Not by the Book

All games need to have rules. That’s obvious. What’s less obvious is the importance of striking the right balance between how many constraints the rules impose v/s how much room they leave for never-played-before scenarios. Why is that important?

In a checkers world championship, a huge number of games turned out to be identical to games played earlier in checkers history. Yes, that’s right: every single move by both players was identical to an earlier game! If that’s not the definition of a boring sport, then what is? It clearly means that the rules of checkers are too constrictive and leave almost no room for variation.

Many accuse chess of being the same. Thanks to all the books and computers, chess openings and endings have been analyzed to death, which means both those parts of chess are played by rote memory.

Except that world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen, seems to have found a way to break that boring trend, writes Tyler Cowen:

“Other grandmasters prepare the opening in the hope of achieving an early advantage over their opponents.  Magnus’s preparation, in contrast, is directed at achieving an early disadvantage in the game, perhaps willing to tolerate as much as -0.5 or -0.6 by the standards of the computer (a significant but not decisive disadvantage, with -2 signifying a lost position).”

Huh? Why would anyone want a disadvantage?

Ca

Well, if everyone is playing by the book/computer/memory, then a player who breaks the pattern ends up creating a position on the board that has never been analyzed before. Which means the players have to do their analysis themselves for these new scenarios they’ve landed in. And that is what Carlsen considers his strength:

“Nonetheless these are positions “out of book” where Magnus nonetheless feels he can outplay his opponent, and this is mostly opponents from the world top ten or fifteen.”

As Cowen wrote:

“So far it is working.”

And more problematically for Carlsen’s opponents:

“It is hard to counter someone looking for a disadvantage!”