Thursday, October 2, 2014

Edit to Review of Grandmaster by David Klass

I just realised that the tournament depicted in the book, despite being a team event, is not in a team format. For all intents and purposes, the participants are playing in an individual event, then adding up the scores of the players in their team. Which, although it would mean that the plot hole I mentioned in the previous review is now invalid, opens up a couple of new ones. 1) Except for the games that they are playing against Daniel's teammates, George Listz's team are assumed to have won the rest of their matches in the last round. For some strange inexplicable reason, everyone knows that. 2) The tournament rule that only the best 5 players from each team will be counted. It could be possible that David Klass means that only 5 boards from each round will be counted for each team, but that would result in a weird situation where teams would prefer getting 5 wins per round rather than 6 wins, as the player who lost for that round would get an easier matchup next round, so I'm going to take it that it's the best 5 players who are counted. Daniel is the weakest in his team. His score wouldn't be counted, unless he managed to overtake one of the two absent teammates. It's possible that that's precisely what happened, but given that he is the weakest, to say that it's weird that no one brought this up would be an understatement.