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By Root 324 0

the game, and also appointed four official advisors to the World Team. These were outstanding teenage chess players, among the best of their age in the world, although none were in Kasparov’s class. On each move, the advisors published their recommendations on the Microsoft website, and, if they wanted, a commentary explaining the recommendation. This was done well before World Team voting closed, so the recommendations could influence the voting. As the game progressed several other strong chess players also offered advice. Particularly influential, although not always heeded, was the GM School, a Russian chess club containing several grandmasters.

Most of the advisors and other strong players ignored the discussion on the game forum, making no attempt to engage with the bulk of people making up the World Team, and so distancing themselves from the people whose votes decided the World Team’s moves. But one of the advisors did actively engage with the World Team. This was an extraordinary young chess player named Irina Krush. Fifteen years old, Krush had recently become the US Women’s chess champion. Although not as highly rated as two of the other World Team advisors, Krush was certainly in the international elite of junior chess players.

Unlike her expert peers, Krush devoted considerable time and attention to the World Team’s game forum. Shrugging off abuse and insults, she extracted many of the best ideas and analyses from the forum, wrote extensive commentary describing the thinking behind her recommnded moves, and gradually built up a network of strong chess-playing correspondents, including some of the grandmasters offering advice.

Simultaneously, Krush and her management team, a company named Smart Chess, built a publicly accessible analysis tree for the game, showing possible moves and countermoves, and containing the best arguments for and against different lines of play. These arguments were drawn not only from her own analysis, but also from the game forum and from her correspondence with others, including the GM School. This analysis tree helped the World Team coordinate their efforts, prevented duplication of effort, and served as a reference point for the World Team during discussion and voting.

As the game went on, Krush’s role on the World Team became pivotal. Part of the reason was the quality of her play. On move 10, Krush suggested a move that Kasparov called “a great move, an important contribution to chess,” blowing the game wide open, and taking it into uncharted chess territory. This move raised her standing with the World Team, and helped her assume a coordinating role. Between moves 10 and 50 Krush’s recommended move was always played by the World Team, even when it disagreed with the recommendations of the other three advisors to the World Team, or with influential commentators such as the GM School.

As a result, some people say the game was really Kasparov versus Krush, despite the fact that Kasparov would ordinarily have beaten Krush easily. Kasparov himself has said he believed he was really playing against Smart Chess, Krush’s management team. Krush has dismissed both points of view. In a series of essays written after the game she explained the thinking behind her recommended moves, and how she drew on ideas from a multitude of sources, ranging from anonymous posters on the game forum to grandmasters. She repeatedly explains how she changed and in some cases abandoned her own ideas, convinced by someone else’s superior analysis. Thus, Krush was neither playing alone nor as part of a small team, but rather was at the center of the coordination effort for the entire World Team. As a result she had the best understanding of all the suggestions being made by members of the World Team. Other, stronger players didn’t understand the different points of view as well, and so didn’t make as good decisions about what move to make next, nor did they have the standing with the World Team to influence the voting as strongly as Krush. Krush’s coordinating role thus brought the best ideas of all contributors