Quote:
Originally Posted by Shady Bill
I haven't really studied the case in great detail. I kind of thought it was Carlsen being upset a 19 year old player could suddenly beat him, and somehow he felt this was impossible and therefor it must mean Niemann is cheating. I guess that might be true. Just because the guy cheated as a kid (he still is a kid), doesn't mean he is cheating now.
Carlsen is someone who is very keen of attention. Even from a very young age, chess has been his entire identity. For him, to come to grips with being beaten by a 19 year old kid, it must challenge everything he knows and believes in. Because it shows that Niemann can do in years, what took Carlsen decades..and that must hurt.
What shocked me more was the guys who cheated so blatantly at the fishing competition: (they were stuffing Walleye with lead)
https://www.themeateater.com/fish/wa...eating-scandal |
Actually Carlsen has said after his last title defence that he is losing interest of repeating endlessly a title, he claled it pointless after the x-th repetition, and he said he will not play another world championship but step down if not a certain player who he rates as strong enoughn to be a real challenge will qualify as challenger.
I too played CC at the late 80s and early 90s, I'm 55 now. I had a very strong fascination for the dedicated chess computers of that era, and I still feel strong love for these machines, their imperfection , the excitement their marketing created, their increasingly elaborated looks and designs. I knew them all, I played them all in warehouses and stores. Back then I had a Chess Challenger Voice, then a Mephisto II, then a Mephisto Exclusive with M-IV module and HG440 opening module. Still have them, and some ten years ago, 15 years, I bought second hand some other objects of my desires that back then neither me nor my parents could afford. It was a golden time and means plenty of very precious memories for me. On some days, when I am blue and my heart is heavy, I am very sad that those times are gone. I played in a club, and for the school team, in those two years we once won the championship of West Berlin schools, and were 2nd or 3rd in the other year. But I never liked the tournament play and the competition thing, I am just no man seeking such tournament competitions, its not my thing to compete, and so I dropped out and went exclusively into "lonesome" CC chess, which was my thing much more (I am a quite unsocial person), and I was damn good at it, I might say. The German CC Federation was (is still?) organised in four main leagues, and you must qualify to access the next higher one. I won the three lower leagues in three tournaments in a row, and then made it second place in my first master class tournament, which was my last, then went to university and had real life getting in the way, played no chess for ten years or more - and when I wanted to return I found that I was so completely out of it that I never got back into it. Too much forgotten, too much routine lost. Today, I play like an idiot again, and thus play almost no more at the live board, only CC - and there really take my time, and need to. Its too frustrating. My three private CC partners however all were dropped by Corona, international guys, knew two of them for over twenyt years, and the third for aroudn 15 years. Never met them, still felt the loss.
Until today I feel very, very sad of this loss rergarding chess skills gone, one of my biggest mistakes I ever made. I should not have allowed to let this happen. I let it slip away, and I was unabel to ever catch it back. And now its too late - its gone forever. Mind and especially memory simply is not what it used to be back then.
How much I hate it to get older. And that is no ironic joke. I mean it. Just losses, no compensations. Every other claim is a lie.