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Why There Shouldn't Be a Chess World Champion
An anonymous reader writes "An article at Slate makes the case that the time has come to stop crowning World Chess Champions. This week, challenger Magnus Carlsen is trying to take the title from reigning champion Viswanathan Anand. Despite currently holding the title, Anand is very much the underdog, which only serves to illustrate why the current system is broken. The article suggests measuring greatness the same way tennis does. Quoting: 'Here's what Carlsen should do: Beat Anand for the title, and then work with FIDE to institutionalize four big tournaments as chess's Grand Slams, simultaneously eliminating the title of world champion. Corporate funding for even major chess tournaments can come and go with frustrating regularity, meaning FIDE itself has to get involved. Perhaps the grand slam tournaments could be located in three cities permanently—Moscow, Amsterdam, and a Spanish locale such as Linares would be natural picks—with a fourth that would rotate from year to year. This would give chess the same clear and predictable yardstick for greatness that golf and tennis have instead of the extremely crude world champion benchmark.'"
I watch chess for the riveting slow-action replays.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
But does he get a teapot and groupies?
#DeleteChrome
Clearly, the current 3-year cycle makes no sense.
At the same time, people LIKE tournaments. If you want to be the true world champion, why not have regionals, as the author suggests -- but limit them to residents and let them be "open" (single elimination in round 1). We have brackets in other sports. This would allow people to compete regardless of wealth.
Each "continental champion" (think "North American Champion" or even "East Asian Champion") could face off in a tournament with the other regionals. This would let each population cheer for its hometown star from New York to New Dehli. Sure, maybe the two "best" don't face off in the "World Championship" but it also allows underdogs to win more easily and makes it more competitive.
Or we could just crown Deep Blue every year.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
America sucks at chess. Among the top 100 players, only 4 are from the US, and get this - none of the four were actually born in the US.
In tournaments it's about who can pick the most points from the weakest players, of course you'd like to win every time but if you're facing Carlsen I think most players will be more than happy to draw and try to outpace him on the rest. The world championship is intended to be a hardcore duel between the two best players, you have to defeat your opponent to win you can't skirt around it. The issue is twofold, one to get the opportunity to play you must win the candidates tournament meaning you must be pretty damn good in tournaments anyway and second by the time another championship comes around many expect the current champion to fall. Unlike many other sports the chess ranking is far more important than "points" collected from tournaments in other sports, so it's hard to make a single tournament be all that important. There are already several long-standing tournaments that usually have most of the top ten players, they're not going to get bigger even if the world championship went away.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That would have been the Indians. Or the Italians and Spanish for the modern game, via the Moors who brought it from Persia.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Yes. It's important that Chess avoid being a big money sport.
...because that's _totally_ a possibility, lol.
I think the problem the author has is that he wants to believe that there is a singular notion of "best chess player". In reality, there are multiple notions of the best chess player. Ratings measure more the ability to stay consistent throughout your career and never let your form dip, tournament wins measure more your ability to take points off weaker players and shift our mindset rapidly to deal with the next style which comes along... and the world championship measures more your ability to present an impregnable wall of defensive ability and be unbeatable.
These are all very valuable things to have, and wanting to take one of them away just because your mind isn't flexible enough to cope with them all existing simultaneously is selfish.
It is not actually separated. Most chess is open. And there is no such thing as men's chess. There are special women-only tournaments as a response to there being 10-1 men in the sport, and a lot of sexist morons. So for a lot of women that is the only way for them to enjoy it.
See also: http://phys.org/news150954140.html
They don't have separate men's and women's. The main FIDE rating list includes both men and women players. The thing is, there are just not that many highly rated women players. To put it into perspective, the current FIDE top 100 list contains only one woman - Judit Polgar, no. 58. So they created another list for women to make the game more competitive for women and increase women's participation. There are chess tournaments exclusively for women, but there are no tournaments exclusively for men. Women are free to enter the open tournaments.
As to why there are so many more good men chess players compared to women? I don't know.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
And moreover, since Judit Polgar was capable of becoming a world championship candidate, it's proven that women can compete with men at the top.
The problem is that chess, or at least, serious chess seems to be an almost exclusively male pastime, for reasons I can only guess at. This leads to there being very few women in the top ranks of the game, simply because there are very few women at all ranks of the game, which creates the perception that they can't compete. So people organise separate tournaments for girls because that's what you do in sport. And so girls learning chess only have a tiny pool of other people to practice against, so they don't get the broad range of experience that the boys do, and they imagine becoming women's world champion rather than world champion so they don't get the ambition boys do, and so the regular stream of Judit Polgars which we need to break this idea is suppressed.
Segregation is a disaster for women's chess, but it creates a self-propagating vicious circle. It is its own explanation.
>The Cult of the Hand-Egg,
I didn't know Rugby was a cult.
--
BMO
Why should all three locations be in Eurasia? Fuck that.
Why should the US baseball finals be called "the world series"? Why should the US rugby-ripoff-for-sissies-in-padding-who-need-a-rest-every-twenty-seconds be called the same name the rest of the planet had long been using for a completely different game? Fuck that, in the wrong'un.
One town's very like another
when your heads down over your pieces brother
Basically it is a bribe to get more women playing, no more no less.
The more women that play, the more they will teach their sons to play.
Unlike most people, I don't see chess as an end in itself, but as a means to an end.
Chess is a universal human language, it matters not, how old you are, what race you are, or what sex you are, OTB we all start equal. (OTB = over the board)
There is another universal language, it is the language of 'logic', the fact that we now have computers that in terms of chess, can wipe the floor with all of us is evidence.
I have this mad dream of a democratically run UN with real teeth, by democratic, I mean a UN with delegates from each nation in proportion to it's population, voting on global law.
My idea is, that one of the qualifications required to be a UN delegate, is to have a demonstrated ability at logic, proven by a demonstratable chess ability, maybe an ELO of above 1600.
It is my guess, that this would lead to a better planet, in terms of how we treat each other and all the other species.
The current state of play is incredibly wasteful, with every separate nation armed to the teeth, with it's own army navy and airforce to protect it's Sovereignty.
I propose a different kind of Sovereignty, that being individual Sovereignty guarunteed by a global rule of law.
Then once we have global democratic rule of law, instead of things being run by a cabal hiding in the shadows, we can build a road to the stars.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
just accept it, and move along. No need to bend the rules just because an Indian is the best in the World. The rules and title have been the same for decades when Karpov and Kasparov were World Champions; so why change them now?
You mean the Moops?
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Chess does not need to be a show financed by big money
Of course it does.
Announcer:"If Kasparov fails to move his Redbull King within the next two moves, he could face danger from the Challenger's Capital One Queen."
Madden:"That's right Gus. All he has to do is put Kasparov into a Bud Light Checkmate, and then he might just stand a chance of winning this thing."
we've always brought in big talent from elsewhere
Einstein 'nuff said
Arguably, we have a certain talent for importing talent... Scoring all the Jewish physicists when the Nazis drove them out, in order to build a bomb, and then scoring all the Nazi rocket scientists when the Soviets drove them out, in order to build something to deliver it with...
Playing both ends against everybody, awww yeah...
whats wrong with the same method used by boxing?
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
Indians are the only true Americans. Every one else is an immigrant. And if republicans had their way would be kicked out ex post facto haste.
Archeological for any human inhabitation of the Americas is pretty recent. (Some) indian populations did have the distinction of being the only immigrants who didn't need to squish the locals; but all available evidence suggests close to zero chance that any human population originated here.
Is this the start of a 'Sports'-subcategory? I know the number theory behind chess (wrote a decent chess program a few years back), but is this really a topic for slashdot? Don't get me wrong, I like watching and playing chess, as I like watching football (playing not so much, since I'm physically not so fit), but I wouldn't want a rule discussion and similar on slashdot,...
Chess does not need to be a show financed by big money. All sports where money got injected tend to turn into reality shows with media buzzing around searching for dirty stories, with pervasive doping, etc.
In that case, give chess one hell of a cash bolus, stat!
Wouldn't having the same care and attention devoted to developing exotic new ways to juice mental performance that sports doping has to enhancing various aspects of physical performance be an amazing boon to humanity?
Right now, the situation is pretty bad. We have a few stimulants and alertness aids, sometimes enough to get ADD Billy to do his homework; but nothing compared to what a suitably enthusiastic athlete can do to muscular performance... Just imagine: A world where the truism 'You can't fix stupid' has been falsified.
Bring on the sponsorships, sign the high-stakes exclusive television coverage contracts, let's roll!
Shouldn't we just have the chess-playing computers in a 24/7/365 competition cycle, with mastery changing hands as often as is computationally feasible, and then just use the time-honored traditions to decide who among us shall bear the title of 'Meatsack Prime' within the chess world?
I've yet to RTFA, but the sentence "Despite currently holding the title, Anand is very much the underdog, which only serves to illustrate why the current system is broken" does nothing to illustrate the point. Rather the opposite: a contender who beats the incumbent happens all the time. The fact that this is possible, is the prime motivator for trying at all, and thus the reason for the existance these tournaments.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
You mean Hand Egg?
Moscow, Amsterdam.... Bangkok? It's a drag, it's a bore, it's really such a pity To be looking at the board, not looking at the city
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Logic has its uses; but why would you expect performance in a deterministic game of perfect information (and only a moderately complex one, at that: this isn't tic-tac-toe; but even some games that humans actually play for fun, like, Go, are considerably nastier, and never mind the ghastly stuff that mathematicians come up with for fun; by generalizing games into N dimensions or building rulesets for use on boards of peculiar sizes and not-fully-possible-in-three-dimensions structures...) to be particularly relevant to performance in the world, which shows...limited... determinism at useful scales, and certainly isn't a game of perfect information?
At the risk of sounding sexist, I wonder if it is because men seem to have more of a tendency to become single minded/obsessive about things. I don't know whether it is just more socially acceptable, but I note that men are far more likely to be the ones that have all consuming hobbies.
As to whether this is a product of the way society is structured or nature I have no idea.
Why do they have separate men's and women's?
But why in chess? It's baffling to me.
Its because the girls don't have a penis, silly.
The problem with modern chess is that it has been analyzed to death.
To make it more interesting they should make some kind of modifications. One that was suggested a long time ago was the players choosing the positions on the back ranks. Maybe adding more pieces and squares etc.
Also add time to the clocks. Let games last several sessions. etc.
I'd hope that chess cultivates a certain decorum; but given the... atmosphere... at a variety of other nerd-heavy and largely male events, it wouldn't be a huge surprise if they have some of the same appeal that the Japanese women-only subway cars do...
Truly the greatest thing about America is its ability to attract immigrants that then add to its greatness. We should be very careful not to ruin that, either through policy or xenophobia. It's the one thing we can compete in better than anybody else, and that fresh infusion of energy and labor keeps our economy and culture going.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
The extant populations aren't original; but there must have existed a tribe (we'll call them 'Squish-ee Zero') who came first, and thus squished not, until they were squished. In some cases, there may even have been more than one squishless squish-ee (if disease, starvation, cold, or other natural misadventure cleared the stage of tribe N before tribe N+1 showed up); but that isn't logically necessary, just a contingent possibility.
I wonder if it is because men seem to have more of a tendency to become single minded/obsessive about things.
You're obviously not married.
Why should all three locations be in Eurasia? Fuck that.
Why should the US baseball finals be called "the world series"? Why should the US rugby-ripoff-for-sissies-in-padding-who-need-a-rest-every-twenty-seconds be called the same name the rest of the planet had long been using for a completely different game? Fuck that, in the wrong'un.
Why should the US rugby-ripoff-for-sissies-in-padding-who-need-a-rest-every-twenty-seconds
Realize this is a joshing semi-troll. But it's like running 100 m v. running a marathon. Short bursts of strength/speed don't scale to the marathon, but that's not to say marathon runners are better athletes than sprinters, most people would say the opposite. US football has the biggest, fastest, strongest athletes of any sport. Seriously. Vernon Davis runs 100 m in 10.7 seconds while benching 225 lb/100 kg for 33 reps and weight 250 lbs/15 stone/114kg. No distance-running-based sport is going to have athletes who manage anything close to that.
Not to say football is my favorite. But faulting a sport because it involves strength instead of endurance is bullshit.
I think there's something to be said in spreading it around. It will garner more interest worldwide, and probably have economic benefits as well, with more money flowing into the competition from more than just three or four countries.
I would take it a step further, though. Instead of 3 permanent cities and 1 floating competition, how about 3 permanent continents and a floating one? It could be sort of like the Olympics, with the events moving so it's more of a worldwide competition. Moscow may be a good choice for representing Asia, but what about China, India, and Japan? Let the Asian chess championship tournament move around all of Asia, then have a European chess championship tournament bounce between Amsterdam and Linares if they like, and other cities in Europe too. Then put a third one in North or South America moving to various cities. The fourth championship can hit up any other cities in other continents not on the permanent continents.
And for those saying the US has no good chess scene, how do you think it's supposed to get one? And who cares where the players are from. Not only is the money there in the US to support a tournament, but there's plenty of chess players, regardless of skill, who would be interested in watching a tournament hosted in the US.
FIDE should absolutely get involved and set up a Grand Slam of some sort, but the reasons aren't purely for determining who the best players are. It's also about bringing new players into the game. For that, they'll need a global outlook.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
My idea is, that one of the qualifications required to be a UN delegate, is to have a demonstrated ability at logic, proven by a demonstratable chess ability, maybe an ELO of above 1600.
It isn't often that I physically roll my eyes when reading, but you managed to get me to do it.
Clearly a better metric is who can win at "Guess Who?" without asking if they're wearing glasses.
Democracy in the Golden Age of Greece, established the original blueprint that evolved into modern democracies, eventually. But it was once very different. First of all, if a member of the senate voted for something that turned out bad, they could be punished or even executed by the state for neglectful voting. Also, there was a random factor in elections that did not require a majority vote for every representative: an electoral appointment was made by lottery to the senate so that common man was assured a voice, even if unpopular. Not just career politicians or entrenched special interests would have all the influence on the legislative process. Anyone could put their hat in the ring by virtue of their citizenship. Vagrants would be an improvement of our career politicians' gridlocked constipation and offers a little social laxative and lube required to pull their heads out of their asses.
Like ancient Democracy, chess evolves over time, and with disagreement and controversy over the rules. Its likes politics and power plays, psychological edge and humiliation are part of the calculus.
It's because men are at a severe disadvantage in cognitive ability to women, so we are having separate tournaments to "protect" women from sexist assholes to camouflage that stain on our greatness and otherwise supreme superiority. Now stop asking questions. Thank you very much.
Why does chess need a "clear and predictable yardstick for greatness"? It's a game, not engineering.
Well, and the whole football name criticism is a bit disingenuous as well. There is no such sport as "football." That's merely a common shortening of the name of several sports. In America, technically it's American Gridiron Football, whereas what most of the rest of the world calls football is Association Football, which itself is a "ripoff" of Rugby Football and Cambridge Rules Football. Then there's Australian Rules Football, Canadian Gridiron Football, Gaelic Football, two major kinds of Rugby Football, and a host of other related sports. Most of these involve a fair bit of hand use, with Association Football being the exception, though let's not forget the goalkeeper uses his hands quite a bit. All the games involve the feet, and all the games share a common ancestry. Just as we didn't evolve from chimpanzees, both species evolved from a common ancestor, the same can be said of the various football sports.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
You do realize American Football is a very intellectual game and is probably the closest physical sport to chess. I very highly doubt you know anything about it. Each play is carefully choosen to outwit the opponent. The time between plays allows for that setup.
You keep watching that sissy garbage of yours. Ill stick to a real sport.
To be fair, it's because the game is pure cerebral memoization and lacks and true skill component or even the mildest hand-eye coordination. The devs have all but abandoned the game after the queen and bishop patches. IMO, I liked the preivous versions when the queen was no more special than the king. At least it was more accessible to checkers players.
From a game designer perspective the complexity level of chess is painfully low, so much that computer "AI" opponents consists of better ways to organize a tree of known moves, hardly anything like machine learning at all. It's only slightly less boring than checkers to most folks. It's not like other more complex (and fun) turn based strategy games don't exist. Try out one of the flavors of Ogre Battle, or Final Fantasy Tactics -- Hell, even Advance Wars.
If the "digital vs board game" component is throwing you for a loop: It shouldn't. I implement tactics games as paper cutouts and dice to ensure they're fun before spending a bunch of time fleshing out the tedius combat details you'll only concentrate on in rare instances, in favor of the larger game. See? Chess even lacks the levels of complexity an average videogame has. Humans are cybernetic beings, as such they can allocate their attention across a wide ranging field, then bore down into problem spots; A good game provides interesting detail at all levels of play with enough varriation that even without dice you'll never get the exact same game twice -- With chess? There's basically right and wrong moves starting at the 2nd move -- no emergent properties at all, and an environment complexity of precicely ZERO. Whomever can think far enough ahead wins. That's why Chess is a solved game.
Oh sure the game's got history and an over inflated sense of prestige. Look down your nose at other games and play that shitty one. You die-hard elitist chess fans are fucking ridiculous from an information theory and cybernetics vantagepoint. Computers can just help precicely manage more variables and thus allow us to play games with more breadth and depth than a 64 cell grid overlaid with 6 -- COUNT THEM: SIX -- movement patterns. A kid playing halo competively has more shit going on in their brain than a chessmaster. Don't believe me? Whip out the FMRI and see.
Bunch of pompus morons. I'm fine with chess having it's circlejerk. What pisses me off is how folks who tend to like these "ancient" games see everyone else as childish, when their game requires the least cognitive ability to master comparatively. Pokemon would be a step up, though I reccomend Magic: The Gathering instead.
Perhaps it's not America that sucks at chess, but Chess that sucks at America?
and while your at it, let's stop having winners and losers, every game is a draw and these overgrown children can all feel good about themselves no matter how good/bad they do...it's all about their self esteem!
"Truly the greatest thing about America is its ability to attract immigrants that then add to its greatness."
It got you the World Series.
"That would have been the Indians. Or the Italians and Spanish for the modern game, via the Moors ..."
I'm so sorry, but It's the Moops.
Because in Oceania it rains all the time and Eastasia prefers Go.
Besides, chess has always been played in Eurasia.
You do realize American Football is a very intellectual game and is probably the closest physical sport to chess. I very highly doubt you know anything about it. Each play is carefully choosen to outwit the opponent
I will state without fear of contradiction that Bill Belichick could lecture on the cover zero, cover one, cover two, and the necessary gap responsibilities and after about three hours of that any chess snob would be no masing out the door.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I love ELO... Jeff Lynne is a musical genius!
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Your comparison's a bit moot given you're comparing it to the wrong sport. "Rugby", y'know, from the bit you quoted from.
Magic is a great game but it will never be that popular due to the business model. It's about to get demolished by Hearthstone and Hex simply because Wizards of the Coast are fucking retarded. The amount of people playing Hearthstone already dwarfs MTGO and Hearthstone is still in a fairly exclusive beta phase. It's a shame because Hearthstone is an inferior game in almost every respect.
Possibly because, in a game where the Queen is the most powerful and versatile player, she is subordinate to protecting the King.
Association football is called "football" because it's played on foot, as opposed to polo, which is played on horseback. The name was originally given derisively; it implied "poor people ball."
In the 1850s, the word "soccer" meant "a member of an association." A 19th century soccer star popularized its use to mean "the game played by members of an association football association."
The only thing worse than gridlock is when they do stuff...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
need-a-rest-every-twenty-seconds
Not for resting ... it's for the adverts, the resting part is a side-effect
Well, and the whole football name criticism is a bit disingenuous as well.
In America, technically it's American Gridiron Football
"American" and "Gridiron" make sense. But "Football?" The players feet hardly ever contact the ball. And it's not even a ball.
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
Hmm ... lets see. The author thinks the incumbent - who looks like a worthy champ to my admittedly unenlightened eyes - is useless and that the challenger shits gold.
... it ain't a done deal, mate. That's why they play!
Consequently, he'd like to replace the current system which is subjective but works for other sports (boxing?) and replace it with an equally subjective system so that his favourite challenger will rise to the top sooner than he'd like.
He then goes on to spout nonsense about what the challenger should do *after* he beats the crap out of the incumbent.
Duh
Why should all three locations be in Eurasia? Fuck that.
Why should the US baseball finals be called "the world series"? Why should the US rugby-ripoff-for-sissies-in-padding-who-need-a-rest-every-twenty-seconds be called the same name the rest of the planet had long been using for a completely different game? Fuck that, in the wrong'un.
Ah yes. I love when British or Aussie wankers like you post that. Allow me to educate you out of your ignorance.
Imagine, if you will, that the MLS (Major League Soccer - the top US professional league of what the rest of the world calls "football") announced that it was the greatest team in the world and that the EPL champion was a bunch of chumps who it could easily defeat. You would laugh. Rightly so. What European league do you think MLS is probably equivalent to? Maybe the French league?
The fact that you don't know due to your ignorance is that the best players in the world in baseball play in the USA in MLB. The gap between MLB and the best other league, which is Japan, is probably akin to the gap between MLS and the EPL. So there actually are no other leagues/teams that can realistically claim to be world's champions. That's why it's called the World Series - it truly is the best of the best. There are players in MLB right now from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Asia. The cream of the cream play in MLB. They don't toil in the other leagues. Again, the only other professional league that has a decent number of MLB quality players, and it's probably only 1-2 per team, is the league in Japan. I'm deliberately ignoring the top minor professional leagues in the USA as the best of those players will be in MLB eventually, but explaining how that system works would take more time than really necessary.
If you don't like American football and prefer rugby, that's your business, but rugby is actually a pretty crappy sport. If the US cared about it at all, and we do not, we would own the entire world in the sport. I have zero doubt about that. In fact, I wish that someone would field a team out of our best professional football rejects and compete internationally.
By this logic we should crown the crane the weightlifting champion, the car the running champ, the airplane the long jump champ, and the cannon the shot-put champ.
We need a -1 Stupid mod.
And moreover, since Judit Polgar was capable of becoming a world championship candidate, it's proven that women can compete with men at the top..
I can tell you aren't really a player, at least not anyone who's ever played in tournaments. You're actually quite wrong in that statement, unfortunately. All Judit Polgar proved was that she could compete at the top levels with male players, but she never even came close to being a world championship candidate. What she did is roughly akin to a woman competing in the men's tennis tournament in Wimbledon and getting past the first round but losing handily in the second. Judit is really good and lots of men wish they were as good as she is, but she's never been a serious world championship candidate. Earlier this year she was ranked something like 52nd in the world, which doesn't even put her within a light year of being a serious candidate for the world championship. Anand, who I agree is clearly on the decline, would easily defeat her in a tournament. I'd be shocked if she won more than 1 game in such a mythical tournament.
Yes, it's only open to U.S. teams like the Toronto Blue Jays.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Why should the US baseball finals be called "the world series"?
Because I'm pretty sure the Toronto Blue Jays would object to it being called the "US baseball finals."
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Why do you assume !Eurasia consists solely of the US and no other countries? Last I checked there were two continents in the Western Hemisphere and quite a few countries that aren't the US.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
The players feet hardly ever contact the ball.
Presumably because it starts with a kickoff.
And it's not even a ball.
The "ball" part was probably to associate themselves as a sport with the much more popular (at the time) "baseball."
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I wonder what Gary Kasparov thinks about this idea. He is a bit of a thorn or a blackened eye to some Russian politicians.
A post like this in a forum like this would not be out of character for them.
Yes, it is a little bit of a conspiracy theorist idea. Sadly, folks in governments like to conspire. ;)
I'm pretty sure this type of "USA is the greatest" response only establishes the point of the AC you replied to. Nationalism is a funny thing, it's actually helpful up to a point, as it creates a sense of belonging together. After that point, though, it varies from laughable to dangerous. The amount of flag waving and anthem singing going on in the USA would be considered well into dangerous territory by many.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
I thin this one is more pertinent for the Salon article.
Bunch of pompus morons. I'm fine with chess having it's circlejerk. What pisses me off is how folks who tend to like these "ancient" games see everyone else as childish,...
Did you have an actual point to your tirade? Have you even attempted tournament level chess? No, there are no pretty colors, or toons with inflated boobies, only real head to head mental stimulation. And believe it or not, some people are actually capable of playing both chess and video games.
Just another day in Paradise
Maybe. You have money and population, that's true. There are basically no countries that really care about rugby except South Africa and New Zealand, and in SA it's only really the whites. If you watched the recent final of the NZ national championship (highest level with NZ-only teams) you would be forgiven for thinking they don't give a shit about it either. The 35k capacity stadium wasn't even half full!
NZ also has very few registered players compared with other countries (Oz, UK, SA, FR) but has managed to dominate the sport for the last hundred years and is currently in a class above all other countries. NZ also loses many, many players who were born there because salaries are minuscule compared to what they can get elsewhere, and if you don't play in NZ you can't play for the national team. It is true though that almost all of the true athletes in NZ play rugby rather than any other sport.
So if you could get all of the best athletes in the US to play rugby then you would almost certainly win. You are one of the most highly populated countries though, and by FAR the richest over 150M. Nothing really to see here.
The article really fails to make a substantial argument. Okay, the every 3 year issue I can see. Make it every two. First year is to pick the top 4 contenders. The next year the tournament.
But I don't see what the issue is with having one champion. It seems there may be an issue with point scoring system. As frankly, I think wins are more substantial than draws.
I just came away from the whole article questioning what the issue is in having a world champion. It seems to me that no harm is there. And the fact that the ranking doesn't equate to champion is not uncommon. Look at baseball. How many times does the top ranked team win the World Series? A lot, but no where near always. The top ranked team makes it to the play off, it doesn't mean they survive to the World Series. And it shouldn't.
I think what the author wants is that "World Champion" is merely a result of the tally of rankings. Not established by an event. But that's dumb. Because the challenge of a championship adds a unique pressure and intensity. It adds a goal. And many top performers are not capable of performing their best if there is no goal.
This seems much more like the typical "Tea Cup" generation. Everyone gets a trophy. We can't have a winner. No more football, someone might get hurt. No more World Tiddlywink Championships cause someone might LOSE!!!!
Is it just me, or did anyone else hear "One Night in Bangkok" playing in their head as they read this?
The 4th best player on the current rankings is from the US: http://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml Behind Norway, Armenia & Russia ...
Stop applying logic to my favorite useless gripe.
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
That is how every sport is. Women are welcome to play on the PGA Tour, NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB, etc... Yet, there are the LPGA Tour, WNBA, and other leagues that are women only.
I do now.
Time to offend someone
Actually, gridiron football is called "football" because it derives from the same sport as association football does. If you go back and look at the sport as it existed before organizations started codifying the rules you will discover that different towns played the sport differently. Association football chose to adopt (and adapt) the rule sets from towns that minimized the use of the hands. The various rugby variants adopted (and adapted) rule sets from towns that emphasized carrying the ball. Both variants of the game were called "football" because they were played on foot, rather than on horseback. I have never seen a good explanation of how gridiron football evolved from the rugby variants, although I am sure it has something to do with the introduction of playing on fields laid out with yard markers.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Perhaps because in America (historically at least) one had great opportunity and could improve their position in life by applying their talent to something useful. Your prospects become limited if you dedicate the kind of time it takes to become a master of that level.
We are the Americans. You are welcome to assimilate with our culture if you wish. We're far from perfect, but your intellectual distinctiveness can be celebrated and rewarded like in no other nation in no other time on this planet. However, you can also choose to remain a pinko socialist and degrade with the futile effort of the rest of your culture.
FTFY
This would give chess the same clear and predictable yardstick for greatness that golf and tennis have instead of the extremely crude world champion benchmark.
Except that golf and tennis are actual sports, while chess is not. Golf and tennis are followed by 100s of millions of people, while chess is not. Now if you want to destroy the tradition and intellectual pursuit known as chess and turn it into something that can be monetized, go ahead. Years ago, they did that to wrestling, so who knows, 25 years from now, we might all be watching All Star Chess on television.
Indeed, if you read various chess forum comments (the vast majority of which are made by males), the difference in the way male and female chess players are discussed is striking. Big names like Judit Polgar and Yifan Hou attract comments about their physical appearance and the femininity of their demeanor. If similar comments were made about Anand or Kramnik, people would find it bizarre and laugh. And then, of course, are the more overtly sexist comments, making broad claims about how women are simply less intellectually capable than men, or that chess requires a level of physical and mental endurance that only "real men" can handle.
This is also true in more conventional athletic sports--e.g., tennis. The culture of sexism is so ingrained in the male psyche that most men are completely incapable of detecting sexist behavior, whether in others or themselves; and when confronted, the response is predictably some form of vehement outrage and denial. Some then proceed to shift the blame, claiming that others have been indoctrinated by some militant feminist agenda, or worse yet, a nebulous "political correctness."
Not to mention the queen is far too op. She needs to be nerfed to balance the game. I'm sick and tired of getting demolished by queen pickers. NoobS!
Actually, there is a very pragmatic reason that the U.S. dominates most sports it cares about. It has almost three times the population of the next country with a comparable average per capita income. In addition, the U.S. is ethnically more heterogeneous than any other country on the planet. These two factors mean that for any given activity the U.S. almost certainly has as many or more people with the inborn ability to excel at any given human activity and the money to make it worth their while to develop that ability IF sufficient numbers of people in the U.S. have an interest in that activity. This does not mean that the U.S. is better than other countries, it just means that the confluence of factors leads to there being people in the U.S. who can excel at an activity and there being, potentially, enough money to attract the best from elsewhere. No other country currently enjoys that combination.
The EU comes close to providing a similar environment, but it has greater cultural variations between its various parts than the U.S. does, at this time. In those instances where its interest in an activity crosses all, or most, of its internal borders, it is able to develop a similar position on the world stage that the U.S. does in baseball and basketball (that is, develop world class competitors and attract the best from the rest of the world).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Arguably, we have a certain talent for importing talent... Scoring all the Jewish physicists when the Nazis drove them out, in order to build a bomb, and then scoring all the Nazi rocket scientists when the Soviets drove them out, in order to build something to deliver it with...
Playing both ends against everybody, awww yeah...
I have mod points, but I don't see the "+1 America Fark Yeah!" option.
Woman chess players can compete in all the tournaments where men can play, but the best woman chess player isn't on the same level as the best male chess player, therefore they can earn more money in woman only tournaments.
There's only one team from a country neighboring the US. It's not a worldwide event. Even the NHL, which has the most teams outside the US of the big 4 (7 teams in Canada), doesn't try to portray itself as a worldwide championship.
I think the reason that baseball gets away with calling it a world championship despite being geographically limited is that baseball is only really popular in a few countries. Obviously the US, with Japan and some South American countries....and that's it. Compounding that, there's a history of getting the best talent from those regions to join the MLB, so what's left in those countries isn't usually their premier talent.
Since I like crushing willful ignorance one poster at a time, I'd like to point out to SuricouRaven that American football began with no passing game and more points awarded to field goals than touchdowns, which made the kicking game more important. Also, the ball could be snapped with the foot ("heeling") in addition to the hand. The names of games don't change just because their rules do.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I believe the appropriate colloquialism is "Whoosh!".
Cynical Idealist
I refuse to believe that women are as intellectually shallow as you suggest.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
It's actually not nationalism. Most of those players aren't from the USA; they just play in this particular league, which makes the MLB the de facto premier league. Americans probably aren't any better or worse at baseball than anyone else with a substantial farm system, but the guys at the top of other national leagues don't stay in there, they move to the MLB.
Based on just the title, I thought this was going to be about computer chess opponents consistently beating world chess champions, making the title unnecessary.
I'm not so sure that women would be accepted into most of these leagues at all.
All right, I see your point. But actually the nationalism bit in my post was triggered more by these nuggets on the part of GP:
Ah yes. I love when British or Aussie wankers like you post that. Allow me to educate you out of your ignorance.
If the US cared about it at all, and we do not, we would own the entire world in the sport. I have zero doubt about that.
Not that I am particularly offended by any of this, mind you.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
No points. Participation awards for all!
Look man, i know they look fat, but ANY American football player would crush you with his athleticism. There is no room for carrying people in the NFL, its just that competitive. I dont even like football, but holy shit are you wrong.
Good-bye
as opposed to polo, which is played on horseback.
Which is yet another confusing and utterly wrong name, since people in a lot of countries use the word "polo" as in "water polo". I hereby suggest that "polo on horseback" be renamed to "horsegolf", since it involves using a long golf club on horseback.
All right, I see your point. But actually the nationalism bit in my post was triggered more by these nuggets on the part of GP:
Ah yes. I love when British or Aussie wankers like you post that. Allow me to educate you out of your ignorance.
If the US cared about it at all, and we do not, we would own the entire world in the sport. I have zero doubt about that.
Not that I am particularly offended by any of this, mind you.
If you'd read Attila Dimedici's post above yours, you'd understand why the assertions you have such a problem with are actually true.
Or you accept it as a tongue-in-cheek comment, as it was meant. I guess I should have included a [sarcasm] tag.
Yeah that's a good point. There was significant pushback when women have talked about joining the PGA tour. I think that MLB and possibly golf would be the only ones likely to welcome a female and that's pretty much because there is no physicality with the opponents.
and the world championship measures more your ability to present an impregnable wall of defensive ability and be unbeatable.
That would be Mayweather.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
They don't have separate men's and women's. The main FIDE rating list includes both men and women players. The thing is, there are just not that many highly rated women players.
Which is how it should be for every sport. Let everyone play by the same rules, and win or lose according to their actual ability. In any other field saying "You're good at X, for a girl" is considered an insult. But isn't that exactly what we're saying to women when we create separate leagues for them?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Well... not really. The Cambridge Rules were a code of rules for football, which has existed in many forms for centuries (interestingly, illegally, too). Since about the 14th century, "foot ball" and "hand ball" were considered different. The current association football rules are just a set of rules for football, just like the Cambridge rules were. Rugby football is derived from football, as is Association football and American football. The Football Association was founded in 1863, 15 years after the first Cambridge rules, and the Rugby Football Union was founded in 1871, so association football can't really be a ripoff of rugby. That being said, the modern rules for association football are wildly different than many earlier rules, probably, but no one knows because none of the early rules were written down. Not even the first Cambridge rules were written down.
To be honest, I don't care what people call their sports... I call "soccer" "football", because I'm English.
Gridiron football is called "football" because the ball was classically 12 inches long. (They shortened it to make the forward pass easier about 100 years ago, so the modern football is 11 1/2 inches.)
No. The American football was derived from a rugby football (as was the game itself), so it made sense to just keep calling it the same thing.
Association football is called "football" because it's played on foot, as opposed to polo, which is played on horseback. The name was originally given derisively; it implied "poor people ball."
This is one of the possible explanations for the word football itself, yes. A more correct explanation is that American football is called football because the games it is derived from are called football.
In the 1850s, the word "soccer" meant "a member of an association." A 19th century soccer star popularized its use to mean "the game played by members of an association football association."
That story is almost certainly apocryphal. The word "soccer" did not appear in print until 1895.
It's huge in Cuba. Of course we don't let them travel to the US to compete.
What European league do you think MLS is probably equivalent to? Maybe the French league?
Not a chance... do you know how good PSG are currently?
So there actually are no other leagues/teams that can realistically claim to be world's champions.
Some would beg to differ. Have you seen the USA's record?
If you don't like American football and prefer rugby, that's your business, but rugby is actually a pretty crappy sport. If the US cared about it at all, and we do not, we would own the entire world in the sport.
Hahahahaha... oh wait, you're serious, let me laugh even harder.
Wouldn't having the same care and attention devoted to developing exotic new ways to juice mental performance...
Sponsored by Luminosity
Just another day in Paradise
This is also true in more conventional athletic sports--e.g., tennis. The culture of sexism is so ingrained in the male psyche that most men are completely incapable of detecting sexist behavior, whether in others or themselves; and when confronted, the response is predictably some form of vehement outrage and denial. Some then proceed to shift the blame, claiming that others have been indoctrinated by some militant feminist agenda, or worse yet, a nebulous "political correctness."
I've heard plenty of women talking about the attractiveness of male tennis players, sometimes quite graphically. Do you think that is sexism?
Interesting study on gender differences regarding spatial relations. forbid that there might be actual differences between the sexes...sorry, I just despise political correctness.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2909401/
Just another day in Paradise
From the title, I thought the article was going to discuss why the real World Chess Champion these days is always a computer, and how they should add a qualifier to the sobriquet for the winner of the Carlsen-Anand match: the Human World Chess Champion.
You BASTARD!!!
Damn! I've been out of the country for a long time, and haven't followed baseball, but the Expos moved to Washington D.C.?
Why do I need to learn about things this way? Now it really is the "National" league that it always claimed to be, leaving the "American" league the old "North America" excuse.
Parent does have a point. I spent some time studying chess openings and competitive play, and it is kind of stale. There isn't a lot of variety in openings that won't get your ass kicked all over the board, and to be really competitive you have to spend a lot of time examining openings and positions that haven't changed much in several hundred years. I believe that a few chess masters have advocated changes to the game to mix it up a bit, and chance it from a game of who can memorize more openings and positions and into more of a dynamic strategy game.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Indians didn't really start immigrating to the United States in significant numbers until about 50 years ago. Citation.
I don't know why someone would suggest that a group that only arrived here so recently could be the only "true Americans". This whole thread is idiotic.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Yes, "Football", not "Foot making contact with ball". Good luck playing if you have no feet.
If you want to be pedantic, feet hardly ever contact the ball in Association Football as well, because players usually wear shoes that cover the entirety of their feet.
Along a similar tangent, I guess rugby doesn't use a ball either?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Go is a far more ancient game than chess, and lacks many of the problems as cited above with Chess. I mean granted, one day Go will be considered a "solved" game, but that is a long ways off.
So that explains Howard Coselle's "Look at that monkey run!" comment. Makes sense now
World Baseball Classic. That's the real global championship tournament for baseball. The United States isn't the world champion.
Judit Polgar was one of eight players who participated in what FIDE called the "World Chess Championship 2005". Now, the FIDE world championship during the era when the champion wasn't participating was of course a joke, but the winner of that tournament, Topalov, challenged the world champion Kramnik for the title on the basis of his win. This makes the FIDE "World Chess Championship 2005" a de-facto candidates tournament, and hence, the eight participants, including Judit, world championship candidates. Players who were candidates to challenge for the world title.
Actually, there is something to that (although it is more complex than that). The forward pass was introduced to open up the game and reduce injuries and deaths (18 college players died playing the game in 1905).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I can hardly wait for the match to start (the first game is this Saturday). I will be getting up at 4:30AM EST for the duration of the match, to watch the games live on the web. Although I play nowadays only against computers, I used to play for college team (at Brown) and had reached an expert rating (2100 USCF rating), before quitting human play. As a kid back in the old country (ex-Yugoslavia), my brother and I who shared one bedroom, after the lights out would play blindfolded chess games in the dark, each with the chessboard in his mind eye. He never stopped active competition and became a chess master eventually (that's one rank above me). Once you are bitten by the chess bug, it stays with you for life.
I find the faux elitism by people like SuricouRaven odious.
So he doesn't like American Football. Yes? And? I'm sure I could point out aspects of his culture that I don't like and ridicule that too. But ya know what? Life is too fucking short. I will never understand Cricket, but I'm not going to begrudge people who do and enjoy it.
--
BMO
The US loses a substantial number of its' best players to the other countries in the WBC, despite them playing in the MLB. For example, the MVPs in 2009 and 2013 were playing in the MLB at the time, despite playing for Japan and Cuba in the WBC. There are also some odd rules that aren't found in the MLB, like a hard pitch count limit (which happens to be stupidly low too - only 65 in the first round, 80 in the second, 85 in qualifiers, 95 in the championships), and 2 runners start on bases in extra innings past the 12th.
Well I did not get voted up or down, so thought I would add a bit more detail, to my post.
I wrote "There is another universal language, it is the language of 'logic'"
I consider the language of 'logic' to be boolean algebra.
I wrote "instead of things being run by a cabal hiding in the shadows"
According to Wikipedia, the first Gulf war ended on 28 February 1991.
I remember reading at the time, when the allied forces had reached the Iraqi borders, that both Generals Schwarzkopf and De la Billiere wanted to carry on to Baghdad, capture Saddam and have him tried as a war criminal, they were ordered not to by Colin Powell, I do not think Powell was running things, but was acting under orders from Bush the elder.
I find it hard to imagine, that an American President would not want international rule of law, sadly, the only explanation that makes any sense to me is, George Bush the elder, was told to end it there, by a cabal in the shadows, who did not want international law, and did not believe all men are cousins (whether they want to be or not) these people have far more power than is democratically realised.
How else can we explain the 12 years after, when the west tortured the Iraqi people by denying them international justice.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
By playing blindfold chess as a child you practiced the vital skill of every chess master - the ability to mentally visualize the chess board.
Once you are comfortable with this, it is only one more step to set up mentally stable decision trees (referencing mental visual images) and of a of a depth limited only by your memory for positions
Rugby Football existed before the Rugby Football Union, dating back to at least 1845, predating even Cambridge Rules. The sport of Rugby branched off into Canadian Gridiron Football (1861), American Gridiron Football (1869), Rugby Football Union (1871), and all of the variants of Rugby and Gridiron we enjoy today.
If anyone should be arrogantly claiming the title of the one true football, it should be Australians, as theirs was codified before any other extant football rules, ahead of the Canadians by two years, the British by four, Americans by ten, and the Irish by twenty-eight. The Australians use their hands plenty in their football, so maybe we should give up on the notion that football is played with only the feet (especially since it's not, in any variant, actually true).
I say, why can't we all just be friends, and enjoy as many footballs as we care to invent? Every type I've ever played or watched, I've enjoyed. Who really cares which was first, or who calls which one by a common nickname?
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
You do realize American Football is a very intellectual game and is probably the closest physical sport to chess
Slashdot is becoming like the special olympics
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Here is an article in the main chess press with a picture of two GMs arm wrestling, and the caption "Males performing the typical early summer test-of-strength rituals"
GM Yasser Seirawan broke up a fistfight (over dancing with a lovely WIM) and was described as the Man of Steel, including testimony as to the physical prowess of his figure.
The #1 chess website, the one that gets more traffic than all the others... chessqueen.com the home of former Women's World Champion GM Alexandra Kosteniuk. She is also a model, actress, mother, and promoter of scholastic chess. She likes to remind the world that "chess is cool!"
There are obvious differences between men's and women's chess though. Any chess player can tell you that. Men's chess people look at the crosstables, and play for a draw they think it helps their chances to win money. Women tend to focus more on winning, take more chances attacking, and have fewer draws. As in tennis, they also look better doing it.
Oh yeah, there was that other thing about competitive chess that I found annoying that I forgot to mention: Pretty much all the serious players are total assholes.
this is a really wonderfully complicated game that most people can't handle, so they try to put it down as "memoization" (sic) or "a solved game".....you shouldn't try to comment on things you don't understand.
I put it down as stale, so that means that I am not 'good enough' to understand it? Your comments call out anyone who disagrees with your opinion as to stupid to have a valid opinion. That is some amazing logic there, poindexter....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
It's hard to say that the US dominates most sports it cares about, when there are not a lot of international competitors. Gridiron, Baseball and Basketball...it's mainly only the US that plays these sports.
Considering US performance in the Olympics and other sports that are played worldwide, like soccer, and it's even harder to make the argument of the US dominating at sports.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.