Petrosianic: <How come more than half of the simul games I see, he loses?>Maybe because most of the wins are unremarkable, and of the "Bambi Meets Godzilla" type, not worth commenting on.
Even this one, though White plays the attack impeccably, makes me wonder what Black's rating was. I find it hard to imagine that anyone over 1800 would have played 13...c4.
<I guess the losers find a way to "misplace" their scoresheets...>
Oh yes, it's all their "fault", of course. But that presumes there <is> a fault, which presumes that Fischer <wanted> these games saved. Is that very likely?
In the 70's, after the first Fischer Complete Game Collection came out, someone wrote a letter to Larry Evans, pointing out an easy win that Fischer missed in the only Fischer-Saidy game that Saidy managed to draw.
(This game, in fact. As an exercise, see how many of you can spot it without computer aid:
Fischer vs Saidy, 1957
)
Evans commented that there was something morbid in publishing every possible game available from a player, even casual and simul games. In those days, the games you usually saw were from Best Games collections and tournament books. You'd never have even seen a game from something as informal as a 50/50 Swiss System Tournament unless Fischer went out of his way to make it available. But these days, there's no such thing as casual chess any more. Any game, however trivial, makes it into a database where people go over it with the same scrutiny they would a world championship game. It's almost Orwellian: "Little Brother Is Watching You."
Since then, there have been Complete Game Collections done for other players. I always feel like I'm reading someone else's private mail when I look at games like this. They never wanted them seen, not even the wins. There are maybe a few very remarkable ones that deserve to be seen, like this one:
Capablanca vs Botvinnik, 1925
...but even those I'd prefer to omit, given Chessgames.com's unusual practice of lumping casual games in with serious ones to tabulate lifetime scores. Look up Botvinnik vs. Capablanca, and it will, erroneously, tell you that Botvinnik beat Capablanca +2-1=5, because they're counting a simul game in the equation.
sac: 14.axb6
