Sunday, October 5, 2008

Kasparov - Smyslov, 1984

I have a new chess project:
I'm going to study the games from the 1984 Kasparov -Smyslov match. I'm very excited about it. First of all, it's an awesome awesome match with lots of classic middlegame structures and some rocking endings. Plus it's the old guy against the new guy in the Candidates Final. Great openings: some Tarraschs (I'm trying to learn this), some super-sophisticated Slavs, some isolated d-pawn positions. And I've never studied anyone's games, so a match seems like a nice, managable place to start. Don't you think?

This is how I'm going to do it:

1. For each game, first I'm going to guess the moves for one side.

2. Then I'm going to go through and stop at 3-6 points in the game and try to predict what Rybka's assessment of the position is. Just to see if I'm on the right track about the trends of the game. Doesn't that sound like a fun little exercise: "What does Rybka think?"? I can give myself rewards for guessing close to the right number.

3. Then I'm going to try to annotate it by myself a little. Just fill in important calculations or candidate moves.

4. Then I'm going to read some annotated version and have rybka running to answer any questions I have. I think Kasparov describes the games in something I read recently.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting choice - Smyslov at this time was having one last "bloom". He admitted that sometimes he just "let his hand" find the moves. Kasparov was not yet KASPAROV. Should be a good contest. Sometimes, those older matches can be fun and educational to examine (Spassky Karpov, Spassky Petrosian)

Please keep your readers posted on your findings!

Anonymous said...

Is there a book on this match?

Anonymous said...

Kasparov analyzes all the games of the match in his book "The Test of Time", which is IMO one of the finest books ever written.

I especially appreciate that there were no strong computer engines around back then and the analysis is pure Kasparov.

He will most probably also write something new about this match in his upcoming last book of his "On Modern Chess"-series.

BRUZ

Anonymous said...

Well written article.