I agree, but it still comes back to the same problem. Relying on another site membership. What if SiteA uses Twitter to login because they don't want to make people have yet another login account, but I don't have a Twitter account... Great, so now I have to sign up at Twitter to sign up at SiteA... Making me have to have an account at a site I don't want to have an account at, just to have an account at a site I DO want to have an account at, just because Twitter is more popular.
If I didn't use facebook in London then I would simply miss every social invitation that I am given. Many people only use it because of this and would drop it otherwise.
I never said that they don't exist, and I would agree I must value them less, that is implied by the choices I have made. There are also intangibles that push in the opposite direction as well, say such as Apple being a comparatively evil tech company in regards to opensource interactions, market tactics, patents and labor/human rights.
Considering that Pentagram recently bought World Chess and their World Chess Championships it looks like there'll be changes made in the running of world chess but not sure if they'll do away with the World Champs.
Wouldn't overspecialization be common with most pro sports?
Playing sports is great but becoming a swimming world champion, for example, is just hours every day of swimming. Hardly world-changing or helpful outside the pool.
I believe the contention focuses on the difference in how you play against an opponent. In chess, by this contention, ultimately what your opponent is doing has little bearing on what you do. There is a "correct" response to every board position.
Now, I think this is accurate for essentially single player sports. Golf and the like. Many competitive sports, however, you have to adjust what you are doing based on what your opponent is doing. Not just in a "correct" way, but to account for changing circumstances.
In the book How to Choose a Chess Move by Andrew Soltis, Andrew analyzed high level chess games and counted the number of moves into four categories. Here was the breakdown:
1. Forced moves 6%
check with a forced move, forced defensive move, etc.
2. Book moves 28%
opening moves following the opening book
3. Clearly best moves 30%
there's one clearly best move out of all the moves on the board
4. Discretionary moves 36%
there are many best moves, so one person would choose one move, but another person could choose a different move, and neither would be "right"
What does this mean for your playing?
It means that there is not always a best move, and so you shouldn't obsess over trying to find it. You have to accept discretionary moves.
I'm not really sure this disagrees with the assertion, though. Upwards of half of the moves are either "following a book" or "clearly best."
I'm also assuming for a large portion of the remaining "discretionary" moves, there is a "clearly bad" set of moves that should not be picked. This is a large set of things you have to memorize that are not really based on what or how the opponent will play.
Just because this correct response exists (and almost surely it's not unique anyway) doesn't mean it matters. What your opponent does and what his style is has huge meaning in practice and that will remain the case as we are not solving chess in near future and even if we did the solution will be too big to memorize anyway.
I think I agree. Just saying what my understanding of the assertion was. Basically, that there are only so many "meaningful" positions on the board. And at the upper levels, the question becomes more of how many of those positions have you memorized. Not, "how does your opponent play?"
As opposed to a game such as tennis. Where you really have to consider not just what you are capable of against a volley, but what your opponent will do with it.
No, chess is not about memorizing position and most games leave memorized territory fast. I don't know why this idea that chess is about memorizing openings got so much traction, it's nonsense. Top level games are rarely decided in the openings these days (although it happens that someone got nailed but usually it's because choosing very sharp variation and then forgetting the analysis) and there is a lot of play in positions never seen before in most of them.
Top level games are rarely decided in the openings because top level players typically don't make bad ones. :)
Is this akin to saying that top level tennis games are rarely decided by double faults. Likely true, but completely ignores the point that learning to serve over the net correctly is a vital skill. Just as learning a vast repertoire of studied moves and board continuations is key to chess.
How is the tennis points system arbitrary? Each tournament has set points depending on ranking of the tournament, each placing in the tournament has a set number of points. The points won are carried for 1 year.
Rankings are seen to be pretty accurate when you look at who gets through each Grand Slam round.
The system works for the top players, but I think once you move below the elite rank the rankings aren't really accurate. I think the system is arbitrary for a few reasons:
1) The number of points awarded for tournament performance seems pretty arbitrary. For instance, winning a grand slam results in 2000 points, while coming in second is worth 1200 points and coming in third/fourth is worth 720 points [1]. Is coming in second really only 60% as good as coming in first? It's hard to believe there's some deep, evidence-based rationale behind picking these precise values.
2) The tournament hierarchy is also arbitrary. A win at a Grand Slam is worth 2000 points, while winning gold in the Olympics is worth 750 points [1]. Why? Shouldn't the points awarded be based purely on the strength of your competition?
There are other issues, such as rewarding someone who plays a ton of tournaments with mediocre performances, versus someone who plays less often but with better results (though this is somewhat offset with the difference in points awarded based on performance). I've had friends complain about similar systems in video games-- apparently in Halo the top rung of players is full of mediocre players who play a lot, racking up points in the process and moving up the ranks.
Since tennis doesn't have a concept of "World Champion," I think the sport would be better served to switch to the Elo system like chess. It provides an accurate comparison of relative player strengths, it does a decent job dealing with the plays a lot vs. better results problem, and it functions exactly the same regardless of the tournament you play in-- you only get more points if you perform better or play stronger opponents. Another interesting tidbit is that it gives you a statistical probability of any player beating any other, which isn't possible under the ATP system.
Edit: One other problem with ATP points--since most tennis tournaments are knockout (as opposed to swiss pairings used in chess tournaments [2]) the only thing you know for sure is that the winner as the best player in the tournament, assuming tennis results are transitive (a big assumption). But if you're unlucky enough to be in the knockout branch that features the best player, you could be knocked out earlier than your would otherwise merit, which means you could get far less points than you deserve.
