
with Mark Crowther, and three tournament books.

The MegaCorr2 CD is a gold mine for the chess historian as well as
for the correspondence player. Unlike the Chess Informant CD which I
reviewed a few months ago, MegaCorr's open format guarantees that it
will serve as a basic reference for many years to come. Many of the
annotated games explore the inner secrets of chess in the same way
that a correspondence player does. The whole effort gets three thumbs
up.

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For the final piece of this review, I'd like to look at some basic
data about the games from the 14 completed ICCF finals. After
extracting the headers from the PGN files and loading them into a
database, I counted 1533 games. Of these, 10 are marked 'extra'
because the results were cancelled when a player withdrew. Of the
remaining games, 22 are completely missing the game score. This means
that I had 1501 full games.

My first numbers are based on the 1523 official games. In the 14
events there were 212 participants, drawn from 149 different players.
Four players participated in more than three events:-

6 Zagorovsky, V.
5 Estrin, Y.
4 Baumbach, F.
4 Sanakoev, G.

There were also 15 players who participated in 3 events, 18 in 2
events, and 112 who played in a single event. Vladimir Zagorovsky
played in the finals of the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 11th events.
His namesake Mikhail Zagorovsky also competed in the 7th final.

Only 10 players competed in the 3rd final, while four events (5th,
7th, 9th, & 13th) had 17 participants. Not too surprisingly, the four
players who competed in more than three events also played the
greatest number of games:-

87 Zagorovsky, V.
76 Estrin, Y.
60 Baumbach, F.
58 Sanakoev, G.

The 10 most successful players have been:-

Berliner, H. +12-0=4 87.50% 16 gms.
Rittner, H. +10-0=5 83.33% 15
Umansky, M. +10-0=6 81.25% 16
Purdy, C.J.S. +9-1=3 80.77% 13
Ragozin, V. +9-1=4 78.57% 14
Sloth, J. +8-0=6 78.57% 14
Malmgren, H. +7-0=6 76.92% 13
Mikhailov, A. +19-3=8 76.67% 30
Schmid, L. +9-2=3 75.00% 14
Oim, T. +24-3=7 73.86% 44

Only two of these players competed in more than one final. Oim played
in three, Mikhailov in two.

What about long running rivalries? Estrin and Zagorovsky played each
other four times in finals. Seven rivalries spanned three games :
Kauranen - Sanakoev, Thiele - Zagorovsky, Balogh - Napolitano, Nyman -
Zagorovsky, de Carbonnel- Zagorovsky, Boey - Estrin, and de
Carbonnel - Estrin.

34 different countries have been represented. Of these, the countries
appearing the most have been:-

49 USR : Soviet Union
18 SWE : Sweden
15 BRD : West Germany
12 CZE : Czechoslovakia
10 DDR : East Germany

The USSR had eight players in the 9th final, plus six in the 6th,
8th, & 11th. The second country on the list was a complete surprise
to me. Twelve different players have represented Sweden. Lundqvist
and Nyman have competed three times.

These country counts are somewhat problematic, as geographical
boundaries have shifted significantly over the last 12 years. Two
time world champion Oim, for example, has played twice for the USSR
and once, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, for his native
Estonia. In fact, four other players have also participated under
more than one flag:-

Baumbach (DDR x 2; GER x 2)
Franzen (CZE x 1; SLK x 1)
Sanakoev (USR x 3; RUS x 1)
Stern (DDR x 2; GER x 1)

If we ignore political realities by lumping related countries
together, the picture changes and Germany overtakes Sweden:-

USSR ('RUS','USR','EST','LTU') : 56 participants
Germany ('BRD','DDR','GER') : 30 participants
Czechoslovakia ('CZE','SLK') : 13 participants

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Correspondence chess is an important laboratory for opening theory.
The element of surprise attached to an opening novelty, which can be
so crucial to the result of an over-the-board (OTB) game, is
diminished considerably. Otherwise unfathomable variations can be
dissected and analyzed to depths which exceed the ability of the
greatest human calculators, like Kasparov.

The following statistics are based on the 1501 games where the game
scores are complete. Just one word of warning : the samples are so
small that we can't extrapolate too much knowledge from them.

First, here's a table showing the win-loss-draw records from White's
viewpoint for the five main ECO (Encyclopedia of Chess Openings)
classifications:-

A +68-42=59 57.69% 169 gms.
B +163-117=189 54.90% 469
C +158-91=154 58.31% 403
D +87-54=97 56.93% 238
E +72-56=94 53.60% 222

Note the large number of e4 (B/C) vs. d4 (D/E) openings, which I
believe is contrary to OTB practice. Combining these, the percentages
are:-

e4 +321-208=343 56.48% 872
d4 +159-110=191 55.33% 460

Going one level down in the ECO classification, the most & least
successful openings (again as seen from White's side) have been:-

C3 +3-0=0 100.00% 3
D0 +7-0=4 81.82% 11
D3 +21-4=13 72.37% 38
A7 +3-0=4 71.43% 7
E9 +19-4=16 69.23% 39
C9 +43-11=30 69.05% 84
B1 +26-7=22 67.27% 55
B9 +25-9=24 63.79% 58
A0 +11-3=15 63.79% 29
E0 +8-3=10 61.90% 21
[...]
E4 +8-10=7 46.00% 25
A8 +5-6=1 45.83% 12
D9 +6-8=9 45.65% 23
B8 +18-24=26 45.59% 68
E1 +4-7=17 44.64% 28
B0 +16-22=17 44.55% 55
E2 +3-4=2 44.44% 9
E3 +4-7=8 42.11% 19
E8 +3-5=4 41.67% 12
C6 +7-20=15 34.52% 42

Does this mean that if, as Black, you play less popular lines of the
Ruy Lopez (C6; a.k.a. the Spanish), you are likely to finish better?
No, chess is not this simple. The C6 percentage means that some great
specialists in these lines were among the most successful players to
have competed in ICCF final events. Believe me, I checked!

Bye for now,
Mark Weeks

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at...

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