Josh Waitzkin's resignation from competitive chess

I'd like to know your thoughts about this subject. For those who may not know, here's a quick link to the wiki entry about Waitzkin:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Waitzkin

He was

-believed to be the "next Fischer" in USA for some time, after being one of the youngest IMs in the world at that date.

-the main character of the book and movie "searching for bobby fischer", which brought him huge popularity, and probably more than he would want.

-is the main lecturer in popular software Chess Master's courses.

-is the author of the book "the art of learning"

-is the Thai Chi world champion at the moment, a martial art which he took on years ago after he quit chess, and showed amazing improvement and skill.

My thoughts about the guy are very positive. I think his lectures on chess master are the best (literally, I haven't seen any better so far), I love his approach to the game and to learning. I've read his Art of Learning too, and although there were glimpses of some NLP style from time to time, I liked the book very much.

Now what I don't appreciate about him is the reasons he puts forward about him quitting chess. He openly accuses Dvoretsky (again, for those who may not know, he is one of the best chess writers and coaches in the world) for killing his love of the game, and impose a chess style that didn't suit him.

I think that's not fair at all to Dvoretsky, and seems like he just couldn't get out of his romantic passion for attacking to take his game to the next level (a world class GM).

He explains that his heroes of the game were Kasparov and Tal, who had attacking styles, often producing beautiful tactical play decorated with a lot of sacrifices.

He blaims Dvoretsky to try to teach him a more defensive and positional style, like Karpov. He cites him saying things like "try to find how Karpov would play this position?", and always worked on his defensive abilities.

My thoughts about this is that Dvoretsky analyzed the young man's games, and spotted a weakness in his abilities to defend and play somewhat more positionally. I think this approach is the correct one if one wishes to improve his game: spotting weaknesses and working on them.

Kasparov had said many times that in their first match with Karpov, he wasn't ready yet. His style was too aggressive, and his sacrifices for activity just hit the defensive wall of Karpov and got refuted. He then slowly learned the game from Karpov, he worked on his weaknesses, he worked on his endgames, defensive abilities, and actually, he learned Karpov's style of chess, and built his own upon that. He's said he thought of the match as free lessons.

Within this perspective, I think Waitzkin just couldn't handle the necessity of broadening his arsenal with other styles, and when he reached to the limits of natural talents, he decided to quit, instead of trying to change.

what do you think?

I enjoyed his chessmaster games too, they were great!

When you can't live up to your own expectations, you fail.  As far as I'm concerned, Waitzkin started believing his own hype, and couldn't follow through... and so ... well at least there's Tai Chi :P

Are you sure you have the movie title right? I quote-

-the main character of the book and movie "bobby fischer plays chess", which brought him huge popularity, and probably more than he would want.

Wouldn't that be "Searching for Bobby Fischer"? (If not, I apologize, but when I think of Waitzkin, I think of "Searching for Bobby Fischer.")

you're right dc1985, wire issues in my brain . thanks, I fixed it.

we americans got lucky with Fischer..  Americans just don't care about chess enough to have a serious world champion contender.

Josh, Josh, Josh, I think the hype was to tough for him, and he was "only" a IM, I would wait with the "new Bobby Ficher" untill he atleast Reached the GM title.

But I'm a norwegian, at "home" we dont hype that much, Our own star, Carlsen, it was easy to guess that he would be something special, but the title and the rating came first, not the hype, and after all - he is no hype.

I think that a student-coach association that ultimately results in the student quitting the discipline is a failure of the student but also of the coach. Dvoretsky may have correctly identified the weaknesses in Waitzkin's game, but his coaching approach failed to help him overcome them. Maybe it would have been different with another coach, maybe not: raw talent (which Waitzkin seems to have) is only one of the qualities required for playing chess at the highest level.

Also, it may very well be that Waitzkin is better off like this. Even for the very best, professionnal chess is a crazy choice of career... in the recent video interviews that I've seen, he certainly seemed to be happy with his current life.

The best for annyone is not to have a monkey on theyr back....

The problems starts when you start to belive in your own hype, he could easy still play chess and have fun doing it.

Lets just be clear.  He's have no chance against David Carradine in tai chi :)

I like Josh and the chessmaster CD's is all I had to teach myself with early on and who knows maybe that is why I'm an attacking player and enjoy chess so much.

I see no problem with his decision. He saw that to improve at chess he would have to stop enjoying chess. So why bother? Because everyone thinks he should be the next Bobby Fischer? He should live his own life, and not let others live it for him.

I'm not trying to be rude, I like Josh (the chessplayer) because he playes good and fun games.

But I think he may have this problems because of his talent, talent can make you lazy. A man without talent, like myself, cant be lazy it would not take me annywhere, so from day one as a chessplayer I had to work hard.

I knew that I would never ever be the next Bobby... but what is so great in beeing Bobby annyway?

Hard work pays of! It's not all fun, but it's more fun than beeing lazy and knowing that your not the next Bobby because of it!

Well said Gonnosuke! Josh lost the love of the game and moved on. He has done well since then. How many people ever live up to their hype and is it fair to hype such young talent (and not just in chess)?

So if he was (is) that talented and worked that hard, why did he only reach the IM level?

 Hm.. so either he was lazy or not that talented. IM dosent give you much in chess these days, even ordinary GM's at 2500 is common, you need to reach the 2700 limit to be remembered as a real talent.

I like Tai Chi and Krav Magà =)

Talent is relative, if he had that great talent and did that much hard work, what went wrong?

Since he was only among the 1300 best in the world: http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=2005158

 http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=17030

In my country we have 14 IM's and 10 GM's, and there is curently only living 4,6million people in Norway, and ca 3000 of them is playing chess.

In USA there is 300 million people ++

So back to the talent... Obviously he didnt work hard enough, I know some of those 14 IM's, they all did not work that hard, thats for sure!

I think that the legion of GM-strength players from chess.com give the false impression that the GM title is something achievable quite easy. And a GM is nothing but a slightly better pawn pusher. How can one say that in order to become an IM you don't need to work that hard?? Obviously, they have no idea of the level of a titled player and how hard is to get there.

You have to compare one players with the others to tell something about his strengt and talent, if you are the 1300. best in the world in something, would you write a book about your talent? Could it be some kind of hype in the story...

Gonnosuke's posts in this thread are wise and true! I have nothing to add to them.

One clarification -- only the unfortunate title of the movie and the hype surrounding the success of the movie ever made anyone think that Josh was "the next Bobby Fischer." No one in chess that I know of ever seriously thought Josh was that kind of a magical talent -- merely extremely talented. There are always a few dozen boys and girls around the world who have huge chess talent, Josh was one. Actually, I think at that time more of a hope for a North American born World Champ went with the "bad" kid in the movie, canadian Jeff Sarwer *(sp?) I don't think there's much doubt that Sarwer had more pure chess talent than josh, but where Josh has strong family, Sarwer had a very screwed up home life that completely undermined him and his chess career... from what I've read on sarwer's blog, he's come thru into adulthood as a fully functioning human being (for which he deserves A LOT of credit) but he's got a "I coulda been a contenda" chip on his shoulder, too.