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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)[reply]
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