ChessNetwork on YouTube has the most clear and concise explanations of what's going on. They're incredibly easy to follow even for patzers like myself: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh9KTUiimzE" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh9KTUiimzE</a><p>ChessVibes has good summaries of the event with post-game interviews: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI7Jbf_Kkqc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI7Jbf_Kkqc</a>
I've been following the match since it started and can't fathom what this has to do with hacker news.<p>Though I can't help but mention that interested parties would be much better served by the coverage at chessbase than the dry 'game-score+laconic-engine-commentary' as presented here.
A general comment about playing Chess. I've been playing since I was a kid. I like the game. Well, sort of. I've probably logged nearly 10K games on the playchess server. One day, while having a conversation about Chess with another (older) engineer he made a comment that really stuck in my mind, he said: "All you accomplish by playing a lot of Chess is to become a better Chess player".<p>His comment had a point to it. The conversation took place while we were waiting for the results of FEA for a fluid-based thermal management system. Each run took 18 hours. It had been running overnight and we were about to get results. While we waited I fired-up a quick game of Chess and we started to talk about the subject once I was done.<p>His point was that, unless your goal is to become a world champion and somehow earn a living out of playing Chess the game can very easily become a huge waste of time. You don't learn anything more than playing Chess. It is false to assume that good Chess players are really smart people. Yes, they might have the ability to achieve deep concentration and focus on the game. One would be surprised to learn just how bad some really good Chess players are about other things in life.<p>I thought about this on-and-off for months. Nearly every time I thought about playing Chess his words played back in my head. My conclusion was to accept that he was right: There was no point to playing Chess beyond a level of entertainment.<p>In order to become truly competitive in Chess you have to become a human database. You need to study openings, endings, all sorts of mid-game permutations. You need to study your opponents' games and know how to counter some of their moves or approaches. In other words, you need to turn a fun game into a job. That, to me, turns a fun game into an ugly job. I have no interest in being that person.<p>This point got driven home as I taught my kids to play. I started one of them off when he was six. This was prior to my "revelation". Very soon he was winning local tournaments right and left.<p>As I understood what was happening I pulled him back a bit from this rather serious engagement with the game. To some extent he had already learned a lot of what the game has to offer: Considering your options; Patience; Planning; Concentration; Goals; Making choices; etc. His time would be far better invested on such topics as programming, music, even building cool things with Legos.<p>You can learn the basic real-world-usable lessons of Chess within six to twelve months of playing the game. Anything beyond that is just playing more Chess with no further lessons that apply to other aspects of your life.<p>I admire GM's at the levels seen in these championships. Good for them. It is their chosen profession and they excel at it. However, I am no-longer in awe of their mental abilities. What they have to become in order to play at these levels is, to me, the absolute opposite of what the game felt like when I was a kid. It was very cool to solve problems as they were presented and "fight the battle". It isn't cool to play against a database --or have to become one.
While I don't know why the poster put this up, one could argue that hn is about learning from others opinions, victories and mistakes.<p>Here, we are given a chance to analyze two great chess masters and replay their strategic battle. What decisions made one lose? How is the strategic deployment of pieces similar to running a company? What attracts hackers to chess?<p>Or it could be that bunch of people on hn like chess, and this got voted up. Who really knows what fuels articles to the front page of this community?
Perhaps because Chess is a fascinating thing for Hackers!
I'm just a casual Chess Player and I play while I relax or get tense with work.<p>I don't really follow the championship but they were unable to win for quite a while, right? So, this is the first win. We'll have to watch how Anand comes back.
HN may be interested to know that Anand is a brand ambassador for NIIT, a computer education company from India (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIIT" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIIT</a>). AFAIK this is the only brand he endorses.