World Chess Champs start tomorrow

Conundrum wrote:

Another draw through repetition of moves. So far in the first two moves it seems like there are no edge of your seat thrilling moments. Both are playing just safe and careful chess.

Its like watching a championship boxing match where neither boxer is throwing punches during the first two rounds.

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Or a sit and kick 5000m....

It is no surprise to me that many competitive runners were or are competitive chess players. While one sport is mostly cognitive and one is mostly physical they both are highly similar in personality requirements and emotional rewards.

In both, the competition event is very taxing, where participants have to push themselves well beyond any normal limits and really endure high levels of discomfort in order to win. The drive to win must be exceedingly high in order to prevent let down of performance.

In both sports, competitors tend to be very ego involved. (I know that might be true for many sports, but it seems like for a runner and a chess player, the sport seems more of a test of them versus other sports such as tennis or golf where it might reflect them and their skill in the sport) In running your goal is to change yourself where in tennis its to develop your tennis skills. Chess is often thought of as a test of intelligence (but it isn't of course)

In both running and chess, they require much discipline and effort in training.

Both are individual sports. You are not dependent on teammates. Both have ratings and race times to measure your progress in the sport. Both are somewhat misunderstood by those who don't participate.

The competitors in both sports are very driven and aggressive when it comes to their sport.

I hope to see the kick soon

Subfive wrote:

Or a sit and kick 5000m....

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. 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.

Had completely forgotten about other notable chess players portraying themselves. Anyway, my best guess is that Asa was pleased to be included in the story but pissed not to get the money and attention that would have come from playing himself. I always thought he looked a bit like a down-and-out Richard Gere. Who knows, maybe someday some director will see it the way I do and we'll get to see Richard Gere in a small, independent Hollywood version of the Asa Hoffmann story. Guess I shouldn't hold my breath...

But what about you, Mr Number? Where were you living when you were playing your best chess? Who were some of the players you played or encountered at tournaments who made an impression on you?

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I've competed at chess and running. And I've put far more effort into trying to improve at these activities than any other activities. But I do not think that the expression of the "competitive personality" trait is associated with these activities any more than any other thing individuals compete at. I've played tennis but did not become fixed on that sport, but if I had, I would have been just as competive minded in that sport I suspect. I think for whatever reason I liked chess and running more than other forms of competition.

And by the way, all our abilities have a physical basis. Cognition at it's foundation is a physical thing. Without the necessary neuronal configuration there will not be any high level chess performance.

As I mentioned before, age matters in chess performance. Very old brains do not perform as well as they did when they were in their peak development years. Elite runners or chess players at 30 years old will not be as capable at age 60. Why...physical deteriation.

Subfive wrote:

Without the necessary neuronal configuration there will not be any high level chess performance.

That's basically what I think. There's more purity to mental abilities, either you can or you can't. Muscles are a more ancient structure and its designed to be trained and improved depending on what the animal/human encouters in life, not saying there's no talent involved. But no fido is going to have a fide score over the dumbest human, and no dumb human is going to have a fide score over a smarter one. Your brain congealed and networked into a certain level of smartness in the womb and that's that.

my 2 cents wrote:

Subfive wrote:

Without the necessary neuronal configuration there will not be any high level chess performance.

That's basically what I think. There's more purity to mental abilities, either you can or you can't. Muscles are a more ancient structure and its designed to be trained and improved depending on what the animal/human encouters in life, not saying there's no talent involved. But no fido is going to have a fide score over the dumbest human, and no dumb human is going to have a fide score over a smarter one. Your brain congealed and networked into a certain level of smartness in the womb and that's that.

FYI, you're never going to beat a pronghorn antelope over 10 kilometers.

In the 1970s there was a private gaming club on 86th Street between 5th and Madison. Does anyone know the name?

Lots backgammon money games were held there. Some sort of a private charter club I think.

Not just for geeks wrote: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

moron

can't you read ???

a 5 - 0 lead & match abandoned at 5 - 3

it was NOT drawn it was abandoned

& idiot, that "data point" was the most epic match of all-time in terms of duration & world-wide publicity - 5 months of worldwide news coverage

no one who followed chess back in those days believed kasparov coud carry karpov's jockstrap when getting hammered 5 - 0 in a race to 6 match

There are reasons why both running and chess appealed to you. Its possible some of those reasons were characteristics inherent in both sports. And I do believe there are inherent differences in these sports that make them quite different than most other sports. Endurance running emphasizes training versus practice. I go to basketball practice to practice dribbling, passing and shooting baskets. I train in running with the primary emphasis to change my body.Endurance racing has the goal of pushing oneself to physical limits. Pretty much each endurance race has that component to it. Other sports require endurance but also application of learned skills. So its different. Many of the calculations in chess can also be stressful and let up can lead to a blunder and loss. Your position on this is different than mine. I can see your point as sound but arguable about whether running is different than other sports. Your other response to my comment about one sport being cognitive and one being mostly physical was poor. You said that a cognitive activity is physical too so they are both physical. Of course everybody knows that but in colloquial speech when one refers to something being mental (or cognitve) versus physical they refer to "mental" as being primarily a neurocognitve activity versus "physical" as being an activity that also includes large muscle movement. So your comment didn't add anything that people didn't know and came off as a bit argumentative.

Subfive wrote:

I would have been just as competive minded in that sport I suspect. I think for whatever reason I liked chess and running more than other forms of competition.

And by the way, all our abilities have a physical basis. Cognition at it's foundation is a physical thing. Without the necessary neuronal configuration there will not be any high level chess performance.

Conundrum wrote:

There are reasons why both running and chess appealed to you. Its possible some of those reasons were characteristics inherent in both sports. And I do believe there are inherent differences in these sports that make them quite different than most other sports. Endurance running emphasizes training versus practice. I go to basketball practice to practice dribbling, passing and shooting baskets. I train in running with the primary emphasis to change my body.

Endurance racing has the goal of pushing oneself to physical limits. Pretty much each endurance race has that component to it. Other sports require endurance but also application of learned skills. So its different. Many of the calculations in chess can also be stressful and let up can lead to a blunder and loss.

Your position on this is different than mine. I can see your point as sound but arguable about whether running is different than other sports.

Your other response to my comment about one sport being cognitive and one being mostly physical was poor. You said that a cognitive activity is physical too so they are both physical. Of course everybody knows that but in colloquial speech when one refers to something being mental (or cognitve) versus physical they refer to "mental" as being primarily a neurocognitve activity versus "physical" as being an activity that also includes large muscle movement. So your comment didn't add anything that people didn't know and came off as a bit argumentative. [/quote].

Yes, there are characteristics in chess and running that I find appealing. But those characteristers can be found in other activities. Weightlifting, swimming and cycling are individual activities, which require training and altering the body...like running. Personally, I like running the best. Running is a basic test of athleticism.

Chess is a basic test of mental ability. It's not the only test anymore than running is for athleticism. But there are other activities like, poker, go, jeopardy that test mental ability. I like chess the best.

You said my comments about cognitive / physical was poor and did not add anything that people did't know. But It's not clear to me that everyone knows that? That's what the mind-body problem is about.

Yes, actually the human brain has evolved to be extremely malleable. Early in life it adapts easily and develops to meet the demands of the environment. That is one reason for our success as a species.More adaptable than muscles.

Cheer up, BRO! wrote:

FYI, you're never going to beat a pronghorn antelope over 10 kilometers.

not just for geeks wrote:

lol. You still here, bitch?

total lol moment

Subfive wrote:

There are other activities like poker, go, jeopardy that test mental ability. I like chess the best.

Interesting list of activities that test different mental abilities in different ways.

Go: my dad was really into Go and tried to teach me how to play, but it just never made sense to me or interested me. I looked to see what the current state of computer Go is and wasn't surprised to learn that the best human players are still a bit better than the best computers.

Poker: bit different from Chess or Go because of the probabilistic element. I don't play so I don't know how the pros do the required calculations so quickly and accurately. I realize there are all kinds of tricks to structure and simplify the process, but they certainly impress me. The highest rated chess player I ever beat was Howard Lederer back in his younger days as an obese, somewhat narcoleptic low 2200.

Jeopardy [College Bowl, HS quiz shows]: My turf. I played on a very good HS team [won the city title, won a regional tournament sponsored by Ashland Oil, probably would have been competitive against the top College Bowl teams] and my HS and Columbus in general produced quite a number of top Jeopardy! players, including Michael Day, the guy who kind of ruined Jeopardy!

Prior to Michael, you could interrupt a question on Jeopardy!, and deciding when to interrupt is where a lot of the skill comes in in most quiz show formats, but because of Michael you now have to wait for Alex to finish reading the question before you can buzz in, and if you try to buzz in early, you get locked out for a few seconds.

From Michael Day's Jeopardy! archive page - "The signaling device lockout system was instituted after Michael used a strategy of continually jiggling the signaling button throughout the game in his original five games in order to ring in first on virtually every clue. This is described in The Jeopardy! Book (pages 59-60) and in Harry Eisenberg's exposé (page 75 of the first edition and page 79 of the revised edition)."

dkny64 wrote:

Who knows, maybe someday some director will see it the way I do and we'll get to see Richard Gere in a small, independent Hollywood version of the Asa Hoffmann story. Guess I shouldn't hold my breath...

But what about you, Mr Number? Where were you living when you were playing your best chess? Who were some of the players you played or encountered at tournaments who made an impression on you?

Here are a couple of youtube videos on Asa Hoffman. He talks about his portrayal in "Searching for Bobby Fischer." (Apparently, he was paid for the rights and he signed a release.)

Most of my chess-playing was in Philadelphia (high school); Cambridge, MA (college); and Washington, D.C. (post-college). The first great player I remember meeting was Bent Larsen, when he came to Philadelphia to play a simultaneous exhibition. At the time, Larsen was the highest-rated active player outside the Soviet bloc, since Fischer had gone back into seclusion after becoming world champion. I was fifteen years old, and had only been playing tournament chess for a short time. On the black side of a Benko Gambit Reversed, I managed to get a draw. (Larsen played 31 games, winning 28, losing one, and drawing two.) Afterward, Larsen talked to me for a long time, answering every stupid question I could think of, which made me a fan for life.

I remember Walter Browne (a very brash guy who looked and dressed like a porn star and dominated U.S. chess for a while in the 1970s), Pal Benko, Lubomir Kavalek, Lev Alburt, Roman Dzindzichashvili (who reminded me of a Russian bear), Joel Benjamin when he was a 13-year-old master (he broke Bobby Fischer's record for the youngest U.S. master ever, but he seemed like an incredibly normal kid who just happened to play a particular board game really well), and lots of others. I was awed to see Sammy Reshevsky still playing in tournaments. He was a diminutive man who had been perhaps the greatest prodigy in the history of chess when he was an 8-year-old master-level player back around 1920. If life circumstances and world politics had been a little different, he might have been the world champion in the 1940s or 1950s. He continued to play at an international level up through the 1980s, when he was in his seventies.

One guy who especially impressed me was Ken Rogoff, a grandmaster who had dropped out of high school to play chess in Europe for a couple of years, but eventually resumed his formal education in the U.S., first as an undergraduate at Yale, and then as a grad student in economics at M.I.T., where I met him. He wisely chose economics over chess, and is now a professor at Harvard. Here's a nice article about him:

This is great stuff. I'll bet Larsen wanted to talk to you!

Thanks for the links to the Asa Hoffmann videos - I'll definitely have a look at those.

Never saw Reshevsky in person but vividly recall the "Sammy at 70" cover of Chess Life [made a quick but unsuccessful attempt to find it on the web.] And that's quite a list of other notables you encountered. Dzindzhi passed through Columbus a few times and I believe Joel Benjamin was playing for Yale at the 1983 (?) Pan Am, where I got to play a few games as the 2nd alternate on what I believe was the worst chess team in Columbia University history. [iirc the next year a completely different group of Columbia students won the Pan Am.]

Cambridge, MA - reckon you must have known that guy who hustled in Harvard Square. Can't remember his name but do remember that he liked to sing "What's it all about, Alfie" whenever an opponent stopped to think for a while.

A guy named David Glueck who I knew a little bit from Ohio, where he hit 2400 in HS, was at Harvard from 82-86. Did you cross paths with him at all?

The guy who hustled in Harvard Square was Murray Turnbull, a Harvard drop-out who looked every bit the part of the homeless street hustler. He had a little cardboard sign that said "PLAY THE CHESS MASTER." I believe he charged $2 per game, but you got your money back if you won. (I suspect that arrangement was, in part, to try to avoid problems with gambling laws.) I talked to him pretty often, but I don't think that we ever played each other.

I probably did cross paths with David Glueck, but I don't remember him. I played my last rated game in 1982, and generally tried to keep a safe distance from the game thereafter.

A third draw today. Carlsen seemed to be in trouble for a while, but his defensive skills saved him once again. Still, he seems to be struggling in this match. I get the impression that he is trying to steer the games away from Anand's prepared opening analysis (probably Anand's biggest edge, aside from the venue itself), but Anand has captured the initiative in every game thus far.

Thanks for Murray's name. Cracked me up to find on the web that he played a rated game in 1984 at the "Au bon pain invitational" - wasn't that kind of the anchor store in the atrium just across from where he set up his table? I see there's video of him on the web too - I'll have to take a look.

That's really something about Ken Rogoff. I just know his name as "famous economist who might win the Nobel" - hadn't known about his serious chess background.

When you talked to Larsen, did you ask him about the 0-6 result against Fischer in the famous candidate's match?

To my chagrin, I see that USCF actually still has a record of my existence and that my final rating was 1772. Sigh. It was such a shock to see my USCF membership number - I used to have it memorized and seeing it was like hearing a bit of some song I hadn't heard in years. And even though I don't actually have any desire to play tournament chess again, when I saw 1772 part of me started thinking, "If I study a little bit and play half-way decently, I can get back over 1800." Strange how the mind works sometimes.