My Obsession With Chess
scottmccloud.com
scottmccloud.com
Sad thing is, unless you get most of your 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice" at chess from the ages of 10-18, you'll never get any good. I am 2400 FIDE, but I missed ages 14-16, doing other things. The neural pathways in my brain are hard wired now, the basic tactical sense will never improve substantially, no matter how long I practice. I am yet to find a counterexample, that is someone who started after age 25 and became a GM.
My point is as follows: almost anyone can reach good strength in chess if they put a lot of deliberate practice at the early age(case in point, Polgar sisters). Conversely, at a later age, it is much, much harder to progress.
Put a 25 year old on an island for 20 years with only a chess computer and chess literature, and they are unlikely to make more progress that a 12 year old would make in 2 years.
Chess is not unique in this regard, in fact, many passtimes/sports/hobbies have the same limitation. However, I think chessplayers often prefer to ignore this facet of chess.
http://main.uschess.org/datapage/adult_ratings_2007.png
50% of adult chess players with a USCF rating (who already tend to be more dedicated to chess than most chess players, who tend not to have a rating at all) have a rating of only 1400 or below.
With a rating of 2400 you're getting up around the 99th percentile. You could easily crush virtually every chess player with a USCF rating. Of course, there are chess players who are even better, but they are the elite of the elite.
(Note: I wasn't able to find the equivalent FIDE rating information, so I have to use USCF ratings here. But you can bear in mind that a player with a given FIDE rating is generally stronger than a player with the same USCF rating)
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/scott_mccloud_on_comics.h...
He also mentions his father's blindness. Although it probably wasn't true, Scott's father believed it was caused by looking at a solar eclipse.
Computer-aided chess though might be interesting: the human would focus on strategy and get help for tactical play from a computer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_complexity#Complexities_of...
I'm not big into playing chess on a computer, but it is fun to play against a friend once in a while. Just because something is better suited for a computer doesn't mean that you can't enjoy doing it yourself.
You can crush someone with good tactical play who wastes moves locally in this fashion. The difference one stone can make is astounding.
amateur chess players are mostly terrible at tactics, by the way. non-masters hang a piece every game, pretty much. (but usually their opponent doesn't notice)
That just isn't true. Remember the famous game where Kramnik got mated by the computer? It is impossible to play chess without ever searching the game tree. Different players search it to different extents, but there's nobody who is so good that they know all the tactics in a game by instinct.
By the way, thanks for linking to that site. I saw that "playing to win" article a while ago, and was really impressed by it, but then I forgot the title.
I would not use Fischer as a gauge for anything but genius and madness.
There are literally millions of chess players, and the source of their enjoyment of chess likely varies from player to player as it does for any other human activity.
Because he was so good, he could say things about the game that were controversial, but deep down a lot of patzers knew that what he was saying was right.
Sure, one's source of enjoyment from chess varies between players, but what both Scott McCloud and Fischer were pointing out is that winning a game of chess makes you feel wonderful, and losing one makes you feel bad.
I think virtually every chess player would be familiar with those feelings, and would concede that "crushing the other guy's ego" (or its corollary "not having my ego crushed") has a little bit to do with it.
Whether you are playing Spassky for the World Championship or a game of blitz with a friend, the emotions are the same.
However, there's a big difference between that and agreeing with Fischer's goal of "crushing the other guy's ego" or your earlier assertion that chess is about "beating someone up with your mind". I don't think that's true at all, or at least no more true of chess than any other game.
Also, I would strongly disagree with Fischer being "the archetypical chessplayer". From what I've read about chess players through the ages and from my personal experience, the overwhelming majority of chess players are nothing like Fischer.
Sure, you will occasionally find an obnoxious, childish, mentally ill genius, but that's the exception. Even non-genius chess players are generally no more childish or obnoxious than people in the general population.
And I see no evidence that the average chess player's motivation is anything like Fischer's motivation, except wanting to win and hating to lose. But that's the same for players of any competitive game.
Personally, I found the rush from winning a game of chess to have a different character to winning at some other competitive game, and I think ego has something to do with it.
Maybe I suffer from some of the same flaws Fischer did (without the same gifts).
But even there, Fischer is in a class with few peers. There's obsession and then there's all-consuming passion, which is more of where Fischer fit in (at least until his resignation from the World Championship).
http://main.uschess.org/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,...
Not saying it's bad, mind you. Rather the opposite, I enjoyed it immensely. Just that .. I'm always struck by a sense of forboding by this kind of thing. I could never be like this, and the fact that someone is .. has implications I find unsettling. If such variation is possible - who's to say it's not the norm? Maybe being obsessed with chess is the norm and I was just dropped on my head one too many times as a baby or had alcohol in my blood-surrogate and I'm the sub-gamma who is too stupid to see the fascinating brilliance of chess.
In that way, it's sort of like mathematics. Few adults would find arithmetic very beautiful, and if that's all they knew of math they might wonder what mathematicians see in mathematics. It takes years of dedication and practice to learn enough math to get to the higher levels, where one begins to see the beauty in math.
Chess is the same. Playing it after just learning the basics might be fun, but it's only once you've put in a significant investment of time in to the game that you begin to get a glimpse of its depth and beauty. Don't expect to see it after merely learning the rules and playing a few games.
That said, something has to keep you going until you learn enough chess to begin to really appreciate it. And that something, for most chess players, is mere enjoyment. For us it's just fun, and that's enough.
Then I read "In search of Bobby Fisher" and "the chess artist" and I did a 180; I don't want my kid to become obsessed with chess.