Minister of Truth
Practically Perfect
We need Grandmaster TDAK here to explain some of these concepts for us.
first American since Fischer to challenge for the World Chess Championship.
- Thread starter dukkha
- Start date
I can get Woody Harrelson to work real cheap to give lessons on blunders!
I still remember my father and I being electrified by the unexpected Bobby Fisher victory in the 1970s. It almost felt like it was an extension of the cold war, where sports and chess were asymmetrical forms of warfare in seeking dominance over the rival superpower.
The reason Russians, aka East Slavs, dominate at chess is cultural. In my experience, Russian boys are taught chess at a very young age and play relentlessly throughout their lives. A distant cousin of mine has a chess move named after him. I literally will not play against most Russians because I know I will get my doors blown off, wasting both their time and mine.
The reason Russians, aka East Slavs, dominate at chess is cultural. In my experience, Russian boys are taught chess at a very young age and play relentlessly throughout their lives. A distant cousin of mine has a chess move named after him. I literally will not play against most Russians because I know I will get my doors blown off, wasting both their time and mine.
Fentoine Lum
Verified User
first American since Fischer to challenge for the World Chess Championship.
Pffffffffft, terrific.
Pffffffffft, terrific.
Fabiano Caruana, a US-American and Italian chess grand master, and Grischuk (not pictured), chess grand master of Russia, playing at their boards at the "FIDE World Chess Candidates Tournament" in March 2018
http://time.com/5444715/fabiano-caruana-world-chess-championship-bobby-fischer/
Fabiano Caruana did not start playing chess in Brooklyn, New York when he was five years old because his mom thought he’d be a future grandmaster, or that he’d one day play for the World Chess Championship, just like fellow Brooklynite Bobby Fischer did back in the early 1970s. No, Caruana’s mom thought chess would calm him down and keep him focused in school.
“I was having trouble with concentration,” Caruana, 26, tells TIME, “and the idea was that maybe chess would help with that. It was more of a remedy.” Before long, this cure for little-kid hyperactivity took Caruana much further than his Lego buildings and origamis ever could. Within a year, he was winning tournament games against kids who were in junior high school and older. “His first instructor told us he was trying to teach her chess concepts,” says Caruana’s father, Lou. “We knew he was special.”
Starting on Friday in London, Caruana will become the first American since Fischer, who won the world chess title in 1972 and held it until 1975, to challenge for the World Chess Championship. Caruana faces Norway’s Magnus Carlsen, the world chess champ since 2013, in the 12-game match that will be played over three weeks at The College, a 10,000-square-foot venue in the city. Chess rarely attracts much mainstream attention in the United States. But chess pundits expect that a Caruana victory could spark an explosion in chess interest America hasn’t seen since Fischer’s heyday. “You do like your winners, don’t you?” says Mark Crowther, the U.K.-based founder and editor of The Week In Chess.
In March, Caruana earned the right to face Carlsen by beating out seven other top players to win the Candidates Tournament in Berlin. “Fabiano has the power to be better than Carlsen,” says Crowther. “There have been very, very few players you can say that about. I honestly don’t know who’s going to win this match. It’s a total toss-up.”
Caruana forged a circuitous path to representing the U.S. on chess’ grandest stage. His family decided to take Fabiano out of school and move to Spain when he was 12 in order to compete in more high-level tournaments and train with top instructors. Since his mother is Italian, he could compete for Italy’s chess federation. “It was not an easy decision,” says Caruana’s father Lou of taking his son out of school. “The plan was always to do it for a year or two and see how it works out. Is he loses a year of school, so what? He’s smart and can catch up. We could always correct things if it wasn’t going in the right direction.”
Initially, Caruana didn’t support the plan. “I wasn’t really keen on the idea of going to Europe when my parents suggested it,” he says. “I had friends in Brooklyn; I had a life in Brooklyn. But once I started playing chess pretty much full time, it just became a normal part of life. Me and my dad would just go from tournament to tournament in different countries. I missed out on social things in school and everything, but I was able to see the world as a young kid, which is very rare.”
Lou, a former data processing consultant who also earned income from real estate holdings, says he spent as much $100,000 on chess travel and instruction for his son in those early years in Europe. The investment paid off: Before his 15th birthday, Caruana became the youngest chess grandmaster, at the time, in the history of both Italy and the United States. Caruana admits early success swelled his head a bit. “You don’t think you need the work, which is always a mistake,” Caruana says. “I would take excessive risks and do crazy things to win a game, and commit suicide.”
Caruana overcame his growing pains, however, and started earning a living playing chess. At the same time, he eyed a return to the United States. In 2014, he turned in a dominant performance at the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis, beating out Carlsen and other elite players to win the tournament. The Sinquefield Cup is named after Rex Sinquefield, a financier who pioneered the first index stock funds back in the 1970s – and has invested north of $50 million over the past decade to building one of the world’s premier chess clubs in St. Louis. With St. Louis now a budding epicenter of global chess, Caruana moved back to America in 2015, and switched federations from Italy to the U.S. Caruana now lives in St. Louis. “For a chess player,” Caruana says, “it’s the best place to be.”
To prepare for his match against Carlsen, Caruana spent some time this summer training at Sinquefield’s country home in Missouri. Besides playing hours of chess with fellow grandmasters, he jogged and shot hoops and played tennis to keep in peak physical shape. “Chess requires a lot of stamina,” says Caruana. “You’re sitting down and you’re playing six, seven hours at a time. You’re burning a lot of calories and you can easily get mentally tired. If your physical form is not good, then you’re likely to crash at some point.” Caruana doesn’t stick to a strict diet, though he does try to avoid excessive sugar, to avoid the high and inevitable come down.
In the weeks leading up to the World Chess Championship, Caruana has trained in Spain, where he’s done yoga and swam in the Mediterranean to keep his head clear. He’s also played games for up to eight hours a day. “The goal is get you thinking about chess 24/7 in preparation for the match,” he says. “It’s playing quick games, slow games, anything that will get you in that mode where you calculate very quickly. Your mind is working in the best possible shape.”
Caruana knows that Americans are blessed with plenty of sports and entertainment options. So why would even casual observers of chess have a stake in his three-week match with Carlsen, never mind those who don’t play the game? “It’s sort of like boxing or MMA,” Caruana says. “It will be a fight that is blow for blow, with each of us trying to get the upper hand, trying to impose our will on the other guy. It’s not a physical sport. But if people are into these one-on-one duels, chess is in a way similar to that.”
Being able to play chess is a sign of intelligence. Playing it well is a sign of a youth mispent.
The story begins with Mikhail Chigorin. Chigorin stopped working to pursue chess full time. He published a magazine and played many informal and formal tournaments, culminating in a prestigious second-place finish at Hastings, 1895.
This made Chigorin a household name in Russia and also attracted the attention of Tsar Nicolas II.
After this, chess became a praiseworthy pastime (keep in mind many cultures had dis-favorable views of chess, viewing it as a waste of time or a potential vice due to gambling).
Tsar Nicolas II played an active role in establishing Russia as a venue for tournament chess, by sponsoring a junior championship (notable winner: Future world champion Alexander Alekhine) and designating the top 5 winners of a 1914 tournament in St. Petersburg as "Grandmasters of Chess".
World War I and the Russian Revolution certainly prevented chess tournaments for a few years, but Lenin himself was a fan of the game and even encouraged participation in chess.
However, the biggest proponent was Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko (Supreme Commander in Chief of the Army). Krylenko famously proclaimed: "We must organize shock brigades of chessplayers and begin immediately a five-year plan for chess." .
Some described the Soviet attachment to chess as an ideological one. Yakov Rokhlin, a Bolshevik who knew Krylenko, said chess was "a true weapon and a living piece of propaganda against religious delusions."
So the Soviet Union tasked the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS) with organizing large and small chess tournaments, and encouraging their members (most of the working population of the Soviet Union) to play chess. The Soviet Union set aside money to sponsor tournaments to attract top international players.
In an era where the average worker struggled, distinguished chess players used their influence to gain favor (sviazi). Chess players had help from powerful party officials (like Sergei Kirov) to obtain passports to travel internationally, to attend the best universities in the Soviet Union (Botvinnik obtained a doctorate in Electrical Engineering), and to receive a monthly stipend from the state (which could be yanked in case of disfavor--ask Mark Taimanov after he lost to Fischer in 1971).
Finally, I have to mention the crucial role of the Pioneers Palace (Wikipedia). Most every Soviet champion from Botvinnik onward learned chess as a child after school in a Pioneers Palace (Petrosian, Spassky, Tal).
Even current Russian players got their start there (e.g. Peter Svidler). If you were talented and motivated, club directors would notice you and get you coaching and eventually pay for travel for participation in tournaments.
So the Soviet Union had an ideological justification for chess, a huge player base (making chess an integral part of the culture), a path to success through chess, and completely free training for top talent.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, this system was shaken (Pioneers Palaces no longer exist, for example), but a strong cultural connection and extensive after-school programs still ensures that Russia has the most grandmasters in the world, by far.
Soltis, Andy. Soviet Chess, 1917-1991. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...ow_did_the_soviets_come_to_be_so_dominant_at/
keeps you out of the bars unless you play speed chess for drinks!Being able to play chess is a sign of intelligence. Playing it well is a sign of a youth mispent.
I've done that. Did well enough to get drunk occasionally.
Minister of Truth
Practically Perfect
Yeah, I know. Now you have a reason to root against him.
Although it scarcely occurred to me at the time, my daughter and I were embarking on a sort of cognitive experiment. We were two novices, attempting to learn a new skill, essentially beginning from the same point but separated by some four decades of life. I had been the expert to that point in her life—in knowing what words meant, or how to ride a bike—but now we were on curiously equal footing. Or so I thought.
I began to regularly play online, do puzzles, and even leafed through books like Bent Larsen’s Best Games.
I seemed to be doing better with the game, if only because I was more serious about it.
When we played, she would sometimes flag in her concentration, and to keep her spirits up, I would commit disastrous blunders.
In the context of the larger chess world, I was a patzer—a hopelessly bumbling novice—but around my house, at least, I felt like a benevolently sage elder statesmen.
And then my daughter began beating me.
The age question is hoary in chess. Indeed, one of the earliest discussions of the now-universal player ranking system called the “Elo rating” (named for its inventor Arpad Elo) was in a 1965 article in The Journal of Gerontology. Using his novel statistical analysis, Elo found that the peak age for master-level chess performance was around 36, with a slow steady decline after that.
That was then. Today, chess is only getting younger. Neil Charness, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, has long studied the question of chess and performance.
“Bobby Fischer became a grandmaster at age 15,” he says. “Then Judit Polgar beat his record.” And then Sergey Karjakin beat Polgar, by doing it in 2002 at age 12. “The record of the youngest age to achieve grandmaster status,” Charness tells me, “keeps getting beat.”
More recently, the 13-year-old Wei Yi became the youngest to rise above a 2600 rating. Magnus Carlsen, the world’s current top-ranked player, was the youngest player to reach number one, at age 19. In a process akin to the “Flynn effect,” or the global rise in IQ scores over much of the last century, chess ratings have risen over time. Charness notes that “younger players are getting skilled faster than they used to,” thanks, in part, to better tools and better feedback: Sophisticated computer engines, databases, the ability to play players of any level at any time of the day.
Chess—which has been dubbed the “fruit fly” of cognitive psychology—seems a tool that is purpose-built to show the deficits of an aging brain.
The psychologist Timothy Salthouse has noted that cognitive tests on speed, reasoning, and memory show age-related declines that are “fairly large,” “linear,” and, most alarming to me, “clearly apparent before age 50.”
And there are clear consequences on the chessboard.
In one study, Charness had players of a variety of skills try and assess when a check was threatened in a match. The more skilled the player, the quicker they were able to do this, as if it were a perceptual judgment—essentially by pattern recognition stored up from previous matches.
But no matter what the skill, the older a player was, the slower they were to spot the threat of a check.
Denise Park, the director of research at the University of Texas’ Center for Vital Longevity, described what was happening to me in unsettling terms.
“As you get older, you actually see clear degradation of the brain, even in healthy people. Your frontal cortex gets smaller, your hippocampus—the seat of the memory—shrinks.”
My brain volume is atrophying annually, my cortical thickness dropping some 0.5 percent a year.
Where my daughter’s brain was hungrily forming new neural connections, mine could probably have a used a few new ones.
“You don’t want to be pruning synaptic connections, you want to be growing them,” Park told me.
My daughter’s brain was trying to efficiently tame the chaos. “For older adults,” Park said, “there’s not nearly enough chaos.”
Back at the board, there seemed to be plenty of chaos. For one, my daughter tended to gaily hum as she contemplated her moves. Strictly Verboten in a tournament setting, but I did not want to let her think it was affecting me—and it certainly wasn’t as bad as the frenetic trash talking of Washington Square Park chess hustlers.
It was the sense of effortlessness that got to me. Where I would carefully ponder the board, she would sweep in with lightning moves. Where I would carefully stick to the scripts I had been taught—“a knight on the rim is dim”—she seemed to be making things up.
After what seemed a particularly disastrous move, I would try to play coach for a moment, and ask: Are you sure that’s what you want to do? She would shrug. I would feel a momentary shiver of pity and frustration; “it’s not sticking,” I would think. And then she would deliver some punishing pin on the Queen, or a deft back rank attack I had somehow overlooked. When I made a move, she would often crow: “I knew you were going to do that.”
I would sometimes wander into the room when coach Simon was there, watching him present her with some puzzle on the board. I would struggle toward some solution, feeling smug, only to find I had completely botched it.
My daughter, meanwhile, swiftly moved the right piece into position. He would shoot me a look, beaming at her precociousness.
I was proud, I was frustrated. There are surely fewer greater parental satisfactions than to see one’s progeny doing well at something. But there is altogether different feeling—a sobering slap of pathos, a vague sense of alarm that some genie had been let out of a bottle—when they exceed you on the same task.
When a person who still cannot always successfully tie her own shoes, who has yet to do long division, can beat me at the royal game.
She was Deep Blue,1 and I was the human race, being slowly outmoded.
I began to regularly play online, do puzzles, and even leafed through books like Bent Larsen’s Best Games.
I seemed to be doing better with the game, if only because I was more serious about it.
When we played, she would sometimes flag in her concentration, and to keep her spirits up, I would commit disastrous blunders.
In the context of the larger chess world, I was a patzer—a hopelessly bumbling novice—but around my house, at least, I felt like a benevolently sage elder statesmen.
And then my daughter began beating me.
The age question is hoary in chess. Indeed, one of the earliest discussions of the now-universal player ranking system called the “Elo rating” (named for its inventor Arpad Elo) was in a 1965 article in The Journal of Gerontology. Using his novel statistical analysis, Elo found that the peak age for master-level chess performance was around 36, with a slow steady decline after that.
That was then. Today, chess is only getting younger. Neil Charness, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, has long studied the question of chess and performance.
“Bobby Fischer became a grandmaster at age 15,” he says. “Then Judit Polgar beat his record.” And then Sergey Karjakin beat Polgar, by doing it in 2002 at age 12. “The record of the youngest age to achieve grandmaster status,” Charness tells me, “keeps getting beat.”
More recently, the 13-year-old Wei Yi became the youngest to rise above a 2600 rating. Magnus Carlsen, the world’s current top-ranked player, was the youngest player to reach number one, at age 19. In a process akin to the “Flynn effect,” or the global rise in IQ scores over much of the last century, chess ratings have risen over time. Charness notes that “younger players are getting skilled faster than they used to,” thanks, in part, to better tools and better feedback: Sophisticated computer engines, databases, the ability to play players of any level at any time of the day.
Chess—which has been dubbed the “fruit fly” of cognitive psychology—seems a tool that is purpose-built to show the deficits of an aging brain.
The psychologist Timothy Salthouse has noted that cognitive tests on speed, reasoning, and memory show age-related declines that are “fairly large,” “linear,” and, most alarming to me, “clearly apparent before age 50.”
And there are clear consequences on the chessboard.
In one study, Charness had players of a variety of skills try and assess when a check was threatened in a match. The more skilled the player, the quicker they were able to do this, as if it were a perceptual judgment—essentially by pattern recognition stored up from previous matches.
But no matter what the skill, the older a player was, the slower they were to spot the threat of a check.
Denise Park, the director of research at the University of Texas’ Center for Vital Longevity, described what was happening to me in unsettling terms.
“As you get older, you actually see clear degradation of the brain, even in healthy people. Your frontal cortex gets smaller, your hippocampus—the seat of the memory—shrinks.”
My brain volume is atrophying annually, my cortical thickness dropping some 0.5 percent a year.
Where my daughter’s brain was hungrily forming new neural connections, mine could probably have a used a few new ones.
“You don’t want to be pruning synaptic connections, you want to be growing them,” Park told me.
My daughter’s brain was trying to efficiently tame the chaos. “For older adults,” Park said, “there’s not nearly enough chaos.”
Back at the board, there seemed to be plenty of chaos. For one, my daughter tended to gaily hum as she contemplated her moves. Strictly Verboten in a tournament setting, but I did not want to let her think it was affecting me—and it certainly wasn’t as bad as the frenetic trash talking of Washington Square Park chess hustlers.
It was the sense of effortlessness that got to me. Where I would carefully ponder the board, she would sweep in with lightning moves. Where I would carefully stick to the scripts I had been taught—“a knight on the rim is dim”—she seemed to be making things up.
After what seemed a particularly disastrous move, I would try to play coach for a moment, and ask: Are you sure that’s what you want to do? She would shrug. I would feel a momentary shiver of pity and frustration; “it’s not sticking,” I would think. And then she would deliver some punishing pin on the Queen, or a deft back rank attack I had somehow overlooked. When I made a move, she would often crow: “I knew you were going to do that.”
I would sometimes wander into the room when coach Simon was there, watching him present her with some puzzle on the board. I would struggle toward some solution, feeling smug, only to find I had completely botched it.
My daughter, meanwhile, swiftly moved the right piece into position. He would shoot me a look, beaming at her precociousness.
I was proud, I was frustrated. There are surely fewer greater parental satisfactions than to see one’s progeny doing well at something. But there is altogether different feeling—a sobering slap of pathos, a vague sense of alarm that some genie had been let out of a bottle—when they exceed you on the same task.
When a person who still cannot always successfully tie her own shoes, who has yet to do long division, can beat me at the royal game.
She was Deep Blue,1 and I was the human race, being slowly outmoded.
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Park told me I was most likely at the peak of my cognitive power. For all my daughter’s seemingly spritely processing power, I had higher-order capacities I could draw upon.
“If you’re younger, you can process information super-fast,” she told me, “but you may not know what to do with that information as you process it.”
She cautioned she was “oversimplifying” things, but I was happy to take it.
There are, I learned, two forms of intelligence: “fluid” and “crystallized.” As first theorized by the psychologist Raymond Cattel, fluid intelligence is, basically, being able to think on one’s feet, to solve new problems. Crystallized intelligence is what a person already knows—wisdom, memories, metacognition.
Even if I was only learning chess for the first time, I had a lifetime of play behind me.
Fluid intelligence is generally seen to favor the young, with the crystallized variety rewarded by age
(though there are many exceptions).
Old mathematicians doing their best work are as rare as young Supreme Court Justices. Chess, especially played at the top levels, can encompass both fluid and crystallized intelligence—one needs the firepower to quickly think through a novel position, but it also helps to draw upon a deep reservoir of past games (grandmasters like Carlsen can often identify a historical game with a glimpse at a single position).
Of course, my daughter, like most children her age, has not memorized a huge library of games; nor does she consciously think in terms of higher-level strategy. “I think I’ll go with the Rubenstein Variation to the French Defense” is not a thought she will have. She seems to play with some brute instinct, pure fluid intelligence.
As Daniel King, a London-based retired professional chess player who now analyzes and commentates chess matches, tells me, “children just kind of go for it—that kind of confidence can be very disconcerting for the opponent.” Lacking larger representational “schema,” the psychologist Dianne Horgan has noted, children players rely more on simple heuristics and “satisficing,” choosing the first good-looking move.
Indeed, my daughter often makes a rapid-fire move, after which I invariably ask: “Do you want to take a little more time?” She rarely does. Experts, curiously, make similarly rapid intuitive judgments. Magnus Carlsen, for example, has described how he often makes a move quickly in his head, then spends a great amount of time verifying it is the correct one.
When I asked Rudowski, my daughter’s coach, about the differences he sees in trying to teach beginner children and beginner adults, he said: “Adults need to explain to themselves why they play what they play. Kids don’t do that.
It’s like with languages. Beginner adults learn the rules of grammar and pronunciation, and use those to put sentences together. Little kids learn languages by talking.”
Here was my opening. I would counter her fluidity with my storehouses of crystallized intelligence. I was probably never going to be as speedily instinctual as she was. But I could, I thought, go deeper. I could get strategic.
I began to watch Daniel King’s analysis of top-level matches on YouTube. She would sometimes wander in and try to follow along, but I noticed she would quickly get bored or lost (and, admittedly, I sometimes did as well) as he explained how some obscure variation had “put more tension in the position” or “contributed to an imbalance on the queen-side.” And I could simply put in more effort.
My daughter was no more a young chess prodigy than I was a middle-aged one; if there was any inherited genius here, after all, it was partially inherited from me. Sheer effort would tilt the scales.
The house took on the atmosphere of a war-room. I gravely analyzed opening lines and tried to keep on my toes with intense online blitz matches. She played in tournaments on chesskid.com but seemed as interested in being awarded little iconic trophies (like “Chess Marathon,” for playing a game with more than 100 moves) as in actually beating other kids.
When I asked her one day who she thought was a better player, she answered in a cheekily engineered way that both hinted she had picked up on the research I had been doing, and that she wanted to get under my skin:
“I am. Because I’m younger and my brain is faster, and still growing.”
Then, just a few weeks ago, months into her winning streak, I beat my daughter at chess twice in a row.
Even if I had to work twice as hard to do it.
I learned that, as good as my daughter is at launching aggressive attacks, at almost clinically probing my weaknesses, she has a blind spot: What I am doing. She played, in those games, as if I were just some lower-level chess engine making haplessly random moves.
Indeed, when I made my moves, her eyes would often drift elsewhere—as if what I was doing was almost inconsequential to the larger game.
She failed to spot that my seemingly minor, unthreatening moves were all part of a larger strategic purpose.
Against her onrushing fluidity, I was laying in a minefield of crystallized traps.
Both matches also went to the endgame, where I was able to draw upon my greater capacity for attention and pure endurance.
And lastly, I noticed that even when it became clear (to me) she was going to lose, she wanted to press on.
I had noted a similar tendency with her in playing poker: She always wanted to keep betting, to the bloody end, with the most marginal of hands, even as other players were showing strong cards. She was lacking that larger, strategically metacognitive sense, that Bayesian ability to use probability to change one’s beliefs.
It was, in the end, a Pyrrhic victory. Not only has she since beaten me many times, but there was the look in her eyes as I checkmated her a second time.
For whatever the games had taught me about brains young and old, about the different ways we learn and deploy our cognitive resources, they also taught me that the only thing harder than losing to your daughter in chess is winning against her.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/learning-chess-at-40-1278104318
“If you’re younger, you can process information super-fast,” she told me, “but you may not know what to do with that information as you process it.”
She cautioned she was “oversimplifying” things, but I was happy to take it.
There are, I learned, two forms of intelligence: “fluid” and “crystallized.” As first theorized by the psychologist Raymond Cattel, fluid intelligence is, basically, being able to think on one’s feet, to solve new problems. Crystallized intelligence is what a person already knows—wisdom, memories, metacognition.
Even if I was only learning chess for the first time, I had a lifetime of play behind me.
Fluid intelligence is generally seen to favor the young, with the crystallized variety rewarded by age
(though there are many exceptions).
Old mathematicians doing their best work are as rare as young Supreme Court Justices. Chess, especially played at the top levels, can encompass both fluid and crystallized intelligence—one needs the firepower to quickly think through a novel position, but it also helps to draw upon a deep reservoir of past games (grandmasters like Carlsen can often identify a historical game with a glimpse at a single position).
Of course, my daughter, like most children her age, has not memorized a huge library of games; nor does she consciously think in terms of higher-level strategy. “I think I’ll go with the Rubenstein Variation to the French Defense” is not a thought she will have. She seems to play with some brute instinct, pure fluid intelligence.
As Daniel King, a London-based retired professional chess player who now analyzes and commentates chess matches, tells me, “children just kind of go for it—that kind of confidence can be very disconcerting for the opponent.” Lacking larger representational “schema,” the psychologist Dianne Horgan has noted, children players rely more on simple heuristics and “satisficing,” choosing the first good-looking move.
Indeed, my daughter often makes a rapid-fire move, after which I invariably ask: “Do you want to take a little more time?” She rarely does. Experts, curiously, make similarly rapid intuitive judgments. Magnus Carlsen, for example, has described how he often makes a move quickly in his head, then spends a great amount of time verifying it is the correct one.
When I asked Rudowski, my daughter’s coach, about the differences he sees in trying to teach beginner children and beginner adults, he said: “Adults need to explain to themselves why they play what they play. Kids don’t do that.
It’s like with languages. Beginner adults learn the rules of grammar and pronunciation, and use those to put sentences together. Little kids learn languages by talking.”
Here was my opening. I would counter her fluidity with my storehouses of crystallized intelligence. I was probably never going to be as speedily instinctual as she was. But I could, I thought, go deeper. I could get strategic.
I began to watch Daniel King’s analysis of top-level matches on YouTube. She would sometimes wander in and try to follow along, but I noticed she would quickly get bored or lost (and, admittedly, I sometimes did as well) as he explained how some obscure variation had “put more tension in the position” or “contributed to an imbalance on the queen-side.” And I could simply put in more effort.
My daughter was no more a young chess prodigy than I was a middle-aged one; if there was any inherited genius here, after all, it was partially inherited from me. Sheer effort would tilt the scales.
The house took on the atmosphere of a war-room. I gravely analyzed opening lines and tried to keep on my toes with intense online blitz matches. She played in tournaments on chesskid.com but seemed as interested in being awarded little iconic trophies (like “Chess Marathon,” for playing a game with more than 100 moves) as in actually beating other kids.
When I asked her one day who she thought was a better player, she answered in a cheekily engineered way that both hinted she had picked up on the research I had been doing, and that she wanted to get under my skin:
“I am. Because I’m younger and my brain is faster, and still growing.”
Then, just a few weeks ago, months into her winning streak, I beat my daughter at chess twice in a row.
Even if I had to work twice as hard to do it.
I learned that, as good as my daughter is at launching aggressive attacks, at almost clinically probing my weaknesses, she has a blind spot: What I am doing. She played, in those games, as if I were just some lower-level chess engine making haplessly random moves.
Indeed, when I made my moves, her eyes would often drift elsewhere—as if what I was doing was almost inconsequential to the larger game.
She failed to spot that my seemingly minor, unthreatening moves were all part of a larger strategic purpose.
Against her onrushing fluidity, I was laying in a minefield of crystallized traps.
Both matches also went to the endgame, where I was able to draw upon my greater capacity for attention and pure endurance.
And lastly, I noticed that even when it became clear (to me) she was going to lose, she wanted to press on.
I had noted a similar tendency with her in playing poker: She always wanted to keep betting, to the bloody end, with the most marginal of hands, even as other players were showing strong cards. She was lacking that larger, strategically metacognitive sense, that Bayesian ability to use probability to change one’s beliefs.
It was, in the end, a Pyrrhic victory. Not only has she since beaten me many times, but there was the look in her eyes as I checkmated her a second time.
For whatever the games had taught me about brains young and old, about the different ways we learn and deploy our cognitive resources, they also taught me that the only thing harder than losing to your daughter in chess is winning against her.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/learning-chess-at-40-1278104318
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Remember how I told you that most Russian boys learn chess at, like age 6, and play continuously throughout their lives?
This me playing chess against Russians in a village near Smolensk, Russia. I really tried to put in a respectable showing for Uncle Sam - but I got my doors totally blown off!
Minister of Truth
Practically Perfect
As far as Cold War sporting matches, Rocky Balboa vs Ivan Drago and the Miracle on Ice are the two greatest. Bobby Fischer is definitely up there, however.
looks like you are down a couple pawns and your king side is blown open?Remember how I told you that most Russian boys learn chess at, like age 6, and play continuously throughout their lives?
This me playing chess against Russians in a village near Smolensk, Russia. I really tried to put in a respectable showing for Uncle Sam - but I got my doors totally blown off!
that is a insane chess board.
maybe it's the angle of the photo, but the pieces look like when I used to eat mushrooms and play for fun.
they look yuge and distorted.
Ya Russians and chess go together - although grandmasters are becoming more diverse.
we got a Norweigan world champ playing against an American - no Russians in sight!
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Petrov opening -move 8 position.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/chess-world-rattled-as-someone-nearly-wins-game/
Chess World Rattled As Someone Nearly Wins Game
Game 6 of the World Chess Championship was one to remember.
Magnus Carlsen of Norway, the world’s No. 1 chess player, fended off a vicious siege at the hands of U.S. grandmaster Fabiano Caruana, the world No. 2, in London Friday. It was the sixth frame of the World Chess Championship, and one that for hours appeared likely to give the American a critical lead. But Carlsen escaped, and the match remains level, 3-3. Each of the six games so far have been a draw.
“It’s a miracle save,” said Robert Hess, an American grandmaster commentating on the match for Chess.com.
To catch you up: Carlsen is seeking his fourth world title while his challenger Caruana is trying for the first American world championship since Bobby Fischer in 1972. Their horns are locked in the middle of a best-of-12-game match for the game’s most important title.
The two began Friday’s Game 6 in one of Caruana’s favorite openings: the Petroff.
hess players are second only to maybe biological taxonomists in their proclivity to elaborately name things, and sure enough even this rare position has its own proper name: the Karklins-Martinovsky Variation. But neither player was troubled by Karklins-Martinovsky, they said after the game. Its theory is well known to these elite players.
And so they played on. The powerful queens came off the board by move 8, but this loss took no edge off the fight. For a while, the game looked less like a battle and more like a dressage competition, as 66 percent or more of each player’s first 12 moves were knight moves.
Many moves later, as the game cantered through its middlegame, winning chances emerged and swelled for Caruana’s black pieces, according to both the computer engine and human grandmaster commentators. (Surprisingly, black, which is usually at a disadvantage, has often had an advantage over white in this match.) While there was no single blunder for Carlsen, there was an accumulation of … what to call them? “Mistakes” seems too serious. “Slip-ups” make them sound like pratfalls. Let’s go with “inaccuracies.” Carlen admitted after the game that he’d made a number of imperfect moves. By move 34, knights and bishops were the only firepower left on the board, and they threatened salvo after salvo in a crucial struggle over the pawns.
By the 47th move, Carlsen was down a knight but up three pawns, which gave him a few slim hopes. Two had open routes to the end of the board, where they could become queens. Much delicate, asymmetrical and impossibly complex maneuvering commenced, as Caruana tried to prevent the pawns’ promotion.
A dozen moves later, Caruana had captured three of Carlsen’s pawns, including those aspiring to become queens, and still had one of his own. That left him in a victorious position — if only he could see it. On the 68th move, a supercomputer analyzing the game found a guaranteed checkmate a distant 30 moves down the road
Caruana is an unbelievably strong player — though not that strong. As play continued, the silicon’s guarantee quickly went away. If only Carlsen could eliminate the pawns, he’d survive: a bishop and a knight versus a bishop is a theoretically guaranteed draw.
Finally, through many feats, Carlsen was able to spirit away his king to a fortress on black’s side of the board.
Despite black’s apparent material advantage, there was no progress to be made. The players agreed to a draw on the 80th move.
Carlsen had walked a slippery bridge and survived. His escape act drew attention. As the tension built toward the end of the game, the match became the most-viewed stream on the popular game-streaming site Twitch. Books could be written about this endgame.
So, another draw, huh? Yawn, am I right? Not so fast. Today’s Game 6 was an instant classic. Journalist David Hill, who’s been in London reporting on the match, tweeted that there can be beauty in draws. Not all of them are created equal.
^GAME 6 FINAL POSITION (draw)
Magnus Carlsen springs Game 8 escape thanks to Fabiano Caruana's false step
said a disappointed Caruana: “I had some chances, it’s not like it’s always going to work out. Just because you put some pressure on Magnus doesn’t mean that he collapses or anything.”
The 26-year-old American challenger played into the Sicilian for the fourth time in four games as white
(1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4), veering into the Sveshnikov variation
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2...rld-chess-championship-game-8-carlsen-caruana
play game at link
said a disappointed Caruana: “I had some chances, it’s not like it’s always going to work out. Just because you put some pressure on Magnus doesn’t mean that he collapses or anything.”
The 26-year-old American challenger played into the Sicilian for the fourth time in four games as white
(1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4), veering into the Sveshnikov variation
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2...rld-chess-championship-game-8-carlsen-caruana
play game at link