"help bot" wrote in message
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Chess One wrote:

Adorjan told me in his interview that maybe the top 30 players in the
world
actually earned money by playing chess - he admitted that other opinion
says
top 50.

From what I've seen, even American GMs can
afford to fly to tournaments, when they want to.
Let's say they want to play in a tourney in Las
Vegas; no problemo: they just hop a plane.

Perhaps GM Adorjan is suggesting that a GM
likely could make *better money* at some other

I think he means to earn their income by actually playing chess.

occupation than chess. The idea that they
can't "make money" is ridiculous; fly here and
I'll show you a guy who charges $35 per hour
for lessons, and three of him would barely make
one GM!

.

But to maintain the standard of GM performance if you are not paid for
it,
means giving up much else in order to do so. Would you want to do that?
What
if it were giving up everything else, still want to be a GM?

A lot of it is talent, by which I don't mean
study and hard work, but natural talent; in
other words, visualization skill and the
ability to figure out what the opponent is
trying to do, and just avoid losing blunders.
Oh, and the will to fight on, even after you
make one or two of those!

Is our Greg telling us his own experience, or guessing at that of GMs? I
think there are two pertinent points;

a) if Agassi didn't hit a ball for 6 months, then despite fantastic talent,
he might not make it through the first round of a tennis event - I think
this is a fair analogy of chess preparation to sports preparation

b) while this certainly needs more study, suggestions by Howard Gardner and
Adrian de Groot on 'visualization' need to be taken in. I have been checking
this with some strong chess players, and since we mention Adorjan, his reply
about visualization [was it like a video camera on fast-forward?] was in his
own words, "I do not see the board, I do not see the pieces."

...

Yes. It is understandable! I suppose the ultimate question along these
lines
would be, "would you like to be like Fischer?" And there's the rub, as
Shakespeare said.

The idea that you can strive to be among the
top players in the world, not merely a no-name
GM, needs to factor in things like innate ability.

While that is an interesting aside - my question is more a fantasy one.
Basically, "would you like to be like Fischer?" could be answered at any
period of his life, though possibly one period invokes the next. It's a
nasty question, and I note that here, as elsewhere, no one has yet said
"yes."

Some folks just don't /have what it takes/ to
reach the very top, while others do, but never
get there. From what I've seen, what are
called "weak GMs" simply don't have it in them,
which is why they get stuck; lucky for them, the
FIDE title is permanent, not rating-based.

One last comment on this from Adorjan, was ~ in fact, it was a question I
obtained from him in presenting an interview to Mickey Adams~

if the top 200 or 300 players should all take part in a 13 round
tournament, would you expect the result to accord with Elo?

Adorjan didn't think so, somewhat echoing Khalifman's comment in 1999, and
Khalifman proved it!

Phil Innes

I've seen people who talked about being a
"former master" or a "former expert"; people
who lost the highest title they ever earned due
to a decline, perhaps due to just getting older.
Looking at them it is hard to feel sorry for the
"weak GMs", who can choose to write chess
books (which people will actually buy!) or give
lessons, no matter how much their results
may decline.

But to train and compete for the world title
is a whole different ball game. Relatively few
have a real shot, no matter how hard they
might work. Some play knowing they have
no real shot at the title-- just to see how far
they can get, or for the opportunity to play
the big name players (in person, not on ICC!).


-- help bot