[ List Earliest Comments Only For Pages | Games | Rated Pages | Rated Games | Subjects of Discussion ]
Comments/Ratings for a Single Item
Shogi champion plays Simpleminded Chess: http://en.chessbase.com/post/shogi-masters-play-chess.
So much for the element of surprise: Is d4 or e4 the better, asks Chessbase, the Simpleminded Chess site, http://en.chessbase.com/post/1-e4-best-by-test-part-2? Suppose, within different elo ranges, one stands atop 1% or 2%. Then theoretically they can ban the other opening move from given tournament, as stupid, and eventually everyone must play even the first ten moves alike. Well, almost they do already in generalized sense that each sensible first 8 or 10 has been long recognizable as to have own disambiguated name. Hence the liturgical ring of some "Nimzo-Indian Defence, Normal Variation, Bernstein Defence, Exchange Line" though "simply" '1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 e6 3 Nc3 Bb4 4 e3 0-0 5 Nf3 d5 6 Bd3 c5 7 0-0 Nc6 8 a3 Bxc3 9 Bxc3...' It and hundreds others speak volumes in memorizable confining repetition of fundamentalists. The November 2014 championship is fully in the works: http://www.fide.com/component/content/article/1-fide-news/7672-bidding-procedure-fide-world-championship-match-2014-.html. It will pit Carlsen and someone other than Nakamura. Though Nakamura is now #3 elo, on technicality he happens to lack the pre-qualifiers this year. "Magnus" and "Gargantua," though different cognates are of course synonyms within and across languages, meaning very big. Too, the images -- http://susanpolgar.blogspot.com/2012/07/magnus-carlsen-am-i-tired-what-stupid.html, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pantagruel%27s_childhood.jpg -- arguably bear not altogether remote resemblance, one of OrthoChess Carlsen, other from Rabelais five-book masterpiece. Now his 'Gargantua and Pantagruel'(circa 1540) is totally concerning Chess of the 1530s, when modern ranging Queen was recent invention, expressed in this work's Chapter XXV, http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/r/rabelais/francois/r11g/book5.25.html, and later illustrated by Gustave Dore.
Whew. Anand is going to participate, so chances are Simpleminded Chess will pit the same two Carlsen-Anand championship November 2014. http://en.chessbase.com/post/anand-will-he-won-t-he-he-will. Nakamura though #3 lacks required pre-qualifier, or more so became as high as #3 too late.
Variantists, here's a new fantasy CV to rate: http://en.chessbase.com/post/a-new-challenging-chess-variant. Poor? Mediocre? Good? Great? That actually just went up with full Rules here at CVPage recently: http://www.chessvariants.org/other.dir/sscc.html. Hey opening theory certainly goes out the board, if a player thinks "chain" and is willing to lose a little material. Is all Rules dis-ambiguation complete? See Switch-Side Chain-Chess to critique, preliminarily noted above whilst Zurich tournament progresses: http://en.chessbase.com/post/zurich-03-freak-occurrence. Unlike the best ever chess tournament Zurich 1953 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zurich_1953_chess_tournament), current Zurich 2014 is not a Candidates', but the coverage stays here since Anand-Carlsen 2013 will soon morph into Carlsen-other 2014.
Post-Zurich there is a Candidates', http://en.chessbase.com/post/candidates-2014-what-will-it-bring, to get challenger 2014 World Chess Championship. Who won Zurich? Magnus Carlsen. Will it be Carlsen-Anand again in November? Or Carlsen-Aronian, or someone else? All the Orthodox tournaments stay here since they morph one into another. Here's an Aronian best game: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1633757, one of five best. Where does White go wrong? Any takers?
Towards the rematch, http://en.chessbase.com/post/candidates-rd10-kramnik-s-downfall, and 8 months of hoopla til November.
Coverage of OrthoChess events has not been extensive since November 2013 title match between Carlsen and Anand. Supposed breaking news: Http://en.chessbase.com/post/breaking-news-world-championship-2014-in-norway. It's April 1, so unlikely the match is to be on oil rig. Yet other than Roberto Lavieri's elo rating discussion a decade ago, Chess variantists mostly avoid Simpleminded Chess anyway, and oil rig would be really tacky. On the very same day chessbase announces World Championship on practical temporizing oil rig, oxymoronically: http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_25463370/u-s-calls-costs-inaction-catastrophic, so the joke's on 10 million species. This topic will go on looking at some great games, like the one already queried Aronian versus Carlsen in 2011, http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1633757: where does White go wrong? It is continuation of topic "Spassky-Bronstein++": http://www.chessvariants.org/index/listcomments.php?subjectid=4a7b07267bc311c0. There over score of OrthoChess all-time games are annotated, including most of the Spassky-Fischer 1972. [Instead of quote, today's side topic: http://www.ifaw.org/united-states/our-work/whales/which-countries-are-still-whaling. Here's for genuine end to Whale slaughter, as well as Draw-dominated simpleminded OrthoChess championship business as usual?]
I certainly agree about the whaling - but even if the Japanese abandoned whaling altogether I still feel that Whale Shogi is too short-range a game for its theme. Not having its pieces named thematically might make for easier graphics, too.
http://en.chessbase.com/post/on-an-oil-rig-you-gotta-be-kidding the expected Be Mused retraction. [8.4.14 Today's quote: "A gust of wind is wild and free, but there are handcuffs on the storm." --Charles Fort 'Wild Talents' (1932). Also excellent article: http://en.chessbase.com/post/world-championship-reclaiming-a-lost-century. The fulcrum has to be Kasparov as number 13 appropriate for April Fool's, Kasparov birthday April 13, and the question is whether five earlier champions.]
http://en.chessbase.com/post/world-champions-reclaiming-a-lost-century-2 is ChessBase article Part Two.
Chess is Art! http://en.chessbase.com/post/diana-mihajlova-chess-is-art. Some of CV art embedded in new CV: http://www.chessvariants.org/index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MSdurerschess by Cannon whose first CV designs were in 1970s. http://www.chessvariants.org/large.dir/contest84/tetrahedralchess.html, 3d by mathematician Thompson. http://www.chessvariants.org/index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MSantarcticchess, snow crystal.
http://en.chessbase.com/post/no-bids-for-world-championship-2014
Is e4 or d4 the better? http://en.chessbase.com/post/1-e4-or-1-d4-which-is-the-better-move. Contrast to the earlier series of 'e4 versus d4': http://en.chessbase.com/post/1-e4-best-by-test-part-2, http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=30425. On Carlsen-Anand II for November 2014, there is routine extended time by world chess body f.i.d.e. to announce venue. Here is a Carlsen-Anand game from 2012: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1693032. Where does Black go wrong? There are fourteen pages of kibitzing, 80% of it live 12.Oct.2012, mostly about Anand's errors.
A close contest, Ilyumzhinov and Kasparov, in the ninth inning: http://en.chessbase.com/post/kasparov-answers-questions-in-norway-1-2. [And http://en.chessbase.com/post/kasparov-answers-questions-in-norway-2-2, in which on deep 'e4 or d4?' at top 'e4' is shunned]
November Championship, Carlsen-Anand II, to be in Sochi, thanks to Putin and Ilumzhinov: http://en.chessbase.com/post/breaking-news-world-championship-in-sochi. Interests in Chicago, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-05-27/opinion/ct-make-chicago-chess-mecca-edit-0527-20140527_1_chess-master-chess-mecca-bobby-fischer, had been weighing a bid, "before Vladimir Putin snags this tournament for the greater glory of Russia."
http://en.chessbase.com/post/explaining-male-predominance-in-chess -- would males also predominate at Chess variants?
Joe Joyce wrote on Thu, Jun 19, 2014 06:31 PM UTC:If the author's conclusions in this article are accurate, then males would also be better at chess variants. Chess is chess, until it isn't. (How many would recognize this game as a shatranj variant? http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/1178742/some-impressions-after-playing-the-battle-of-macys) However, I would take issue with at least some of the conclusions in the article. The last 2 paragraphs of the article are: "Males on average may have some innate advantages in developing chess skill due to previous differing evolutionary pressures on the sexes. Females may have greater talent on average in other domains, however. If the male predominance in chess was due just to social factors it should have greatly lessened or disappeared by now. Indeed, some researchers now recognize that many psychological sex differences are due to complex interactions between nature and nurture. This conclusion is unpalatable to many but it is best to acknowledge how the world actually is." The idea that social factors are now balanced between men and women is a stretch, one I do not agree with. I believe it's been demonstrated that if there is a difference between men and women in any area, a good part of that difference *is* social conditioning. Encouragement and discouragement in children is often quite subtle, and recent studies of films of classes, for example, show this clearly. You want 2 kids who read the same to read completely differently 5 years from now. Tell one kid (s)he is a good reader and the other (s)he is a bad reader. Sometimes that's all it takes to turn 2 average readers into non-average readers. If that isn't enough, give the "good" reader encouragement and somewhat harder and harder books to read, and ask them what they liked and didn't like, and what they learned.Give the "bad" reader very simple kids books to read, with orders to write book reports on them. Keep it up for a year, and see what happens several years further on. Any bets? I do not claim men and women are equal in everything, as that is obviously wrong. I do not even claim that the difference shown in the article isn't real. What I do claim is that the author never analyzed the male players the way the female players were analyzed. Suppose only the top 5% of all chessplaying men go on to get better, and the top 50% of women do. What would that do to the conclusions? We know that women are discouraged from things like chess, and men are encouraged to play things like chess, on average. Finally, the little matter of sexual harassment also has a bearing. Based on studies of women, any that rise are subjected to more intense, more open, and more hidden harassment. In fact, you can see that in the news, if you look. Just 1 example, the Gov. Christie bridge-closing scandal was blamed entirely on a woman working directly for Christie by the lawyers Christie hired to "investigate". It seems she was having an affair with another Christie top gun, and he dumped her, leaving her to close the bridge in a fit of irrational female passion - all her fault, because she was jilted.
I think Joe Joyce's post on "male predominance at chess" make more sense than the study itself. The explanation of gender differences in Chess may be simpler yet. **On average**, men are more likely than women to purse activities that have no social utility apart from the pleasure of doing that activity. Chess is in that category (as indeed are checkers, card games, etc.) No insult intended--I am interested in Chess variants for my own pleasure and no other reason and feel no need to apologize to anyone for that fact, and neither judge nor wish to judge anyone else for doing the same. I have considered that Chess can teach critical thinking, strategic planning, etc. Yes it can, but so can a myriad of non-game things useful in themselves apart from teaching. "Male predominance at chess" is a current fact of reality. I suspect there are males who believe this has 1) always been true, 2) always will be true, and 3) SHOULD be true. A significant number of such males will then reason by analogy about "male predominance in science", etc. I won't touch of the idea of a female human being who argues for "male predominance ...", the very idea terrifies me.
e4 or d4? Not locked in a vice: http://en.chessbase.com/post/popularity-of-chess-openings-over-time.
[Added 17.July.14, http://en.chessbase.com/post/garry-kasparov-on-the-threat-to-troms]. http://kasparov2014.com/. http://www.fide.com/component/content/article/1-fide-news/8067-fide-elections-2014-time-schedule.html. http://www.chessdom.com/2014-fide-election-tickets-anounced-ilyumzhinov-with-big-lead/ -- there support data in May has Ilyumzhinov 56, Kasparov 20.
http://www.fide.com/component/content/article/1-fide-news/8168-90th-anniversary-of-fide.html. http://www.chess.com/news/ilyumzhinov-vs-kasparov-whats-going-on-with-afghanistan--gabon-7142. http://kasparov2014.com/.
It starts: http://en.chessbase.com/post/olympiad-just-two-days-left (Environment-conscious are free to think of the repugnant Whaling aspect to the venue, http://www.ifaw.org/united-states/our-work/whales/which-countries-are-still-whaling). It ends? -- http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-29/scottish-referendum-could-end-300-year-union-with-england/5629924. Edinburgh, Scotland, to Oslo Norway, direct as the crow flies, is 934 kilometres (580 miles), the same distance as Chicago to Washington and same as Moscow to Kryvyi Rih, central Ukraine. Recall Ukraine, http://www.chessvariants.org/multimove.dir/progressive.html, holding Progressive tournaments, and Scottish Progressive one of the few.
http://en.chessbase.com/post/opening-ceremony-in-tromso. Background from 2 months ago regarding f.i.d.e. election August 7: http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/russia-seeks-to-sway-chess-election-against-putin-enemy. In September 2010 Ilyumzhinov was elected again that time over Karpov by 95-55: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirsan_Ilyumzhinov. There are 174 countries with teams participating now. The Wikipedia article linked above lists 'The Chess Artist', and following does include quote by Ilyumzhinov from that book: http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=20571. http://kasparov2014.com/ OR http://fidefirst.com/?p=2393 -- three days to the voting on players' day off.
25 comments displayed
Permalink to the exact comments currently displayed.