What's really scary about Carlsen is I don't think he's close to reaching his full potential yet. He's rapidly approaching the level of dominance in elite chess not seen since Fischer or Kasparov, and he's only 22. I can't think of anyone in the next Candidate's Tournament that would be a serious threat to take Carlsen's title, aside from maybe Kramnik.
I'm also really interested to see the impact Carlsen winning the World Championship has on the game's popularity worldwide. He's a very marketable champion, young with good looks and modelling contracts. Both of the former champions, Kramnik and Anand, are obviously very popular in chess circles (and Anand is immensely popular in India), but maintained generally lower profiles in the media.
The next couple of years should be really interesting for chess. My hope as an American is that Nakamura can eventually qualify for the Candidate's Tournament and set up a dream title match down the road.
Allegedly Carlsen has said that he "didn't know anything about chess when I became world #1", reflecting over the amount he had learned since then. I don't understand what that can be, but I'm no chess player..
it may mean he went from being a more calculating type of player(tactical), which you can win many games with, to being a more positional type of player (strategical) which takes a much greater understanding of the game.
I'd agree with this. A few top players have stated that Carlsen is extremely difficult to prepare for, because he's capable of playing a wide range of openings, using obscure variations, and adjusting his play/style towards his opponent.
If you review his games over time, you'll noticed he's become a much more balanced player, capable of playing both extremely dangerous and tactical positions filled with traps, but also more quiet positions that aren't as sharp, but rich with strategic possibilities.
Many players tend to lean towards a specific "style" of play, but Carlsen has a rare gift to be able to adapt a variety of styles depending on his position and opponent.
That's true - however, Fischer did play the same openings religiously. To prepare for Carlsen, you don't have the luxury of knowing what opening you will face.
Tactics are often associated with winning material through a combination or attack, so you could think of concepts such as trapping an opponents queen or blundering a knight are more tactical in nature. Other ideas, like discovered check, pins, decoys, etc are primarily tactical as well. Many lower level games are decided by tactics simply because players are more apt to fall into traps, not calculate properly, etc.
Strategic play is much more subtle, but becomes more important as you get stronger. Strategic play generally involves more long term planning with the goal of creating a lasting advantage for yourself. Some examples of strategic concepts are creating more space for yourself (and at the same time constricting your opponent), having a better pawn structure (e.g your opponents pawns are isolated and vulnerable to attack), having your minor pieces better positioned(e.g your bishops rake open diagonals while your opponent's are trapped behind pawns)
Not particularly good at chess, but could the difference be likened to the following:
Tactics - winning pieces or losing fewer than your opponent
Strategy - putting yourself in a position where the above is more likely to happen or be possible
?
In chess, tactics are usually shorter term moves that aim to gain material advantage or mate. Pins, skewers, discovered check, forks, double attacks, etc. These are usually in a time frame of around 2-3 moves. This is often described in chess terms as 'concrete' threats.
Strategy concerns more of theoretical ideas, long term possibilities. 10+ moves ahead. This involves pawn structure, where your king is positioned, how your pieces are developed, which side of the board left or right you might launch an attack, end game considerations, etc. How you intend to defend or win the game. This type of play is usually called positional. Whereby the placement of your pieces gives you an overall advantage. In GM level play this is very subtle and 15+ moves ahead. Positional vs. tactical.
As an analogy tactics are like cobra strikes and positional play is like a boa constrictor where tiny shifts strangle the opponent in the end. Both are lethal.
strategical: I wonder if I can machinate to end up mostly on white squares by the end-game, then I could let his black bishop take this pawn for free, while I work on getting my pawn structure to become invincible on the other side, effectively nullifying his bishop by the end-game while opening my position for greater pressure.
tactical: how can I protect this pawn, together with the rest of my pieces, so that all lines in the next 15 moves have all pieces protected, so that he can't take anything, and defensive enough that he can't force a 'better position' in any of them, while remaining offensive enough to open up for a future attack.
Strategy refers to overarching objectives that will direct the larger part of your moves throughout the game.
IE - Knowing your opponent is aggressive with their queen and having plans in place to quickly neutralize her,
or being good at manipulating your opponents pieces util it gets to a point where you can gain a strong advantage by castling.
All these objectives form the basis of what you're trying to accomplish with the ideal being that successfully executing your major objectives will gain you victory.
Tactics refers to how well one reacts to and overcomes changes on the board.
IE - Based on the current board layout you notice that a certain move(s) will heavily fortify a section of the board that you previously were not focused on, or seeing your opponent set up for a particular pattern of play you feint a reaction only to hit them somewhere else.
As a tactical player he focuses more on evolving his strategy(larger objectives) to fit the board rather than trying to manipulate the board to fit his strategy more so than the average chess player.
tactical: calculating the right moves in complex situations. strategical: positional play. making sure the pieces work well together, choosing the right plan and so on
Sure there's a comparison. Kasparov maxed out at 79 points higher than the second-rated player (Kramnik). Carlsen is currently 70 points higher than the second-rated player (Aronian).
By the way, Fischer at his peak was 125 points ahead of the second-rated player, Spassky.
Well, I think the main reason we can't yet compare him to Kasparov is that Garry become world champion at a similar age, but then held the title for many years (a decade and a half depending on which title you count after the Fide/PCA thing). Carlsen will win the title, but let's see how long he holds it for. If, for some unfortunate reason (I hope not of course) he feels too much pressure, gets tired, has some breakdown, and loses the title in 2 or 4 years, then no one will compare him to Kasparov, except as being in very early 20s when winning the World Title.
Rating differences at any given point in time are comparable to rating differences at another given point in time. That is, A being 200 points better than B in 2013 means the same thing as C being 200 points better than D in 1963. This is a fundamental underpinning of Arpad Elo's model.
It is absolutely true that the Elo model is a relative one and does not guarantee that a given rating number represents the same ability over time, but the belief that modern ratings are inflated is not unanimous. Ratings have certainly gone up over time, but computer analyses of games have indicated that intrinsic play quality has gone up over time as well. See the work of Ken Regan, for example (search for "ken regan ipr").
Is there a mathematical proof that the Elo ratings have interval properties (so that "Rating differences at any given point in time are comparable to rating differences at another given point in time" is a surely true statement) and not just ordinal properties? I ask, because this is a hot issue in psychology, which I study, and it appears that almost all psychological "measurements" have, at best, merely ordinal properties ("A is smarter than B") and not interval properties ("A is as much smarter than B as B is smarter than C"). Constructing interval measurements properly is HARD, and yet assuming numbers have interval properties when they have only rank-order properties is easy, so I wonder if there is really a rigorous proof on this issue as to chess ratings.
It is mathemtatically proven that the Elo Rating system converges to the Bradley Terry interval rating system over time.
The difference between Elo and Bradley-Terry is that Bradley-Terry assumes to have "all" the data. So Bradley Terry is used in Psychology studies for that reason. (Eventually, you stop taking data).
Elo on the other hand, is mathematically equivalent to Bradley-Terry except with infinite data. Elo allows you to incrementally "add data" to an existing Bradley-Terry-esque model and make it more accurate.
BTW: Elo has been superceeded by superior models today, but all (good) ranking models are "interval properties" that have been derived from the Bradley Terry model from Psychology research.
See TrueSkill (which is based on Gaussian Curves, so they aren't technically Bradley-Terry but instead the Thurstone scale), Glicko, and Glicko2.
It's built into the definition of the rating. A 200 point difference in rating always means that there's a 75% expected chance of the higher ELO winning. In less fluid arenas, the actual ratings can diverge from ideal ratings but there's enough matchups in chess that this isn't a huge concern.
In addition to the other comments, I'd add that in the context of Chess, we have a contest in which there is a winner or a loser or a draw, and we can relatively easily verify that the system is functioning as designed with simple statistics. We also have a system that broadly speaking produces a fairly uniform ordering. Yes, at the very top of chess there's some question of who might win or whether styles have an effect, but broadly speaking in the population at large, a 50 point difference will have a certain meaning; at the macro level, we're measuring something with one dimension.
I would imagine many psychology studies are measuring something a great deal less well defined and more multidimensional in practice than "A will beat B at chess."
The Elo rating system is based on the model that a rating difference gives x an expected result as a function of x. Therefore, the Elo ratings "have interval properties". For example, the Elo rating model states that if A's rating is 200 points higher than B's, A will get in average 0.76 points against B.
However, of course the Elo model might not be perfect, and thus a lot of other things contribute into the rating difference of players A and B, not only the expected result of the players playing only against each other.
dfan, you make good points. But also we need to keep in mind that today's top players on an absolute level, really probably are better than previous era's top players. They simply have access to the past, and technology.
More databases, more games played, internet giving opportunity to play many, many more games. Programs to analyze their play, coaching in the modern era, etc.
That is something that Anand didn't really benefit from when he was young.
Yes, exactly! It is no insult to players from earlier eras that today's players have surpassed them, just as it is no insult to track and field athletes from earlier eras that their records don't still stand. Today's athletes have better equipment, better training, and better medicine, just as today's chess players have 24-hour access to computers better than any human and databases with millions of games. It would be surprising if today's top players weren't better than they used to be.
Given today's level of obsession required to become #1 in any professional sport, I wonder what kind will be needed to be #1 in, say, 25 years. Have we reached some sort of pinnacle? I doubt it, but we probably thought these kind of athletes 30 years ago were already as perfectionists as they could be.
P.S. I mean obsession in regards to hours devoted to training, practicing, building etc, not as a description of their personality, although it probably is present there in varying quantities.
yes, i believe that we can agree that it gives us some idea of where the players were relative to each other.
but, at the same time, it's messy. and comparing the top two players only will probably not be as meaningful as looking at their games and their play.
the interesting question is not that you can be dominant against bad competition, but you can dominate over great competition. I think we can agree on that point.
I was specifically responding to the claim that there was no comparison of their "dominance": that is, how good they are/were relative to their competition.
I agree that Carlsen isn't quite at Kasparov's level of dominance yet (he's only 22), but the James Harden analogy is a poor one. Harden is a great player (say someone like Aronian in the chess world) but isn't quite a once in a generation talent like, say, Lebron James.
I think it's quite fair to call Carlsen the Lebron James of chess.
Except to those who saw Jordan play [1]. LeBron is probably a top 5 - all-time player, but his style is very different from Jordan, which makes comparisons difficult. He seems more like Magic and less like Mike.
People will always gravitate toward recent greatness being greater than those in the past. But, it's frankly impossible to teller cause we don't have enough context and emotional separation. Being able to say that we saw the greatest ever play is appealing because some of that greatness can then pass over to us by association. It's better to enjoy the greatness we see now and leave the comparisons for history. It is fun to think about though.
[1] I never saw Jordan live, which is something I regret.
It's not that hard to argue. Given there are lots of things to take into account, but Jordan averaged 2.5 more ppg than lebron, and 5 ppg if you take out the wizards comeback. Jordan also won 6 out of 8 championships, (and you know, was playing baseball for the other 2 years).
Obviously ppg is not the only metric, and championships are won by teams. LeBron is probably in the argument for best all time, and by the end of his career may have a legitimate argument, but he certainly isn't just obviously way better than everyone else. He's probably top 5 though.
It's not that hard to argue. Given there are lots of things to take into account, but Jordan averaged 2.5 more ppg than lebron, and 5 ppg if you take out the wizards comeback. Jordan also won 6 out of 8 championships, (and you know, was playing baseball for the other 2 years).
In a specifically chosen 8 year period. There were 7 years before that where he didn't win a championship. LeBron's career is far from over, and titles won by a player is surely the least informative measure of an individual player's skill anyhow.
surely ppg is a relevant measure of a player's skill right? I'm just pointing out that even if you think LeBron is best ever, it's not a landslide by any means as the parent comment seemed to indicate. "hard to argue he's not best ever." It's not really. He's in the argument, but by no means is he "obviously" #1.
Fwiw Lebron didn't win a championship for his first 8 years. Perhaps he will win the next 6 and make Jordan look pedestrian. He's not there yet though.
There is a comparison, even if Kasparov wins it. IMO the best place to start would be the highest tournament performance ratings[1]. Kasparov had five of the top ten at the time the list was compiled, over a ten year span. That's pretty dominant. OTOH, Carlsen's later 8/10 at Pearl Springs 2009 (Category XXI) got him a new record PR of 3002[2]. If we include matches, his current performance against Anand might also rate pretty high.
I'm not saying Carlsen is the greatest ever. I'm just saying comparisons are totally valid.
By the way, there is a very interesting tournament going on currently -- TCEC, unofficial computer chess championship [1]. The main intrigue of the tournament is the fight between Stockfish and Komodo. Houdini, dominating engine in the last few years, already lost any chances to go into the superfinal -- two very strong challengers, Komodo and Stockfish, in the last few months were able to eat huge advantage of Houdini. The author of Komodo, Don Dailey, is terminally ill, according to his wife he has just a few days to live, so it's possible that he will not know if his engine will win or not. It's really heartbreaking, he was very active in the chat of TCEC just a few days ago, commenting games, discussing computer chess and so on. Stockfish is an open-source engine that uses distributed testing framework, so anybody can participate in its development donating CPU time [2]. Both engines are very strong and have relatively equal strength.
Wouldn't a match with an open-source engine be unfair? The competing close-source engine could embed the opponents source inside it to predict the exact moves that the opponent would make, thus gaining a speed advantage.
Even more interestingly, what would a match between two open-source engines look like, if they both embedded each other?
This is a very interesting tournament. AFAIK it is the only computer tournament with long time controls and equal hardware for both sides. I have been following it for some years already since the times of Old TCEC. The most interesting games annotated by GM or FM level players can be found here [1]. My favourite is the game Old TCEC Elite Match - Season 1 game 1.1, in which Houdini crushed Rybka with black pieces very convincingly by sacrificing 3 pawns to get a devastating advantage.
Do you know of a document explaining the most important ideas in these chess engines? I know about alphabeta search and the like, but I'm wondering what the secret sauces in the recent best chess engines are.
Here you go: http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/ It's an ultimate source about chess programming. Also, Stockfish code is short (several KLOC) and well commented.
To make it truly interesting (from the algorithmic point of view), these competitions should be limited to a standard machine with no connectivity. Otherwise it's an arms race.
In TCEC all engines run on the same 2x 8-core Xeon. It's WCCC that allows engines to use arbitrary hardware -- e.g. on WCCC 2013 Jonny run on 2400-core cluster, but lost anyway to Junior that used 24-core Xeon.
Right now the chess produced is still more interesting than the algorithms themselves. Once we've hit diminishing returns there, it's likely that they'll realign as you've suggested.
According to CCRL [1], Komodo 6 and Stockfish 4 are 20-25 Elo weaker than Houdini 3 (in the last few years Rybka wasn't able to compete with Houdini, in TCEC it wasn't even able to qualify into Stage 4). However TCEC uses development versions of Komodo and Stockfish that are much stronger than their latest stable releases.
It's hard to say precisely because top players don't really play top computers competitively, but the best computer engines appear to be well above 3000 by now. The estimates on the TCEC page put Stockfish and Komodo both at around 3100.
The official commentary and analysis, imo, was not very good though.
I was watching this feed live to see the players, but for audio I was over at http://www.twitch.tv/chessnetwork . Jerry from chessnetwork did a wonderful job of breaking it all down as it was happening. In general, his Chess YouTube channel over here http://www.youtube.com/chessnetwork is awesome.
If you're interested in the match go watch Jerry on his channel on Youtube [0]. He's uploaded some great videos so far. He also livestreams the games on Twitch btw.
During the press questioning the computer they were using froze up a bit and Anand became frustrated and rattled through his thinking out loud instead.
The commentator then asks Anand something along the lines of "did you think through all of these complications?" and his response was a curt "no, I was thinking of what to eat tonight."
"Yeah… so, do we have questions to the players?"
oof... such high stakes and he just missed the move. Really gotta feel for him.
> The commentator then asks Anand something along the lines of "did you think through all of these complications?"
The question was "did you try really to calculate [...]?" which is quite a bit different that "did you think through all of [...]?". The latter is implicitly asking if perhaps he was not successful at seeing through the variations (which is a reasonable question). The former is asking if he even tried, which is not a good question.
He had come out of the opening with a significant lead in time, and near the end he spent a very long time thinking, so much that he became behind on time. Of course he was calculating variations. It is quite reasonable for him to give a snippy answer to that question.
Isn't it obvious to assume that of course he thought through the complications, but that there was just apparent escape?
I can understand being frustrated by that question. Reporters for a chess championship should be more understanding of what it's like to play a tough match.
I think he was just frustrated with himself and then he got frustrated with the laptop and then the question. I'd cut him some slack. I just thought it was a bit funny.
Yes, it was. But anyway, even after the correct Bf1, there isn't a mating attack, and the game would probably lead to draw, which isn't good enough for Anand. So he spent almost all his time to find some decisive attack, but there probably just wasn't one to be found.
Yeah. It was a standard type of calculation error (forgetting when you visualize a variation that a piece has vacated a square so that it can now be passed through) but not one I would expect a top-level player to make.
Carlsen is the best/only hope for chess to clean up its act (reinventing FIDE and the Candidates process), and market itself to the broader Western public, much as poker has been marketed. Keeping my fingers crossed.
As a chess player and fan, this will never happen. Poker can be very fun to watch, even for people who don't know how it's played. Chess is often boring to watch, even for people who do know how it's played. Can it's profile be increased? Absolutely. Will it ever compare to the television success of poker? I doubt it, but that's OK.
Blitz games, and bullet tie-breakers. Brightly-colored computer evaluations - a "win %" that swings wildly with every move. HD close ups of the players' frantic, sweaty faces. Pieces flying. Maurice Ashley. Anna Sharevich.
With the right backing, chess can definitely be as popular as poker. Big-money TV poker is very much a modern creation. Even big-money basketball is a "creation," not a founding plank of US culture.
I feel the other way: Poker is boring to watch, too much luck/randomness when watching. Fun to play, though.
I'm not really a chess player, but I've watched all the matches this Championship, and all my friends (not chessplayers as well) are watching. It helps that we are Norwegian, though. And that may be the point: A western player will bring back the popularity in the west.
If you're thinking of tournament poker, than I can see what you're saying. Try watching some deep-stacked cash games sometime though; this is the most high-level and interesting poker to watch (and also the most instructive).
Also, poker has the "everyman" factor going for it. When the amateur Chris Moneymaker won the World Series in 2003, the popularity of the game exploded. This could never happen in chess.
Winning 4 national championships in a row is one of the most amazingly dominant feats in anything, especially given a game that has a significant luck factor.
A top tournament player in a Scrabble Facebook group just said this about him:
"I'm pretty sure what he's doing is not capable by most human brains tbh, he plays better than any computer with seemingly a very small amount of tilt. You will never be as good as him, no matter how hard you try. Makes the game pointless (said this a million times b4). As a sidenote, his existence in scrabble is terrible for the game"
it's a shame ganesh asirvatham dropped out of the scrabble scene; he was a very impressive player, and the popular pick at the time for most likely to challenge nigel's dominance.
(anecdotally, as a 1700-rated player there are lots of people who can beat me handily, but nigel and ganesh are the only two i've ever felt actually intimidated by)
The worst part about that match is, Anand spent 50+ minute on one move, to loose all the time advantage he had pushed carlsen into.
First I thought, it was to make Carlsen loose his nerve, but he lost his own nerve, by moving Qe4, instead of slow push hh4. That was the turning point :( He went from winning position to a clear loss.
Also, I don't get the point of resigning, on this level, it should be a fight till the end, no matter how shameful.
I don't see anything wrong with resigning. First off, it acknowledges your weak position, which saves you some face for at least knowing. Second, it is a strong compliment on your opponent's skill, because only poor play from your opponent would put you into a draw/win situation. This in turn is classy, because it's saying "I want to win on my own merits, not on a mistake of my opponent."
Indeed. The comment about "on this level" shows a misunderstanding about high level play. It's at low level play where it makes sense to play it out because a low level player is less likely to realize they are in a losing position, and a low level opponent is actually fairly likely to make a mistake that could turn the tide.
At high levels of play, continuing to play implies that you think you have some chance of winning and that it is therefore worth both players' time to continue the game. If you know you shouldn't win, you are either implying that your opponent may make a stupid mistake that would let you win (an insult to their ability) or you are assuming a right to their time for the mere formality of finishing the game.
At a low or mid level of play, it might even make sense to say that you know you should resign, but you'd like to play it out to see just how the checkmate happens and thus learn more about the game (and giving your opponent that chance to take the resignation rather than assuming you may have their time), but no one is going to learn anything from playing out a losing position at this level of play.
In this case, dude lose because of a clear blunder... players of all levels make blunders, so there is some benefit in always playing a game till the end... Its more a question of mental stamina, are you gonna spend 8 hours of concentration on something you have less than a 1% chance of winning... maybe a true overlord of chess would be willing to do this...
One of the games this match, the commentators said that this was almost a forced draw, slightly advantage for Carlsen but no way he could win with it, and that they should resign.
Carlsen played on, grinding, and a few non-optimal (not blunders) from Anand, and Carlsen won. Today it was a clear win, so I agree shaking the hand and end the game was right. But not always.
Once you get a reputation for playing out positions more than a rook down, you may have a harder time getting tournament invitations, sponsors, collaborators, etc. If you're an amateur, soon even your friends won't want to play you.
I know a kid (age about 10, rating around 1900) who doesn't resign ever. He'll be a couple of pieces down against a player 400 points better and still play on.
It doesn't make him popular, it wastes the time of the opponents who have to sit around for an extra half hour and we even have to warn visiting players to expect it. His opponents will sometimes create 3 Queens or similar just to make him look stupid.
If you get a reputation then others will start to treat you like an idiot. Eg one strong player recently played out the full 50 moves of K+R vs K+N against another strong player, possibly to "punish" past behavior.
it's about personality. some players do play on for a while and it is part of the rules and has nothing to do with tournament invitations. You can play for as long as you want within the rules, and every once in a while, people do just that.
Others will resign very prematurely and they say so. They say they just didn't "feel" the position. Computer analysis later on says they are equal in position, though.
If Carlsen started playing out all his games do you think he wouldn't be invited into tournaments?
He'd be in the tournaments, it would just be a waste of time for him to play out all the games, when he is certain to lose. instead, he resigns and relaxes his mind and winds down before the next game.
If Carlsen started playing out all his games do you think he wouldn't be invited into tournaments?
I think that if Carlsen had started out in life being a brat, he wouldn't have got much support to get to where he is today. Besides, other players are not Carlsen. E.g. Topalov seems to receive fewer invites than other comparable players. Could it be because of his (and his manager's) abominable behavior during two WC matches?
First, presumably you mean Qf4, not Qe4 - there was no Qe4 in the game - and h4, not hh4. Second, you're the only chess-playing entity (human or computer) I've come across who thinks after Qf4 anyone is clearly lost (and I think it's almost as debatable that after h4 the position was winning). Third, at this level especially it's absurd to continue playing a rook down with no compensation.
Mental exhaustion or "burnout" is a very real thing. Just like many professional athletes stop trying or substitute out when their team has no hope of winning, resigning the game allows you to preserve your mental energy for your next game.
I'm an experienced poker player however I'm an absolute chess novice. Aside from the obvious "just practice" advice, what are the best resources to fall back on in terms of books, videos etc if I wanted to learn the game in significant depth?
I know this is cliche, but I think the single most effective way to improve is to play a lot, then review your games with a player that is stronger than you and have them point out better moves you could have made, explain your thought process, etc. If you don't have a stronger player available to look at your games (I can look at a few :) ), then just replay them yourself, look for moves where the game turned towards one player and things you could have done better. Or, plug them into a computer program and see what moves the computer suggests, and then ask yourself why the computer is suggesting them.
For books, I started out by reading a few books by Yasser Seirawan. Two titles I particularly found helpful are "Winning Chess Strategies" and "Winning Chess Tactics". Seirawan is a good writer and both titles do a really good job explaining their concepts to players new to the game. Jeremy Silman wrote a book called "The Amateur's Mind" which I thought was pretty good, that compares thought processes between amateurs, intermediate, and expert level players across similar positions.
One other idea is to simply get a book that is a collection of annotated master/grandmaster games, set up a board, make some coffee, and replay through them. Review the authors notes. Replay them again. Get a sense for the openings being used and the different strategies. Two good collections are "The Mammoth Book of Greatest Chess Games" by Burgess and "The Most Instructive Chess Games Played" (can't remember author).
Chess.com is a great free place to play. They have free tournaments and games online, you can get a rating, track your progress, etc. If you do a paid membership, you get access to videos, tutorials etc. I just use the free membership, so I can't comment as to how good these videos are, but at least to me they look solid.
Good luck. Happy to help more offline (maybe trade for poker tips :) )
I agree with reading Jeremy Silman. My first chess book was http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Chess-Player-Fred-Reinfeld/dp.... I started beating my dad after reading it! It covers some basic positional ideas (control of the center, pawn structure) and basic tactical ideas (pins, discovered check). With those two things, you can go a long ways.
Once you get a good handle on that, analyzing your own games and reviewing GM games starts to become helpful.
Don't worry about reading lots of chess books and learning all the theory or openings (other than the basics, that is). The main things you should do are:
1] Develop a good thought process and general approach to the game. NM Dan Heisman has an excellent series of articles ('The Thinking Cap', 'Novice Nook' and others). Find his stuff and study it well.
2] Tactics, tactics, tactics! chesstempo.com is my favourite place for tactics problems. Make an account there and play regularly; you'll see a huge and rapid improvement in your game. There are many great books that cover this ground as well.
3] Play regularly at reasonably slow time controls (necessary to utilize and internalize the proper thought process), mainly against players who are slightly better than you are. FICS or ICC are great places to play online (humans, unlike chess engines, will not allow you to take back your mistakes, which tends to focus the mind!).
4] Analyze your games. Ideally you'll have a stronger human to help you with this, otherwise get a strong chess engine. Identify your major tactical blunders and remember the patterns so you can avoid making the same mistakes in future.
5] Go through annotated games of the strongest grandmasters. There are lots of collections available. Good ones for starters are Morphy, Marshall, Spielmann, Alekhine, Tal and Kasparov (highly tactical players).
6] You can also find GM games where one player resigned. Take the winning side and finish the game against a chess engine on its highest strength. See if you can convert the win.
7] Now you can read a bit more about strategy, openings, etc. Try to play openings that lead to open, tactical positions (forget about whatever the latest fashions amongst grandmasters are). Excellent choices are the various gambits, and ancient openings like the Spanish, Italian, etc.
The number one thing you should work on as a chess novice (and a chess intermediate!) is tactics. chesstempo.com is the best place on the web to practice tactics: it serves you tactics problems from a database of over 100,000 problems harvested from actual games, and keeps track of both your ability and the difficulty of the problems so that it can give you problems appropriate to your level.
There are other tactics servers on the web (chess.com, chess.emrald.net), but Chess Tempo is easily the best.
seconded. No single book made a greater difference in my playing level. Reading this at a relatively young age made me a far better positional player than everyone else around me.
My System was my second chess book. I bought it in an underground book market in a forest for 10 roubles when I was a 9 year old.
It is a great book and without it I would have struggled to reach FM, but it is a little bit too advanced for a first book. I'd say it is a good 4th or 5th book.
I'd say something like Lasker's manual of chess would be better suited as a first book. Perhaps one of the other starter's volumes from Seirawan, et al would fit the bill.
If you're a novice, here's some good advice: play lots of games, but when you study, study tactics. Get some basics down on the endgame, some strategy concepts, but just the very basics, and then just study tactics. And by that I mean do tactical exercises. Most of your games, as in 98% of them, will be lost/won due to tactical errors and blunders (a blunder is just a really, really bad tactical error). If you keep to tactics you'll get pretty good over time. When you reach, say 1800, you can start getting to grips with some deeper strategical ideas, study more openings, etc.
Oh, and since you asked about books, here are two books that came to mind and are pretty good (and you can go through them in this order):
Winning Chess Tactics by Seirawan
Winning Chess Tactics for Juniors by Lou Hays
Oh, and don't mind the 'Winning' in both titles. You'll lose plenty of games right now :-)
Clearly shows a paradigm shift with the new generation taking over. Anand is around 44 years now and it's quite obvious that his mental reflexes would have slowed down while Carlsen is just half his age.
i don't think there's a paradigm shift. winning the world championship in Chess is not like winning a World Championship in Boxing. These players play each other all the time, including in blitz. The paradigm has been clear for a while now.
Chess players typically peak in their 30s, and it's very difficult (though of course not impossible) for players to stay world-class through their 40s. This is one reason everyone has been so impressed with the play of Boris Gelfand (45) this year.
See the age distribution of the top players in the world here (last column): http://2700chess.com/
Well I don't know much about chess, but I've read some chess history off late. I think age should not be an issue.
But sometimes people go through rough times. It happens, people don't stay in form and the added pressure of the event makes people more desperate and to act in urgency. Big blunders happen in such situations. This isn't just restricted to chess. In nearly walk of life this happens.
I know some very brilliant people who make silly mistakes during urgent production issues.
Anand seems to have some frustrations. In an interview he lamented that he reached GM at the age of 18, while the youngest have been able to do that at 12 or 13 (Magnus at 13). He's not content with being the world champion, he wants to be the youngest, most talented, etc too. Can't have everything.
Since internet commentary is always interpreted with a negative tone, I'll edit to add: Anand is a fascinating personality and very sympathetic. I hoped he'd score 1 point today :-)
>>he wants to be the youngest, most talented, etc too. Can't have everything.
As an Indian, and someone who practically looks at Anand as a role mode. I would be disappointed if Anand really had that attitude.
Frankly speaking, I don't like the 'naturally talented' or 'natural genius' or this whole belief that people are born with some skills that can't be matched by other people. This isn't just about chess. This sort of thing manifests in every other walk of life.
Most kids just resign to be incapable at math due to constant comparison with other kids. Though I they would do far better if only they were motivated enough to put more effort.
Frankly speaking, I don't like the 'naturally talented' or 'natural genius' or ...
I think you will enjoy reading the book Mindset. It's for parents, and it explores and expands on the very idea you have described ... which is the opposite of how every Indian parent thinks, so the total addressable market for the book is a big one!
I'm sorry but you're just in denial. There's no doubt that the peak is in the 30s. Even late 20s it's starting to slow down, it's just that the amount you can learn and experience in the 30s you get further, but once you are in your 40s the decline surpasses it.
Pity. 27. Ne2 looked really fun. If 27...Bf5, 28. Nf4! b1=Q? 29. Rxb1 Bxb1 30.Nd5 +-. If 27...Qa5, 28. Nf4 also. Strangely, the move didn't get mentioned in the Chessbase analysis, or the official commentary.
Haven't paid attention for a while, but the reduction of games from the classical best of 24 series, seems far too short. Anand had to take this risk because there were only 4 games left and he needed to win 2 which is super tough. Another 12 games would have been interesting. So if the next game is a draw, which is highly likely, would the championship only have 10 games?
Classical championship should allow for more battles; there are other tournaments where speed can be the focus.
I don't buy that at all, no more so than the existence of motor vehicles have made track and field events irrelevant. If anything, wide accessibility of very strong computer engines only boosts the high-level game, as it enables very deep analysis - opening theory has moved quite a bit in the last 20-30 years.
track and field is largely irrelevant. Chess is pretty irrelevant, no matter how much i love it. avant-garde Novels are also irrelevant.
What i mean is that a huge majority of gifted athletes will not be going into track and field. The best athletes aren't pro runners. I'm not saying that there aren't great runners who are athletes, just that soccer, and basketball will be taking a lot of the talent away from track.
Same is true of chess. Best gameplayers are not deciding to go into chess. It is a very minor game, like rugby. I would even think that Poker has more strategic talent than Chess does.
I am curious to see what you base this on. Sounds like a lot of hand-wavy speculation to me. If you would have talked about Americans going for American Football in college rather than say, Olympic Weightlifting, that would be a different thing.
When exactly does someone like a Carlsen (Norway) or Anand (India), as "gameplayers", choose to go into a different game than chess?
As an example, I used to play chess when I was younger. Plenty of people later took up things like poker and starcraft, and a few became quite successful at it. These people were generally not the best chess players, instead they were more likely to be average / slightly above average (for being serious club players) in chess.
you choose to go into it when you see that you have a lot of talent in it and you enjoy playing it more than other games and it interests you. you have time to try out many games. Some will choose chess, others will choose Go. Chess was THE game during the cold war. if you were smart and you loved games, then you played chess. a lot.
That doesn’t seem relevant at all to me. I honestly fail to see the connection. I would agree that human-computer matches are probably be quite boring and don’t have a chance to be successful as entertainment but that doesn’t imply anything for human-human (or even computer-computer) matches.
Human competition is about humans competing against each other. Machines, computers or animals being better than humans doesn’t really figure into it.
NL,the only popular Texas Holdem variant is far from being solved with 100 big blinds+ (the normal buyin). If that was the case then we would see bots at the higher levels. It might happen one day, but then we will know within days because someone eventually will get too greedy. That said, at micro limits ($10 buy in etc.) there are bots that can make a small profit, and from time to time poker companies ban these and freeze the money. Even Dropbox CEO claims to have made a breakeven bot.
I'm also really interested to see the impact Carlsen winning the World Championship has on the game's popularity worldwide. He's a very marketable champion, young with good looks and modelling contracts. Both of the former champions, Kramnik and Anand, are obviously very popular in chess circles (and Anand is immensely popular in India), but maintained generally lower profiles in the media.
The next couple of years should be really interesting for chess. My hope as an American is that Nakamura can eventually qualify for the Candidate's Tournament and set up a dream title match down the road.