Viswanathan K's Thoughts

As reigning world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen, is getting ready for his title defence, San Ingle mentions something very interesting he said: “The biggest advantage is that I am the better chess player… Having said that… there’s a famous quote: It’s not enough to be a good chess player. You also have to play well.”   Since Carlsen has an excellent record in tiebreaks (if the main series of games ends in a tie, they play rapid games), Ingle asked whether he intended to aim for “a thumping victory, or is he prepared to win ugly?”. Carlsen’s answer: “I am happy to win in any way possible. I’m somebody who puts more emphasis on the sporting aspects of chess than the artistic. And even more so during world championship matches. It’s about getting results.”   Carlsen’s focus on winning, with artistry relegated as a good-to-have, not a must-have, reminded me of something I read in the autobiography of tennis great Andre Agassi titled Open . Agassi, of course, was an a...

All games need to have rules. That’s obvious. What’s less obvious is the importance of striking the right balance between how many constraints the rules impose v/s how much room they leave for never-played-before scenarios. Why is that important? In a checkers world championship, a huge number of games turned out to be identical to games played earlier in checkers history. Yes, that’s right: every single move by both players was identical to an earlier game! If that’s not the definition of a boring sport, then what is? It clearly means that the rules of checkers are too constrictive and leave almost no room for variation. Many accuse chess of being the same. Thanks to all the books and computers, chess openings and endings have been analyzed to death, which means both those parts of chess are played by rote memory. Except that world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen, seems to have found a way to break that boring trend, writes Tyler Cowen: “Other grandmasters prepare th...