There follow some of the typical questions that chess players get asked by non-players or casual players, with typical answers – or at least my answers.
How far ahead do you look?
Ah, that old chestnut! It varies a lot. In some positions it is possible to look ahead many moves, generally when there is very little material left on the board, or when many of the moves are totally forced. In other positions there is no point calculating – when there are no forcing variations it can be better to think generally about the position and find simple ways to improve it. In some sharp positions where it is not possible to get to the bottom of the tactical variations, chess players will often let their intuition be the main guide in their choice of move.
That isn’t the sort of answer you wanted though. In a typical middlegame position (if such a thing exists) with some possibility of sharp tactics, but nothing too forcing or complicated, then a good player will typically look ahead three to five moves by both sides, concentrating solely on the plausible moves – this is where intuition comes in. How many positions this amounts to is hard to judge. Consciously, a player may be aware of looking only at a few dozen positions that arise in the variations he looks at. Subconsciously, hundreds of positions will flash past his mind’s eye, but little conscious thought is needed to dismiss those that embody dreadful ideas. Throughout this process, the player will be looking to identify any particularly critical variations that demand more searching analysis.
How do you become a grandmaster?
This is far easier to explain than to do! There are some events (e.g. world junior championship) in which the winner is awarded the title automatically, but most grandmasters gain their title by achieving grandmaster norms. These are exceptional results in international events. If a player scores enough points against sufficiently strong opposition, then he achieves a norm. When he has achieved norms equivalent to a total of 24 games, then if his rating is sufficiently high, he is eligible to receive the title. Most grandmasters achieve their title by scoring three norms of 9 to 11 games, but there is nothing to stop a player gaining the title in one 24-round event!
Does chess require a great deal of patience?
No. In appearance the game may look like one in which patience is essential, but the thinking behind it is mostly violent. Each side is trying to destroy the other. This is not a game of peaceful coexistence, where one tries to coexist slightly better than the other. True, once a high level of skill has been reached, some games can reach technical positions, which become a war of attrition, but even then it is often a slow build-up to a violent finish.
Do the games take a very long time to finish?
Not necessarily. It is entirely possible to play a game of chess in just a few minutes when using a chess clock. When playing for fun (or perhaps for a stake of some sort), one of the standard time limits is five minutes for all the moves – so the game lasts a maximum of ten minutes. Some players prefer even faster time limits – for instance one minute for all the moves. True, the quality of such games is not too good normally! Another way of playing fast games is to use a “lightning buzzer”. This makes a noise every ten seconds (or whatever), and the player whose turn it is to move must make his move at that moment. As for tournament chess, there are plenty of quickplay events, in which each player is allotted twenty to forty minutes for all the moves in each game. In standard tournament play each player has two hours for the first forty moves, and an extra hour to reach move sixty. This does not seem slow if you are playing a tense game! It is true, however, that some forms of chess do take a long time. Postal games can take months or even years, while there is the story of one postal game being played at the rate of one move every year.
How can humans hope to play successfully against powerful computers?
Hmm. A few years ago this question would have been “how can computers hope to play successfully against powerful humans?” In purely calculating terms, computers have a huge advantage. Even the primitive chess computers of the mid-1980s were strong enough to see some intricate tactics. However, computers have no real concept of long-term planning, and no intuition. Put a human up against a strong computer in a position with the pieces randomly scattered over the board, with nothing from which the human can take any bearings, and silicon will come out on top. However, such positions don’t occur very often in chess games. A skilful human chess-player can guide the play along more intuitively graspable lines, and so give the computer more problems. But even this has become too hard, and from around 2005 onwards the best players in the world were struggling to take many points off the best computers. That is not to say that computers comprehensively outclass humans though. Computers still miss ideas that humans see readily, and sometimes choose moves that are obviously bad. A computer working with human guidance will play and analyse far better than either in isolation, and this human-computer cooperation has been one of the major driving forces behind the sharp change in playing style at the top levels of modern chess – see the chapter on Computer Chess for more on this topic.
Why don’t more women play chess?
Good question. The reasons generally advanced are social conditioning, or women tending to be less aggressive by nature. I tend to think that most women are much too sensible to persist in playing a board game unless they can become really good at it. Men are perhaps more obsessive. Quite simply, I don’t think anyone really knows why chess doesn’t appeal to more women, or has even advanced a particularly good explanation.
How come there are so many chess books? What is there to write about?
The market for chess books is substantial since there are many ambitious chess players to whom it is important to be up to date with chess theory, since this gives them an edge over their opponents. If you’re spending a lot of time studying chess, there is nothing more annoying than losing a game simply because the opponent is better read. Many books are about openings. Ambitious players tend to specialize in particular ways of starting the game. In a major chess opening, of which there are many, there are hundreds or even thousands of important new master-level games each year. Reading a recent book on the opening in question is the best way to keep up to date. There is also a good market for general books. The understanding of chess strategy does not stand still, and while one could reach a certain level by studying only the games of the “old masters”, one would also be missing out on a lot of new dynamic ideas.
Isn’t chess getting played out? Don’t the top players play most of the game from memory?
This is a common misconception. There are far more possible games of chess than there are particles in the known universe, and the number of possible chess positions, though far fewer, is still astronomical. While it is true that in some openings there are main lines that extend past move twenty, this is not a sign that chess is being played out – just that some of the main highways have been extensively explored. That does not imply that there isn’t a great deal of unexplored territory. And once the known territory is left behind, the players are on their own.
I’m just an ordinary social player. How long would it take a grandmaster to beat me?
If you play sensible moves, then no matter how strong your opponent may be, he will not be able to force a quick checkmate. Expect any mistakes to be punished quickly, and to come under pressure if you play passively. Against a grandmaster, a player below club level would be doing well to avoid serious mishaps in the first twenty moves, and could be proud of reaching move thirty alive. In terms of time taken over the moves, a top-class player could play more or less instantly under these circumstances. It is only when the players are evenly matched that the course of the game depends on strategic subtleties or long-term plans.
Can anyone who didn’t learn chess when they were a young child hope to become any good?
It depends what you mean by “any good”! Most players who go on to join the world élite took up the game when they were very young, but it is not unknown for those who started to play chess in their late teens to become good international-level players or grandmasters. However, I’m not aware of anyone who started to play chess as an adult becoming a grandmaster. However, if your ambitions are to reach a good club or county level, then whatever your age, this is an entirely feasible aim. Get hold of a few books, a reasonable chess computer and visit your local club, and don’t get too upset if you lose a lot of games to start with. Those who take up chess relatively late in life can often become successful in correspondence chess, since in the slower form of the game, speed of thought is not so critical as when playing against the clock – positional understanding, which can be learnt, and a methodical approach count for a great deal. And you can verify everything with a computer, but check the rules of the individual event if you want to have a clear conscience...
Who is really the World Champion, and what’s all this business with FIDE and the PCA, BGN, WCC, etc.? I’m interested in the details.
From 1993 to 2008 it was a rather complicated mess, and there are still some loose ends that could easily become frayed over the next few years. But the good news for chess as a whole is that there is now (as I write in late 2009) a single, undisputed World Champion: Viswanathan Anand from India. But before then...
Garry Kasparov had been the “official” FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Echecs – World Chess Federation) Champion up to 1993, when he broke away to form a new organization, the PCA (Professional Chess Association). Under the auspices of the PCA, he defended his title against the challenger who had won FIDE’s candidates cycle, Nigel Short. Thus the formal legitimacy of both players was obtained by successes in FIDE events. Following the breakaway, FIDE disqualified both players. Under FIDE’s rules, Karpov and Timman, the two highest placed men in the candidates’ events who had neither been disqualified nor had lost a match to anyone still involved in the cycle, contested the then vacant “official” FIDE World Championship. It did little for the credibility of the FIDE match that both these players had lost matches against Short, who in turn was comfortably defeated by Kasparov. Karpov, who had been FIDE Champion 1975–85, won the match.
Most players tended to accept Kasparov as the real champion, but several factors clouded the issue greatly. Kasparov’s organization, the PCA, lost the sponsorship that it had secured from the microprocessor producers Intel. The PCA then ceased operations after just one more title match, Kasparov’s successful defence against Anand in 1995. FIDE’s own championship was plagued with delays in holding Karpov’s next defence, against Kamsky. The match eventually took place in 1996 in Elista, after plans to play in Baghdad had caused outrage around the chess world. FIDE subsequently adopted a knockout format for its world championship, which, while an interesting event in itself, held little credibility as a World Championship. Several key players didn’t take part, and the format tended to produce a new champion each year (generally, but not always, from the world’s top 20 players), as the statistical probability of even a clearly superior player coming through a whole series of mini-matches victorious is extremely small.
Meanwhile Kasparov’s attempts to organize a credible world championship had gone further awry. In 1998, Kramnik and Shirov (taking Anand’s place, who declined to take part for contractual reasons) were “appointed” to play a match, with the winner to challenge Kasparov. After Shirov unexpectedly beat Kramnik, it proved difficult to find adequate sponsorship for a Kasparov–Shirov match. At the end of 1998, Shirov was left out in the cold, with Kasparov inviting Anand, who had by then established himself as clearly World No. 2, to challenge him directly. Even for this match, sponsorship proved difficult to find. Russia’s Vladimir Kramnik was then reappointed challenger, and he unexpectedly defeated Kasparov in a match in London in 2000, largely by stifling Kasparov’s creativity with very solid chess.
This was to be Kasparov’s last world championship match, as he was granted no rematch.
Various plans and organizations came and went, before Peter Leko qualified through a different cycle again to face Kramnik, and narrowly failed to lift the crown.
Until his retirement in 2005, Kasparov remained the dominant figure in world chess, and no championship that didn’t involve him in some capacity was going to have much credibility. Once he was out of the picture, a reunification plan had a chance to become reality, despite the many aggrieved parties that both world championship cycles had left in their wake, and the obvious difficulties involved in getting two men to sit down to contest a title that they both believed they had already earned, and with FIDE never admitting that their championship had ever been anything other than the “real” one. But the damage to chess as a whole from its highest-profile event being diluted into two rival cycles was evident to all, and the impetus for reunification looked set to sweep all obstacles from its path.
Without going into all the ins-and-outs, Veselin Topalov from Bulgaria won a world championship tournament in 2005. This had been intended as the reunification event, but Kramnik refused to play, still leaving two rival champions. Kramnik and Topalov contested a bitter match in 2006 (so bitter that the reunification process nearly failed), with Kramnik winning eventually. In 2007, the process called for a further world championship tournament, which was won by Anand, ahead of Kramnik. Those of a traditional frame of mind were disappointed that what had generally been a matchplay title had been decided in a tournament. They could finally be content when in 2008, Anand defended his title with a decisive match victory over Kramnik: the line of succession was intact, and the title was reunified to the satisfaction of all. Or most, at any rate.
2013 Postscript: In a sense, the situation remains the same: Anand is still World Champion (having narrowly fended off challenges from Topalov and Gelfand in 2010 and 2012 respectively), and there is a single unified championship, organized by FIDE. However, media interest in the World Chess Championship remains very low, and the qualifying cycles have looked chaotic at times. Cancellations and rule changes have been the norm, while FIDE retains its obsession with very short matches and rapidplay tie-breaks, leading to some rather farcical situations and cynical short draws. The withdrawal of Magnus Carlsen (world number 1 since 2009) from the qualifying cycle for the 2012 match was a heavy blow to the whole system. But a successful candidates tournament in 2013 and a well-fought championship match later in the year could put things back on a firmer footing.