World Chess Champs start tomorrow

J.R. wrote:

Ol Grumpus wrote:

Carlsen will take it. I just wish they started the games at 5:30 pm local time instead of 3:30 pm, so that it would be easier to watch them live in North America.

Are you serious. Do people really sit and watch a chess match for hours?

Well not me, that's for sure.

Same goes for a marathon or any distance event!

In the recent book "The Sports Gene," David Epstein nicely summarizes a 2007 study of competitive chess players of varying strengths. Among the players who achieved master (2200 Elo) level, the average time to reach that level was over 11,000 hours of practice, with a range of 3,000 to over 25,000 hours. Of course, the great majority of tournament players never get close to master level. Also, tournament players are, especially in the adult population, a highly self-selected group, unlike the collection of people who show up at many road races. I'm confident that anyone who reaches 2200 in one year has very rare talent, and I think that anyone who reaches 2000 in one year is also likely to have a fairly unusual aptitude for the game, although I believe that the use of computers in recent years has greatly accelerated the rate at which chess knowledge and skill can be acquired.

I find the comparison of chess and running ability to be interesting but intellectually hazardous. I was a tournament chess player in the 1970s and early 1980s, and participated in road races off and on for about thirty years beginning in the late 1970s. In my mid-twenties, my USCF rating got up to about 2200. At the time, I was probably about 32:30 in the 10k and maybe 2:33 or so in the marathon. I considered myself to be much more talented in chess, but I was more passionate about running, so I quit tournament chess to spend more time running, and eventually ran about 2:18 in the marathon and comparable performances in other events. (I would guess that my 10K time would have been around 29:40 or so on a sea-level loop course when I was in decent marathon condition.)

It surprises me to see some of the "equivalent" performances that have been suggested on this thread. Perhaps I had more talent in running or less talent in chess than I believed. On the other hand, I certainly didn't spend anywhere close to 11,000 hours on chess; maybe I just didn't devote myself as passionately to chess as I did to running. I don't know. But I would caution about making comparisons based on how one ranks within a self-selected group of chess-playing nerds and how one ranks within the collection of fat and thin, young and old, male and female participants in that modern social gathering called a road race.

JMartin wrote:

And it is Kasparov with a K.

It is pronounced Гаспаров, as most Russians with the name spell it, and as he did before he changed it from Гаспарян.

I would tell you how to pronounce it exactly, but I don't like you. Go ahead and keep saying Casper-off.

areusure? wrote:

J.R. wrote:

Are you serious. Do people really sit and watch a chess match for hours?

Well not me, that's for sure.

Same goes for a marathon or any distance event!

People are moving when running. Watching people sitting in chairs is not interesting and I'd rather do something else.

.

Any human ability can compared to any other human ability. All we need to do is measure performance validly, then rank the values in percentiles and compare them. By doing this, we can see how rare a performance is in any given activity.

It seems quite reasonable to believe that Anand and Farah are comparible in standing among competitors in their respective activities. And why would we not be able to say that a chess player who out performs 98% of all chess players is comparible to a runner who out performs 98% of all runners? The measurements might be more difficult as you look at the less capable performers but it should work in principle.

And why do you think chess players are more self-selected than runners are? I do not not think they are.

A 29:40 10k runner(male) is a higher level performer than a 2200 chess player.

Really interesting stuff. I'll post some further thoughts in the morning, but meanwhile a quick question: in your chess playing days, did you ever cross paths with Calvin Blocker? He was Ohio's best player in those years. I remember him hitting 2562 after a particularly dominant performance at the Ohio Chess Congress tournament [maybe 1981?]

And I guess if you ever played at the good ole Barpoint House of Backgammon here in NYC, you would have run into Asa Hoffmann. Man did I spend too many hours there my freshman year of college.

eh ???

you clearly have no clue about chess history

karpov hammered him in their 1st match leading 5 - 0 in a 1st to 6 match with unlimited games

kasparov then played for draw after draw trying to tire out the physically weak karpov & match abandoned at 5 - 3

anyone who was aware of karpov hammering out a 5 - 0 lead woud NOT post such nonsense about kasparov being better

that match more-or-less finished karpov physically & probably psychologically & thus a chess force

dkny64 wrote:

And I have to add, 1500s [at least when I was playing in the late 70s / early - mid 80s] were truly bad players - just not even close to as good at playing chess as 40 minute 10k runners are at running.

.

Subfive wrote:

It's difficulty to believe that you believe that; "anyone who takes chess truly seriously for one year can become an expert"????! That's ridiculous. Did you really play in tournaments as an A player?

You're correct about few people being able to break 30 min for 5 miles. The same applies to becoming an expert chess player.

And then you go and say that 1500 players are "truly bad players". Truly bad??? These are slightly above average tournament players. It seems over the top to say they are truly bad.

I apologize for making such an obnoxious comment. It's exactly the kind of comment I really dislike when it's made about runners of some given level of ability.

Anyway, yes, I really was an A player - I think my highest rating was somewhere in the 1850s.

As a runner, I've broken 40 for 10k - my PR is 39:12 - but in my case running at that level required much harder and smarter effort than I ever devoted to chess, so I reacted badly to the idea that a 40 minute 10k is the equivalent of a chess player with a rating of 1400.

I came up with the 200 x mph for 5M thing a few years ago and I don't think it's absurd, but clearly other people on this board see the correspondence differently. And since I never managed to hit 1900 as a chess player, I like a system where on a good day I can still hit 1900 as a runner.

I think in chess if you are not prodigious within a year, whether as a 12 year old or a older person picking the game up for the first time. Your potential is already written in stone. Running you can grind your way into respectability even if you were of the equivalent mediocrity in chess, you can truly work harder and longer and achieve something well beyond.

dkny64 wrote:

Really interesting stuff. I'll post some further thoughts in the morning, but meanwhile a quick question: in your chess playing days, did you ever cross paths with Calvin Blocker? He was Ohio's best player in those years. I remember him hitting 2562 after a particularly dominant performance at the Ohio Chess Congress tournament [maybe 1981?]

And I guess if you ever played at the good ole Barpoint House of Backgammon here in NYC, you would have run into Asa Hoffmann. Man did I spend too many hours there my freshman year of college.

I remember Calvin Blocker and Asa Hoffman from Chess Life, but never played either of them. Asa was consistently one of the most active players in the country. As you probably know, Asa was portrayed in a rather unflattering light in the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer."

Round 2: Another quick, uneventful draw.

If these guys are really that smart, they should be forced to do something more productive for society. Imagine having all that brain power and wasting it by playing games all day

Look, you've already outed yourself as not knowing anything about chess. That's fine. But don't make it worse by picking one data point (a drawn match) and trying to make a counter argument about it. You fail, now STFU

Bad Wigins wrote:

JMartin wrote:

And it is Kasparov with a K.

It is pronounced Гаспаров, as most Russians with the name spell it, and as he did before he changed it from Гаспарян.

I would tell you how to pronounce it exactly, but I don't like you. Go ahead and keep saying Casper-off.

Exactly. Kasparov, from Azerbaijan, changed it. It's pronounced Kasparov. So, I pronounce it as he does.

I'm sorry you don't like me. Just can't stand people who think spelling and grammar is more important than content. Makes me wonder if people actually read entire posts. I even corrected my spelling. Let it go.

Hank Moody wrote:

[quote]Camazotz wrote:

[quote]Hank Moody wrote:

You're joking right? Running might not be super mainstream but come on, don't be an idiot.

Uh, no, I'm not joking. I'm afraid that, to my mind, you betray a very, shall we say, immature perspective on life generally. For example, I (as do others here) know the names of both professional chess players and professional distance runners. At the same time, there are people who know only the names of professional distance runners and not those of any professional chess players. Conversely, there are people who know the names of professional chess players, but not that of any professional distance runners.

And, of course, there are people (surely the majority) that don't know the names of anyone in either group.

But that's point: people take interest in different things, in varying degrees of intensity of interest. What some people are fascinated by, others are wholly oblivious to. It's what the "make the world go 'round," to a great degree.

As I've gotten older, I've come to understand that the world makes a lot more sense if one realizes and accepts that, no, my way of looking at the world is not the only way there is.

So, Hank, my gentle suggestion to you is, wise up yourself, get out of the bubble you live in, and try to understand that the world out there in which other people live is a lot bigger, a hell of a lot bigger, then what you imagine in that pedestrian mind of yours. You do that, and I promise you, you won't find yourself so "shocked" so often.

That's what "not being an idiot" means when you're an actual grownup, you know?

I never played Blocker or Hoffmann but they were both very distinctive, memorable characters.

Blcoker was just kind of manic - in constant motion while he was playing, talking a mile a minute [often about himself] when he wasn't but also drawn to commenting on any game he happened to see.

I think Hoffmann was pretty much homeless when I was seeing him at the Barpoint House of Backgammon [formally known as "The Chess Center", but the sign over the entrance said Barpoint House of Backgammon, which is how I always thought of it] and may well have been sleeping there. He'd hustle chess and I believe other games too. It seems he's still alive, which is nice to see. I was upset when I saw Searching for Bobby Fischer not about how Asa was portrayed - I don't even clearly remember - but that they hadn't let him play himself because I'm sure he could have used the money and would have given viewers a better sense of what the chess world was really like in those years. [Ben Kingsley as Bruce Pandolfini - really? really???]

My sense is that a 2:18 marathoner is more like a 2500 than a 2200, but you've been a 2:18 marathoner and you've been a 2200, so you're in a much better position to comment on that than I am. I'm guessing that when you were a 2:18 guy, you were doing training that was very similar to what the best guys were doing, but you weren't quite as good as they were, and I would say that was my impression of the 2400-2500 types I met - they were immersed in chess the way the pros were, they just weren't quite as good.

apples and oranges wrote:

I think in chess if you are not prodigious within a year, whether as a 12 year old or a older person picking the game up for the first time. Your potential is already written in stone. Running you can grind your way into respectability even if you were of the equivalent mediocrity in chess, you can truly work harder and longer and achieve something well beyond.

I knew at least one chess player who never seemed very talented but worked very hard and slowly but surely made his way to 2200. I kind of doubt he got further than that, but I stopped playing, so who knows?

A couple of the 2400s I knew were definitely more talented than that 2200 was, but they too had worked very hard to get from the 2000-2100 level to 2400. [one of those guys had a rating of, like, 1176 when the USCF had its great computer meltdown in 1977(?) which led to some pretty good players shaking their heads after he crushed them.]

A lot of this can end up devolving into arguments about what's good and what's mediocre. Is a 2200 a good chess player or just "a random master" who can't really challenge a pro?

I don't mean to suggest that a 2200 is comparable to a 2:18. But I've been surprised by some of the proposed equivalencies, like 2200 (which takes a lot of work to achieve, even for very talented players) and 16:00 5K (which is, at best, a rather ordinary junior varsity time for a male collegiate runner), or 2000 (which I might expect from a bright math or physics undergraduate who is also an ardent chess player) and 30:00 5-mile (which I think would have been dead last place in virtually every collegiate cross-country race I ever ran). Of course, if you change the universe of discourse (for example, looking at all road racing participants instead of just college-age male athletes), the comparisons change. In any event, I do think that it's an interesting topic, in part because true objectivity in these kinds of comparisons is so elusive, and different assessments seem to reflect different life experiences and expectations.

Regarding Asa Hoffman, "Searching for Bobby Fischer" portrayed him as a bright guy who dropped out of Columbia (as I recall) and became a chess bum. I was surprised that the film did that, because the real Asa Hoffman, unlike the real Bobby Fischer, was not what I would have considered to be a public figure, so the portrayal seemed a bit insensitive and invasive. I agree that it was disappointing to see Asa portrayed by a professional actor. It was fun to spot other real players in the movie; I remember recognizing Joel Benjamin, Roman Dzindzichashvili, and Kamran Shirazi, who were all playing themselves.

Avocado's Number wrote:

Regarding Asa Hoffman, "Searching for Bobby Fischer" portrayed him as a bright guy who dropped out of Columbia (as I recall) and became a chess bum. I was surprised that the film did that, because the real Asa Hoffman, unlike the real Bobby Fischer, was not what I would have considered to be a public figure, so the portrayal seemed a bit insensitive and invasive.

If he was a bum, when why was it insensitive and invasive to say so?