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Drug Testing For Olympic Chess Players?
Lawrence Person writes: "According to this AP wire story, they're thinking of adding chess as an Olympic sport. The downside? Mandatory drug testing. 'He's using steroids to move that pawn!'"
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Did anyone think that a chess tournament between 16 people could easily take longer than the olympics to complete? Either that, our you're going to have to tighten up the time rules...
Seriously, seing as they usually play multi-game matches, and I've heard of many matches over the course of, say, 8 hours or more, couldn't this stretch out??
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
i don't mean offense, but it seems really obvious you've neither 'thrown a metal ball' or 'ran down a track' in a seriously competitive way.
I would turn this right around and say that you've never been involved with or been a serious spectator in either competitive Quake 3 playing or a serious chess competition.
the people at the top of these fields practice many hours a day, through intense physical stress/injuries. the mental discipline it takes is absolutely incredible.
And Quake 3 players don't spend thousands of hours practicing and becoming experts at their game? Chess players often start their careers as young children to fully develop a brain that can make the leaps required for chess.
. and i wouldn't be shocked if there reflexes were far superior to most q3 players, as both of the activities you mentioned rely greatly on fast twitch muscle and body/eye coordination. if these people spent the same playing q3 as 99% of q3 players, they'd be better.
Wow that's quite a blanket assertion: The Quake 3 world is just waiting for the day that a 100m athletes comes over and wipes up the field. Sorry, but that is proposterous. There are millions of players who partake in computer gaming, and of those the best of the best of the best, with the best mental abilities (for the requirement) and the best reflexes, move to the top. This idea that "naturally superior" superhuman track and field athletes could be the best Q3 player if they only wanted to is absolutely, positively proposterous (no different than me claiming that the top Q3a player could be the fastest runner and the longest jumper if only that's what he wanted to do). Let me guess: a baseball player would automatically make a great chess player?
Umm, you guys do know that Ritalin causes brain atrophy, right...?
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
Uh huh. Go play an hour of Ultimate Frisbee, and after you've scraped yourself off the floor (like I did) tell me it's not a sport. Face it, people invent new sports all the time, and if they become popular enough, they become spectator sports. Look at beach volleyball for another example, and tell me those people aren't working.
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[Mr Kasparov]Judge!. I think that my oponent has been using drugs again
Ok, that was a bad joke, but I couldn't resist
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I'd say that if you have hung out with a chess team, Linux User Groups, D&D players, and by god, Magic The Gathering players, you have no right to be calling someone else poorly socialized.
BilldaCat
Here's a list you can start with.
And as others have pointed out, there's more than just steroids that can be used to improve performance. Imagine a drug that can be used to simply keep the mind more alert for a longer period of time (the side effect being the need to sleep for several days afterwards to make up for it). I would surmise that a chess player that has taken such a drug would fair better than one that hasn't considering the length of some chess matches.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the banned substances are chosen on a sport by sport basis. Therefore, perhaps steroids would be allowed for chess. Just not some concentration-enchancing drug. Or rather, the IOC has a certain set of standards, and the individual sports have others.
Canadian Olympic Snowboarder Ross Rebagliati tested positive for marijuana use. The IOC has no minimum amount set for marijuana use, but the Internation Ski Federation did...
Let me get this straight
:)
You think feeding a bunch of World-class chess players (who are always RUSSIAN) a bunch of ALCOHOL will make any difference whatsoever ?
How many russians do you know ?
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Well, yes, I had this spare disk to restart and didn't want to take too much power from the main supply...
Olympic Squad : What the Hell ! A spare disk !
Blue : Well, yes, whats wrong with that ?
Olympic Squad : Please follow us, M. Blue.
We will also have to check your steppings. Using a higher voltage and starting this spare HDD motor as a fan Facility let us think you might have Overclocked during the competition
Blue : No, It's Wrong ! I never did this. Anyhow, you have no right to discompile my log file. DMCA is still here to protect us ! And I just had the file pass through Rot-13 ! You Can't beat me without trepassing your Law ! You can't Decrypt without my aothirisation !!!
Blue Squad : Under bill 1-2007 (Bill Gates against The World / USA) I have to read yor rights !
You have the right to stable power supply ! Everything you write can be used to prosecute you. You cannot defrag during your detention time. Any use of non licensed source within your code can put you up to 5 years in Prime Number Calculus Detention Center
Blue : Noooooooo !!!! I won't support this !!!
I will BSOD if you come closer to the plug ! I warn you ! It will make a messy memory Dump in the news !!!
Olympic Squad : Stop him ! I have a QNX floppy here with me. You won't suffer, I promise !!!
To be followed
011 100 000 011
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
That said, there are many real sports that have been introduced to the olympics that I don't believe belong there. Mountain bike racing, for example. I am a mountain racer myself, but I don't think it makes a good olympic sport, since it isn't simply a test of an athlete's skill and endurance. Anything can happen when you are on a trail!
The olympics should be track & field, swimming, and wrestling. Nothing else. And absolutely no friggin' games!!! (basketball, baseball, football, water polo...)
The drugs alter your perception of reality. Specifically amphetamines tend to make you enjoy yourself. If you get this effect while playing guitar you will very much enjoy your musical abilities, thus thinking you play better. "But I swear dude, I play better high!" heh.. yeah, right.
Sigs are awesome huh?
Chess as an olympic sport? *sigh* That's almost as bad as when they brought in baseball.
His gold medal status is pending until further review.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
I have numerous 2nd and 3rd hand accounts of the use of some prescription drugs (including ritalin) being used to aid concentration during long study sessions. (Obvously it isn't hard for medical personnel to get them or to know the side effects.) How widespread this practice is or how effective it is, I have no idea but it does appear to happen and apparently to some degree.
Maybe that's why I was never a curve wrecker in college. Everyone else was doping... Yeah, that's it. That's the ticket...
>The olympic motto is "Swifter. Higher. Stronger." I fail to see how
;-)
>this includes chess and other non-physical competitions.
Swifter. Interesting that I see that and you don't...
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"This really isn't a big deal. They should treat all the Olympic participants fairly. Not testing the chess players would be discriminating against the other participants in my physical events.
... because the guy who created the Olympic Games also wanted to win a medal. Of course he won the gold medal. The same year they also gave out medals for photography or painting.
...
All this happened around the year 1900.
There's lot of stuff hidden in the old history books
Lots of atheletes can benefit from drugs in ways you wouldn't normally think of. Shooters, for example, have been caught taking drugs to lower their metabolisms so they can have steadier aim. Maybe for chess they will ban ginko biloba or even caffine.
I just wonder how long till they decide to let big blue play. Only problem would be figuring out how to get a urine sample from a super computer.
You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson: never try.
'He's using steroids to move that pawn!'
Nooo.... They're overclocking Deep Blue!
But they don't say which is which. So, would it be an unfair advantage if my opponent could smell his next move? What if he was so fearful that my Bishop was going to strap him to a wall and go Inquisition on him that he played with more ferocity?
I have a hunch that such abuse would have you busted back to playing old wooden puzzles.
In other news: The PC Turns 20 And We Are Supposed To Care
great, make broad generalizations about a large group of people based on your limited high school chess experience.
i'm glad you could share.
let's see if I have this right. people who think they're smart because of great skill with a game of strategy are way off base. here's a question: how much difference can you really point out between chess, a mathematical proof, and computer programming... they all require very similar cognitive processes. perhaps you can prove me wrong, or give me a pointer to 'scientists' who have proved it.
as for chess clubs having poorly-socialized members, and linux user groups coming in a close second... i'd like to direct your attention to the following...
and last of all. you say that chess is stupid, and magic and d&d are real games of strategy that demand true intelligence. how about this... maybe some chess players think that fantasy games are immature? i don't, but just a thought.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
Oh, how very western to invite chess to the Olympics. Great game, for sure.
But I hope go is next.
According to the Nihon Ki-in, there are at least 7 million go players in Japan alone. That's 5-6% of the population! Go is rampant in China (add maybe 36 million players to the previous number!) and very much so in Korea (maybe another 5 million players there). In the US, it's not as well known as chess, but I'll bet more people could/have/would play it than other esoteric olympic events like fencing or whatever that gymnastic ball and ribbon stuff is.
But the big question: Is go more or less TV Friendly(tm) than chess?
Yeah, and the Gold for First-Posting could join Golf as only the second contest in which a NEGATIVE score is a good thing! :)
(I'm sure there are plently of contests in which a negative score is desirable, but please don't ruin my lame little joke with logic.)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I was gonna play some chess, but then I got high, I was gonna play with the olympic best, but then i got high now i'm just sittin here I must confess, and I know why-- hey hey because I got high, because I got high, because I got high....
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
methamphetamines don't calm you down, they do exactly the opposite: They rev you up. You feel like you could run the 100 meter dash in under 10 seconds.
As for the feeling of "speed of thought", that's exactly what it is - a feeling, nothing more.
- Toby
Damn. Drugs are about the only thing that makes chess interesting.
"Old man yells at systemd"
What exactly is your definition of sport if not physical activity governed by a set of rules? Does shooting, archery, etc. not fit this definition?
What does it matter if the sport was derived from military activity?
Q.
If they don't exist now, someone, somewhere will develop a drug that will improve your chess game. How do you then impliment drug testing? You could go 2 or 3 sets of olympics before the arguments are over. By then, chess would be as much of a joke as weight lifting.
Another notion is whether chess be in the olympics. I believe that it was previously stated that the olympics were origionally to display skill in military arts. And what are they now? Is hockey any more martial than chess? At least in chess, you're eliminating the opposition. (though as a Canadian, I'd hate to see hockey removed from the games). And then there's synchronised swimming (ew)
Even if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you can't be sure until you see the RealDuck
I. Asimov disliked most of the members of mesna for similar reasons (he became a member, but for a long time never attended because he couldn't stand being with these people).
But not all chess players are like that. I worked with someone who was a member of the chess federation. That is he had a ranking (low as it was).
Some people would say that being able to hack computers takes a special kind of mental skill. I guess any group of people can sink to snoberism, and yet another group of similar people will rise above it. There are assholes in any group.
Then maybe you can include Quake, bridge, backgammon, strip poker, etc...
Not so. Motor sports are endurance sports, like triathalon or marthathon. F1 and CART drivers are all in very good shape. They do continuous conditioning work and lose weight, up to 15 lbs or more, during the course of a two-hour race.
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Ignore the "Chess Isn't a Sport" arguements. That does not matter to the IOC. What matters is that chess is not TV friendly. The IOC cares more about ratings than anything else.
posted by an irrate fencer, a sport that is in danger of being cut because we aren't "TV Friendly".
W
Actually, just today on NPR they discussed a research study that suggested that many Master and Grandmaster level chess players are using a part of the brain completely unused in the average player. The conclusion drawn by this researcher and study was that your average person is incapible due to his brain structure to become a Grandmaster.
Now while I don't agree with that, since it's been proven that different experiences can help develop the functioning of different parts of the brain, and I would imagine thousands of games of chess in childhood would warp anyone's brain... anyway, there's a point here somewhere.
The point I'm trying to make is that just because you someone may think differently, it's an amazingly concieted assumption to make to assume that it's "stupid".
And no, I can barely keep the names of the pieces right, I'm not a chess fanatic.
Imagine a chess match in which the players drop some LSD or eat some magic shrooms...
The players would get into a philosophical discussion on the underlying meanings of the game or they might feel sorry for the pawns since they always get the shaft.
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
cf. Radical vegans, "do other primates have voting rights?", considerable debate... Friday night drunks, "we're really cool and the girls love us", considerable debate...
The fact that one small group may believe it doesn't make it true, or even worth everyone else bothering with. The rest of the world sees this and laughs. Remember, this article was put in as a funny, not as a serious question.
Chess is not a sport. Nor are poker, backgammon or mental arithmetic, since none involve any physical skill at all. Snooker/pool/billiards may _just_ make it in there, since it requires considerable hand-eye coordination, which is physical skill. Chess only requires the hand-eye coordination necessary to close fingers over a piece, move it to another square and hit a timer button.
Grab.
A chess master might get an advantage from taking Ritalin in one constest but even that is doubtful. It is a very powerful drug that messes with several areas of the brain. If you are a chess grandmaster you almost certainly don't suffer from ADD. Like if you had ADD how did you get there? You might well suffer from dyslexia which is the problem that many Ritalin victims actually have it being easier to prescribe an addictive drug than diagnose the problem.
One of the ironic things about high school and college abuse of Ritalin is that the kids who take it so that they can concentrate hours at a stretch would almost certainly learn more if they took regular breaks. Fatigue is the brain's signal to the body that it needs a rest. Transfer from short term to long term memory appears to work best as a background task while the variables are not locked by another process. It is better to take regular five minute breaks than try to sit down for hours at a stretch.
LSD may have helped the Beatles write Sgt Pepper but I don't think anyone considers that it would have helped their creativity over the long term if they had kept taking it.
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The simple fact is the IOC doesn't give a flying duck if a given substance is legal in a given country. In some events athletes are banned from taking cough syrup and aspirin. It also doesn't really care if they are performance enhancing (quick name an event that you would do better in if you were on weed).
That's a valid point, but I'm thinking there is a different reason for this.
It would be a huge mess if you started trying to apply different drug-use standards to different sports. Imagine the confusion and potential for error...
class A - swimming, track & field, gymnastics and wrestling - no steroids, no amphetimines, etc
class B - fencing, skeet shooting, curling and equestrian events - no steroids allowed, but amphetimines are ok.
class C - chess - take whatever the hell you want
"no, no, no -- please just make it easier for us to know what we can and can't take by having one standard for everything!"
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
If Chess is added to the Olympics, it's only a matter of time before many many other "mental" games are petitioning the Olympic Commission for admission to the games. Instead of allowing the Commission to be very judgemental in what they allow, it'd make better sense for a mental Olympics to be wholly created outside of the existing Games, IMHO.
Why? Because Big Blue would always fail the drug tests due to extravagant arsenic and lead counts! This is discrimination!! IBM should sue!!!
Scientists have proved that all it takes to be a good chess player is a good memory. So why do we treat these people as though playing chess is a sign of intelligence ?
Rarely is anything about the mind proven, just speculated and corelated. If all it takes to play chess is a good memory, then why has it take so long for computers to compete with grand masters level chess players. Computers have superior memory to people. It is becuase computers lack abstraction and reasoning skills, two basic component in what you call imagination.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
This also applies to bridge, which is on track for Olympic status, and already has had its first dope tests.
actually it does not
It keeps you focussed for a longer time period. That's not the same thing
Of course, they can't ban cofee.. can they?
In many sports, there are strict limits for caffeine. It's possible to get busted in tests just by drinking too much coffee. Usually 300-500mg of caffeine pushes you above the limit (12mg of caffeine in 1l of urine). Since there is usually 40-60mg of caffeine in one cup of coffee, 10 cups of coffee would be too much.
When you smile, the world laughs at you.
The society we live in has put a higher premium on the mental skills, that's what is going on.
To grok this we need to go back to the original Greco-Roman games. The games were feats of athletic skill and battle strategy, which were definitely essential survival skills during those days.
Today, while these skills are still important, the mental aspect of strategy and tactics has become far more important.
When a panoply of technologies can deter even the largest crowd (audio detterence technology, microwaves meant to temporarily blind people mounted on tanks are all part of the "nonlethal" arsenal) the controllers of these technologies are at the crux of social decisions.
The Int'l Olympic Committee is supposed to consider the social relationships of the Games, their deeper meaning, etc. along with all the cash and entertainment values of the Games. Perhaps, by adding chess, this social value is their primary consideration.
(It certainly won't add any entertainment or monetary value to the Games!)
Goat sex free since 2001
Like an academic decathlon for adults?
Canada recently enacted laws making cannabis available as medicine for the seriously ill, and the US gov't continues to provide it for 7 individuals grandfathered in from Bush the Elder's termination of the Compassionate Investigative New Drug trial of the '80s.
Would these individuals be barred from competitive chess?
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Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Of course, curling is kinda a minority sport, and one of the weirder ones they've included.
Chess, on the other hand, is in a totally different league - it's solely reliant on mental ability. A quadraplegic could play it as well as someone with full use of their limbs. This isn't true of any of the other sports (AFAIK). Quake would still require fairly physical skills, so I wouldn't count it as the same sort of game. I'd still love to see it as an Olympic sport though :)
I wonder what it would be like playing chess stoned. You'd probably make amazing insights into the other players strategy (they're basing their attack from Darth Vader's plan in The Empire Strikes Back!)... all wrong of course.
Alternatively we could numb the grand masters brain cells with alcohol. http://www.firebox.com/product.php?id=115
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
Speed chess can be fun to watch. Watching regular chess is a good way to slip into slumber-land.
I don't think any network will need to cover a regular chess game live. Even golf moves faster.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Massive ratings?....of course not...but SOME ratings if they actually got televised, sure. :) Of course, the number of actual events that get televised during the Olympics currently is absurd. Basically, it must have an American in it, and look very dynamically interesting. When was the last time you saw Table Tennis or Fencing or Judo or hammer throw or any of the other gazillion events televised?
My Toyota Camry can run a mile in well under 40 seconds. Cars can beat people because the mile run is related to only one variable - speed.
There are not many games left that a well designed machine can not beat the entire human population at.
m00.
Though... if you want to get technical about it, maybe "faster, higher, stronger" could be used in an arguement for drugs in competition.
A friends girlfriend, a pharmacist to be, offered to give me beta blockers. I didn't accept, but she insisted that they'd make it hard for me to be nervous.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Like the Mind Sports Olympiad, perchance?
Thad
Contestants compete in a giant chess board shaped pool, each team representing the appropriate chess piece (pawns, knights, queens etc.). Teams alternate turns with their rhythmic gymnastic ribbons fluttering non-stop as they try to get the ball in the other team's net with table tennis paddles. Equestrian referees with badminton raquets shall penalize players who foot fault or allow the ball hit the sand. The match shall be declared upon completion of a flawless SDE (Synchronized Drowning Event) by either team.
Anyone with me? I say we petetion the IOC for recognition of this event...
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
If you ask me, its stupid. I'd rather play Magic - The Gathering
So, you spend a fortune on a rip-off card scheme and say that chess is stupid? At least when you buy a chess set, all the pieces are included.
The article on espn stated that doctors for the World Chess Federation said that caffeine and steroids and other drugs can give a person an endurance advantage when a match runs into the 5th or higher hour, which can lead to an unfair advantage in favor of an individual using an IOC-banned substance.
I find it kinda strange that the same drugs that allow Mark McGuire (sp?) to hit dingers also gives the brain an endurance lift.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
The USCF is talking about having drug testing at all tournaments. Would you want to have to urinate in the presence of the TD just to play chess? If you have a 9 year old son or daughter who plays chess, would you want the 50 year old TD taking them to the bathroom to watch them urinate? This is absolutely insane. Note that among the banned substances is caffeine! I've been playing in tournaments since 1984, but this may be the end of it for me.
Terry Layne
Portland, OR
I don't see why the presence/absence of games in a particular category should preclude them. Physical games? Caps, pissing contests, propane tank hurling, bumper-shining, beer can skeet, etc, etc, etc. I can easily come up with a hundred games that I've actually played (grew up in rural Canada) that are physical, but aren't in the Olympics.
Oh, and for the record: you don't need to appease the non-athletic crowd. Most of us are smart enough to not waste our time with media-driven 'events' in the first place :)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
uhhh, I wasn't going for a realistic example, just using drug names as they came to me to illustrate my point (badly, it seems)
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Sorry, chess doesn't fit.
Not every activity/hobby should become an Olympic sport.
no way! chess as an olympic sport? guess the geeks have to get in somehow. I'm still awaiting freestyle walking, dwarf tossing and log rolling to become olympic sports.
E.
-
This Post has been brought to you by the letter "E".
I can see the TV audiences for the 'mental olympics' being HUGE!
I'll put my money on the U.S. "crack team" any day of the week. We're #1!!!
:)
- Robin
PS - how would they handle drug testing for the crack team?
These drugs would be okay for Quake, etc, but not for Chess, given their side effects inhelping a person going postal.
On the other hand, Olympic Quake sounds like fun
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I beleive that a small dose of methamphetamine could be very benficial to a chess player. In my experience, if the correct dose is used, a general relaxed feeling comes over the user, as well as a feeling of confidence and speed of thought.
The increase in cognative speed and the general projected confidence could be extremely useful in a chess match.
You'd have to be very careful about the tendancy to over compensate though...
http://www.erowid.org has more information on various chemicals, some of which could be interesting in this discussion.
R, Linus
How about Ritalin or some other drug to improve concentration skills. What about some kind of coolness-under-fire drugs to block out the pressure? Are there drugs that won't 'zombify' a person, but keep them focused?
Just asking...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
Will they allow replicants like Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) to compete? He did help J.F. Sebastian beat Mr Tyrell.
that would actually benefit the chess player? Apart from ones that actually make chess *interesting* of course...
FP?
That's cause caffeine helps make you smarter. Once I memorized the whole periodic table in about 15 minutes only using two cans of pepsi and the chart. Go caffeine!
No sig for you.
Actually, caffeine is regulated as an illegal drug in the Olympics. I know for sure that there are limits placed on track and field runners because it can be a performance enhancing drug when used "correctly". There will be no enhancing effect for the sprints or the really long runs, but for the mid-distance events, studies have shown that caffeine can produce a boost.
Just search google for "Ritalin brain atrophy". You'll find scores....
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC