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Hopefully Carlsen's becoming the FIDE World Champion will be loud in the media and will bring back the popularity of chess into our times.


Not very likely now that most of us have a computer in our pockets that can beat each of these guys.

Chess will never be the same again.


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.

Today, the game is poker.


My car can go faster than Usain Bolt.


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.


one reason why Poker is becoming the great strategic game for all of the World (or so it seems)


Limit holdem has already fallen (see, eg, polaris and sonia --- and even freely available software like neopokerbot is very strong)

It appears that NL is close to falling too, if it hasn't already: http://www.pokersnowie.com/


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 didn't say it was solved, I said that it's nearly as strong as the best humans.

Furthermmore, known bots have been winning at mid-high stakes from at least a few years, and have taken millions from online poker rooms.

Lots of discussion about pokersnowie here: http://www.deucescracked.com/forums/131-Poker-Theory/topics/...

Most of the experts agree that it's very strong.


what about Go?


afaik, Go has not yet fallen.


He had a very expansive interview in The Guardian recently, it was very good to read to get a sense of his character.




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