I’ve just spent about an hour going back through all of my old tournament crosstables, remembering the chess tournaments I played in years ago. That was back when I was 16 years old and I was obsessed with chess. I would spend the week waiting for Friday because Friday night was chess club. At school I would bring chess books and read them during class. Sometimes I would bring my magnetic set and go over games. I was able to hide all of it well - not only so the teachers wouldn’t know what I was doing, but so the other kids wouldn’t see it and harass me.
This is the first I’ve noticed that the USCF has updated their ratings data on the website. Now you can search for a player and view all of their tournament history. It’s great because you can see the actual crosstables of the tournaments - and each player is clickable, so you can see what they’ve been up to. For example, here is Hikaru Nakamura’s tournament history, which shows all of the crosstables from all of the tournaments he has played in since 1995, back when he was rated 684! He’s now rated 2736 - the second highest rating in the USA. Here’s a link to the crosstable of the first rated tournament he played in.

Tyro just sent me this link to a new Bobby Fischer documentary on Google Video, I haven’t watched it yet - but I’m excited to check it out.

I’ll post my comments after I watch it.
Thanks Tyro!

Former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer died yesterday in a Reykjavik. No word yet on his cause of death, but according to chessbase, he had been seriously ill for some time. He was 64.
Although Bobby Fischer became crazy later in life, it is sad to hear of his death. He was an amazing chess player and created some beautiful games of chess.
In memory, I am reposting an article I wrote about him in June:

Did you know that in 1958 Bobby Fischer became the US Chess Champion at age 14? He was only 14 years old and he was better than any other chess player in the US. Pretty impressive, wouldn’t you say?
That’s one of the amazing things about chess - in a test of intellect, a child can beat a man.
Even more amazing were his results in the 1971 Candidates matches - competing for a spot in the 1972 World Championship, which he eventually won.
In the candidate matches, the best players in the world compete to decide who will challenge the world champion. Fischer won his first match against Mark Taimanov with a perfect score of 6-0. This is an amazing score. Often, when the best chess players compete with each other, there are many draws. When both players are so good at the game, it is difficult to find an edge and leverage it to a win. Many grandmaster games end in draws. But Fischer completely dominated.
His next match was against Bent Larsen. The previous year Larsen had played first board ahead of Fischer for the Rest of the World team. But Fischer beat him 6-0! That’s 12-0 against the best chess players in the world! He then beat Petrosian 6.5-2.5 to play Spassky.

Another thing that made this time very exciting was that the chess world had been completely dominated by the Russians for decades (and still is). Since 1927, only two world champions had not been from the Soviet Union, and no player from the United States had claimed the title. Then in 1972, during the Cold War, Bobby Fischer rose to beat Spassky.

Fischer’s victory over the Soviet world champion Boris Spassky in the 1972 World Chess Championship not only sparked heightened international interest in chess, but was seen as a symbolic victory for the capitalist West. Particularly in the United States, Spassky was portrayed as the product of an impersonal, mechanical, and oppressive system of state control, while Fischer was depicted as a solitary genius who had heroically overcome the Soviets’ dominance.

What does this hero do now? Well, he has pretty much gone crazy and sometimes goes off on radio broadcasts about how much he hates Jews and the USA.
It’s kind of a depressing end to a very amazing story.
This video shows what he has now become (warning: it is very offensive and not safe for work!):

This is great advice for traders, too:

Richard says he is not worried about computers that can trade. Others have told me they aren’t worried either - they believe there will always be ways for a human to make money in the markets. They could be right, but I don’t think so. I think it is only a matter of time before even the best human traders (without the help of AI) cannot make consistent profits in the market. Here is a comment I just added to his post:

Basically it comes down to this: computers are getting smarter and smarter. Not just in a brute-force way - they are getting more intuitive and creative. They are really becoming smarter, with pattern-recognition capabilities that are beginning to rival those of humans. Eventually they will be the best traders.
Trading is a lot like poker, and look at the progress of poker-playing AI. I think it is important for traders to watch this progress in poker. When computers dominate poker, as they now do chess, it will be more clear as to how they will also dominate the market.
I don’t think even the best unassisted human brain will be enough to compete with this AI in 10 years. I think it will be like playing Deep Blue. Over time it will just be better and take your money. Why is it so hard for traders to make money in the markets today? Because it is competitive, we all can’t win, and there are really smart, good traders to compete with. Smart AI is currently and will continue to be a growing part of this competition.

He was also in Philadelphia this week.

Here is a short chess game I just played online as black that was fun:

1. g3 e5 2. Bg2 c6 3. d4 exd4 4. Qxd4 d5 5. Nc3 Nf6 6. Nf3 c5 7. Qd1 Nc6 8. h3 Be6 9. e3 Qc7 10. O-O O-O-O 11. Re1 Bd6 12. Kh2 Nh5 13. Ng5 Bxg3+ 14. Kh1 Bxf2 15. Nxe6 Ng3+ 16. Kh2 Nf1+ 17. Kh1 Qh2# 0-1

You can view it online here.

When I used to play chess with the hustlers in Washington Square Park, Russian Paul was the strongest regular player. He was an International Master. I played him a couple of times and he always beat me.
According to this New York Times article, it looks like he has moved up to Union Square Park.

Another hustler, whose first name is Kenny and whose street name is Little Daddy (he is 5 feet 3 inches tall), said he could always tell how good his opponent was in the first couple of moves. For example, he said, if someone moves quickly but fumbles the pieces, or uses one hand to move the pieces and the other to hit the clock, which is against the normal rules of speed chess, then the person is not experienced.

This is good to know - next time I play them for money I will move a piece with one hand and hit the clock with the other.

“You make the games close,” he said. “You don’t want to crush them. You want to leave their ego intact, because you want to keep them coming back.”

Yeah I saw them play with people like this many times. They pretend that it was a close, exciting game - when it really was always in complete control of the hustler.
From the sounds of the article it seems that the hustlers have moved to Union Square. The last time I was in NYC, I remember thinking that the chess scene in Washington Square Park had become pretty seedy. I wonder if they moved uptown to Union Square because of that. Nobody played chess in Union Square when I lived there. I’ll have to check it out when I visit in a few weeks.