Vass wrote on 11/23/13 at 14:24:57:
What I would want to say was that people often exaggerate when praising our heroes of the past.
Well, when we have such a person right in front of our eyes (at the very start of his own carrer) most of the people cannot immediately recognize him. It's natural for the human beings, I suppose.. But, I just wanted to say: Stop, look around! He's here! Let him continue his way!
Anyway, I was sure that Carlsen would prepare his openings for the match. And that was exactly he said at the press-conference after the last game.
It's a completely new approach in chess since the beginning of the development of the chess openings.
What Carlsen is trying to do is achieving an equal position as soon as possible - yes, equal...but rich in strategical terms and plans. From there he would try to outplay his opponent. Amongst the best players ever, he was the first one who understood that examining the memory of the opponent is not the right way to start a game. What's the point to examine the memory of your opponent and play 30-35 moves or more, just to find that the game is equal and the strategical plans are well known from there on? Of course, such a type of playing is suitable for the most creative players only.
I've read several statements that Carlsen is not good at the openings, that he can't compare to the best ones in this field.. And even that he is kind of lazy in that matter..
Complete nonsense! Just a new approach, that's all. And I wouldn't be surprised if his preparation is harder and way better than the preparation of all the stars in this chess sphere. To find a rich yet equal position in all the variations of an opening as soon as you can is not easy I think.
Some remarks I want to give on your statements.
First I want to indicate that there were players before Carlsen already using this so called new approach. From the topplayers we certainly can consider Short and Ivanchuk as pioneers. I wrote many articles on my blog about it (just one:
http://schaken-brabo.blogspot.be/2013/02/de-wetenschappelijke-aanpak.html) which discuss this subject. The important difference is now that somebody became the best player in the world with this approach so making clear that this approach is solid and fully reliable.
Choosing/ finding variations of an opening which are rich to ideas take a.f.a.i.k. only a fraction of the time compared with finding killernovelties in a fixed repertoire. However if you can achieve the same or even better results by an approach needing much less time than an approach needing much more time then you are not lazy but just more clever.
Why the other topplayers don't use this easy approach? Well today most topplayers do implement to some extend already this easy approach (Anand and Kramnik included) but their results don't come so easy as with Carlsen. Strategical, calculation, endgame,... skills become more important compared with the more difficult approach and these skills are much more difficult to develop further compared with openings. I believe this difficulty is exactly the reason why it took so long till somebody mastered the necessary extra skills sufficiently to gain more with the easy approach than the difficult approach.
Finally if somebody with the same skills like Carlsen will show up but at the same time will use the difficult approach (or Carlsen stops/declines in strength) then i am pretty sure that the pendulum will be back to the difficult approach of studying lots of theory with killernovelties.
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World Championship interviews (Read 43335 times)
