Media comments on chess

[JustinHorton]

"My online chess addiction was ruining my life."

[EDIT: see thread]

[Phil Neatherway]

The song 'It ain't what you do' includes the lines

I thought I was smart but I soon found out
I didn't know what life was all about
But then I learnt I must confess
That life is like a game of chess

[JustinHorton]

Zugzwang central banking

[Paul Habershon]

Zugzwang central banking

Whatever you invest you lose.

[Stewart Reuben]

Paul and Justin >JustinHorton wrote: ↑Thu Sep 08, 2022 9:35 pm
Zugzwang central banking
Whatever you invest you lose.
Tht is NOT zugzwang because you do not have to invest.

[JustinHorton]

There's a piece, What's The Difference?, in the latest London Review of Books, by Arianne Shahvisi, reviewing books by Gina Rippon and Sharon Moalem. It's probably paywalled, so I'll quote the opening paragraphs in full:

As a teenager,​ I couldn’t find anyone to play chess with me, so I pored over a small yellow copy of Chess Made Easy and set up games against myself. Mine is the 26th edition of Cecil Purdy and Gary Koshnitsky’s primer, first published in 1942. Returning to it recently, I noticed a brief section towards the end on ‘Women in Chess’. It is often the case, the text notes, that when a husband and wife learn to play together, ‘the wife wins a majority of their games.’ One anticipates an adversative conjunction followed by some folk sexism to dash the hopes of a girl improver. Instead, there’s this:

Competitive chess is a different story. One basic reason may be that a woman’s time tends to be cut into more. But mainly it’s just fashion and tradition. Young girls generally just don’t study chess seriously, as many boys do. The very few who do so have considerable success.

A pocket book on chess isn’t the first place you’d look for an elegant nod to the effects of gender socialisation and the fragmentation of women’s leisure time. When asked, in 1963, about the obvious disparity in the game, Bobby Fischer said of women: ‘I guess they’re just not so smart.’ In 1989, Garry Kasparov insisted that chess ‘does not fit women properly. It’s a fight, you know? A big fight ... Women are weaker fighters.’ (When he was reminded of these comments after Judit Polgár beat him in 2002, he said: ‘I don’t believe that now.’)

No woman has ever been world chess champion. Probabilistic effects are sufficient explanation for this – fewer women ‘study chess seriously’, so the pool of potential champions is much smaller – but ‘stereotype threat’ is also implicated. A study from 2007 showed that women play as well as men in online chess games provided they don’t know the gender of their opponent. Their performance suffers when they are told they’re facing a man and improves if they think they’re up against another woman, regardless of their opponent’s actual gender.

The British grandmaster Nigel Short wrote in 2015 that men are ‘hardwired’ to play better chess, and later tweeted ‘Men and women do have different brains. This is a biological fact.’ (Short too was defeated by Polgár, but evidently it didn’t do him any good.)

[Stephen Westmoreland]

What can I say, other than sigh and put my head in my hands. Bless the Mail...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailym ... sport.html

[John Upham]

What can I say, other than sigh and put my head in my hands. Bless the Mail...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailym ... sport.html

I love the smell of an .xml file in the morning

[Stephen Westmoreland]

Extra anti cheat checks coming up...

[Roger de Coverly]

What can I say, other than sigh and put my head in my hands. Bless the Mail...

I think this link may work better.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... sport.html

It was someone's joke originally, but whose?

[Stephen Westmoreland]

Thinking Elon Musk but he may have just seized on it (so to speak).

[Chris Goodall]

In 1989, Garry Kasparov insisted that chess ‘does not fit women properly. It’s a fight, you know? A big fight ... Women are weaker fighters.’ (When he was reminded of these comments after Judit Polgár beat him in 2002, he said: ‘I don’t believe that now.’)

...

(Short too was defeated by Polgár, but evidently it didn’t do him any good.)

While I certainly don't believe that women are biologically unsuited to winning world titles, Kasparov is +12 =4 -1 lifetime against Polgar, so that's a bit of a cope. Short is +3 =6 -12 against Polgar despite usually outgrading her, which is indeed hilarious. But really, you can't extrapolate anything from the existence of one extremely good female player. We need ten more women to smash the 2600 glass ceiling. I mostly agree with Hou Yifan about why they haven't. Hopefully the Queen's Gambit generation will change things.

[NickFaulks]

I mostly agree with Hou Yifan about why they haven't.

I expect I should know about that but I don't. Could you expand?

[Chris Goodall]

Growing up, female players are told, "If you win the girls’ title, we’ll be really proud of you, and this is a great job!" It’s unlikely that any of them were told, "No, you should be fighting for the overall title!" Girls are told at an early age that there’s a kind of gender distinction, and they should just try their best in the girls' section and be happy with that. So without the motivation to chase higher goals, it’s harder for girls to improve as fast as boys as they grow up.

https://www.chess.com/article/view/hou- ... view-chess

(She made some other distinctly hedged comments about emotionality where I think she was just spitballing to avoid saying "no, don't be silly".)

[NickFaulks]

https://www.chess.com/article/view/hou- ... view-chess

Thanks, I hadn't seen that.

It is a long and thoughtful interview, and she is clear that the paragraph you have plucked out describes just one of a variety of plausible reasons.

(She made some other distinctly hedged comments about emotionality where I think she was just spitballing to avoid saying "no, don't be silly".)

You will of course continue to make that interpretation, but I can see not a shred of evidence to support it. Her comments are quite clear and well expounded - if she actually believed the opposite, there was no reason for her to have said what she did.

As a matter of fact, I think the views she expressed about possible fundamental differences between the sexes came close to what you are not allowed to say nowadays, and she risked being expelled from social media for them. I shall not quote individual scraps, but recommend anyone who may not have seen the interview to read the whole thing.