
Norwegian 19-year-old crowned world chess champ - Evgeny
http://www.nationalpost.com/life/story.html?id=2392166
======
grellas
A highly informative overview of current FIDE ratings may be found here:
<http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6027>. Basically, this is a
system by which chess grandmasters get rated based on their tournament play
over a lengthy period.

The top chess players of recent years (post-Kasparov) are the trio of Kramnik
(Russia), Topalov (Bulgaria), and Anand (India), with Anand being the current
world champion and with Topalov scheduled to play him for the title in the
very near future. Each of these guys has been at the top of his field for at
least a decade and Magnus Carlsen has done nothing as yet to displace them
from the very top. Even when it comes to the FIDE ratings, all these players
are neck and neck (Carlsen: 2810; Topalov: 2801; Anand: 2790; Kramnik: 2788).

What is _amazing_ here is not the absolute ratings but the prodigious nature
of Carlsen's ascendancy to the highest rating in the world, which can be seen
by comparing the following graphs showing the ratings progress from 2001-2010
for each of these players:

Carlsen: <http://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=1503014>; Topalov:
<http://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=2900084>; Anand:
<http://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=5000017>; Kramnik:
<http://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=4101588>.

As the graphs show, Topalov, Anand, and Kramnik have each had a 2700 or
greater ranking (more or less without fail) for each of the years from 2000
through 2010. They are the old guard who have dominated the game for years.
They have significant variations in their play (for example, Kramnik is super-
methodical and cautious, preferring to grind his opponents slowly while opting
for drawish variations in his manner of play while Topolav is a tremendous
risk-taker who frequently likes to bust up the positions with wild variations
and super-aggressive tactics) but the chess world has lived with this for some
time now and there is nothing new here.

In contrast, Carlsen has moved in a virtually unbroken upward line from about
a 2000 FIDE rating in year 2001 (when he was 10 years old) to his current 2810
rating in year 2010 (he is now 19). Thus, he represents the child prodigy
coming into maturity as a breath of fresh air to the chess world - though he
is not the world champion, for him, it is all potential future greatness and
this has stirred tremendous excitement. It doesn't hurt that Carlsen is
likable and is being mentored by Kasparov, who is perhaps the greatest
grandmaster of modern times.

------
Evgeny
A slightly misleading title though, he's not a world champion but number one
in the rankings, which is not the same. Still fascinating.

~~~
tspiteri
It is not slightly misleading, it is very misleading. To become champion, he
must win the world championship, which involves winning the candidates
tournament, and then beating the current champion in a match. Which is very
different then being the top-ranked player.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Very _very_ misleading. I was stunned by the headline, since my impression,
confirmed by this Wikipedia page:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship>

... is that nobody has ever become world champion at a younger age than their
twenties.

Being a chess idiot, I don't really know why this has been true, but I assume
it's simply a matter of practice: that it takes time to get good enough at
chess to usefully train against grandmasters, and then it takes time with the
grandmasters before you can dominate at grandmaster-level chess, which my
chessmaster friends have told me is almost like a different game, one which
they can follow with great excitement but not necessarily understand well
enough to play.

~~~
gcheong
"..but I assume it's simply a matter of practice"

The book "Talent Is Overrated" cites some interesting studies on chess players
that support the idea that this is probably the main factor. Basically a
combination of improved training methods, long hours of deliberate practice,
and starting at as young an age as possible. There isn't much in the article
that would lead me to think otherwise. The comparison to Mozart is interesting
as the book goes into much detail citing evidence how much of Mozart's
"talent" was due to his father's efforts to deliberately train him to become a
great musician.

~~~
d0mine
There are many fathers like the Mozart's one but how many Mozarts are there?

~~~
dunstad
The father's efforts would have been wasted without the son's motivation.
Mozart practiced, guided by his father.

------
nandemo
A few random comparisons from a go player here.

Any professional go player can remember their own games as matter of course.
They also replay hundreds of pro games for study, thereby memorizing them. I'd
be surprised if it were any different for chess players.

In fact, even amateur low-dan -- advanced but far from professional level --
players can replay games they have played in the same day, and can memorize a
few games with some practice.

Go games often last more than 200 moves but players memorize sequences, not
isolated moves.

Pros can routinely read 50+ moves ahead but, as tsipiteri mentioned, the
hardest part is evaluating the positions.

While there is no single "world" pro championship, a couple of Korean
teenagers have won prestigious international titles. A 19-year-old who's
"merely" a contender wouldn't be called a prodigy in the go world. I guess
Asian go players just train more and are more competitive than chess players.
Unlike Carlsen, they don't usually care about a life besides their game.

~~~
dgordon
Somehow go always makes its way into online conversations about chess.

The Wikipedia article on computer go suggests that humans are better at
calculating long sequences in go than in chess because the pieces in go stay
where they are unless they're captured. This seems reasonable to me, though
I'm no better than a beginner at go (I'm probably around the equivalent to an
"amateur low dan" at chess, and can do what you suggested a go player of that
level should be able to do in replaying and memorizing games.)

Also, it's not really fair to compare international titles in go, of which
several are contested every year, to the world championship in chess, which is
only contested every other year. A better comparison might be some of the
major international tournaments like Wijk aan Zee, Linares...or perhaps this
year's Nanjing Pearl Spring tournament, in which Carlsen decisively defeated a
field consisting of five other top-20 players: Veselin Topalov (currently
world #2, and the challenger for the world championship to be held later this
year), Wang Yue (#9), Peter Leko (#12), Teimour Radjabov (#16), and Dmitry
Jakovenko (#19). Carlsen scored 8/10 (six wins, four draws) -- no one else
scored above 5.5/10.

------
michael_dorfman
I've been following Carlsen in the news here in Norway for quite a few years
now, and it has been a fascinating ride.

He hired Kasparov last year as a trainer, and it really seems to have taken
his playing to a new level.

It will be interesting (to say the least) to see how he does in the next World
Championship round...

------
jimbokun
I think this guy is even more amazing to me:

"His early coach Simen Agdestein successfully juggled being Norway's chess No.
1 and a national team soccer player..."

It would be fascinating to hear if he was able to leverage anything from one
of those realms to the other. Did he see football as a more fluid kind of
chess?

Any other examples of someone achieving that level of excellence at both a
physical endeavor and an intellectual one? Has there ever been another
national chess champion who was simultaneously a professional athlete?

~~~
mtoledo
I'm highly inspired by Josh Waitzkin, who inspired the book and movie "in
search for Bobby Fischer" and then went to win 21 national championships and 2
world championships in Tai Chi Push Hands, a competitive kind of tai chi.

He explores how he's linked chess and tai chi with overall 'learning' in his
book 'the art of learning' which I highly recommend.

He's alse been training BJJ and said he expects to be world champion by year
2010.

~~~
hypermatt
one of my favorite books also ;)

------
markbao
> Magnus Carlsen plots _20 moves ahead_ and can remember matches he played six
> years ago move-for-move

Wow.

~~~
nanijoe
It's really not possible (or practical) to plot 20 moves ahead in a chess
game. Every different piece moved by your opponent would represent a new
'line' that you would have to compute 20 moves for.

~~~
pavs
> It's really not possible (or practical) to plot 20 moves ahead in a chess
> game.

20 'best' moves ahead, according to the observer/player/chess-engine; assuming
opponent played the best moves (according to the observer) in reply.

Remembering a game played 6 years ago or being able to "think" 20 moves ahead
may seem an amazing feat to regular chess players. But for professional
players of GM or IM status - I don't think it is something amazing.
Professional chess players memorize 100s (if not 1000s) of chess opening moves
and their variations for many years. Remembering a chess game is not very
impressive in that context.

~~~
robryan
I'd imagine at the top level being able to see say the 20 best moves ahead
would regularly occur similarly as predicted by the player and if things
deviate it could be there there advantage anyway.

~~~
iron_ball
Yes, and in fact that's how openings work. Each opening is a sequence in which
both players are making an optimal response to the previous move. If a player
deviates from the opening, then by definition he just made a suboptimal move.

~~~
KC8ZKF
Openings aren't demonstrably optimal. (Or there would be only one.) Players
make improvements on openings all the time.

~~~
swombat
There are a relatively small number of equally optimal moves (compared to the
total number of possible moves) for a given opening, after white has opened in
a certain way. The vast majority of moves other than the ones covered in the
opening and/or its known variations are indeed sub-optimal, and quite often if
someone deviates from one of the great many standard openings, this can be
exploited by the opponent.

~~~
nanijoe
The truth of the matter is that chess players seldom play out a single
opening..Since most openings are pretty well known (along with their optimal
moves), the beginning part of a chess game is usually spent trying to maneuver
your opponent into an opening of your liking (or trick them into thinking you
are playing one thing, then switching on them).

What starts out looking like the Slav , may end up Queens Indian (as an
example), and this makes the 20 moves ahead claim even more ludicrous.

There are whole books on (slaying) the dragon variation of the Sicilian
defense and the Sicilian is just one option that can result from the first
move being e4..of course your opponent can also transpose to a different
formation as the game progresses.

In the end game where there are relatively few pieces on the board you may be
able to plan ahead with more precision, but other than that trying to think 20
moves ahead is not just impractical, it may well be dumb.

