Wikipedia:WikiProject Chess/Review/Swindle (chess)

I have put a ton of work into this article, and think it is quite comprehensive, well-sourced, and has excellent examples. I have looked at a lot of sources, and I frankly think that this article covers the subject better than anything I've seen in the literature. There are a lot of books along the lines of "How to Defend Difficult Positions," such as "The Art of Defense in Chess" (Soltis), "The Art of Defence in Chess" (Polugaevsky/Damsky), etc., but there is not much on swindles as such: how to try to rescue yourself from a clearly lost position. And I haven't seen anything that treats swindles in a comprehensive way, as this article does. Apart from Marshall, who reveled in swindles, most authors tend to shy away from the subject, considering swindles somehow uncouth. Even great swindles usually don't make it into players' "best games" collections, since people like to show off games where they played brilliantly the entire way, rather than games where they played badly, got lost positions, then bamboozled their way out. (For example, Bouaziz-Miles, a swindling masterpiece, is not in Miles' biography, and Karpov's "My 300 Best Games" doesn't include Karpov-Csom. Very few players have ever heard of Beliavsky-Christiansen, maybe the greatest swindling game of all time.) Anyway, enough blathering. I hope you like the article. Thanks for your consideration. Krakatoa (talk) 06:47, 4 March 2008 (UTC)/

WITHDRAWN BY PROPONENT This article is obviously unworthy, and should be deleted instead. Krakatoa (talk) 08:15, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Comment: Thanks a lot for your work on this article, it looks very comprehensive. I don't have time to go through it now, but I can tell you that the biggest hurdle to get this article featured will be (a) the topic, (b) the style of the article. This is the sad reality of featured articles! Now I am not saying that the topic isn't worth being featured, or that the article is written in a bad style, just saying that if you are trying to make this article featured, you should be prepared being attacked on both. I ran the article to the automatic peerreviewer bot, and here is the output (this should help improving (b)):

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question:

• Please expand the lead to conform with guidelines at Wikipedia:Lead. The article should have an appropriate number of paragraphs as is shown on WP:LEAD, and should adequately summarize the article.^[?]
• Consider adding more links to the article; per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (links) and Wikipedia:Build the web, create links to relevant articles.^[?]
• Per Wikipedia:Context and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates), months and days of the week generally should not be linked. Years, decades, and centuries can be linked if they provide context for the article.^[?]
• Per Wikipedia:Context and Wikipedia:Build the web, years with full dates should be linked; for example, if January 15, 2006 appeared in the article, link it as January 15, 2006.^[?]
• Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (headings), headings generally do not start with articles ('the', 'a(n)'). For example, if there was a section called ==The Biography==, it should be changed to ==Biography==.^[?]
• Please reorder/rename the last few sections to follow guidelines at Wikipedia:Guide to layout.^[?]
• This article may need to undergo summary style, where a series of appropriate subpages are used. For example, if the article is United States, then an appropriate subpage would be History of the United States, such that a summary of the subpage exists on the mother article, while the subpage goes into more detail.^[?]
• The script has spotted the following contractions: didn't, didn't, Don't, if these are outside of quotations, they should be expanded.
• As done in WP:FOOTNOTE, footnotes usually are located right after a punctuation mark (as recommended by the CMS, but not mandatory), such that there is no space in between. For example, the sun is larger than the moon [2]. is usually written as the sun is larger than the moon.[2]^[?]

Voorlandt (talk) 19:55, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! I will definitely look into all of that. I didn't realize that getting an article featured was such a ritual, although I should have expected as much. I don't generally look at the featured articles, but looked at today's on the Philadelphia Inquirer. No doubt it's impolitic to say so, but I was pretty underwhelmed. Ungrammatical sentences, at least one misspelling, whole paragraphs making assorted factual assertions without a single reference, etc. Krakatoa (talk) 23:16, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Yeah I am just mentioning it, since I had a rather bad experience with Bughouse Chess. For the article I read several books, spend weeks researching and contacted a dozen of people for info. In my obviously biased opinion it is the most balanced and complete essay ever written on bughouse. Nevertheless, it was critized for its length and for the lack of history section. Although it is hardly my fault the history is unknown! What matters for FA more is (1) the topic; (2) the length of the article and perhaps the most important one (3) whether it looks good! Shorter articles, with less text are read far more thoroughly than long articles, and therefore far more prone to critic. I have also seen many long FA articles riddled with mistakes. That said, don't let my bad experience discourage you. The first step is of course getting this article through A and GA review. I think it needs a little bit more work, but not much. Voorlandt (talk) 09:02, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Bughouse chess indeed looks like a very thorough article, and I'm sorry you didn't make it. But I appreciate learning of your unhappy experience: that way I won't take it too hard when Swindle (chess) gets shot down . . . . Krakatoa (talk) 23:40, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Comments This is clearly a very good article on a difficult and understudied subject. Apart from Voorlandt's comments, here are some additional remarks if we want to narrow the gap to FA-class:

• The article includes Original Analysis, and that is forbidden in Wikipedia! See for example the 38th reference.
• In the lead, I do not understand the difference between the first sentence "In chess, a swindle is a ruse by which a player [...] achieves a win or draw instead of the expected loss" and the second sentence "It may also refer more generally to obtaining a win or draw from a clearly losing position". Probably the first sentence refers to one-mover and the second is more general, but this could be more explicit.
• As the lead states that certain players [...] have become famous for their swindling exploits, I would expect to see a section in the article on famous swindlers (with due references, of course), otherwise it is just reckoning.
• Some diagrams have a legend that is too long. I would expect the legends to be no more than one line.
• I would suggest to systematically include in the legend of the diagrams the move number at which is position is obtained.
• Most sections in Recurrent themes are just a collection of examples. Would it be possible to add a bit more substance (I mean, some general considerations in each chapter) to make it a bit more "encyclopedic" ?
• In the section Perpetual check there are interesting remarks about the pieces that are good for attack but suddenly bad for defence, making it impossible to the player to adapt to the new situation. Maybe these considerations could be generalised, developped and put into the section Practical consideration as they are not valid only for perpetual check.
• The section Practical consideration is the most encyclopedic one. In order to promote it, I would propose to put it before the section Recurrent themes, and to split it into different subsections (for the moment it is too long).
• There seems to be some syntax problems here and there (although I am a pure patzer in syntax), just to name a few:
  • The first sentence of the section Classic example lacks an ending point.
  • Same section, the second sentence has a reference placed in the middle of the text, which is not in line with the Formating Guidelines, as far as I know.
  • Same section, sentence but Marshall saw an opportunity for "a last 'swindle", there seems to be a lonesome comma in the quotation.
  • In "de Firmian-Shirazi", in the sentence "since 31.Qxe4 allows 31...Rfl#." there is a "l" instead of a "1".
  • The sentence "Draw by perpetual check is another oft-seen way of swindling" when the word "often" is misspelled.
  • The sentence "However, Krogius warns that one should deliberately get into time trouble only after after a detailed assessment of a number of considerations" contains twice the word "after".
• There is no History section; that could be useful to know if there are more or less swindles than in the past, e.g. due to the improvement of chess computers.
• There is no example with a chess computer, whereas I believe they are very good in swindles due to their great tactical abilities.
• The consequences of famous swindles could be explained further, e.g. for "the swindle of the century".
• In the Stalemate section, a sentence says "Another famous Marshall swindle is Marshall-MacClure, New York 1923 (diagram at right)" while I understand it should be "(diagram at left)".
• In the Weak back rank section, the first sentence says "Mating threats along the opponent's back rank often enable one to win or draw from a lost position." which is precisely the definition of swindles, if I understand correctly. Therefore a more consise formulation could be something like "Mating threats along the opponent's back rank often enable one to swindle."
• Having the diagrams first and the explanations next could be found a bit confusing for the casual reader, especially as there is no clear separation between the different articles. Maybe sometimes some subsections could be used ?
• In the example "Chigorin-Schlechter, Ostend 1905", I find there are too many exclamation marks in the explanations, as I would only give an exclamation mark to 44...Qc7, the other ones being nor difficult to find, nor forced.
• I do not see the point of putting wikilinks for years, like 1997, especially when the sentence has nothing special to do with the concerned year.
• The article contains some Id. references that do nothing apart from taking space, while it is better in Wikipedia to cite several times the same reference without creating a separate line every time.
• In the first sentence about "de Firmian-Shirazi", we can read "GM de Firmian is ahead three pawns" while I am not sure it has been explained above that "GM" stands for Grandmaster ? Same remark for "IM Shirazi".
• The difference between a swindle and a blunder is not clearly explained. I mean, do you have a swindle every time there is a trick in the position ? Or is it only when you play second-best move that sets up a trap ?
• I am not sure the "Zukertort-Steinitz, London 1883" example is a good one, as I do not see the swindle. I mean, Black has sacrificed an exchange to decentralised the White queen and get an attack, then the attack succeeds because White blunders. But where is the ruse ?
• Same remark on "Donner-Fischer": is it really a swindle ? it looks like just a blunder from Fischer.
• Same remark on most of the examples in the Material insufficiency section: not really swindles to me, just good play from the side with the less material. This is acknowledgeg in the article, but then why keep them here ? A good example of swindle could be the recent game "Grischuck-Polgar" when Polgar managed to save a K+N+2P/K+N endgame.
• Very generally, in a FA review there could be some critics regarding the need for an article on the subject, for example:
  • What is the need for an article on "swindling in chess" ? I mean, there could just be an article called "Swindle (games)" ? Is there any way swindles in chess are particular, e.g. compared with swindles in Go or Checkers ?
  • Why is this theme encyclopedic, and not just trivia ? Given the references, it seems noone has bothered to publish some work dedicated to this subject, so maybe this is just a collection of anecdotes ?
  • Why is this theme encyclopedic, and not just a definition ? Why not just moving the definition to Wiktionnary, instead of an article in Wikipedia ?

I hope you don't find these comments too harsh or pointy, of course the aim is just to improve the article and maybe prepare a FA review, which are often very depressing. SyG (talk) 13:57, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Close the review As the nominator has withdrawn the nomination for the article, I shall close the review. SyG (talk) 21:19, 18 March 2008 (UTC)