DD 13: Resign or Hand Over to Hikaru

Hand over to Hikaru

or when should you resign?

When should you resign?

According to Ben Finegold, lower rated players should never resign. This is important advice and I fully agree with the statement. At the same time, I’ve reached the rating level where it’s becoming less and less rewarding to keep on fighting. At some point, it’s time to admit defeat.
Essentially, it's a trade off, where I’m weighing the chance of winning against the effort required and the alternative benefit of starting a new game. For me, the deciding factor is whether I see chances to win. No matter how small. As long as I have a chance to win, I will go on playing. Only after all future prospects of winning are gone, I will resign.

This means I will only continue playing a position with zero winning chances, if there is a reasonable chance for me to win on time. I will also keep on playing positions with engine evaluations of -60 as long as I can see a potential mate happening when my opponent blunders. When one moment of inattention by my opponent can change the game, I’ll go on looking for that back rank mate or keep hopping my Knight around waiting for a forking opportunity.

The game is over when my chances of winning are gone. If we are in an endgame and my opponent succeeds in cutting off my King, making it impossible for me to stop one or more of his pawns from promoting, I will resign. Even when he will need 10 to 20 moves to convert, as long as it’s inevitable. In fact, I consider playing a crucial move that destroys all my hope, an act of mercy.

The worst scenario is when you are playing a game that’s pretty much lost, but not over. You have almost no chance of winning, but there is one tiny sliver of hope. Hope is not even the right word. I have no hope, but I have identified a way to still win. When my opponent plays just good enough to keep me at bay, but not enough to definitively secure a win.

It’s difficult to determine when a position becomes unwinnable. How much behind do you need to be? This is of course arbitrary, so I decided to use Hikaru Nakamura as my imaginary arbiter. What this means is that I created a rule for myself:

I only allow myself to resign if Hikaru would not be able to win or draw the game from this exact position against the same opponent.

Handover to Hikaru

It’s an imaginary bet that I have with Hikaru, like a thought experiment. It works as follows. Whenever I am about to resign a game, I enter into a conversation with Hikaru and we discuss another scenario. Instead of me resigning the game, I hand over control to Hikaru, who will continue from that point on. I can’t disclose the figures me and imaginary Hikaru discussed, these numbers are purely for illustration. The idea is that for every game he takes over for me:

• if he loses the game, he pays me $10
• if he is able to draw the game, I pay him $20
• If he wins I have to pay him $100

It’s just a helpful guideline I use before resigning. Whenever I feel like giving up, I ask myself the same question: If Hikaru takes over from this position and manages a draw or even a win, it will cost me money. Am I absolutely sure he doesn’t have a chance?

Why Hikaru?

Technically, the same argument can be used with Stockfish. I would have called this article Switching to Stockfish but the gist would remain unchanged. And Stockfish is demonstrably better at chess than any human player. I just prefer humans over engines, when I create imaginary bets in my head.

Speed Chess Championship

Another reason is that he just feels right to use as an example. While I was watching the coverage of chess.com Speed Chess Championship, something caught my attention. I saw him play matches that looked undecided for a while, where he and his opponent went head-to-head in the Blitz section, until it was time for Bullet chess and he completely obliterated his opponents. In Bullet chess he is known to be a dominant force. That’s the format where he crushes his opponents and he wins most of his games. If you just look at the results, you can see he wins more than his opponents, but I felt that was only half the story.

While watching the game, it stood out to me how often commentators referred to his resilience and resourcefulness defending. It was a recurring theme. He was facing the best players in the world and often got into positions that appeared completely lost, but against Hikaru, you still had to convert to a win. With only single digit seconds on the clock that’s difficult even for the best players in the world.

I really don’t know if he is actually a better defender than other players, but in my head he became the symbol of unbeatability.

Bonus Clip

There is a clip where Hikaru plays MrBeast in increasingly more difficult handicap matches.
MrBeast, at the time of the recording, was barely a beginner. He had a basic understanding of how the pieces move but no idea how to play chess. Pairing him against Hikaru is a total mismatch. Given the difference in playing abilities, you need to drastically change the odds.

In a way, no matter how much you change the odds, Hikaru’s dominance over a player like Mr Beast is not going to be impressive. Yet, the way Hikaru played still amazed me. Later in the video, the odds became absurd. It was no longer about beating Mr Beast, it was about finding opportunities where none should be possible.

For me, Hikaru is a symbol of resilience in chess. He can win games he should not be able to win

Practicing Lost Positions

There is one more argument for me to keep playing lost positions. It is because I want to practice. I’m forcing myself to play on, even when it’s unlikely I can get any result. Because there is going to be a game in the future, where I’m way behind but I can still win if I play the right moves. I want to be prepared for that moment.

Levy Rozman is my influence here, he helped me with finding a strategy and focus in games like this. He taught me: “What to do when you are behind? You create chaos!”.
This shifted my perspective from thinking ‘my position is lost, why bother?’, to thinking ‘how can I create chaos?’. Even if this current game is hopeless, I’m going to challenge myself to play to the best of my abilities. This experience will help me later on when I play a game where I do have a chance.

Unwinnable Game (example)

This game illustrates the dilemma: my brain tells me it’s rational to resign, but the voices in my head hold me back.

• When I am behind, I hear Levy telling me I should create chaos.
• Whenever I think about resigning, my imaginary gambling buddy Hikaru whispers in my ear he will find a way to win the game that I couldn’t win (losing imaginary money).
• As a final resort I hear Ben Finegold telling me to never resign.
• Worst case scenario, I can consider it a learning experience.

Ideally, this doesn’t work. Once you collect enough evidence that it’s useless to go one, you can safely resign. And then this happens:

I was hoping I had reached to the point where I could safely resign a lost position. Alas, it appears I still have to fight for every game no matter how pointless it seems!

Update

In Q2 of this year I've been doing very well in positions that were pretty much lost, so I wrote another article, called Progress Q2 King of Counterplay.