Grandmaster Capablanca
July 26, 2006 12:46 PM   Subscribe

 
capablanca's end game was amazing. I always thought his name was pretty cool too.
posted by milarepa at 12:50 PM on July 26, 2006


Also, Capablanca was 20 years old at the time of this 1909 tournament. I think of him as the Good Will Hunting of chess: he had no formal training, had never read a chess book, but when he looked at the board and pieces, it just made sense.
posted by mattbucher at 12:56 PM on July 26, 2006 [1 favorite]


Interesting stuff, thanks.

Here's a post from last year on Susan Polgar's simultaneous gameplay and, tangentially, her father's successful bid to create prodigies. Good to see someone knocking down the mystique of "talent," which 95% of the time is used to refer to hard-won skill. But yeah, motivation is a factor in practice, and behind that has to be some predeliction, one would think. So maybe there is something innate in there somewhere.
posted by soyjoy at 1:42 PM on July 26, 2006


How come I saw "168 games" and thought Capa was a pitcher?
posted by baylink at 10:32 AM on July 28, 2006


Ah; it is in there:
De Groot also had his subjects examine a position for a limited period and then try to reconstruct it from memory. Performance at this task tracked game-playing strength all the way from novice to grandmaster. Beginners could not recall more than a very few details of the position, even after having examined it for 30 seconds, whereas grandmasters could usually get it perfectly, even if they had perused it for only a few seconds. This difference tracks a particular form of memory, specific to the kind of chess positions that commonly occur in play. The specific memory must be the result of training, because grandmasters do no better than others in general tests of memory.

They neglected to mention, though--if this was the thing I think it was--the kicker:

They also tested GMs and Randoms with *randomly arranged collections of pieces*...

and they did equally poorly.
posted by baylink at 10:36 AM on July 28, 2006


They also neglected to mention that the GMs did occasionally make mistakes at the level of "chunks" of the board, but that the positions created by the GMs were equivalent in terms of game play.
posted by djfiander at 10:55 AM on July 28, 2006


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