

Chess World Championship 2012: A First Win - 0ren
http://moscow2012.fide.com/en/live?g=20120520

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vecter
ChessNetwork on YouTube has the most clear and concise explanations of what's
going on. They're incredibly easy to follow even for patzers like myself:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh9KTUiimzE>

ChessVibes has good summaries of the event with post-game interviews:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI7Jbf_Kkqc>

~~~
heyitsnick
KingsCrusher + Chessexplained are also doing indepth analysis of every game:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZvOgTclCSM&feature=plcp](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZvOgTclCSM&feature=plcp)

Sadly audio isn't great on this video but the analysis is still very good.

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asynchrony
I've been following the match since it started and can't fathom what this has
to do with hacker news.

Though I can't help but mention that interested parties would be much better
served by the coverage at chessbase than the dry 'game-score+laconic-engine-
commentary' as presented here.

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robomartin
A general comment about playing Chess. I've been playing since I was a kid. I
like the game. Well, sort of. I've probably logged nearly 10K games on the
playchess server. One day, while having a conversation about Chess with
another (older) engineer he made a comment that really stuck in my mind, he
said: "All you accomplish by playing a lot of Chess is to become a better
Chess player".

His comment had a point to it. The conversation took place while we were
waiting for the results of FEA for a fluid-based thermal management system.
Each run took 18 hours. It had been running overnight and we were about to get
results. While we waited I fired-up a quick game of Chess and we started to
talk about the subject once I was done.

His point was that, unless your goal is to become a world champion and somehow
earn a living out of playing Chess the game can very easily become a huge
waste of time. You don't learn anything more than playing Chess. It is false
to assume that good Chess players are really smart people. Yes, they might
have the ability to achieve deep concentration and focus on the game. One
would be surprised to learn just how bad some really good Chess players are
about other things in life.

I thought about this on-and-off for months. Nearly every time I thought about
playing Chess his words played back in my head. My conclusion was to accept
that he was right: There was no point to playing Chess beyond a level of
entertainment.

In order to become truly competitive in Chess you have to become a human
database. You need to study openings, endings, all sorts of mid-game
permutations. You need to study your opponents' games and know how to counter
some of their moves or approaches. In other words, you need to turn a fun game
into a job. That, to me, turns a fun game into an ugly job. I have no interest
in being that person.

This point got driven home as I taught my kids to play. I started one of them
off when he was six. This was prior to my "revelation". Very soon he was
winning local tournaments right and left.

As I understood what was happening I pulled him back a bit from this rather
serious engagement with the game. To some extent he had already learned a lot
of what the game has to offer: Considering your options; Patience; Planning;
Concentration; Goals; Making choices; etc. His time would be far better
invested on such topics as programming, music, even building cool things with
Legos.

You can learn the basic real-world-usable lessons of Chess within six to
twelve months of playing the game. Anything beyond that is just playing more
Chess with no further lessons that apply to other aspects of your life.

I admire GM's at the levels seen in these championships. Good for them. It is
their chosen profession and they excel at it. However, I am no-longer in awe
of their mental abilities. What they have to become in order to play at these
levels is, to me, the absolute opposite of what the game felt like when I was
a kid. It was very cool to solve problems as they were presented and "fight
the battle". It isn't cool to play against a database --or have to become one.

~~~
jasonkester
Indeed, but you can say this about pretty much any hobby.

What does playing Guitar get you beyond getting better at playing guitar?
Snowboarding? Rock Climbing? Traveling the world? Building perfectly accurate
models of 19th century warships?

There are a million things that people can take up a a hobby, and even
dedicate their entire life to. All of them have your same points in common
that, unless you manage to become one of the top 100 people in the world at
it, it's not really going to ever benefit you beyond your own personal
satisfaction.

And yet, I defy you to find a single person who doesn't have at least one of
these time wasting hobbies. It's part of what makes us human.

My advice is to not sweat it so much and go play Chess if it makes you happy.

~~~
vetler
Snowboarding and rock climbing improves your health, so it's absolutely not
wasted time. You get the benefit of doing something fun, while also making you
a healthier person.

You're still right, though. Play chess if it makes you happy.

~~~
jasonkester
True, though there are better ways to improve your health if that's your goal.

If you want to be truly good at either one of those things (to the level that
the grandparent talks about where he's a "walking database"), you're going to
do all sorts of things that are not particularly beneficial to your health.

Next time you meet a _really_ dedicated snowboarder, have him do a couple deep
knee bends and take a listen. If you ever meet me, have me show you my
knuckles, which I can no longer straighten nor bend completely after 15 years
of dedicated finger training for Rock Climbing. Watch me do a one-arm pullup,
then laugh as I fail to run a mile because I'm not actually, in any normal
sense of the word, in shape.

Pretty much all the hobies I mention above, and most you could think of,
require you to specialize in ways that make them unsuitable training for the
general case area in which they improve you. Just like Chess sorta makes you
smarter and piano sorta makes you more dextrous, training for a sport just
sorta makes you healthy. But mostly it makes you a better snowboarder,
climber, etc.

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zackzackzack
I don't play chess or understand why this matters. What is going on?

~~~
rohwer
They've drawn each game up till this win by Gelfand.

Beautiful mate at the end: Anand, the world champion, playing black, marched a
pawn across the board, but Gelfand will checkmate in two moves regardless. The
knight checks on G6, the King is forced to G8, then the Rook checkmates on G7.

Incidently, Kasparov just called out Anand as old'n lazy while visiting the
match in Moscow. Gelfand came through candidate matches as a surprise
challenger. He's been around forever in the top twenty.

~~~
KC8ZKF
Black could avoid the mate by sacrificing his rook with h1+, then promoting
the pawn with a check, then sacrificing the new queen by taking the knight at
e5. No point in that though. He has lost.

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icco
While I don't know why the poster put this up, one could argue that hn is
about learning from others opinions, victories and mistakes.

Here, we are given a chance to analyze two great chess masters and replay
their strategic battle. What decisions made one lose? How is the strategic
deployment of pieces similar to running a company? What attracts hackers to
chess?

Or it could be that bunch of people on hn like chess, and this got voted up.
Who really knows what fuels articles to the front page of this community?

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Brajeshwar
Perhaps because Chess is a fascinating thing for Hackers! I'm just a casual
Chess Player and I play while I relax or get tense with work.

I don't really follow the championship but they were unable to win for quite a
while, right? So, this is the first win. We'll have to watch how Anand comes
back.

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akashshah
HN may be interested to know that Anand is a brand ambassador for NIIT, a
computer education company from India (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIIT>).
AFAIK this is the only brand he endorses.

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bryze
Really nice game. That's the sort of elegant finish I always hope for in my
games.

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inoop
I've been playing too much shogi, all I want to do when watching this game is
drop a pawn.

