IM Greg Shahade: "Slow Chess should die a fast death"!

Dang, I posted a coment 36 pages late, I'll check the date next time, Go Broncos.

Call him what you want, but that doesnt change the fact that he could beat everyone in this thread at a FIDE time control well before reaching move 40.

But that doesn't make him right the least.

I can probably cook better than anyone else here on this thread, but I ain't telling you how you should eat.
  

What does that have to do with anything?  Nothing, completely irrelevant.  I don't care if Magnus freaking Carlsen says that we should kill classical chess, I'd call him a fool as well, and it would be correct!  

Slow chess is good for you.It helps you stop making stupid moves.What do you think would happen if everybody played blitz all the time we would all suck ass.I am not saying that its bad to play fast chess I am just saying it wouldnt help you improve.

Here we can observe Greg Shahade playing blitz:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMM2RV5-HVc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpOWEbfqDOo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n6Jq06STQk

I'm honestly curious why would he want slow chess to die out.

 Well, the first time I went to a chess club, I was surprised to see people playing blitz chess.  My first thinking was that it was wrong, it was not what I learned from the books I read back in the 70's (yes, I am kind of old).  But what I notice from that moment until now, is that in ever single chess space I find everyone is playing the blitz.  And the most common explanation is really that "We can play more games like that, we don't have much time to long games."  Well, that is what I noticed.  I took some time to start to enjoy blitz chess.  I was refusing to accept the change, for the sake of a "sacred"  slow game.   Now, about what I prefere, I enjoy playing both, either blitz or long games.   And don't think slow chess is dying, but it is for sure losing space for the blitz chess.

In a purely utilitarian sense, blitz is good for honing your board vision, namely seeing what is before you and drawing quickly from inculcated patterns, but it's not good for board visualization, accurately analyzing future positions as a check on tactical fantasies and as a prelude to long range planning.  As Novice Nook's Dan Heisman said, Blitz has its place.  However, do we want all chess reduced to this?  As great a player as Botvinnik said it was bad for serious chess development.

That aside, I'd like to know when Blitz began to be taken seriously?  Previously known by other names including Rapid Transit, it has been part of chess culture for a long time.  However, only recently has it become popular with serious tournaments dedicated to it.

If I were researching its rise and diffusion throughout the world, I would start with the assumption that it was first and foremost an American phenomenon that became popular here and then spread to other countries.  That's because the American culture is one of mobility, of moving on, of an unsettledness, and also one of boredom, a quick disenchantment with the old, with the traditional.  You even have a clue in the name Rapid Transit.

I am not the first to observe that this unsettled pace of life is asymptotically increasing due to rapid technological change, and if America is good at any one thing it's good at the perpetual expansion of technology.  In this sense, Shadade is less a prophet of his times and more a cypher of his culture, a dynamic culture but one increasingly lacking in depth.

Keeping this cultural imperative in mind, you can understand why we have "progressed" from Blitz to Bullet, but why stop there?  Why not A-Bomb at 30 seconds or the ultimate, H-Bomb at 15 seconds.  GMs, start your reflexes.

IM Shahade isn't saying we should revert to blitz or bullet chess. He's recommending games that last 1 or 2 hours, which will allow top players to play more than one game a day and to play more games at a slightly lower level of quality. The quality of these guys in rapid chess is still higher than world champions of a century ago.

You're making strawman arguments.

Well the Zurich Chess Challenge is using a 40|10 time control and starts next week, so we'll see if this is true. I for one am interested about this experimental time control, and it's great to see some of the world's top players on board with the idea. Rapid and blitz definitely have their place in chess, but I think that rapid is the future of making chess more marketable (you look at T20 in cricket, which is bringing in more people to the game). The average Joe would not be too interested in a game that lasts 7 hours, but a game that lasts 30-60 minutes, and can be televised well; that would bring more interest into the game (and I did write a blog article about this).

 I wouldn't want to see the quality of top play be sacrificed so that chess can be marketed better.

 But then again, we can argue about this: is chess even targeted toward Average Joes?
What would be the future of chess, if the next generation of players would be Average Joes playing only short time controls?
What would be the quality, what would happen to theory?
I, for one, would never want to see books with titles, like "How to crush your opponents in 5 minutes" or other nonsense like that.
Chess is bigger than ever.
It attracts the audience that it needs to, and it does it perfectly. There is no reason at all to change anything.
Keep short time controls online, but let classical be what it is, the only true way to play chess.

Exactly, trying to bring in new demographics will only drive the old ones away. Leave chess alone, it's been doing fine the last several centuries.

Well hopefully, if those 'average Joes' get into chess, and then become more interested in longer games, then those 'average Joes' would become 'above average Joes'.

I am not saying that rapid and blitz chess should replace classical; I'm saying that they should co-exist, and then classical chess will get more people interested who before played rapid and blitz. Look at cricket, T20 was not designed to replace Test cricket and it doesn't; however T20 is influencing the way players play first-class and one day cricket (look at Ben Stokes' 250 against SA).

Plus, I would say that the post-Fischer era was one of the most popular eras for chess (and one of the best); players like Karpov, Kasparov, Korchnoi were all household names. I doubt many people outside of chess circles would know of the names of Giri, Caruana etc.

The speeding up of the game has happened in Cricket (IPL, Big Bash, other T20 leagues), and you don't hear too many cricketers complaining about that (there are some of course, but there are far more that are happy with the different versions of the game). Of course, people mainly agree that Test cricket gives the best quality game, but that doesn't mean there isn't a place for faster versions of the sport.

But they already co-exist without any problem.
There is no need for any change, at all.
The system works perfectly as it should.
Chess, is by nature, a lot slower sport than most.
There are no stars and sudden talents emerging every other month, there are no fireworks or huge publicity.
But that's exactly what chess is.
It doesn't need to be marketed and flooded.
There are far less talents compared to other sports (there are only circa 1400 grandmasters in the whole world), and introducing it to mass media would not help discovering talents at all.

Chess will always reproduce the necessary amount of new talents and the necessary amount of changes in theory and point of views in adequate time.
The system sustains itself, as it have for the past couple of centuries.

Maybe they would play bliz chess to choose who is playing black and who is playing white. winner=white loser=black

Nonsense.  I don't make strawman arguments.  If you can't see the direction the culture has inevitably been heading, and not just chess culture, then you haven't been paying attention.  Perhaps you should watch the opening narration of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons.  At least the gossip hasn't changed.

As far as "The quality of these guys in rapid chess is still higher than world champions of a century ago," I see that as odd argument, a non-sequitur regarding time controls.  Improvement over the millennia has been due to heavily analyzed openings and how they relate to the middlegame, home preparation, and a chess culture that has become more complex as revealed in John Watson's Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy: Advances since Nimzovich.  

Regarding match conditions, most contemporary tournament and match books are incomplete compared to those a century ago so it is hard to confirm the time controls in World Championship matches.  However, we know that Fischer-Spassky 1972 was 40 moves in two-and-a-half hours and the next 16 moves in one hour.  I was unable to confirm Korchnoi-Karpov 1978 or 1981, but Kasparov-Karpov 1984 had the same time controls as Fischer-Spassky.  By the time the fifth and final Kasparov-Karpov match rolled around in 1990 the time controls had been reduced to 40 moves in two hours and the next 20 in one hour, the same Swiss System time controls that were once reserved for amateurs.  Then in 1995 when Ilyumzhinov became FIDE President, we saw the degradation of chess into knockout matches and 90 minute time controls, if memory serves.

There has been an inexorable march for faster time controls and, sadly, the trend will continue with also-rans like Shahade and others as cyphers, as mouthpieces, for where chess culture has been headed for some time.  The only thing they do is bring in the bulldozer to level a backwoods trail and pave it so everyone can travel in ease to get to their destination with no attention paid to the scenery. 

Sad, but true.

A voice of reason in the wilderness, but alas I'm afraid the game will inevitably speed up to compete with other forms of entertainment.  Just as American 9-Ball replaced 14.1 Continuous Pocket Billiards as the championship game because it is quick, easy to understand, and can be televised in an hour, I can see a day not too far in the future where rapid chess will replace classical as the Championship time control.  And forget 3-Cushion Billiards, that beautiful game is too arcane; it's like trying to get the public interested in endgame studies.

Frankly, I cringe whenever I read things like "rapid is the future of making chess more marketable" and "would bring more interest into the game" and "can be televised."  The implication is, let's dumb it down so everyone can be involved with the game that obsesses us.  But why proselytize for a game that can speak for itself as an art, a science and a sport.  I don't see the point in selling the game.  I have a feeling scholastic chess has something to do with this attitude.  I know the game wasn't sold to me when my father introduced me to it at the tender age of eight in 1961.  Marketing chess reminds of the song from the 1973 film, O' Lucky Man, "Sell, Sell, Sell."

If only more players were as reasonable as you and would let chess speak for itself instead of giving it a big, fat push in the sad direction it is already headed we would all be better off.  Unfortunately, the culture will decide such things, and we know where it has been headed.

I just watched several blitz games where the endings became a time scramble, it was a farce, nothing more than a mechanical circus.  Blitz chess should be put to death slowly.

@Fightingbob: So it's not a strawman, but a slippery slope fallacy . No, in fact I agree with you. Today I played an important tournament game, needed a win to get a money prize. Time control was very short, 90 minutes + 30 sec increment. After consulting with the engine, I have to say that it was a rather nice game, during most of which I was busy suppressing opponent's counterplay and making sure that deadly kingside attacks on his parts didn't work for one tactical reason or another. Give me less time and I cannot play this kind of chess anymore. Give me less time and I would quit chess (concentrate on teaching, I suppose).

Would elite players have been able to pull off the same thing with just 30 minutes? Of course they would. But that's the nice thing about classical chess, it allows even a minor semi-pather like me to play a decent game once in a while.