About

I have been playing chess since 8 years old, in various formats, from classical to rapid, blitz, and bullet (even though this is more about flagging than chess IMO). My favorite format is arguably rapid (30 minutes), enough to dive sufficiently deep into a handful of lines but still leaves you time to do something else (obviously you still need a job!). My favorite players are Mikhail Tal (The magician from Riga -- he usually hung three to four pieces en prise at a time and still became World Chess Champion in 1960), Rashid Nezhmetdinov (very spicy games with sacrifices), Tigran Petrosian ("If Tal sacrifices, accept. If Botvinnik sacrifices, think it over. If Petrosian sacrifices, resign.") , Vasyl Ivanchuk (Ivanchuk Cures Mass Blindness -- a trap in Benko Gambit in Magnus Trainer), Hikaru Nakamura (insane tactics and attacking skills, especially in "I Am the One Who Naks" Gelfand vs. Nakamura, "Casino Royale" - Krasenkow vs. Nakamura, or ""Rising Stars War Episode II: Attack of the Pawns" - Beliavsky vs Nakamura), Magnus Carlsen (his grinding endgame skills), and Sergey Karjakin (the Minister of Defence). In summary, chess is a game of perfection, errors, as Savielly Tartakower put it: "The winner of the game is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.", and trap!

More about Mikhail Tal: Most of his sacrifices are unsound, but I think he understands deeply what his opponents understand about chess. Tal's sacrifices are simply confusing and dazed and have more psychological effects than they actually are. By the end of the lines, most times Tal comes up top with a pawn. Paul Keres is a master of defense against Tal, as none of Tal's tricks work on Keres.

I particularly enjoy the series of "Road to the Grandmaster title" by IM Attila Turzo. My ELO rating is about 1600, in case you are wondering. Whoever you are, if you are up for a chess game, let me know and we will set up a board.

More about Chess and Go: The beginning of the end for human chess was marked by Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov 1997 rematch, and so is Go with AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol. Indeed, the effects of AI are too strong that Lee Sedol (the World Champion in Go) retired roughly 3 years after the event, citing AI as "an entity that cannot be defeated". Despite the mass hype of AI, it has a deep connection with applied mathematics, where high-dimensional approximation plays a fundamental role in optimization (after all, board games are all about finding the BEST moves). Stuff like Monte Carlo methods, neural networks become more and more important as you go deeper. But the human chess (and probably Go) are probably over, as even the world champions rely on heavy supercomputers to analyze the move to a certain depth. If you have seen AlphaGo versus Stockfish, I don't think most of the moves even make any sense to humans (it keeps giving pawn away against Philidor's advice that "The pawns are the soul of chess"). But chess should be considered as a sport for the brain, and very much so that today elite chess players often require great physical shape to play the game (none of them drinks or smokes excessively as on tournament days, chess GMs often burns about 6,000 calories a day -- yes, you read it right).