Peter Leko is content because his legacy lives on.

<JASAHA: Based on what I've seen in this tournament I think So needs an injection for Fighting Chess a la Kasparov. He has the skills but needs more advancing.>

In my view, and I could be wrong on this, I am simply guessing: it seems to me that Wesley had something to prove. He needed to prove that he can draw games rather easily if he chose to. Wesley is really an attacker, who has unfortunately discovered that his attacks can be weathered by the Carlsen's and Giri's et al ie. top 10 Super GMs, and the minutest inaccuracies or weaknesses arising from unsuccessful attacks, severely punished.

It appears to me that Wesley has usually lost when he took a risk in attacking or playing dynamically against this échélon. He may have therefore decided to prove that he can draw easily as it takes great courage to risk losing in order to win, especially on this level where the stakes are the highest.

Very droll, as you know he committed suicide in despair at the state of the world, and the rise of the NAZIS etc as well as the rather forlorn situation he found himself in South America.

I read that novella recently. It is quite good. I believe Zweig wrote other novels and was quite popular in his time. The description of the master who beat the World Champion on the ship is great especially the how he came to get into studying chess and playing 'mental chess' and analysing games, imaginary games, and the two sides of himself.

Insanely famous. The years before their double suicide, they toured several South American countries and were received by heads of state and high government officials, feted like modern rock stars. They were perhaps the most photograph couple in the Americas during those times and Zweig was very much in demand as a lecturer.

Of course they were away from their friends, country and family. Of course they were depressed by the war. Of course they didn't have access to a good library, and Lotte was having recurrent asthma attacks and they were childless and weren't used to Brazilian summer heat.

But they were famous, they had money, they ate good food, had a servant and a dog and lived in paradise-like peaceful place surrounded by nature and away from the clutches of the world war. They had chess. Yet they found no reason to go on living and killed themselves.

In contrast, millions were then in hellish conditions brought by the cruel war, deprived of almost everything (especially in those death camps put up by the Nazis) yet they found reason to live and fought and a few of them managed to survive.

Which only shows that life is, indeed, like chess: when you are losing you mightily try to find ways to survive and get at least a draw. But when you are winning, you unconsciously try to find a way to blunder and lose.>

Fascinating. I got to Zweig as I am a writer myself, and a book launch, a friend of mine ( a published writer and bibliophile etc ) said (probably a little facetiously, that 'we' thought you might be playing chess...he had been reading Zweig's book (the chess one which I also later read)...I couldn't get the name as he knows a lot of languages (but not German so well) and pronounced it properly...then I realised. I later read it....

Re your comments, I aggree. But things are more complex. I think people who are suffering - and remember that a lot of Jew and others who were not happy with the coming war etc, committed suicide: these were often people well to do, sensitive etc: but others, of whatever ilk, ignored events and as we know many survived - so I suppose the point is, one can be materially in great shape etc but inside the sensitivity affects one.

It is an unusual suicide though. I once read a book on suicides and the main reason seemed to be financial stress and the accompanying anxiety and depression. Of course people react differently to stress and there is no correlation: that is as many of the poor suffer mental illness as the better off and so on.

But the chess point is interesting. The most difficult thing, as most of us know, is that changeover from being winning in a game to losing or facing a setback. Sometimes I collapse, and curse myself. One player over here, an ex-NZ Champion, resigned a game in a won position! I think he was playing a GM. I resigned in a game where I won a piece with a nice tactic, then my opponent counter attacked, which wasn't very civil...and after the game I found with good play, a draw.

But there was one game when I was first time in the A Grade, I hadn't played for years and my rating had slipped and slowly I crept up, but in almost my first tournament, I became convinced on about move 22 that, not that I was lost, but a kind of voice said: "X is one of the best players in NZ, you are in all likelihood going to lose, there is no point playing on." And I resigned! I had a kind of complex about this young player (he is very good but I kept getting won positions against him and blowing it, or making mistakes against him, unforced blunders) but this one was quite strange. As if I had been hypnotized to lose. I hadn't been. I just suddenly resigned. Examining the game at home I couldn't work out why I had resigned.

But I did a similar thing about 2 years ago. I had worked out some brilliant and accurate calculation that showed my opponent, if he saw the ideas, couldn't make the tactical complications he might have. He didn't go for it at all, then a few moves later, I suddenly thought: "He has this, and this, and then I will be in trouble if not losing, I have to make a sacrifice to save the game, I have to sac and go on the attack"...which I did, then my game collapsed in few moves and I resigned. I had deluded myself. It was not the case. Such things are quite strange.

There are survivors of wars and holocaust who seemed to have survived by all indications, only to succumb to suicide later. It seems logical to think that a person, after clinging so relentlessly to life in the face of evil and suffering, would cling to it even more when the ordeal has passed. But the human mind is far more complex to allow just this type of A to B deduction.

As for hope, it could be for or against the act of suicide. There are religious radicals who would give up their lives for a heavenly "hope." Others live on in the hope of a better tomorrow (although they too will die some day). There are also those who commit protracted suicide and still enjoy life: incorrigible smokers and drinkers, for example. ;-)

<Richard Taylor: <<epistle> Your summation 'has truth' as they say, but lacks logic of course as the picture is far more complex. As I say, sometimes people who have all those things, suddenly, for no apparent reason, not even war or illness, commit suicide. But usually there are causes...>

Suicide, of course, is the conscious choice of death and the implementtaion of that choice.

If chess mirrors life and vice versa, and if resignation in chess is the equivalent of suicide in life, then I think suicide is not at all mysterious as you portray it to be.

For there are always three kinds:

1.suicide/resignation due to hopelessness;

2. suicide/resignation due to intolerable suffering; and

3. suicide/resignation due to shame.

Suicide/resignation is always at least one of these, or a combiantion of two or all three.

I've never resigned a won game. Neither have I resigned due to intolerable suffering. Why? Because I am not a professional player. I do not suffer in a losing game. For I lose nothing by losing as there is always the next game to enjoy. Nothing is hopeless to me. Even if I only have a lone king while my opponent has a queen with his king I still play on sometimes for there is always hope of a stalemate.

But I often resign out of shame. If I am playing with a close friend, I won't feel any shame playing on with that lone king. But against strangers or mere acquaintances, I'd surely just resign out of shame, as playing on would demean me in the eyes of my opponent.

That's a very common form of suicide in Japan where people place much value on personal honor.

"Suicide" due to madness I do not really consider suicide since the act should be free, knowing and voluntary.

People doing "suicide bombings" are not really impelled by hope (of a reward in heaven) but by the hopelessness in the present world--they fall under the first category (otherwise, if it is really hope, why do the final exit now--why not live life some more and just wait for the final exit which we all know is inevitable anyway?)

That is not a 4th category. It is very much under the 1st--hopelessness.

I agree that objectively we can say (especially analysing a position at home after the game) that there are won(or drawn) games lost by the mistake of resignation.

In chess, resignation is no really quite the same as suicide! Suicide would be to deliberately sabotage one's own game. That might happen...

Otherwise there are good reasons in chess tournaments for draws and resignation.

One good reason (and I hear GM Christian say this commenting on a chess match online) is that a draw or a (sensible resignation) means that you can recuperate, and prepare for the next game. People feel differently about chess and differently at different times. Svidler, for example, admitted he found it awful to lose, and hard to recover psychologically from a loss (this is the important point for chess players, knowing when to fight on when fortunes are lost, not when you are a R down in a hopeless position or whatever).

I think suicide is very different. People do this for reasons that even they may not understand.

I don't buy into the stupidity of the ritual Japanese suicides (I would say that neither do the majority of Japanese).

Shakespeare has Mark Anthony, even when all is lost, unable to kill himself. He does it, or tries to, when his servant does it to himself, but then Mark Anthony fails to kill himself. We know that he didn't really want to die.

It is really rare that people die for honour or love etc but it does happen. There are more complex reasons: bullying at school for example and constant humiliation by others or things like that.

Suicide bombing is a form of resistance, as with the Palestinians etc. It is the last ditch thing. But it needs people in a kind of, hard to say, trance like state, or very angry or whatever. Religion or some belief - Communism, Freedom, Patriotism, or whatever, all abstractions which somehow the human mind / brain utilizes.

Many who think they would commit suicide for all the reasons of hopelessness or honour or financial stress or whatever, simply do not do it for the reason that we are 'wired' to survive as long as we can.

If life is just one chess game, and if a chess game is just like one life, then resignation is suicide. Resignation is a choice, with one's mental faculties intact, and done on one's own terms.

Sabotaging one's game--with the end view of losing it--is resignation or defeat as well, only a delayed one compared to an immediate surrender. In fact, resignation is an act of sabotage (of one's game) with a more immediate consequence.

Resignation to recuperate or rest and prepare for the next game is not really done for <that> reason. Something precedes it: Hopelessness, unbearable suffering or shame or any combination of the three. One does not resign a game he knows is winning so he can rest for the next game.

Some suicides are consoled by the thought that they will live again somewhere, somehow, sometime. But they do not kill themselves for that belief. This is but a final consolation, the immediate reason for the decision would be something else.

A self-inflicted death when one does not know why he is doing it is not suicide. It is more akin to an accident, like walking on a highway in a befuddled state and getting run over by a truck. Or a player accidentally flicking his king down in a losing position and absentmindedly shaking the hand of his opponent.

One can imagine a thousand different explanations for some recalled acts of suicide, successful or not, but they always fall into those three major categories of resignation and surrender in chess.

― Thomas Bernhard