Repug's chess club

[Repugnant Abomination]

Preemptive fuck you to ID.

Let's begin.

Anyone interested in chess should first acquaint themselves with Gary kasparov, considered by most to be the greatest chess player of all time.


Born in the Soviet Union, he began his study of chess at the age of 7 and worked his way up the ranks throughout his teens. It's important to understand that during this time, indeed most of the 20th century - save for Fischer's "reign" (I'll discuss him in another post) the Soviets dominated the chess landscape. They often used their dominance at the chess board as propaganda in order to fuel nationalism. There were countless schools across the country where young men like Kasparov studied chess day and night. So when I say he worked his way up through his teens, understand that he worked his way up in the most competitive chess environment on the planet. At the age of 17 he became a grandmaster.

Chess ratings:

Rating range Category
2600+ World Championship contenders
2400-2600 most Grandmasters (GM) and International Masters (IM)
2300-2400 FIDE Masters (FM)
2200-2300 FIDE Candidate Masters (CM), most national masters
2000-2200 candidate masters, experts (USA)
1800-2000 Class A, category 1
1600-1800 Class B, category 2
1400-1600 Class C, category 3
1200-1400 Class D, category 4
Below 1200 novices

To give you some context, I've played and studied for a while now, and usually max out against 1800 level players. Solid, but nothing special.

17,171 players have a rating between 2200 and 2399, and are usually associated with the Candidate Master title.
1,868 players have a rating between 2400 and 2499, most of whom have either the International Master or the International Grandmaster title.
563 players have a rating between 2500 and 2599, most of whom have the International Grandmaster title
123 players have a rating between 2600 and 2699, all (but one) of whom have the International Grandmaster title
31 players have a rating between 2700 and 2799
Only five players – Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Veselin Topalov, Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen – have ever exceeded a rating of 2800, and only Carlsen and Topalov currently maintain 2800+ in the latest (January 2010) list.
The highest ever FIDE rating was 2851, held by Gary Kasparov.

In his teens he developed a fierce rivalry against Anatoly Karpov (to be discussed in another post), who was also a product of the Soviet chess machine. Karpov was the current world champion, after Fischer refused to defend his title. Kasparov was rated second only to Karpov when they played their first world championship against each other. The match was controversially called off by the president of the chess federation, citing physical exhaustion to the players after the match spanned over something like 5 months. Karpov was ahead, but Kasparov had the momentum. In 1985 they rematched. Kasparov secured the title by a score of 13–11, winning the 24th game with Black, using a Sicilian defence. He was 22 years old at the time, making him the youngest ever World Champion, and breaking the record held by Mikhail Tal (more on Tal later) for over 20 years. Kasparov's win as Black in the 16th game has been recognized as one of the all-time masterpieces in chess history. Kasparov and Karpov would battle for the world title three or four more times, with Kasparov winning each time by a narrow margin.

He remained the world champion and the number 1 rated player for a span of over 20 years, something unprecedented in the chess world. He has recently retired to get into politics in Russia, and is a vocal critic of Vladmir Putin. He currently trains Magnus Carlsen, who is Norwegian chess prodigy and grandmaster. He too will be featured at some point in this thread.

One thing that separated Kasparov from his contemporaries was relentlessly evaluating him own play. He talks about it here:

YouTube - Gary Kasparov: Making Mistakes in Chess

YouTube - Gary Kasparov: Making Mistakes in Chess

His style is extremely dynamic and creative, unlike a Karpov, who is positional player who slowly suffocates his opponents. You can find lots of interviews with Kasparov on youtube (his English is very good), as well as many of his games. I'm sure I'll revisit Kasparov many times in this thread, but for now let me just end with saying the man is a genius, and a great ambassador for the game.

**********Update*********

Deep Blue was a chess computer developed by IBM in 1997, created specifically to beat the world champion, Kasparov.


He had already beaten previous chess computers, but the hype surrounding Deep Blue got everyone pretty pumped. The system derived its playing strength mainly out of brute force computing power. It was a massively parallel, RS/6000 SP Thin P2SC-based system with 30-nodes, with each node containing a 120 MHz P2SC microprocessor for a total of 30, enhanced with 480 special purpose VLSI chess chips. The opening library was provided by grandmasters Miguel Illescas, John Fedorowicz, and Nick de Firmian. When Kasparov requested that he be allowed to study other games that Deep Blue had played so as to better understand his opponent, IBM refused. However, Kasparov did study many popular PC computer games to become familiar with computer game play in general.

After the loss, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves, suggesting that during the second game, human chess players had intervened on behalf of the machine, which would be a violation of the rules. IBM denied that it cheated. For example, Anti-computer tactics are a style of play used by humans to beat strong computer opponents at chess. It involves playing conservatively for a long-term advantage the computer is not able to see in its game tree search. This will frequently involve selecting moves that are believed to be sub-optimal in order to exploit known weaknesses in the way computer players evaluate positions. But when Kasparov did this, the computer began to play like a human, which it hadn't done in previous games. Kasparov requested printouts of the machine's log files but IBM refused, although the company later published the logs on the Internet. Kasparov demanded a rematch, but IBM refused and dismantled Deep Blue.

Apparently Kasparov said at some point that he noticed Deep Blue choosing moves that reminded him of Karpov, which is extremely juicy gossip in the chess world. Did IBM have Karpov hidden in some dark room, analyzing the data Deep Blue fed him? It would've been a hugely unfair advantage. A documentary was made about it in 2003 that you can read about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Ov...nd_the_Machine

Sweet, I found the documentary online. It's well worth the hour and a half viewing time. Enjoy.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...71762581045075

[Mr. Blonde]

YouTube - Chess-Boxing

YouTube - Chess-Boxing

this is an actual sport.

[Mr. Mistoffelees]

Do Bobby Fisher please.

[Orgazmo]

I'd like to hear about Deep Blue (or any other computer shit). I remember doing some reading about it on Wikipedia a long ass time ago and it being very interesting.

[Repugnant Abomination]

Updated.

[Orgazmo]

tyty

[Repugnant Abomination]

I lost a huge post I was making on Fischer. I'm pissed off and won't be writing a new one for a while.

[Mr. Blonde]

notepad, baby