This is a blog mainly for members of the Ryde-Eastwood Leagues Club Chess Club which meets every Wednesday evening at 7:30 pm at the Ryde-Eastwood Leagues Club (117 Ryedale Road West Ryde NSW). It is intended to generate discussion and debate on chess and provide an additional forum for members to look at and comment on other members' chess games.
[DM: I don't think it does any harm to the prestige of chess, and in that sense it's good. However, it strikes me as pretty ill-informed. Carlsen has tremendous talent, but it's not as if he's inexplicable but players like Kasparov, Anand, Kramnik, Aronian and Topalov (to give just the other members of the 2800 club) are somehow ordinary and their abilities perfectly understood. And it's not so much that it's insulting to them as it reflects an utter lack of understanding about learning and excellence.The interviewer was also in raptures about Carlsen's 10-board blindfold simul. That's impressive, and I doubt that I could do it even if I started working on blindfold chess in a serious way. But a German FM recently played something like 46 blindfold games simultaneously! That's an incredible achievement, but it still doesn't put him in Carlsen's league as a chess player.So I'd call it the television equivalent of empty calories.]
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