2002-09-30 - 11:23 p.m.

After the Massacre

Wow. 48 wins, 2 draws. I still can't get over it. GM Benjamin really put the hurtin' on us.

Considering how many people he was playing against, scoring 96% is an incredible result. Usually at these grandmaster simuls a couple people will nick the grandmaster for a draw, but not here. I guess we suck pretty hard.

I spent most of the day going over the games from the event. Out of the 50 games played I got 32 scoresheets, which is a much higher percentage of games than I usually get. Looking at the games, I got a pretty thorough cross-section of what happens when a very strong player meets a bunch of amateurs. Generally, the amateurs go "splat!"

Most of the games were rather like mine. There were no flashy tactics, just weaker players being ground down by a stronger one. A lot of the amateurs had decent position at, say, move fifteen, but eventually they made a mistake, and even if it was a small one, the grandmaster would take advantage of it.

This is not to say that a grandmaster, although a very good chessplayer, is some sort of flawless chess-playing machine. In the various games, GM Benjamin missed a number of good moves, especially if they were odd or unusual, but his mistakes were nearly all sins of omission rather than sins of commission. While he sometimes missed the BEST move in the position, he nearly always played a GOOD move, and that was enough to beat nearly all of us. The important thing is that he didn't make any moves that made his position worse - he left that up to us.

However, something that it's hard to appreciate is that the exhibitor at a simul has a certain advantage over his opponents. While for a grandmaster who plays a lot and studies a lot, a simul is just another day at the office, but for an amateur it may be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to play a titled player, so it�s understandable if they are a little nervous. Also, the people with the best positions are generally the ones who last the longest, but the longer your game lasts, the faster you have to move as the exhibitor progressively faces fewer and fewer opponents. There were a number of players with tenable positions who went to pieces when the tempo speeded up.

In my research I remember reading an account of a simul given by Jose Capablanca, the great Cuban World Champion of the 1920s. The writer had a won position, but since he was the last game left, the wily Capa just blitzed him until he blundered. The guy sounded a little bitter, but Capablanca didn't get to be World Champion by letting people beat him.

So what can I conclude? Obviously, the grandmaster beat us because he plays better than us. Not exactly a brilliant insight. However, the idea that we outnumbered him fifty to one was something of an illusion. It wasn't exactly fifty of us ganging up on him, it was him playing fifty of us, one at a time.