"Chess is all about UNDERSTANDING, u can have the best memory in the world, that if u dont understand u wont be a good player."
Yes, OriginalRepertoire is absolutely right there. :)
I think you might underestimate the greatness and capabilities there are in chess, mirlife.
In fact I quite liked your first post, except the - in my opinion- massive exaggerations in the last paragraph.
Chess is not dead or fully analyzed.
Engines just can help humans to reach a new level.
Of course a great memory is important, but I believe
Understanding will always make the difference.
Bad4life
edit:
The only really sad thing is the ease of cheating.
Bad4life@ I completely agree with u.
@bad4life "I think you might underestimate the greatness and capabilities there are in chess, mirlife."
Ok. It is not me only. I will quote some greatest players own words to clarify my position.
I'll start with Bobby Fischer:
"Now chess is completely dead. It is all just memorisation and prearrangement. It’s a terrible game now. Very uncreative."
-----------
"Chess has ceased to be a struggle of personalities or a struggle of ideas and has instead been transformed into a purely technical and boring work of remembering a large number of prepared opening variations. The human element in play is lost completely. I’ve tried to fight against it, 10-12 years ago it seemed to me that 'Fischer’s chess' was a way out of the situation arisen. But I’ve understood then that it is difficult to change the way things are done.
In this sense chess is a reflection of that which takes place in other fields of human activities. The creative element is less and less present in the world! Chess reached this point 20 years ago. The best chess was produced long ago. Nowadays the computer dictates how chess preparation develops. Players have become spectators.
-- Valery Salov, from a 2009 interview
So, OriginalRepertoire if you think that your IM title gives you a better chess understanding than Fischer and Salov, my hats off to you. But I'm not so sure.
Continue ...
“Finally the novelty came. These days it seems to be normal to play novelties somewhere in the ending. Apart from just being the novelty, this move is also very strong. It is most probably that Radjabov found this natural improvement over the board, as he spend more than an hour, if I am not mistaken. But it could be that he was just trying to remember his own analysis (can you imagine how much he has to remember??).”
-- Mihail Marin
So, OriginalRepertoire, I assume that you already know who is Mihalin Marin.
Continue...
“World Championship games are expected to last four, perhaps even six hours. This one was over in little more than two. The Indian World Champion was destroyed; nay, humiliated. On Bulgarian television that night, Topalov explained that the entire game had been prepared by him and his team at home; he didn’t need to find a single original move to score a simple first game victory.”
-- Ian Rogers, reporting from Sofia, Bulgaria, 2010
“It feels a little silly to annotate a game in which I didn't make a single move on my own, just following my preparation all the way. [...] A pretty finale. I was obviously hoping for the beauty prize sacrificing both my rooks and all, but OK, Im [sic] afraid requirements are one makes a move of his own for that it seems. Something I could avoid doing in the last five rounds in Dresden. Silly game, this chess.”
-- Jan Gustafsson, writing for Chessbase, 2011
Is that enough? Or should I continue with Kamsky?
#14
Here is another example of winning opening preparation by a top player.
Consider this well-known game in which Botvinnik beats Spielmann in the opening by trapping his opponent's queen:
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1031882. As noted in the annotations to the game in this article:
http://en.chessbase.com/post/huffington-the-adventures-of-mikhail-botvinnik-1, the same opening line had been played in a game a year earlier with Spielmann playing the white pieces:
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1130948. Both Botvinnik and Spielmann were undoubtedly familiar with the game and the line, but Botvinnik had deeply prepared the variation at home, resulting in a quick knockout by preparation alone.
Of course, the difference in this game is that it was played in 1935, a year before Turing would even publish his paper on his namesake machines, so Botvinnik had no access to engines in his preparation. Preparing and analyzing opening lines is not a new phenomenon in chess, and although computers are strong tools to help top players prepare openings, they do not take away from the knowledge the game requires once players leave their preparation.
The discussion on whether chess has become boring, overly technical or over analysed has gone on for over a century. Many are those who have claimed that chess is somehow 'dead', whatever that means.
In an era when any patzer can google "chess memorization quotes" some feel they are equally entitled to make the same bold pronouncement, forgetting that anyone who disagrees with them can use a search engine for their own purposes.
Ultimately the dichotomy between understanding and memorization is a false one. This is simply not how the brain works. The mammal cerebral cortex has evolved to recognize patterns, not discrete bits of data.
We are lousy at remembering disassociated information, such as shopping lists, phone numbers or multiplication tables. An adult typically has a working memory which at most can process about 7 'chunks' of simultaneous elements, which is laughable compared to a computer. The vast majority of these chunks never reach the long term memory, as our brain habitually disregards information it deems to be irrelevant. This is why association plays such a large part in memory techniques. When we can associate seemingly unrelated points of information to some larger framework, our ability to remember stuff increases exponentially.
This becomes apparent when you let a chess grand master try to remember a truly random piece configuration. They perform no better than average. If you give them a position from a real chess game though they don't need many seconds to store it in their memory. This appears to some to be an amazing feat of memorization, but is actually not much different from a pianist repeating a piece of music they just heard.
The same holds true for learning theory. It matters little how many hours you spend on memorizing opening lines if you don't understand what is going on in that particular line. If you for instance don't know the ideas behind the Breyer variation of the Spanish you will struggle mightily with remembering any move past 9...Nb8.
A concept like 'minority attack' exists to help us understand the games of Capablanca and others. The games of Capablanca can help us understand the concept of a minority attack. Understanding facilitates memorization, and memorization facilitates understanding.
To quote Kasparov from his book "How Life Imitates Chess" (he apparently didn't realize chess had died a couple of decades earlier):
"In June 2005 in New York I gave a special training session to a group of the leading young players in the United States. I had asked them each to bring two of their games for us to review, one win and one loss. A talented twelve-year-old raced through the opening moves of his loss, eager to get to the point where he thought he'd gone wrong. I stopped him and asked why he had played a certain pawn push in the sharp opening variation. His answer didn't surprise me: "That's what Vallejo played!" Of course I also knew that the Spanish Grandmaster had employed this move in a recent game, but I also knew that if this youngster didn't understand the motive behind the move, he was already headed for trouble.
This boy's response took me back to my own sessions with Botvinnik thirty years earlier. On more than one occasion he chided me for committing this same sin of blind emulation. The great teacher insisted that his students recognize the rationale behind every move. As a result, all of us learned to become great skeptics, even of the moves of the best players. We would discover a powerful idea behind each Grandmaster move, but we also found improvements. We studied, we questioned, we grappled with the idea behind a series of moves, and eventually we could build our understanding and create more and better strategies.
For players who depend on memorization, the opening ends when their memory runs out of moves and they have to start thinking for themselves. A rote opening might carry you to move five, or even move thirty, but this practice always inhibits your development as a player. It is one thing for a world-class player to rely on memorization; he already knows all of the whys behind the moves. For your own development it's far more important to think for yourself from the very start."
@Sollerman, Was Viswanathan Anand a talented twelve-year-old boy when playing world chess championship (2010)? Of course not. But please read this:
“The World Chess Championship between defending champion Viswanathan Anand and his Challenger Veselin Topalov got under way with a shocker. In just about an hour Anand was in a lost position. Both players powered down a very well known Gruenfeld line. Then Anand started to think, but he must still have been in preparation. And then he blundered with 23...Kf7?? which was almost certainly as a result of trying to remember his preparation rather than studying the position. He probably mixed up lines in his own mind. After 24.Nxf6 Anand didn't put up a lot of resistance and resigned after 30 moves but there was little he could do after his blunder anyway.”
-- Chessbase, 2010
@ Sollerman, Lasker agree with you about how brain works. But he explain it slightly different than yours:
Education in Chess has to be an education in independent thinking and judging. Chess must not be memorized, simply because it is not important enough. If you load your memory, you should know why. Memory is too valuable to be stocked with trifles. Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting what I had learned or read, and since I succeeded in this I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without. If need be, I can increase my skill in Chess, if need be I can do that of which I have no idea at present. I have stored little in my memory, but I can apply that little, and it is of good use in many and varied emergencies. I keep it in order, but resist every attempt to increase its dead weight.
You should keep in mind no names, nor numbers, nor isolated incidents, but only methods. The method is plastic. It is applicable in every situation. The result, the isolated incident, is rigid, because it is bound to wholly individual conditions.
-- Emanuel Lasker, Lasker's Manual of Chess
Finally I quote great Bronstein:
“I can answer in a single phrase. But I don't think you will venture to print it.... 'Dancing on our graves!' Yes, the young 'stars' are dancing on our graves while we are still alive! They have taken our chess, appropriated our ideas. They are playing the same positions, which they have studied backwards and forwards, and all this pomp now looks rather foolish. Huge prizes, television, sponsors, publicity- and everyone is expected to believe their claims that it was, oh, so difficult to seize control of the c-file... As if they were seizing it with their bare hands or taking a bulldozer and dragging it with their hands to the c-file!
[...]
Thank you very much! At the bottom people will be playing the same chess- the millions will go to those at the top. Look at what's happening now. They at the top of their Mt. Olympus, can refrain from playing for six months at a time, and meanwhile the other two hundred grandmasters do all the research spade-work for them. And when six months later they open their chess magazines or consult their databases, they see that the 'galley slaves' have already debugged all the new continuations and shown how they should be played. You understand? This is their free laboratory. In effect, the 'stars' sell other people's knowledge for big money. But why, in that case, should they consider themselves more important than all the others?
[...]
In their annotations, they juggle a multitude of continuations but play only one. In any opening, there now arises a definite position in which all the continuations have been evaluated. Time and again you read in such annotations that this or that is an innovation, a new move. What of it? You are 'superstars'! Can you not play without the crutches of theory? They have intimidated everyone with their 'innovations'. Or take their standard comment somewhere on the 22nd move: 'The usual continuation here is...' In my day, there were no such comments. It simply never occurred to us to analyse an opening to the 20th move. That's a problem for a computer, not a human being.”
-- David Bronstein
Quoting from and discussing mishaps from the world's top world champions and grandmasters is rather irrelevant to 99% of chess players. A professional chess player is of course going to spend countless hours in theoretical preparation, memorizing lines and reviewing endgames and the like trying to find an edge because it's far easier for these geniuses to recall preparation than to do actual calculation.
For the rest of us Neanderthals, we have to brute-force our way through the tactics and spend a lot of time calculating the candidate moves, especially when our opponents generally don't care that their strange opening is unsound because we aren't going to know the refutation. Even CMs, NMs, IMs, and lower ranked GMs have to do a great deal of calculation in their games. This is no different than if you compare professionals of any sort. A professional dancer has committed their every routine to memory down to the slightest hand gesture. A professional karate master has committed likely hundreds of katas to memory. A professional actor has every line, gesture, stage movement, etc. committed to memory before performance.
And in each of these situations, if something happens unexpected, they have to adapt. Their vast wealth of memorization doesn't take away their ability to perform differently if necessary. The same is of chess. Even those great GMs who have hundreds of lines of all the main variations they played committed to memory, hundreds of endgames memorized, etc. it doesn't take away from the fact they can still perform in situations that are not part of that wealth of knowledge. Saying that chess960 is the only "real" chess is basically like saying calculus is the only "real" math or C++ is the only "real" programming language. It's entirely subjective.
And if chess is dead, why is it drawing more worldwide interest than it has since the Cold War?
