Garry Kasparov Featured in NY Times Magazine

Garry Kasparov featured in The New York Times Magazine

In "Garry Kasparov, the Man Who Would Be King" (August 6, 2014), Steven Lee Myers does a great job of laying out the complex political landscape faced by the former world champion as he seeks the presidency of FIDE and, ultimately, to support opposition to Putin.  A must read for chess players.

Kasparov Reviews "Chess Metaphors"

Garry Kasparov's "The Chess Master and the Computer" (The New York Review of Books, February 11, 2010) offers not only an excellent review of Diego Rasskin-Gutman's Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind but extensive reflections by the world's greatest chess player on the effects that computers have had on the game.  I especially liked the way he sums up some of those effects:

There have been many unintended consequences, both positive and negative, of the rapid proliferation of powerful chess software. Kids love computers and take to them naturally, so it's no surprise that the same is true of the combination of chess and computers. With the introduction of super-powerful software it became possible for a youngster to have a top- level opponent at home instead of needing a professional trainer from an early age. Countries with little by way of chess tradition and few available coaches can now produce prodigies. I am in fact coaching one of them this year, nineteen-year-old Magnus Carlsen, from Norway, where relatively little chess is played.

The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.

The availability of millions of games at one's fingertips in a database is also making the game's best players younger and younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves used to take many years, a process indicative of Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 hours to become an expert" theory as expounded in his recent book Outliers. (Gladwell's earlier book, Blink, rehashed, if more creatively, much of the cognitive psychology material that is re-rehashed in Chess Metaphors.) Today's teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess information and making full use of the superiority of the young mind to retain it all. In the pre-computer era, teenage grandmasters were rarities and almost always destined to play for the world championship. Bobby Fischer's 1958 record of attaining the grandmaster title at fifteen was broken only in 1991. It has been broken twenty times since then, with the current record holder, Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, having claimed the highest title at the nearly absurd age of twelve in 2002. Now twenty, Karjakin is among the world's best, but like most of his modern wunderkind peers he's no Fischer, who stood out head and shoulders above his peers—and soon enough above the rest of the chess world as well.

 Hat tip The Chess Mind.

Jeff Sarwer Interview: Poker and Chess

Jennifer Shahade's "Lost and Found: An Interview with Jeff Sarwer" at the USCF website is worth a read, especially if you are among those numerous chess players with an interest in poker. I have made mention of Sarwer before on this blog ("Jeff Sarwer, Chess Prodigy Turned Poker Star" and "Jeff Sarwer - Josh Waitzkin, National Primary Championship 1986") and his story is worthy of full Hollywood treatment, especially now that he has reached what seems the sort of happy place where the film might end (though his life seems just getting interesting again).  I am still waiting for the full story, but I liked his reflections on the difference between poker and chess:

Shahade: How do you compare the wrenching feeling of blundering in chess to the wrenching feeling of getting knocked out of a poker tournament?

Sarwer:  Can't compare, blundering in chess feels much worse for me. In poker getting knocked out usually doesn't hurt as much because you lose a coin-flip that was out of your control or someone sucks out on you, things like that. Those type of things tend to effect me very little these days, simply because they have nothing to do with myself, it's just life playing variance with me. Occasionally in poker you feel bad when you do make a mistake, like a bad read, but since it is a game of incomplete information usually it doesn't feel that bad. It's more like a "hmmm got it wrong this time". Not a "how could I miss this? I just missed this stupid knight fork?"

Jeff Sarwer, Chess Prodigy Turned Poker Star

Watch EPT 6 Warsaw Day 4: Jeff Sarwer profile on PokerStars.tv
Child chess prodigy Jeff Sarwer (see the film at his official site) is back in the news after finishing third in the 6th season of the European Poker Tour, as discussed in "Chess Prodigy Checkmates EPT" by Martin Derbyshire. See my post "Jeff Sarwer - Josh Waitzkin, National Primary Championship 1986" where I analyzed his famous game (the basis for the concluding scene in Searching for Bobby Fischer).