The dangers of top-level sport

[Peter]

What would happen if we re-titled the thread "The dangers of top-level competition"?

[mattc]

What would happen if we re-titled the thread "The dangers of top-level competition"?

Then we wouldn't have had this distracting diversion, and could have just discussed the truly marvellous and challenging game of chess (which I _assume_ is what Mr Wow desired. I cannot imagine he just wanted to remind everyone that chess is considered a sport by a misguided minority )

[Peter]

 

[mattc]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/16/chess-extreme-sport

That contains a valuable insight into the life of many top players:

... among professional players who are struggling to make a living, or among the hordes of us middle-aged blokes trying to get to grips with this stressful, frustrating, exhausting game – there is far less attention paid to health. Chess clubs often meet in pubs and many players like a pint; the number of huge stomachs on show at any chess tournament is staggering. The game – and I realise this is a wild generalisation, but one based on more than a grain of truth – tends to attract dysfunctional men with peculiar home lives. You can bet their diet will not be balanced; many will be living on bacon and eggs and beer. This is not a recipe for a long, healthy life.

The great Soviet players of the postwar period had the most ridiculous lifestyle: they more or less lived on vodka, cigarettes and chess, and many of them died young. Take Leonid Stein as an example. A three-times champion of the USSR in the 1960s, he dropped dead of a heart attack in 1973 at the age of just 38.

This quote is quite instructive too:

It's not that uncommon for people to die at the chessboard, quite simply because they are sitting there for so long, and also because it's a game that can be played by old men.

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

I don't suppose you have heard the expression "sport fishing" then?

No, never.

[Wowbagger]

I don't suppose you have heard the expression "sport fishing" then?

No, never.

http://www.sportfishingmag.com/

http://www.sportfish.co.uk/

http://floridasportfishing.com/

[Wowbagger]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_IOC_Recognised_International_Sports_Federations

[Wowbagger]

Also

Chess is an affiliate member, or fully recognized by, National Olympic Committees in 117 countries, and chess as a sport is recognized in 107 countries. These numbers are constantly being revised upwards.

From http://www.fide.com/fide/fide-world-chess-federation.html

There are 193 UN member states. 55% of them recognise chess as a sport.

What would happen if we re-titled the thread "The dangers of top-level competition"?

Then we wouldn't have had this distracting diversion, and could have just discussed the truly marvellous and challenging game of chess (which I _assume_ is what Mr Wow desired. I cannot imagine he just wanted to remind everyone that chess is considered a sport by a misguided minority )

Good luck with your misguided minority, Matt!

[Peter]

Oddly, I'd never heard of sport fishing, but I've noticed magazines on game fishing.

[Wowbagger]

I think that in the UK, sport and game fishing are much the same thing, ie the pursuit of trout and salmon, normally using fly tackle. In the US it tends to be from boats catching enormous fish like tarpon and tuna.

[frankly frankie]

It's an interesting one, but I can't imagine getting pissed would help anyone with chess.

The novel The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis explores this topic. 
To quote from the back sleeve
"Now, at eighteen, she's abandoned by her lovers and almost destroyed by drink and drugs. And tomorrow, she'll be in Moscow, facing the greatest chess players in the world ..." 

[Jaded]

So, we've established there is fishing, game fishing and sport fishing.

There is chess, as a game and there is chess as a sport.

[Wowbagger]

So, we've established there is fishing, game fishing and sport fishing.

There is chess, as a game and there is chess as a sport.

Although I am sure you meant that facetiously, you have touched upon the old Indian saying "Chess is a sea in which a gnat can drink or an elephant can bathe."

If you regard chess as EG does, as a trivial game of chance like ludo, but have no ambition to get any better, then you can still have some fun playing. However, once you get hooked and become a good player, that never leaves you. OK, you forget detailed tactical manoeuvres relating to endgame play when you are out of practice, eg Q & K v R & K, but you never go back to the random moves of the complete beginner.

It is quite a well-known phenomenon in chess that, unlike other sports, once you are over the hill your body doesn't tell you when it's time to give up, even though players are usually in steady decline from the age of about 30 onwards. Rather than find themselves overwhelmed by a tide of up and coming youngsters, top players do retire because they cannot handle seeing their standard decline. Others struggle on.

A pal of mine was stiil Southend Club and League Champion right up to his death. He was British Boys' Champion in 1934. I wonder how good he might have become had he not spent 3 years in a Japanese POW camp. He once told me "I was one of 300 to go in. Only 25 of us came out."

Edit: the Irish sports council once rejected Chess as a sport on the grounds that it isn't sufficiently "technical or tactical". That just demonstrates how ignorant they were. I doubt if there is any other game, physical or mental, which involves as much in the way of tactics and technique as chess does.

[Jaded]

Cricket

[Wowbagger]

I doubt that very much.

I once read, in the pre-internet days, that more books have been written on chess tactics than all the other sports put together. It's plausible because you can practise your chess tactics from a book, which you can't other sports.

It is useful to divide your chess thinking into strategy and tactics, strategy being the general principles of where you put your pieces, because they are effective there, tactics being the move-by-move cut and thrust of the game itself. After someone introduced a phenomenally powerful computer program to the game it seemed to turn that on its head: its powers of calculation was so much in excess of that of even the top humans that it seemed that nothing was left to general principles and the game became pure tactics.

[Ian H]

Chess boxing appears to have most of the ingredients of a sport, including badly behaved players.

[mrcharly-YHT]

I doubt that very much.

I once read, in the pre-internet days, that more books have been written on chess tactics than all the other sports put together. It's plausible because you can practise your chess tactics from a book, which you can't other sports.

Fencing

Actually, most team sports have the tactics discussed and written on paper. At the 'beginner level', moves are random. At the top level, they should be coordinated sequences.

In terms of individual sports, fencing, particularly foil, has a huge element of tactics. The actual moves are too fast to respond to by reflex, it is more an exchange of tactics with each player trying to deceive the other. Fencing is a game where if you know what the other person is about to do, no matter how fast or strong they are, you can defeat them.

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

If you regard chess as EG does, as a trivial game of chance like ludo

That isn't what I said, and it isn't what I meant.

[Wowbagger]

Well, in that case I didn't understand the point you were trying to make. Apologies.

Nevertheless, chess can be played like that, and many children start off that way, as indeed do some adults - random moves the consequences of which don't enter their heads. Far be it from me to knock it if that gives people pleasure, but it's my job to get children beyond that state as soon as possible - schools pay me good money to do so because they want the kids to pick up on the transferable skills.

[Exit Stage Left]

If Chess is a Sport, then so is debating.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Sport-Debating-Winning-Strategies/dp/0868406643

It's nice to see a bit of needle in the reviews. Some Premier League debate material there.

I tend to take the view that all training is cheating, it may bring better results, but that doesn't prevent it being unsporting.

[Wowbagger]

They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won
And practise beforehand, which spoils the fun

[Cudzoziemiec]

There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.

He wouldn't have said that if he'd known about cyclocross.