Marion Tinsley a chess player

Marion Tinsley was a checkers legend, annihilating all competition. He said ounce that he could calculate 150 moves in advance! I was wondering if this calculating ability was typical of checkers players and it's relation to top chess players. What happened if Tinsley chose chess as his proffesion would he be top dog revolusionizing the game?

Will the world ever get another super genius again?

This seems like good food for thought.

edit: those looking for more information on Tinsley can wiki him.

Carlsen recently stated that if necessary, he could calculate 20 moves ahead. However, most grandmasters agree that the talent isn't in calculating, it's in judging the position at the end of that calculation. Even more importantly, people have to pick the correct moves to calculate. It is really only necessary to see 5 moves ahead when there are many varying lines coming off a single move.

"I only see 1 move ahead, the right move" ~Capablanca

So no, it's not just typical of checkers, chess has its calculators as well . However, checkers is now a "dead game". There are computers that have "solved" the game of checkers. So, chess is far more complicated being that it is approximated to have 64! (I've also heard 10^43) possible positions so we technically shouldn't be capable of calculating nearly as many moves ahead as checkers.

 From what I have read of Tinsley is that he actually beat that "unbeatable" compter in a match, suffering from it two of the seven loses of his entire life!

Interesting, I'll have to look into that.

Well, he didn't beat it when it was 100% complete... or when it wasn't complete I thought he was sick or past his prime or something and lost... obviously after they solved checkers it would be impossible to beat the machine, he may have been miles beyond any other competition but he wasn't supernatural

Many GMs can play blindfold simuls, the equivalent visualizing 100s of moves "ahead".  Probably the greatest well documented feat of this was George Koltanowski: "On December 4, 1960, in San Francisco, California, he played fifty-six games blindfolded. With only ten seconds a move, he won fifty and drew six."  Also he was able to recite the moves of all the game afterward... but he was never world champion, the number of moves you can visualize means nothing.  In fact during a serious game, unless a special position arises, it would be worthless to calculate 10+ moves ahead.

Over the past few hundred years I think we've seen about the limits of human playing ability from the greats.  I'm sure Tinsley could have been a great chess player if he had chosen to, but his domination of checkers may have been more to do with not as many players taking checkers seriously -- with a smaller pool of players, it's incredible to get even one player like Tinsley, if millions played and studied world wide over many years, we'd have seen more like him.

Checkers is not a dead game.  

Has thesexyknight been here since 2010?