Image credit: Jason Schneider
by Edward Tenner
This past fall, the world championship match in Bonn, Germany, wasn’t the only thing stirring up chess enthusiasts. ChessBase 10, a beefier new version of the massive database program that is the tournament player’s gold standard, had arrived.
In 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue multiprocessor computer defeated the world champion, Garry Kasparov, rapid gains in electronic chess seemed likely to diminish the game’s challenge and glamour. Instead, the Web has built participation at the base and refined concepts at the summit. A new cohort of competitors is playing stronger chess than ever—but its emergence is changing the game in unexpected ways.
ChessBase, introduced for Atari in 1987, is now a compendium of 3.75 million games reaching back more than five centuries. Compiling statistics, including the results from games just downloaded from the Web, it also shows percentages of games won after various alternative moves. The heritage of chess thus becomes a vast, branching cave to be explored game by game.
Jon Edwards, a chess teacher and the 1997 U.S. correspondence champion, says that players still grow through hours of replaying great games; ChessBase just makes that process more efficient. Young Bobby Fischer huddled in the New York Public Library stacks with Russian magazines, constantly resetting pieces. Today’s contenders can play through new games online and onscreen, adding their own games to the ChessBase record and learning more rapidly from their mistakes.
Knowing thine adversary has never been easier. Even the victorious defending champion Viswanathan Anand has said he can’t afford to have a favorite opening. Under pressure because of efficient scrutiny through databases and analysis engines like Fritz (another popular high-level software program that works out new moves), top players must prepare more variations than ever.
Here is the full article.
href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2Vr926F-38&feature=related”> I love chess this Much!
Don’t you mean this much?
For me the crux of the article is at the end:
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But there is a catch. As computers have hooked more contenders and augmented their skills, preparation time has increased. There’s never been much money in full-time chess playing, and now the commitment needed to keep up with the game makes it harder to moonlight in a different profession. One of Edwards’s star students reluctantly gave up his promising pro career to attend law school. And some highly rated amateurs quit, too, as Cossette did in 2001. “It isn’t a sport anymore,” he observes. “It isn’t a game. It’s a research project.” For him and many other professionals, it’s too much like work.
Not all top recreational players agree. Many love computer-assisted analysis and exploration. As a teacher, Edwards believes youth chess is great preparation for college and life. But in chess as in life, technological edges can cut both ways.
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This is ultimately (meaning: around mid-century) why I think chess will move toward expanding the range of openings. IMHO the fairest way to do this is a “non-random” version of Chess960, without requiring symmetry: White and Black begin by placing 1 piece behind their rows of pawns, subject to King between the Rooks (keeping the Fischer castling rule), Bishops on opposite colors, and (maybe) at least one Rook in a corner. This helps Black in the initial stage, since Black commits last, and can play for a must-win by putting Kings on opposite sides.
hello susan happy to know with you.i’m from indonesian and like gamechess.still learn and play chessgame.this is a good article for me.thanks
Computers and the internet are here to stay.