Quality Chess Blog

Being over 40 and an optimist, I think the recent poll got it wrong. A clear majority think that chess is best played by those less than 30 years old.

Obviously we appreciate the support for our star author Boris Gelfand, but we fear a few people have voted this way for entirely the wrong reasons…

I checked the current top 100 on 2700chess.com, not to claim that it is a scientific proof of anything, but just out of curiosity. And I found that the average age for the various top something were practically identical:

Top 10: 30.30
Top 25: 30.36
Top 50: 30.72
Top 100: 30.43

Add to this that it is likely that the average age of players aged 30 is 30 years and six months, it means that the current top 50 might be over 31 in average, but the other groups are just under 31. That the two players with the “right” age are going out of the top 10 soon by current trends, just shows that this is an average. The prime could well be between 21 and 45.

How many chess books did you buy this year?

Marketing survey!

How many chess books/DVDs did you buy this year? We are six months in and we were just wondering.

It does not matter who published them or anything like this. We know that there are plenty of smart people in our business and that we are not the only one to take our job seriously.

The debate on cheating in chess was quite interesting. I played devil’s advocate a few times, though I personally do not have strong feelings on this issue. I have had 2-3 experiences where people were cheating against me the last ten years, mainly where their friends helped them. Luckily their friends (respectable GMs) got busy with their own games and the cheaters were left to their own devices, completely void of self-respect and self-esteem. I scored fine in those games and was happy to not get involved in the thinking about cheating.

Your votes show how divisive this issue is. I fear it will only get worse over the years. This week’s question is a standard one. In recent times we had the two oldest players playing for the title in the last 100 years and the oldest World Champion since Botvinnik. In 2012 everyone told me that the match should be Aronian–Carlsen. Even Topalov! And today Topalov is no. 2 in the World rankings, Anand is close and Aronian is rated not much more than Gelfand… I am not even go into how Anand was not the rightful challenger last year and how Caruana deserved the match on the strength of one good tournament.

New players will always come through, and not evenly. When Anand, Shirov, Kramnik, Kamsky and Topalov broke through, the top 10 were young. Kamsky and Shirov have lost the hunger, but the three others are still possible contenders for the crown – unless you want to write Kramnik off after ONE bad year????

But everyone has his own opinion and it will be interesting to see what the general consensus will be.

A few things to consider:

A friend pointed out that a Grandmaster’s three norms were evident results of cheating. He showed me the games and I was rather convinced I have to say. But who should make the complaint? Neither my friend nor I wanted to be involved in this issue. Especially I could see no upside in being involved in what was someone else’s life and livelihood. Is it double standards and selfishness not wanting to be involved in making other people’s life difficult, even if they have done something I consider abhorrent?

Another case. I was training a young man around 2100 and he was really doing the work needed. After a few months he went to a weekend tournament and scored 5/5 against 2200s as the lowest seed. His games were clearly not computer games. We had changed his style to a more technical style and his openings were more in line with his quiet character. He ground people down in tense struggles. At the end of the tournament everyone agreed that he was cheating and there were boos when he collected his prize.

Read more…

So, finally I am getting around to write a publishing schedule. Sorry it took so long, though I am not too ashamed to have been producing books rather than talk about them… (Follow the links to see excerpts for the five top books)

There is a few things we have alluded to on the blog over the last few months that are in the list. I will just quickly run through them.

Read more…

Last week’s poll was on draw by mutual agreement. It seems that a very considerable minority thinks that draw offers should not be a part of chess at all. This actually surprised me, I thought people would have been more ambivalent about it.

Here are the results:

It was big news recently that Fabiano Caruana decided to change back to the US. The rumoured transfer sum was $200,000 – and then there is the €50,000 to FIDE and an undeclared compensation to Italy. I am not sure we have heard the last thing in that saga.

But a separate question is if we want it to be possible to change country in this way? I will leave the debate to you guys, as I am an obvious hypocrite in this connection. In 2006 I changed to represent Scotland (with proof of address). I paid the FIDE transfer fee myself. But in 2010 I changed back to Denmark, still living at the same address (proving nationality with passport) and I will not rule out changing again in the future, though it is really not something I am planning to do…

But then it was not a business transaction for me. For Caruana and especially Naiditsch it certainly looks that way…

This week’s hot question in the poll is about draw by mutual consent. Is this something we would have if we were to create chess now? Andrew Greet asked. But of course the game comes with baggage and traditions… It will be interesting to hear your views. In general we will work a bit more as moderator in the discussions of poll topics in the future than hardliners for a point of view.

Last week’s poll was about the anticipation of the Fischer-film PAWN SACRIFICE:

Personally I am sold. Definitely going and forcing my girlfriend to come…

I have always known that my dislike of increments puts me in a minority. But I was quite pleased to see how big that minority was!

This blog post is inspired by IM Lawrence Trent’s public announcement that he is retiring from competitive chess, but is by no means meant as advice to Lawrence or a comment on his very personal decision. But it is a small note on goal setting and the way you can set yourself up for failure.

I have personally aimed at the IM title and the GM title at various times in my life. I achieved both rather quickly at the time when I was ready for them, getting all the norms in less than 12 months. It took me an additional three years to surpass 2500 in rating and it is only from this that I learned some quite valuable lessons; what had worked for me and what did not.

First of all, no matter how much I desired the grandmaster title, the desire did not give me an inch of competitive advantage. Rather the contrary – the overload of importance my decision making was suffering from meant that I struggled to work things out that should have been achievable for me. Every defeat was a heartbreak and caused immense emotional suffering. I have since then had to hold my ill child in a scanner for 20 minutes while she was crying and begging me to let her go, so I have definitely experienced worse, but where that was probably 9/10, losing to a 2100 in Cappelle in 2005 was about a 7/10. If I had not been entirely demolished, it might have felt worse.

The way I got past it was actually simple. I allowed myself to fail. I decided that as long as I was trying my best, it was OK. If that was enough, then it was enough. And if not, then it was not.

In 2006 I lost a blitz play-off game at the Danish Championship where I was apparently winning. I went from 1st to 6th place in less than 30 seconds. I knew already then that I would probably never win the championship of my birth country, as I had already changed affiliation to Scotland. Still, there was no pain, no regret, no remorse. I had tried.

In 2007 I became British Champion and surpassed 2500 on the way.

What I recommend to students facing such tasks is to play it move by move. If you are close to GM-level, but constantly failing (as is happening with one guy I am helping at the moment), maybe the thing to do is to improve your chess skills and knowledge? To do the work required to be more than 2500 once; to become a GM for life, if indeed this is your wish. Because if you do not like chess, the whole thing seems rather pointless to me anyway…