Why are the Russians so good at chess?

http://www.slate.com/id/2229515/

by edw519 • 17 years ago

53 69 17 years ago

It's not a mystery. Why is country X good at Y? Because Y is popular and has better support/infrastructure there.

WilliamLP3• 17 years ago

Sometimes it's largely statistics and genetics, and this is so unambiguously well supported that the only reason to disbelieve it is a desire to maintain a certain fantasy about human beings that isn't true but that nonetheless may be valuable or good for social function. (E.g. Kenya / Distance Running, Jamaica / Sprinting.) Of course then this effect becomes amplified by those places getting a better support and infrastructure.

gizmo• 17 years ago

Physical differences are undeniable, but chess is not a physical sport. There's a nice documentary "My Brilliant Brain" that shows how people can get extraordinarily skilled by (surprise surprise) making an extraordinary effort).

In the documentary a guy decides he wants his daughter to become a chess grandmaster, and trains her from a very young age (4 years) for 6 hours a day. The combination of intelligence, aptitude and effort made her one of the first female grandmasters in chess.

If _that_ is the result of dedication, the statistics and genetic factors (if they even exist) must pale in comparison.

idlewords• 17 years ago

Soviet chess grandmasters came from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds. There's no genetic argument to make.

raganwald• 17 years ago

William, I am not disagreeing that genetics may play a dominant role, but I do think it is a very weak argument to compare chess playing aptitude to running. From what I have read, we know a great deal about what physical traits (fast twitch muscles, bone length ratios, and so forth) make someone a fast runner. We know a fair bit about the role genes play in developing these traits.

With chess-playing aptitude we have indirect evidence of genetics gathered statistically. Can we measure a trait like seratonin to dopamine ratios? Can we measure a physical trait like the size of the brain or the pattern of the folds of the neocortex and statistically associate it with chess aptitude? Not to my knowledge.

So while there may be a statistical and indirect argument to make about chess aptitude and genetics, I think it should be made as such rather than making an argument comparing chess aptitude to something like running where (at this time) we know a lot more about the direct traits involved.

joe_the_user3• 17 years ago

Actually, there are cultures which foster intense distance running so I think even the genetics/distance running argument isn't a "slam dunk" - ie, to just act like the point is proven is a cheap, unsupported argument.

pixcavator3• 17 years ago

My guess is that soccer received more support than chess in the Soviet Union, but the results weren't impressive at all.

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

Hypothesis: Your country's likelihood of fielding a world-class soccer team is roughly proportional to the number of person-days of access that the average kid has to an unfrozen soccer field.

Isn't this like asking why US colleges north of, say, Virginia have so much trouble recruiting top-class college baseball players, such that the College World Series always seems to be "some team from Florida vs some team from Arizona"? Aspiring players of professional baseball prefer to play for teams whose home field thaws out before April.

Of course, the opposite is also true. Great hockey players are more likely to be hail from Russia, Canada, New York, or Massachusetts than from Brazil, Italy, London, or California.

mahmud• 17 years ago

Dynamo Kiev was pretty much the national team of the USSR :-)

listic• 17 years ago

Honestly, I don't understand a point of professional team sports at all. If every team of every country can in principle hire every player from every country, constrained mainly by its budget and negotiating abilities - it becomes mainly a battle of budget, and politics also.

jcapote• 17 years ago

Probably the same reason they are amazing programmers

AlexTheFounder• 17 years ago

And scientists. The reason I think is in the traditionally more system-oriented education.

dzlobin• 17 years ago

And a very advanced education system where calculus and physics are taught in 5th and 6th grade

amichail• 17 years ago

If someone is smart enough to play chess at the highest levels, wouldn't he/she be better off as a mathematician?

jefffoster• 17 years ago

Is there any evidence that there is a strong correlation between playing chess at a high level and being a great mathematician?

pixcavator3• 17 years ago

In my experience mathematicians become quite good at chess - if they take it seriously. That's why I gave up playing long time ago.

varjag3• 17 years ago

If you are a great chess player you wouldn't have time to become a decent mathematician.

tomjen2• 17 years ago

Not really, a mathematician would likely make less money than a toplevel chess player.

pg• 17 years ago

But the falloff is sharp. A friend of mine was once ranked 44th in the world, and he switched to programming because he couldn't make a living playing chess.

mquander3• 17 years ago

Fat chance. There's only perhaps a few dozen people in the world who can actually even make a living playing chess (as opposed to teaching it on the side.) It's notoriously difficult.

Many American chess players switch to poker or a different profession.

slackenerny• 17 years ago

According to James Simons, "The average annual income of leading research mathematicians (those, say, with at least three articles in the Annals of Mathematics) is about 10,000,000 USD" ;]

ig13• 17 years ago

Not really. Only a handful of top-level chess players are in the multi-million dollar range, while there are thousands of mathematicians in that range (the majority from the financial industry).

osipov4• 17 years ago

being "smart enough" in chess translates to being "smart enough" in purely mechanical aspects of mathematics. imho, you are underestimating the creative aspect of mathematics.

nvoorhies• 17 years ago

Is there no similar translation between the creative aspects of chess and mathematics?

pixcavator3• 17 years ago

Karpov spent a year (I think) studying math as a freshman... "He couldn't make it" as the story goes.

ig13• 17 years ago

It's a nice story but it's wrong, Russia has had a strong reputation in Chess since the 1700s several hundred years before Krylenko's chess schools.

Merim Bilalić's team did an extensive study that was published by the Royal Society to find out why there are so few strong female chess players. Their study concluded it was purely statistics, less female players overall meant that there were less female outliers (i.e great players).

I imagine something similar is at play here.

pfedor2• 17 years ago

I used to play chess a little as a kid and what I know is in more agreement with the article than with what you say. Prior to the Soviet chess explosion there used to be great Russian players (Chigorin, Petrov) but also many great players from other countries (Philidor, Anderssen, Morphy, Zukertort.) If you look at the official list of world champions, there was only one Russian champion (Alekhine) before 1948 and only one non-Soviet champion between 1948 and the collapse of the Soviet Union (Bobby Fischer, and I read he learned Russian to have access to first-class chess literature.)

In the SU the chess players enjoyed privileges unavailable to the general population, e.g., they could travel abroad (at least as long as they were winning, I read that Taimanov had his passport confiscated after losing to Fischer in the Candidates Match.) They also were favored at the higher education institutions, i.e., as a successful chess player you didn't have to study much to pass and get a degree.

As an aside, I heard from a guy who knew David Bronstein personally that Bronstein could have easily won the World Championship from Botvinnik in 1951, but it was made clear to him that it was considered undesirable for a Jewish player to beat Botvinnik. Bronstein according to my friend was a broken man after that, became excessively extravagant and never played with the same strength again.

cema• 17 years ago

You say: "it was considered undesirable for a Jewish player to beat Botvinnik". What, Botvinnik was not Jewish? That's news to me. I am sure there may have been some pressure, perhaps a lot of pressure, but Jewishness is unlikely to have played a role.

joe_the_user3• 17 years ago

Actually, if chess strength is judged by chess champions, the US was stronger than Russia in the 19th century.

Further, a quick look at Wikipedia shows that modern Chess as such did not really even exist in the 1700s. Modern Chess theory, based on position and piece value, originated in Europe and the United States in the late 19th century. Chess strength of any sort before that is irrelevant.

So basically, the article is right.

ig13• 17 years ago

It's farcical to say that without modern chess theory you can't measure chess ability.

Russia had a strong reputation because strong players from other countries played against Russian players and lost. Have a look at Murray's A History of Chess (1913) it mentions a few accounts of Russia's strong chess abilities significantly pre-dating positional/piece value theory.

wsprague• 17 years ago

Let me echo what some people are saying .... training and education. Duh.

known2• 17 years ago

"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone

teeja• 17 years ago

Exactly. As the movie "Looking for Bobby Fischer" made clear, we in the US live in a non-chess culture. Like mathematicians, chess players and honor-roll students in high-school are ignored while jocks get lots of attention.

Belonging to a subculture can be empowering for people who aren't world-class out of the gate like Bobby, but that's only available for a very small minority in cities. Elsewhere, there's little heavy competition or opportunity to evolve.

The US gets it's ass handed to it in international math competitions because math, as with most intellectual endeavors in the US, gets no respect. The news proves everyday that 2/3's of us are clueless about most things that developed in the 20th century.

known2• 17 years ago

I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs also plays a good role in producing good chess players.

akrymski3• 17 years ago

Chess has always been very popular in Russia, I struggle to think of anybody I met there who doesn't know how to play.

Having said that, mathematics is also taught a lot more than in Europe or USA. When I moved from a Russian school to a European one, math teachers would give me homework that was 3 grades ahead of me. And even then it was English that caused issues more than anything =)

varjag3• 17 years ago

The article is correct. It's the same attitude that with any form of competition that was deemed a matter of national prestige in USSR: popularized by state throughout all outlets, industrialized through a ranks of special schools and training facilities, and usually devoid of fun that was initially behind the whole thing.

You'd have same approach with sports, ballet, or even high-school level contests in natural science. If there'd existed a world-renowned competition in crosswords, rest assured USSR would have had a nation-wide network of crosswording schools that would've enlisted talented kids at age of 5, three state-approved categories of crossword-manship (and one for juniors) and crossword solving discretely featured in every third motion picture.

But I digress. If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers. They would train you like a circus dog, showing you the tricks and running you through hundreds of assignments encountered in previous years, with no focus on the essence of physics. Granted you'd know a lot about pulleys and levers and displacement, but it wouldn't make you any good physicist.

catzaa3• 17 years ago

> If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers.

This is not a bad thing. It is completely the opposite to some Western ideals to ensure that everyone gets the same (bad) education. I think that the motto for a lot of guys on the left is that if everyone is kept behind no-one loses.

What is incredibly interesting to note is that Russia and several eastern bloc countries perform better than the USA in math (school age – according to OECD TIMMS test). Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...

This is quite shocking since the USA spends a lot more on education and is a few times richer.

> Granted you'd know a lot about pulleys and levers and displacement, but it wouldn't make you any good physicist.

In all fairness, the USSR did produce quite a few excellent physicists. Per capita it probably outranks the USA for Nobel Prize winners in Physics.

varjag3• 17 years ago

> It is completely the opposite to some Western ideals to ensure that everyone gets the same (bad) education.

School education is not a good predictor of future performance. I would venture to say that above some (fairly modest) threshold of quality, the difference in schooling is irrelevant.

> What is incredibly interesting to note is that Russia and several eastern bloc countries perform better than the USA in math (school age – according to OECD TIMMS test).

This is not what made the great Russian mathematicians though. You don't get feynmanns and turings by locking up kids to solve monotonous puzzles.

> In all fairness, the USSR did produce quite a few excellent physicists. Per capita it probably outranks the USA for Nobel Prize winners in Physics.

Of course it doesn't. Even the UK is way ahead of USSR on that metric.

There were plenty of great Soviet physicists and champions in other sciences, but bear in mind that at least half of them were product of pre-Soviet, imperial school system.

magv• 17 years ago

> If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers. They would train you like a circus dog [...] but it wouldn't make you any good physicist.

Being one of such people, this is not entirely accurate.

For one thing, there is no practice of transferring students to best teachers, you have to want it get into the better schools. Another thing is that the best teachers are precisely the people who understand and will show you the essence of physics (or whatever your subject is).

Yes, a lot of time is devoted to competitions with repetitive problem set (the olympiads). But then, lots of time is devoted to non-competition topics. There are also competitions with open problems which require lots of imagination and original research on your part (e.g. ТЮФ, ТРИЗ and МАН for those who know). Some of the better schools require each student to complete a research project in his subject of choice.

My point here is that "circus dog training" is not at all correct.

yannis• 17 years ago

  Exceptional Ability = Practice + Availability of Time
                                   for Practice
                                 + Motivation

newsdog3• 17 years ago

I haven't read the article yet, so I'll guess at it's contents then check it to see how well I did.

TRAGAC because they teach every kid the country chess in school - identify the gifted - send them to chess camp - identify the more gifted - send them to chess school - keep filtering - concentrate the best of the best into more and more intense training - Botvinnik ran a chess school at the very top that trained both Kasparov, Karpov and Krammnik.

Make sure the talented get their 10,000 hours in with no distractions, like having to have a job.

Easy, peasy.

newsdog3• 17 years ago

O,k I read it. It DID have some mention of the state support system, but said it was for more ideological reasons.

Ayn Rand wrote an essay on WTRAGAC and she pointed out chess was a very CAPITALISTIC game. Why?

In chess, you own all your own pieces. Just about the only private property in the USSR. No Central Committee or Five Year Plan can tell you how to place your rook. At no time will your rook ever be nationalized by the state just when you need it the most.

Second, only you get to push your pieces. It is NOT collectivized.

Third, you are rewarded for being strong in a non socialist manner. You and the other guy start out with the same number of pieces, soon the stronger player has more. They don't NEED more, being stronger, but, as in life in the West, the rich get richer!

Rand argued that the TRAGAC because they used it to escape an unnatural Socialist system.

Anaid9• 17 years ago

Because chess is so much more popular there. Here the emphasis is on money-making activities, such as sports- that have rules that can be easily understood by the large masses, and that are easier to market. In addition,there is much more support for chess there, and chess is highly admired; here there are a lot of mixed opinions and myths about chess - for example, that in order to be a good chess player you have to be intelligent, chess is for nerds, etc. Now that chess is finally entering the US and increasing in popularity, hopefully it will be much better understood and appreciated in the future, but it may take a long time before it becomes really popular here.

Why are the Russians so good at chess?

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