| Larry Tapper 2005-06-10, 8:37 pm |
| Sam Sloan:
quote:
>Grandmaster William Lombardy has since told me that that he
knew that the games were fixed ever since he became a strong player in
the early 1950s because of the numerous suspicious moves in these
games. Unfortunately, Taylor Kingston is such a weak player that he
cannot understand these simple and obvious points.
This is a good example of Sam Sloan's nearly total imperviousness to
criticism or evidence. He apparently still thinks it's "obvious" to any
strong player that Keres-Botvinnik games were fixed, in spite of the
fact that numerous posters have pointed out that there are GM-strength
players on both sides of this issue.
The Keres-Botvinnik analysis Sam has posted on his own website is
trash, because it uncritically endorses the theory that the more
strategically bad the moves are, the more likely the fix.
Evans' original analysis was (not surprisingly) much better --- he
acknowledged that a skillful fix was likely to involve subtle errors
designed to avoid immediate detection, by the likes of Sam Sloan for
example.
This point sailed right over Sloan's head, and apparently continues to
do so. For example Sam writes:
"The drawing technique is simple. White leaves his rook on the fourth
rank. Eventually, to make progress, Black must advance his pawn to g4.
White then must immediately move his rook to the eighth rank and start
checking from behind. The Black king cannot escape the checks and the
game is a draw."
"What did Keres do? He made a move that even a 1600 player would be
embarrassed to make. He retreated his rook back to d3, allowing
Botvinnik to seize the fourth rank with 53. ... Rf4."
So if Evans is right about the proper way to fix a chess game, then
Sloan's comments do not make sense. A world-class GM does not throw a
game by making "a move that even a 1600 player would be embarrassed to
make".
My own opinion is that game analysis alone could never provide
conclusive evidence of a fix, because a sufficiently ingenious and
paranoid analyst could take _any_ game with decisive errors and make a
case for something fishy going on..
Larry T.
(USCF 2300 if that matters)
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