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BGonline.org Forums
Did the full-team consultation format work well?
Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Tuesday, 6 April 2010, at 2:46 a.m.
I'm curious whether the concept of a full-team consultation in the Denmark/World finale worked out well in practice. It's an entertaining concept that appeals to spectators, so in that sense it was surely a success. What I'm asking, though, is whether it actually promoted a higher standard of play.
Since the players were so strong anyway, perhaps it's not possible to measure whether the level of play was raised. But one can at least ask whether everybody on the team contributed. I watched part of the video and it seemed to me that there were relatively few people involved in the actual decision making for the majority of plays.
Backgammon doesn't seem like a game where there's a workload you can effectively distribute over a team of players. In chess, by contrast, I can imagine having different people analyze different variations in a particularly sharp, tactical position. If there's a well-hidden win then it might be found more quickly when several people are searching different branches. Of course this is just speculation since I have never observed a large-team consultation game in chess. I read about one such game (in one of Andy Soltis's books), played informally, between 5 grandmasters in one room and 4 grandmasters in another, with someone ferrying moves between the two. It produced a fascinating game, but as far as I know this was an isolated event, so it's hard to draw conclusions from it.
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