Chess
games are played with various time formats. Classical chess games of
more than 90 minutes, rapid chess games (of 20 minutes) and blitz
chess (of five minutes) are the major categories of competition for
world titles. This year the world rapid chess championship was won by
the top active elder pro chess player Vishwanathan Anand of India.
Chess on-line is a
rapidly expanding recreational activity. Lichess, Chess.com, Chess24
and Chesstempo and Chess All-Stars are a few of the web sites with
free chess game playing.
Some of the younger
pro chess players have received professional chess instruction from a
very early age-even three years old, and parents have paid as much as
$25,000 a year for chess instruction for their progeny hoping that
they will become top professional chess players.
Skeptics may say that
pro chess is a meaningless recreational activity contributing nothing
more than pro tic tac toe of benefit to benefit humanity; I won’t
argue the point. It isn’t farming yet it is a good mind activity
for the elderly far better than sitting in a darkened room watching
television.
Yet
chess as an Internet on-line activity has a darker side of age and
sex discrimination trash talking. Chess playing does not compel one
to get off-board life experience or maturity. One can be a chess punk
with a bad attitude. Some use chess like trolls to try to victimize
opponents with predatory names and comments. The best remedy is to
beat them unemotionally and ignore the whimpering comments of
perverse losers.
The youth dominated
sport on-line is simply a factor of the recent proliferation of the
Internet world wide. Present youth have been able to play on-line
chess games for nearly 20 years and the opportunities for free chess
learning have increased too, with innumerable videos and pgn game
libraries enabling players to watch chess games of openings and
matches of the past five-hundred years. There is a lot of trash
talking on on-line chess games, and because the present generation
has had so much computer assisted learning they have tended to
believe that chess like physics is an activity where the very young
are best. Vishy Anand as world rapid champion since
28 December has
sort of upset that notion.
One of the primary
reasons for the advantage of younger chess players at the highest
level is that there are more of them and they have all studied the
games of the champion in detail while the champion hasn’t been able
to study the games of so many younger players in equal detail. It is
something like a pyramid where one studies the people above that are
fewer in number as one rises, while the guy or gal on top has to
study the games of all of those rising, and that is quite a different
challenge.
Vishy Anand was the
world classical champion follow Garry Kasparov's retirement. Kasparov
was best at all three major time controls of chess and when he seemed
to be slipping, quit. Anand had been around a very long time before
he got his moment to become world classical champion and took it with
a special selection match in Rio that determined the vacated world
championship title holder. Though he only defended the title a couple
of times he never stopped playing after losing the title.
Anand is a very tough
player that deserved the title as much as Tigran Petrosian or another
of the Soviet chess champs that held the title for just a short time.
Not every player is a Kasparov, Karpov, Steinitz, Lasker etc that
were at the top for a very long time. After losing the title to
Magnus Carlsen the present aging classical chess champ, Anand had the
will to win the candidates tournament and play a rematch with
Carlsen. Winning the candidates tournament is no easy feat. The
former world number two player Levon Aronian who is one of the
highest rated chess players in history tried five times and failed.
Anand gets credit for going back to win the candidates tourney.
After playing and
losing twice to Carlson in the world classical championship Anand may
have decided not to waste time trying again. He did not make the
2018 candidates tournament field. Instead he may have prepared for
the rapid chess competition and ended up being World Champion. That
is remarkable considering his age and shows his determination and
strategy for to winning.
Occasionally people
wish that Garry Kasparov would return to the chess arena as he did in
2017 briefly in a match in St. Louis. If Kasparov were to focus on
just one chess time control such as rapid or blitz and entered
numerous competitions he probably would be a contender for a world
title in his 50s. If narrowly focused apparently one can continue
winning chess to old age if one has the desire to do so.
I
didn’t play a
first complete
chess game until age 57 and made fair progress at blitz chess
discovering that the major problem is just Internet speed and time
delays that can create quite a disadvantage. My blitz high score of
1430 was hit a couple of years ago in a public library in Oklahoma
that had good Internet speed. Riding a bike around the nation looking
for work and playing on-line chess sometimes isn’t the quickest way
to advance yet blitz chess is something like ping pong with complex
vector spaces and trajectories with 16 balls instead of just one.
It’s a good way to relax and to exercise the mind, off-road.
Mcshane vs Anand rd 7 world rapid chess championship 27 Dec 2017
