Magnus Carlsen recently provoked a lot of discussion on the format of the World championship by giving his support to a knock-out system (see the ChessBase report here). What do you think is the best format for the World Championship?
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The results of last week’s poll gave a healthy majority in favour of Carlsen retaining World Number One status, and with no clear indication of who is most likely to challenge him.
With four other players now also rated over 2800, do you think Magnus Carlsen will hold on to the Number One spot until the end of the year?
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Last week’s poll results:
We have been through this one a few times, but I just thought I wanted to run this one past the pollsters…
There are those who do not believe in talent for chess, and there are those who think that talent is everything. Clearly the truth is somewhere in-between. I remember someone on Facebook saying that there is no special talent for chess, only to be told by Peter Heine Nielsen that he knew a Norwegian guy with quite a bit of talent…
Obviously talent without work is poorer than work without talent. But with equal amounts of work, how much does talent add to your abilities?
Rating polls
The final of the three polls about rating makes more sense to view together with the two previous polls. Please draw your own conclusions!
Let us ignore the fantasy that you abandon your job, leave your wife and go on the road with Artur Yusupov and Boris Avrukh perfecting your chess, and just assume that life will continue as you are planning it.
What do you think is the highest rating you can reach? Please be honest.
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Last week’s poll showed a clear majority to the optimists:
I am an optimistic guy, I believe that I will write a better chess book than I have done up till now. I believe that 2015 will be the best year for Quality Chess so far (and the publications we have out so far have been received in a way that makes this optimism persist). I believe I can make it to the first team at the tennis club next year and that I can one day make it to the finals in the club championship.
But I doubt that I will ever play chess as well as I did in 2007. Or in other words – although I understand the game much better now, I have lost something extra I had then. Maybe it was the excitement of knowing that I would become a GM in the near future, or something else.
What about you? Is your best chess behind you or ahead of you?
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The results of last week’s poll:
We are trying to get a picture of our readership on this blog over the summer and in that connection we will ask a number of questions about you. Please answer only once in the week and forgive us for being in holiday mode and only doing a full analytical article at the end of the summer.
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Last week’s poll about what type of tournaments you prefer to play in produced a balanced response:
The Politiken Cup in Denmark is my favourite tournament. And so it should be, not only is it held in beautiful locations, with all the participants staying in the same place (view over the ocean), it is also in Denmark, where I have strong ties obviously.
Yes, they pay me to play there. I even win a few hundred pounds once in a while…
But for others, participating is easily running into £1000 when you include entry fee, accommodation, eating and buying Quality Chess books at the stand. There is no way around it if you are not Danish, as the tournament is held quite a bit from, well anywhere…
What is your view. Do you prefer a cheap and cheerful tournament or a luxury event like this?
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The results of last week’s poll offers some encouragement to chess publishers:
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.
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