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Comment by modin | Hacker News Reader

I played Kasparov in 2017, in a setting similar to Capablanca in the ingress of the article. Whilst I managed 50+ moves, he was sometimes struggling in a way I wouldn't have expected for a GM. It so happened that our chess board was turned "upside down" by the organisers (we didn't notice until it was time to start; white was on row 7,8 instead of 1,2), and I have always wondered how much that mattered.

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I’m surprised neither of you noticed immediately. I would have thought it as jarring as a mistuned musical instrument.

We did notice immediately, but we had the first board to play following a grand speaker introduction, and we just went with it instead of resetting the board with all eyes on us and making the hosts look bad. Speaking for myself at least, I can't believe he didn't notice immediately too.

It made my noting down of the moves quite hard.

> I would have thought it as jarring as a mistuned musical instrument.

This was exactly my thought, how much it mattered to him at his level.

> I can't believe he didn't notice immediately too.

Is it possible that maybe Kasparov noticed and just like you, he went with it instead of making the hosts look bad?

This would be my guess. It's hard to imagine Kasparov didn't notice. There are variants of chess where the pieces are organized differently and obviously as the game progresses beyond the opening you can get into all sorts of positions. I'm sure Kasparov can calculate from any given arrangement of the pieces. The difference would be that moves that he would play automatically because of preparation now have to be thought through deeper.

I'm impressed parent survived that many moves. Must be a good chess player even with the simultaneous game setting.

That's what I think, and also what I think I wrote. Sorry if it's unclear, I'm not a native English speaker.

No worries.

Such good manners. :) I would have politely asked to swap the royal pieces around.

I think you mean sideways, not upside-down? There should be a white square in the bottom-right corner from both players’ point of view.

No, upside-down, or rather rotated 180°. You have rows 1-8 and columns a-h (which are usually written in lower case, as upper case are used for piece value). h1 and a8 are the white corners you mention, with rooks on them initially. White's "home" are on row 1 and 2. These coordinates are usually printed on the board.

In our case black's home was on row 1,2. The king and queen was thankfully positioned "correctly" given this mishap, as normally the white queen are on a white square (and likewise for black queen and square), but not in our case. White still had short castling on his right hand side.

What I wonder is if Kasparov (or any expert) remembers movements from the coordinates, rather than (or in addition to) seeing the pieces on the board, and how much this impacted our game.

That’s interesting. I’ve never played chess on a physical board that had printed row and column ID’s. I’m surprised anyone would care about that while playing, since it’s irrelevant to the rules, but I’m no more than a casual player.

My personal opinion? It seems moderately unlikely that a player as strong as Kasparov, who could have played the entire game against you blindfolded, would have been adversely affected by this. Most strong players' personal chessboards have no coordinates written on them at all. (Mine certainly don't, and I'm not even strong. Identifying squares is just trivial.)

He probably just wasn't putting much mental energy into your game, as he had other simultaneous games to worry about, and then a move you made perhaps caught him by surprise in some way.

(It also seems unlikely coming from Kasparov specifically - he has historically raised quite a fuss, even when on camera, when simul exhibitions were not conducted to his standards. If the board bothered him, I think he would have had it flipped.)

Besides the mismatched board, could you sense something different in his play compared to other people? Some kind of exceptional presence?

Kasparov could have played the game with his eyes closed. He was not distracted by markings on the board.

At first I was imagining this was a blindfolded game, in which case this would have been especially surprising and impressive!

That would've been impressive for sure! A somewhat recent world record[1] I just found shows a blindfolded simul for 48 boards, with 80% win! (All boards correctly turned, I'd expect and hope!)

The games in the article must've been a normal "simul"[2], which was what I enjoyed playing too.

[1]: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/72345-mos... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_exhibition

Surely when playing blindfolded it doesn't really matter how the boards are turned?

Moves are played by square names, and with the board turned around, the king and queen are on the wrong squares (not to mention all other pieces, at least given their color). I imagine it would be an utter nightmare, but have no experience with it myself.

Well yes but the squares are the same. The king starts on E1 by definition, even if the board is turned around so that the markings would indicate it starts on D8. It might be confusing to the person reading out the move to the blindfolded player, but the blindfolded player would not have to deal with anything out of the ordinary.

Yes, the person would have to both call out and take in corrected squares, or else put the onus on Kasparov (which is what I was somehow imagining they did...).

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