English Chess Forum

I didn't post expressing Paul's sentiments, because I was unable to find a way of expressing it as politely as he has done.

What difference does it make how you express it, its just your opinion. I did put my point across with a certain bias but that's not been picked up I see, so best left there.

MJMcCready wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 03, 2021 7:28 pm

It looked like some players were just going through the motions of turning up, getting paid and going home

Players who do this tend to score close to zero, or achieve a string of short draws if that option is available to the,

MJMcCready wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 03, 2021 7:28 pm

rather than show a real desire to win the thing

How many players who had a meaningful chance to "win the thing" failed to give it a go? In most all-play-alls the real contenders are a minority of the participants - the rest just try and do their best.

JustinHorton wrote: ↑

Thu Feb 04, 2021 8:20 am

In most all-play-alls the real contenders are a minority of the participants - the rest just try and do their best.

This is nonsense, because momentum is very important in all-play-alls and things can change relatively quickly. Who where 'real contenders' at the start of Wijk? Duda? Grandelius? Jorden Van Foreest? Two rounds in and it is all change.

Cool, if you think it's nonsense we could undertake a statistical survey of all-play-alls and see what we found

Good idea, but I am not sure how we judge who are 'real contenders', so perhaps you could say who were 'real contenders' at the start of the most recent elite event so I have an idea of how it works.

I dunno, how shall we guess who are "the real contenders for the title when the next football season starts

I am not sure about switching to football, but OK. So if you say who were the real contenders for the Premier League for lets say the last 5 seasons.

Well let us say that an answer is that most of the clubs neither were nor thought they were, that this is obvious enough and admits to far more confirmatory examples than exceptions.

I don't really understand this, because if there are exceptions then surely these exceptions must have had meaningful chances in other years but just didn't win, so how then do we know who are real contenders?

(Talking of examples, obviously these discussions are far better carried out statistically than via individual examples, but I can't help observing than my local club has been in the top division of Spanish football for two of the past three seasons, having never reached that level before. Absolutely nobody thinks or thought that they might be contenders for the title, though they might on either occasion have done rather better than they have.)

Matthew Turner wrote: ↑

Thu Feb 04, 2021 10:14 am

I don't really understand this, because if there are exceptions then surely these exceptions must have had meaningful chances in other years but just didn't win, so how then do we know who are real contenders?

And yet we do understand that in statistics there are such things as outliers and we do understand that sometimes long-odds events occur and we do understand that long-odds events remain long-odds nevertheless.

So what do you understand by your term 'meaningful chance' then?

I do not think the odds on an all-Dutch final at Wijk were as long as some think they were before the event.

It was not a normal tournamemt.

These are exceptional times in otb chess and even on the soccer fields, as well, with no crowds in stadia.

Matthew Turner wrote: ↑

Thu Feb 04, 2021 10:22 am

So what do you understand by your term 'meaningful chance' then?

I'm not sure this is an answerable question, unless we want to be discussing the precise borders of "meaningful" from here unto eternity. I think it's an inexact concept, as most things in language are.