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posted by LaminatorX on Thursday April 09 2015, @05:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the How-about-a-nice-game-of-chess? dept.

Randy Olsen has a interesting article where he explores a data set of over 650,000 chess tournament games ranging back to the 15th century and looks at how chess has changed over time. His findings include:

Chess games are getting longer. Chess games have been getting steadily longer since 1970, increasing from 75 ply (37 moves) per game in 1970 to a whopping 85 ply (42 moves) per game in 2014. "This trend could possibly be telling us that defensive play is becoming more common in chess nowadays," writes Olsen. "Even the world’s current best chess player, Magnus Carlsen, was forced to adopt a more defensive play style (instead of his traditional aggressive style) to compete with the world’s elite."

The first-move advantage has always existed. White consistently wins 56% and Black only 44% of the games every year between 1850 and 2014 and the first-move advantage becomes more pronounced the more skilled the chess players are. "Despite 150+ years of revolutions and refinement of chess, the first-move advantage has effectively remained untouched. The only way around it is to make sure that competitors play an even number of games as White and Black."

Draws are much more common nowadays. Only 1 in 10 games ended in a draw in 1850, whereas 1 in 3 games ended in a draw in 2013. "Since the early 20th century, chess experts have feared that the over-analysis of chess will lead “draw death,” where experts will become so skilled at chess that it will be impossible to decisively win a game any more." Interestingly chess prodigy and world champion Jose Raul Capablanca said in the 1920's that he believed chess would be exhausted in the near future and that games between masters would always end in draws. Capablanca proposed a more complex variant of chess to help prevent “draw death,” but it never really seemed to catch on.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @05:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @05:32PM (#168411)

    Stephen J. Gould's "Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin" (1996). The more interest there is in a game, the more players participate, so the larger sample size and filtering effect causes variance to decrease. Half of Gould's book was in reference to baseball and the disappearance of the 0.400 batting season (i.e., regression to the mean in the face of more uniformly skilled pitchers). The same could be said here for the blunting of chess offense, increase in chess draw rate, lengthened games, etc. I've also seen this mentioned in the context of insurgent warfare (as time goes on, previously unskilled combatants become experts, IED's get more effective, etc.)

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  • (Score: 1) by SubiculumHammer on Thursday April 09 2015, @08:20PM

    by SubiculumHammer (5191) on Thursday April 09 2015, @08:20PM (#168478)

    Interesting idea. But note that in baseball there have been changes to the rules, the height of mounds, equipment, stadiums, etc. Lots of reasons for stats to change.

    • (Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Friday April 10 2015, @12:48AM

      by nitehawk214 (1304) on Friday April 10 2015, @12:48AM (#168564)

      Steroids, as well.

      --
      "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
  • (Score: 2, Funny) by nitehawk214 on Friday April 10 2015, @12:49AM

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Friday April 10 2015, @12:49AM (#168565)

    IEDs would certainly spice up baseball, though.

    --
    "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh