Stalemate

There are those interesting moments when again you briefly stand up in the river of time and realise how far the world has moved, in a good way, from how it was technologically. There is the incremental addition of apps, devices and Big Data applications that come to mind but there is nothing better than looking at one aspect of life and comparing how it was and how it has become.

Most will know that I had chess as a hobby through my teenage years. I read books, played tournaments and followed the comings-and-goings of the elite level chess. I only abandoned it when I went to university as other passions like language learning and philosophy soaked up time. I think I only went in one tournament in my twenties and apart from some social games with friends it was just a very, very idle interest. Put simply, between the ages of 20 and 40, I played more games of Chinese chess than standard international chess.

To set the scene of when I did play in my "prime" (about 1997), the internet had just arrived in New Zealand, but there were almost no mobile phones, not even iPods, let alone smartphones. There were rudimentary computer chess computers on the market but they were not strong. (In that year though the world chess champion of the time, Garry Kasparov, lost to Deep Blue.) To say there was internet is to say there were webpages, YouTube was eight years away. For chess, with the use of special chess notation, you could read what happened in various tournament games. There might have been rudimentary chessboard interfaces back then to click through moves but maybe not. 

As a learner, you had to find people to play which for me at the time involved going one evening a week to Glen Eden to Waitematā chess club and the occasional tournament. Most of the famous games were in books and mainly in notation except for the occasional chess grid illustration of a crucial position, so to study you would play through and try to understand what the grandmasters were doing. During my "active period", let's say the five years of high school. there were three World Chess Championship matches, but I only followed one because there wasn't easy access to the games. Back then, learning did take some dedication, support and resources. 

Now, you don't even need a chessboard to play. Many players play more online chess than over-the-board (OTB) chess, which meant that the Covid pandemic may have led to more chess being played. I have barely ever played online but I enjoy now just following what's going on and, my gosh, it's never been easier. The most recent world chess championships was all live and I could wake up in the morning and watch the middlegame (the middle phase of the game) Chromecast to the television. While watching live, they have a commentary team looking at all probable variations with one of the best chess computers rate the position so, like a scoreline, you could see the theoretical state of the match as well as hypothetical positions after suggested moves. When one of the players does a mistake, the rating could shoot from being in favour of one player to being in favour of the other.

It was a match of two halves. Magnus Carlsen of Norway, the four-time defending champion and highest rated player of all time, was against Ian Nepomniatchi of Russia (AKA Nepo), a player who had the rather unique status of having a positive score against Magnus in classical chess, mostly due to the fact that he was stronger in their younger years. At first there were five tough draws before the historic game six, the longest game in championship history, a 136 move win to Carlsen. Even for a "slow" game like chess, there was remarkably quick collapse in Nepo thereafter, who lost all focus with it three of the next five games with some stunningly bad moves, usually made after not much time thinking and always followed by a long retreat away from the board leaving the champion sitting there waiting for his return. 

That was all "classical chess" - the test match cricket equivalent of chess. But at the start of my holiday, I got to see the semifinal and final of the online speed chess championships as well, and this is incredibly watchable. You can watch the two players face-on (as they are shot through the webcam) and hear the commentary at short game formats; they pack up to 32 games head-to-head in a few hours! 

After watching, you have the usual pangs about what I could have been with such a rich digital environment of chess. (But of course all of my opponents would too have their playing environments thus enriched.)

I've now completed day four of this summer break. Despite the chess watching, it's  a kind of a let-down, feeling as if it's been a little frittered away, but I guess this is expected at the start of a holiday when your mind and body are a just mending their frazzled edges from the preceding months.