The Nature and Mind of a Chess Grandmaster
Chess is an extraordinary enigmatic game between two opposing minds in a duel to determine psychological superiority. Setting out over a sixty-four squared checker board, the sophisticated sport is generally an abstract strategy board game with one central objective: to capture the opponent's king in a trap referred to as a "checkmate." Besides having the goal of mating the opposing king, chess is commonly observed as a game of wisdom, intuition, calculation, abstract thought, an art, and even of theory. The amount of literature on chess exceeds that of perhaps any other board game or sport known to man. The world of chess is repleted with a horde of information and concepts that it is merely impossible for even the strongest player to have perfect knowledge or understanding. In tournament mode, active players are granted a title after achieving an attained status with a designed rating that quantitatively measures their relative skills amongst one another. Of all the chess titles, the most prestigious and highest one can acquire is none other than the Grandmaster (GM) title.
Other than the term having resemblance to the title of a professional martial artist, the title of a Grandmaster is most often recognized as a chess player who has accumulated enough skill and talent that places him or herself significantly apart from the average player. Some argue that obtaining a Grandmaster title is more or less equivalent to earning a Ph.D degree from an accredited university. Nevertheless the two processes are completely different in structure and scope and it is therefore agreed that becoming a professional chess player is far more challenging than receiving a doctorate degree from a higher institution of education. Becoming a Grandmaster in chess is by no means an extraordinarily difficult achievement. Amongst the hundreds of millions worldwide who play chess casually, a few million play competitively with an active rating. Of those several million who are at the competitive tournament level, only a mere 1,400 Grandmasters exist in the world as of today. It takes years of hard work, practice, commitment, and some degree of raw talent to reach the ultimate stratosphere of the world of chess.
However even with all of the persistency, most will not make it there. This is where talent plays a central role in separating the trained experts from the brilliant ones. Like other artistic pursuits in the humanities including painting, music, literature, and poetry, chess can be discerned as a distinct form of art. However the interesting aspect about chess that distinguishes it from other varieties of art is that most individuals will likely not have much appreciation of it particularly at the professional level. Unlike music where even the most creative works such as Beethoven’s symphonies can be appreciated by anyone, the average person will probably not be capable of grasping the intuitive ambiguity of a top level game played between grandmasters. To be able to understand it requires a solid background of chess as well as years of experience that is beyond simplistic rudimentary rules. In a rare recorded audio interview with former World Champion Dr. Alexander Alekhine, the preeminent player of the Second World War expressed his thoughts on the essence of a chess player and how he felt that the game itself is analogous towards a unique form of artistry requiring unparallel ingenuity:
Alexander Alekhine (1892 - 1946)
Interviewer: Now Dr. Alekhine, tell me, would you say that chess players are born, or do you think a great chess player can be made by hard practice?
Alexander Alekhine: No, frankly, I think the ideal chess player is born. Of course, I look upon chess as an art, and just as you cannot make a great painter or a musician, unless the gifts of painting or music are innate in a person, so also I believe that for anyone to become outstanding at chess the ability must be born with the player. There is something much more in championship chess than just following the somewhat limited rules of the game. To play a really good chess, you must have vision. Vision is something of the same way that a creative artist must have if he would lift his performance out of the common realm.
Interviewer: Well, of course, as well as vision, I expect first class chess needs a very well trained memory too, doesn't it?
Alexander Alekhine: Oh, no. That is where chess is just unlike bridge. One does not require an, uh, an outstanding memory. Look forward all the time is the thing to do.
Interviewer: Sounds to me like the perfect game for optimists.
Alexander Alekhine: Yes, you might say so. I never look back on a game or a match but try all the time to see how I may improve my play. Soon, I shall have been playing [?] chess for 30 years. I became a chess master, you know, at 16.
Interviewer: 16? That's amazing!
Alexander Alekhine: Yes. I won then the vase of the Tsar which I still am keeping. It was..., I was allowed to bring it out. As a matter of fact, it was the only thing I was allowed to bring out of Russia in 1921 when I left. But even my 30 years experience has not yet taught me all I should know of chess.
Interviewer: Well, I suppose by now Dr. Alekhine, you must know all the answers, as they say.
Alexander Alekhine: Oh no, believe me, a lifetime is not enough in which to learn everything about chess. If it were, I should soon be getting ready to stop playing altogether. The technique, yes, that can be mastered. But there is always so much more to know about the actual art of the game. So for instance, take my opponent in the last match, Dr. Euwe. He's considered as being one of the outstanding experts in the opening play. And even being that, in our last match, in one game, he got a lost position after already five moves. So you see, every one of us has quite a lot to learn.
As Dr. Alekhine noted the truly outstanding chess players are born with an innate talent for the game. Anyone can get better at chess with practice but to become a Grandmaster level player or even World Champion like Mikhail Botvinnik, Bobby Fischer, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, or Magnus Carlsen it would require a kind of gifted virtuosity that cannot really be taught to the common individual. As one progresses on in chess, the game is seen more of an art in which players can develop an employ their own style of choice. Just as music encompasses many styles and genres including classical, jazz, rock, pop, country, and rap, a myriad of styles exist in the game of chess. Besides the more common ones such as positional, attacking, or all around, some players often play with a bold defensive style as former World Champion Tigran Petrosian was well known for. Others utilize a balanced style while others usually employ gambit openings and some even are imaginative tacticians.
Alexander Alekhine: No, frankly, I think the ideal chess player is born. Of course, I look upon chess as an art, and just as you cannot make a great painter or a musician, unless the gifts of painting or music are innate in a person, so also I believe that for anyone to become outstanding at chess the ability must be born with the player. There is something much more in championship chess than just following the somewhat limited rules of the game. To play a really good chess, you must have vision. Vision is something of the same way that a creative artist must have if he would lift his performance out of the common realm.
Interviewer: Well, of course, as well as vision, I expect first class chess needs a very well trained memory too, doesn't it?
Alexander Alekhine: Oh, no. That is where chess is just unlike bridge. One does not require an, uh, an outstanding memory. Look forward all the time is the thing to do.
Interviewer: Sounds to me like the perfect game for optimists.
Alexander Alekhine: Yes, you might say so. I never look back on a game or a match but try all the time to see how I may improve my play. Soon, I shall have been playing [?] chess for 30 years. I became a chess master, you know, at 16.
Interviewer: 16? That's amazing!
Alexander Alekhine: Yes. I won then the vase of the Tsar which I still am keeping. It was..., I was allowed to bring it out. As a matter of fact, it was the only thing I was allowed to bring out of Russia in 1921 when I left. But even my 30 years experience has not yet taught me all I should know of chess.
Interviewer: Well, I suppose by now Dr. Alekhine, you must know all the answers, as they say.
Alexander Alekhine: Oh no, believe me, a lifetime is not enough in which to learn everything about chess. If it were, I should soon be getting ready to stop playing altogether. The technique, yes, that can be mastered. But there is always so much more to know about the actual art of the game. So for instance, take my opponent in the last match, Dr. Euwe. He's considered as being one of the outstanding experts in the opening play. And even being that, in our last match, in one game, he got a lost position after already five moves. So you see, every one of us has quite a lot to learn.
As Dr. Alekhine noted the truly outstanding chess players are born with an innate talent for the game. Anyone can get better at chess with practice but to become a Grandmaster level player or even World Champion like Mikhail Botvinnik, Bobby Fischer, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, or Magnus Carlsen it would require a kind of gifted virtuosity that cannot really be taught to the common individual. As one progresses on in chess, the game is seen more of an art in which players can develop an employ their own style of choice. Just as music encompasses many styles and genres including classical, jazz, rock, pop, country, and rap, a myriad of styles exist in the game of chess. Besides the more common ones such as positional, attacking, or all around, some players often play with a bold defensive style as former World Champion Tigran Petrosian was well known for. Others utilize a balanced style while others usually employ gambit openings and some even are imaginative tacticians.
Regardless of the style that professional chess players adopt, Grandmasters possess strong extraordinary abilities that set them far apart from many novice and intermediate level players. An average rated tournament player often can see or calculate three or five moves ahead in a given position. Chess masters and grandmasters when glancing at a chess board commonly can calculate and see as many as ten, fifteen, or twenty moves ahead along several different lines of variation. This impeccable form of perception gives Grandmasters the advantage of knowing well in advance the long term consequences of a chosen move much later on in the game. The ability to look a dozen or more moves ahead is a skill that can to some degree be learned after years after practice and to some degree cannot. Besides having the competence to calculate multiple moves ahead, Grandmasters not only think intuitively about the game being played but also are mentally asking themselves serious questions that may often break conventional standards that amateurs have been taught. From what Dr. Alekhine implies "There is something much more in championship chess than just following the somewhat limited rules of chess" besides knowing the basic rules and movements of each piece as well as simple tactics like forks, pins, skewers, penetrating open files, and pawn structure professional chess requires a far deeper understanding of chess in general and of theory. This level of chess becomes much more than an art but mainly a kind of philosophy. The abstract thinking involved in chess with Masters and Grandmasters can be viewed on a part with the level of higher cognition concerning philosophy.
There exists a few different ways to achieve the title of a Grandmaster. The usual and more common way is for a player to attain an elo rating of at least 2500. The elo rating is a mathematical rating system devised by American physicist and chess master Arpad Elo. With chess skill conflated by a somewhat complicated mathematical formula, the elo rating is manifested by a number which increases or decreases based upon the actual outcomes of games between rated players. Once earned, the title of Grandmaster (GM) is held for life. Nevertheless any rating above 2000 is in and of itself an extremely difficult goal to accomplish. Even chess masters themselves may spend years and years trying to reach the highest title in chess but in the end come short of their ultimate objective. Grandmasters in chess are in some sense equivalent to a professional athlete in a sport league whether it be the NBA, NFL, or MLB. Most grandmasters often start out as prodigies in their earlier years and earn the title sometime in their twenties. It is not only hard work and determination that qualifies a person to become a grandmaster in chess but more so a raw gifted talent that is innate within the individual.
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