MARK RUBERY CHESS
The acclaimed author and former top ten player, John Nunn, gave an interview to Tim Harford for the BBC Radio show titled ‘more or less’, from which follow a few excerpts.
Q: There are certain disciplines that seem to breed child prodigies – we see it in music, we see it in math, we see it in chess. Why is that? Nunn:
I think it’s because these subjects are self-contained as they don’t connect with other parts of the real world. So, for example, you wouldn’t expect to get a great child novelist because to create believable and interesting characters in a novel requires an understanding of people and knowledge of how the world operates, whereas in mathematics and chess you’ve got subjects, which have their own internal rules, which don’t relate to rules in other parts of knowledge. So because they’re self-contained formal systems you can become an expert in them without having this experience of life that becoming an expert in other disciplines requires.
Q: Now I have to confront you with this interview some years ago with the World Champion Magnus Carlsen, who told Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, that, “I’m convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became World Champion is that he’s too clever for that”. What did he mean? Nunn:
I think what he meant, and a bit later in the interview he did explain it, was that I was interested in too many different things and didn’t focus sufficiently on chess in order to reach what he apparently conceives to be my maximum potential, although I should say I was at one stage in the World Top 10, which is not that bad.
Q: Do you think computers have spoiled things a bit? Nunn:
They’ve changed things enormously, but spoiled? That I wouldn’t really say. Certainly the chess world is completely different now because of computers, and one really negative consequence has been the possibility of cheating in chess. People can go into the bathroom and analyse the position on their pocket phone, so steps have to be taken to try and prevent that kind of thing. But otherwise, it’s just a change. In a way it helps because, for example, people can watch games on the internet now from tournaments all over the world live and, with the computer backing them up, they can have an evaluation of the position so they know what’s going on. It’s like having a continuous commentary – expert commentary – on the game. So from the point of view of chess publicity and the general chess public computers have in fact helped quite a lot.