Chess

Quote from nitro:

I have read this book I really enjoyed it and recommend it highly. I coach kids to play chess (very part time for fun although I am well payed), and I always ask the parents to read this book.

Chess seems like this innocent thing, but it is a microcosm of life...
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Nice that you coach. True about paralleling life, also push-ups for the brain (still trying to get the other ones up to 100, though :D ).

Glad to hear your training is going well :)
 
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Does anybody know where I might get an old edition copy of

Chess Fundamentals by Jose R. Capablanca?

I don't like the new plasticky ones and I'm quite fond of the smell of old books.
 
BTW, in the video above Kasparov is waaaaaaaaaaaay off in his estimate of the number of possible legal chess games. The actual number is colossal, ~10^80. That is waaaaaaaaay more than there are atoms in the entire [visible] universe. The oriental game of Go completely dwarfs chess in the number of possible legal games, estimated at a number so enourmous, it leaves the realm of human experience, ~10^800. Of course, the key to any game of skill is that only a tiny tiny fraction of those possible games are interesting. This gets me thinking on a different note, on information theory, and one wonders the amount of information that say a grandmaster has to compress (technique, patterns, theory etc) in order to achieve their level of mastery. I think it is estimated at about 25,000 for weak grandmasters, and as much as 100,000 for world champions. No wonder chess is hard. On the other hand, Go I believe requires far less than this, even though the possible legal games is vastly larger. I have always marveled that there are 1.5 billion Chinese, and not a single one has ever entered the top five chess players in the world.

People that aren't trained in science look at for example, 10^10 and 10^11 and think those two numbers are pretty close to each other, when in fact one is gigantically bigger than the other. Exponential notation hides this on purpose.
 
Top ten players in the world:

<a href="http://www.2700chess.com" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://www.2700chess.com/files/topten.png" alt= "2700chess.com for more details and full list" title="2700chess.com for more details and full list"/></a>

For the first time in a really long time, the US has a player in the top ten, threatening to get into the top five!
 
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