first American since Fischer to challenge for the World Chess Championship.

[anatta]

https://chess24.com/en/watch/live-to...hip-2018/1/1/2

play game 2

[anatta]

[anatta]

Although it scarcely occurred to me at the time, my daughter and I were embarking on a sort of cognitive experiment. We were two novices, attempting to learn a new skill, essentially beginning from the same point but separated by some four decades of life. I had been the expert to that point in her life—in knowing what words meant, or how to ride a bike—but now we were on curiously equal footing. Or so I thought.

I began to regularly play online, do puzzles, and even leafed through books like Bent Larsen’s Best Games.
I seemed to be doing better with the game, if only because I was more serious about it.
When we played, she would sometimes flag in her concentration, and to keep her spirits up, I would commit disastrous blunders.
In the context of the larger chess world, I was a patzer—a hopelessly bumbling novice—but around my house, at least, I felt like a benevolently sage elder statesmen.

And then my daughter began beating me.

The age question is hoary in chess. Indeed, one of the earliest discussions of the now-universal player ranking system called the “Elo rating” (named for its inventor Arpad Elo) was in a 1965 article in The Journal of Gerontology. Using his novel statistical analysis, Elo found that the peak age for master-level chess performance was around 36, with a slow steady decline after that.

That was then. Today, chess is only getting younger. Neil Charness, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, has long studied the question of chess and performance.
“Bobby Fischer became a grandmaster at age 15,” he says. “Then Judit Polgar beat his record.” And then Sergey Karjakin beat Polgar, by doing it in 2002 at age 12. “The record of the youngest age to achieve grandmaster status,” Charness tells me, “keeps getting beat.”

More recently, the 13-year-old Wei Yi became the youngest to rise above a 2600 rating. Magnus Carlsen, the world’s current top-ranked player, was the youngest player to reach number one, at age 19. In a process akin to the “Flynn effect,” or the global rise in IQ scores over much of the last century, chess ratings have risen over time. Charness notes that “younger players are getting skilled faster than they used to,” thanks, in part, to better tools and better feedback: Sophisticated computer engines, databases, the ability to play players of any level at any time of the day.

Chess—which has been dubbed the “fruit fly” of cognitive psychology—seems a tool that is purpose-built to show the deficits of an aging brain.
The psychologist Timothy Salthouse has noted that cognitive tests on speed, reasoning, and memory show age-related declines that are “fairly large,” “linear,” and, most alarming to me, “clearly apparent before age 50.”
And there are clear consequences on the chessboard.
In one study, Charness had players of a variety of skills try and assess when a check was threatened in a match. The more skilled the player, the quicker they were able to do this, as if it were a perceptual judgment—essentially by pattern recognition stored up from previous matches.
But no matter what the skill, the older a player was, the slower they were to spot the threat of a check.

Denise Park, the director of research at the University of Texas’ Center for Vital Longevity, described what was happening to me in unsettling terms.
“As you get older, you actually see clear degradation of the brain, even in healthy people. Your frontal cortex gets smaller, your hippocampus—the seat of the memory—shrinks.”
My brain volume is atrophying annually, my cortical thickness dropping some 0.5 percent a year.

Where my daughter’s brain was hungrily forming new neural connections, mine could probably have a used a few new ones.
“You don’t want to be pruning synaptic connections, you want to be growing them,” Park told me.
My daughter’s brain was trying to efficiently tame the chaos. “For older adults,” Park said, “there’s not nearly enough chaos.”

Back at the board, there seemed to be plenty of chaos. For one, my daughter tended to gaily hum as she contemplated her moves. Strictly Verboten in a tournament setting, but I did not want to let her think it was affecting me—and it certainly wasn’t as bad as the frenetic trash talking of Washington Square Park chess hustlers.

It was the sense of effortlessness that got to me. Where I would carefully ponder the board, she would sweep in with lightning moves. Where I would carefully stick to the scripts I had been taught—“a knight on the rim is dim”—she seemed to be making things up.

After what seemed a particularly disastrous move, I would try to play coach for a moment, and ask: Are you sure that’s what you want to do? She would shrug. I would feel a momentary shiver of pity and frustration; “it’s not sticking,” I would think. And then she would deliver some punishing pin on the Queen, or a deft back rank attack I had somehow overlooked. When I made a move, she would often crow: “I knew you were going to do that.”

I would sometimes wander into the room when coach Simon was there, watching him present her with some puzzle on the board. I would struggle toward some solution, feeling smug, only to find I had completely botched it.
My daughter, meanwhile, swiftly moved the right piece into position. He would shoot me a look, beaming at her precociousness.
I was proud, I was frustrated. There are surely fewer greater parental satisfactions than to see one’s progeny doing well at something. But there is altogether different feeling—a sobering slap of pathos, a vague sense of alarm that some genie had been let out of a bottle—when they exceed you on the same task.
When a person who still cannot always successfully tie her own shoes, who has yet to do long division, can beat me at the royal game.
She was Deep Blue,1 and I was the human race, being slowly outmoded.

[anatta]

Park told me I was most likely at the peak of my cognitive power. For all my daughter’s seemingly spritely processing power, I had higher-order capacities I could draw upon.
“If you’re younger, you can process information super-fast,” she told me, “but you may not know what to do with that information as you process it.”
She cautioned she was “oversimplifying” things, but I was happy to take it.

There are, I learned, two forms of intelligence: “fluid” and “crystallized.” As first theorized by the psychologist Raymond Cattel, fluid intelligence is, basically, being able to think on one’s feet, to solve new problems. Crystallized intelligence is what a person already knows—wisdom, memories, metacognition.
Even if I was only learning chess for the first time, I had a lifetime of play behind me.
Fluid intelligence is generally seen to favor the young, with the crystallized variety rewarded by age
(though there are many exceptions).

Old mathematicians doing their best work are as rare as young Supreme Court Justices. Chess, especially played at the top levels, can encompass both fluid and crystallized intelligence—one needs the firepower to quickly think through a novel position, but it also helps to draw upon a deep reservoir of past games (grandmasters like Carlsen can often identify a historical game with a glimpse at a single position).

Of course, my daughter, like most children her age, has not memorized a huge library of games; nor does she consciously think in terms of higher-level strategy. “I think I’ll go with the Rubenstein Variation to the French Defense” is not a thought she will have. She seems to play with some brute instinct, pure fluid intelligence.

As Daniel King, a London-based retired professional chess player who now analyzes and commentates chess matches, tells me, “children just kind of go for it—that kind of confidence can be very disconcerting for the opponent.” Lacking larger representational “schema,” the psychologist Dianne Horgan has noted, children players rely more on simple heuristics and “satisficing,” choosing the first good-looking move.

Indeed, my daughter often makes a rapid-fire move, after which I invariably ask: “Do you want to take a little more time?” She rarely does. Experts, curiously, make similarly rapid intuitive judgments. Magnus Carlsen, for example, has described how he often makes a move quickly in his head, then spends a great amount of time verifying it is the correct one.

When I asked Rudowski, my daughter’s coach, about the differences he sees in trying to teach beginner children and beginner adults, he said: “Adults need to explain to themselves why they play what they play. Kids don’t do that.
It’s like with languages. Beginner adults learn the rules of grammar and pronunciation, and use those to put sentences together. Little kids learn languages by talking.”

Here was my opening. I would counter her fluidity with my storehouses of crystallized intelligence. I was probably never going to be as speedily instinctual as she was. But I could, I thought, go deeper. I could get strategic.

I began to watch Daniel King’s analysis of top-level matches on YouTube. She would sometimes wander in and try to follow along, but I noticed she would quickly get bored or lost (and, admittedly, I sometimes did as well) as he explained how some obscure variation had “put more tension in the position” or “contributed to an imbalance on the queen-side.” And I could simply put in more effort.
My daughter was no more a young chess prodigy than I was a middle-aged one; if there was any inherited genius here, after all, it was partially inherited from me. Sheer effort would tilt the scales.

The house took on the atmosphere of a war-room. I gravely analyzed opening lines and tried to keep on my toes with intense online blitz matches. She played in tournaments on chesskid.com but seemed as interested in being awarded little iconic trophies (like “Chess Marathon,” for playing a game with more than 100 moves) as in actually beating other kids.
When I asked her one day who she thought was a better player, she answered in a cheekily engineered way that both hinted she had picked up on the research I had been doing, and that she wanted to get under my skin:
“I am. Because I’m younger and my brain is faster, and still growing.”

Then, just a few weeks ago, months into her winning streak, I beat my daughter at chess twice in a row.
Even if I had to work twice as hard to do it.

I learned that, as good as my daughter is at launching aggressive attacks, at almost clinically probing my weaknesses, she has a blind spot: What I am doing. She played, in those games, as if I were just some lower-level chess engine making haplessly random moves.
Indeed, when I made my moves, her eyes would often drift elsewhere—as if what I was doing was almost inconsequential to the larger game.
She failed to spot that my seemingly minor, unthreatening moves were all part of a larger strategic purpose.
Against her onrushing fluidity, I was laying in a minefield of crystallized traps.

Both matches also went to the endgame, where I was able to draw upon my greater capacity for attention and pure endurance.
And lastly, I noticed that even when it became clear (to me) she was going to lose, she wanted to press on.
I had noted a similar tendency with her in playing poker: She always wanted to keep betting, to the bloody end, with the most marginal of hands, even as other players were showing strong cards. She was lacking that larger, strategically metacognitive sense, that Bayesian ability to use probability to change one’s beliefs.

It was, in the end, a Pyrrhic victory. Not only has she since beaten me many times, but there was the look in her eyes as I checkmated her a second time.
For whatever the games had taught me about brains young and old, about the different ways we learn and deploy our cognitive resources, they also taught me that the only thing harder than losing to your daughter in chess is winning against her.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/l...-40-1278104318

[Cypress]

https://chess24.com/en/watch/live-to...hip-2018/1/1/2

play game 2

Remember how I told you that most Russian boys learn chess at, like age 6, and play continuously throughout their lives?

This me playing chess against Russians in a village near Smolensk, Russia. I really tried to put in a respectable showing for Uncle Sam - but I got my doors totally blown off!

[Minister of Truth]

As far as Cold War sporting matches, Rocky Balboa vs Ivan Drago and the Miracle on Ice are the two greatest. Bobby Fischer is definitely up there, however.

[dukkha]

Remember how I told you that most Russian boys learn chess at, like age 6, and play continuously throughout their lives?

This me playing chess against Russians in a village near Smolensk, Russia. I really tried to put in a respectable showing for Uncle Sam - but I got my doors totally blown off!

looks like you are down a couple pawns and your king side is blown open?

that is a insane chess board.
maybe it's the angle of the photo, but the pieces look like when I used to eat mushrooms and play for fun.
they look yuge and distorted.

Ya Russians and chess go together - although grandmasters are becoming more diverse.
we got a Norweigan world champ playing against an American - no Russians in sight!

[dukkha]

Petrov opening -move 8 position.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...rly-wins-game/


Chess World Rattled As Someone Nearly Wins Game
Game 6 of the World Chess Championship was one to remember.

Magnus Carlsen of Norway, the world’s No. 1 chess player, fended off a vicious siege at the hands of U.S. grandmaster Fabiano Caruana, the world No. 2, in London Friday. It was the sixth frame of the World Chess Championship, and one that for hours appeared likely to give the American a critical lead. But Carlsen escaped, and the match remains level, 3-3. Each of the six games so far have been a draw.

“It’s a miracle save,” said Robert Hess, an American grandmaster commentating on the match for Chess.com.

To catch you up: Carlsen is seeking his fourth world title while his challenger Caruana is trying for the first American world championship since Bobby Fischer in 1972. Their horns are locked in the middle of a best-of-12-game match for the game’s most important title.

The two began Friday’s Game 6 in one of Caruana’s favorite openings: the Petroff.

hess players are second only to maybe biological taxonomists in their proclivity to elaborately name things, and sure enough even this rare position has its own proper name: the Karklins-Martinovsky Variation. But neither player was troubled by Karklins-Martinovsky, they said after the game. Its theory is well known to these elite players.

And so they played on. The powerful queens came off the board by move 8, but this loss took no edge off the fight. For a while, the game looked less like a battle and more like a dressage competition, as 66 percent or more of each player’s first 12 moves were knight moves.

Many moves later, as the game cantered through its middlegame, winning chances emerged and swelled for Caruana’s black pieces, according to both the computer engine and human grandmaster commentators. (Surprisingly, black, which is usually at a disadvantage, has often had an advantage over white in this match.) While there was no single blunder for Carlsen, there was an accumulation of … what to call them? “Mistakes” seems too serious. “Slip-ups” make them sound like pratfalls. Let’s go with “inaccuracies.” Carlen admitted after the game that he’d made a number of imperfect moves. By move 34, knights and bishops were the only firepower left on the board, and they threatened salvo after salvo in a crucial struggle over the pawns.

By the 47th move, Carlsen was down a knight but up three pawns, which gave him a few slim hopes. Two had open routes to the end of the board, where they could become queens. Much delicate, asymmetrical and impossibly complex maneuvering commenced, as Caruana tried to prevent the pawns’ promotion.

A dozen moves later, Caruana had captured three of Carlsen’s pawns, including those aspiring to become queens, and still had one of his own. That left him in a victorious position — if only he could see it. On the 68th move, a supercomputer analyzing the game found a guaranteed checkmate a distant 30 moves down the road

Caruana is an unbelievably strong player — though not that strong. As play continued, the silicon’s guarantee quickly went away. If only Carlsen could eliminate the pawns, he’d survive: a bishop and a knight versus a bishop is a theoretically guaranteed draw.

Finally, through many feats, Carlsen was able to spirit away his king to a fortress on black’s side of the board.

Despite black’s apparent material advantage, there was no progress to be made. The players agreed to a draw on the 80th move.

Carlsen had walked a slippery bridge and survived. His escape act drew attention. As the tension built toward the end of the game, the match became the most-viewed stream on the popular game-streaming site Twitch. Books could be written about this endgame.

So, another draw, huh? Yawn, am I right? Not so fast. Today’s Game 6 was an instant classic. Journalist David Hill, who’s been in London reporting on the match, tweeted that there can be beauty in draws. Not all of them are created equal.



^GAME 6 FINAL POSITION (draw)

[anatta]

Magnus Carlsen springs Game 8 escape thanks to Fabiano Caruana's false step
said a disappointed Caruana: “I had some chances, it’s not like it’s always going to work out. Just because you put some pressure on Magnus doesn’t mean that he collapses or anything.”

The 26-year-old American challenger played into the Sicilian for the fourth time in four games as white
(1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4), veering into the Sveshnikov variation
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/20...arlsen-caruana

play game at link