Notation Help Needed

Hi SB

Bronstein gives a couple of graphs in that book.
I think perhaps looking at a graph of one's own games may help or indicate
some area to work on.

I know players who record the times as well as their moves.
There may be some here on who do it.

Of course the joke is you can imagine this happening:

"I started recording the times to see where I was wasting time and
getting into time touble.
I found I was losing more games on time because of the time it took to
write down the times of the clock."

Agree 100% about computer evaluations.

That position I posted on the latest Blog.


What does a box come up here. Black to play. (give it 30 secs.)
I bet some computers claim Black is winning easily.

Originally posted by Shallow Blue
I would have trouble trying to agree less. The numbers, without fuirther human explanation of the specifics of the position, are meaningless.

Sure, it may tell you that some engine (Which engine? What settings? When's hardware? Who operating it? Why bother?) thinks one player is nough-point-eight-five-three pawns' worth ahead of the other, and ...[text shortened]... d

* I should know, I'm a programmer, and the bleedin' things surprise me all the time.

I understand what you are saying about computer analysis and I agree. I cant make heads or tails of it. The author is speaking of learning and doing this method in your head ! Which I have tried and practiced some of these exercises in this book with some success but honestly to be fluent in that way of thinking is a bit out of my league. You do a intuitive assessment and an analytical one. Here is a example from the book.

Dorfman-Makarichev (USSR,1984)



There can be no doubt that White possesses an overwhelming advantage. Compare his rook on e1 with the black one on h8, or his bishop on e4 with his opponents on b7. The bishop on h6 can be exchanged for the one on f8, depriving Black of the right to castle. Alternatively it can go to g5, when White has a huge lead in development.
On a cursory evaluation,the position can be rated as 0.8-0.9. Nonetheless Black has no obvious weaknesses, and if White doesn't take drastic action black will be able to hold the position and escape defeat.


A simple piece of analysis reveals Whites path to victory: 1. Bxc6+...Bxc6 2. Rxe6+!...fxe6 3. Qxe6+...Be7 4. Qxc6+...Kf7 5. Re1...Rf8 6. Qe6+...Ke8 7. d5...Qd7 8. Qe5 +- In other words the analytical assessment confirms the intuitive one.

Originally posted by greenpawn34
Bronstein gives a couple of graphs in that book.
I think perhaps looking at a graph of one's own games may help or indicate some area to work on.


Agree 100% about computer evaluations.

That position I posted on the latest Blog.

[fen]8/8/6R1/7p/7k/7P/6PK/2q5 w - - 0 1[/fen]
What does a box come up here. Black to play. (give it 30 secs.)
I bet some computers claim Black is winning easily.

Aha! A graph would be more revealing than the bare numbers. Still not as useful as a graph and an explanation of the graph, but at least a graph allows you to pick out the salient extremes without having to compare forty sets of digits.


As for that position: it gives Qc2, and Black as easily winning. Funnily enough, if I then make that move, and its first recommendation for White, it suddenly realises that the position is a dead draw! I don't understand why it doesn't realise that two half-moves earlier, even when I let it run for a bit longer. Perhaps it's something in its innards which is efficient only when it have moves to work with, rather than a position.

Richard