1- still goes to school (carlsen quit with 12 years old)

2- lives REALLY far of any decent chess center. (Carlsen and karjakin lived pretty close and ukraine is very good)

3- at 13 years old carlsen had already traveled to 23 different countries to play chess. i doubt the So traveled to more than 10

4- no coach. (carlsen had GM Agdestein and another guy with 2 GM norms)

5- from a **** country in chess (well not so ****. philipines is not so bad. but cant compare with ukraine of karjakin)

6- the youngest ever to make 2610 rating (with 16 years old and some days)

7- knocked out Ivanchuk and Kamsky. a huge monster and a WORLD CHAMPION defending his title.


http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=5905

if this girl is Bobby's daughter, from philipines.
maybe Wesley too!

I dont know what to think about it.
A DNA-test would resolve it

is this serious or is that meant to be a metaphor? You know there are 100 million people in the Philippines?

The interesting part is whether Jinky is Bobbys daugther or not?

The Wesley So stuff in this thread is just bs.

can you argue why the stuff about So just bs? then u will be refuted for someone with 200x more chess knowledge than you

metaphor. of course.

This So kid is truly remarkable. I'm laughing to myself a little bit because I know that in 5-10 years we will have a human player who is superior to Rybka. No one else believes this, but they don't understand how one generation of humans can far outperform the previous generation due to being exposed to superior training methods during childhood.

What does being good at chess have anything to do with being related to bobby fisher? There is no genetic predisposition to being good at chess--intelligence perhaps, but not specifically chess.

For some reason people are under this misconception that bobby fisher was "naturally" good at chess. A prodigy that was born great. People often think the same things about many other talents like the piano. As if some young kid is just a freak of nature. This is incorrect. The real secret is practice.

In 1992 a guy Charness actually did a study on cognitive patterns using chess as a tool and used it to puncture the long-standing myth that of born greatness--the chess prodigy. Charness even said, "One of the important points that chess research has made since its inception is that chess experts are made, not born."

Tom Rose, a chessville.com columnist even wrote an entire article about Carlsen in which he dispells the notion that greatness at a young age is anything more than intense study.

Another famous study, notably cited in the book "outliers," was made by Universtiy College of London psychology professor David R. Shanks. He concluded that, "Evidence is now emerging that exception performance in memory, chess, music, sports and other arenas can be fully accounted for on the basis of an age-old adage: practice makes perfect.

Anyone who thinks Bobby Fisher was given his gift of chess ability is just wrong. He worked to get it. Fisher learned the game at around six years old and for about a year just sort of messed around with the game. He went to a simul at age seven and lost pretty horribly to an expert. Then he joined a chess club and studied and practiced like crazy until he had a "breakthrough" and was "discovered" at age 13. Fisher was no doubt a smart person--there are many pre-dispositions that genetics can provide like intelligence, ambition to study and become great, spatial reasoning. At the end of the day, though, Fisher, just like everyone else, become great through practice.

also, carlsen never quit school iirc.

Imagine two small children in an orphanage (two years old let's say). Both were given up by their mother at birth. One of them happens to be the biological child of Judit Polgar and Garry Kasparov and you don't know who the parents of the other child are, although both children appear to be healthy. You'll be choosing one of them to adopt, and if possible you'd like to train the child to be a chess player. If there's no genetic predisposition to being good at chess, it shouldn't matter which child you choose. Do you really believe this?

+1 mirrion

You undermine your whole argument with this statement. If spatial reasoning is a genetic predisposition, then it stands to reason that one could be naturally gifted in that area. That's the main thesis behind the "prodigy" theory in chess, music, and math.

Practice and obsession/fixation no doubt help, but if we can say that genetics plays a part, we can also say that one child can have a huge natural advantage over another in these areas.

It is incredibly amusing that you believe in genetic predispositions and mention Judit Polgar here.
After all, her father always wanted to show that gifts are not inherent (that is, already present at birth) but are acquired through education. In short, "geniuses are made not born".
I suspect he was right, at least regarding chess.

So you'd just as soon flip a coin at this hypothetical orphanage? You wouldn't select the Kasparov/Polgar child as probably having greater genetic potential as a chess player than a child of unknown parents? And there might be plenty of female chessplayers who had greater genetic potential than Judit Polgar, I really don't know, but I think we're splitting hairs. The point is that she managed to become a grandmaster, so unless "genetic potential" is a complete myth when it comes to chess, her genetic potential would have to have been well above average.

Of course the years of study and intense preparation matter. Nobody becomes a great chess player without putting in the work. All I'm saying is that there is such a thing as genetic potential for chess or basically anything else (for chess this could be decomposed into components like spatial ability, short-term and long-term memory capacity and recall, etc). And if you aren't born with a pretty high level of genetic potential, you'll never be an elite chess player no matter how hard you work at it. There will be people who put in a similar level of work as what you put in, and if some of them started with greater genetic potential, you won't be able to compete with them. I don't know why this is even controversial.

I agree that hard work will only bring you so far, and that you need to have talent. I am not sure however that chess talent is something one can inherit from the parents.

It's only my opinion, I am not qualified in any way to know if this is true or not. I was just amused by the mentioning of Polgar in this context.

you have to think of it like an equation:

talent x investment = ability

So yes, while the key is the investment, it is multiplied by the natural talent that you have. If you work extremely hard, but dont have the prerequisite natural talents, you can become good, but not great. So someone like Fischer became one of the best not only because he was naturally gifted and worked hard, but because he more than likely had natural gifts and worked extremely hard to develop them.

From Laszlo Polgar's wiki:

Ok I see the irony of choosing Judit Polgar for my hypothetical. I still maintain that she must have had significantly above average natural ability in spite of her father's thesis. The only scenario I could imagine where genetic predisposition for chess ability wouldn't exist, would be if every human being was born with identical brain architecture. Otherwise, if there's any type of genetic variation, some brain architectures will be more conducive to acquiring chess ability than others (and the same goes for any other type of mental activity). Of course training would be necessary to maximize one's potential and it's clear that Laszlo Polgar did a fine job of training his daughters.

If Laszlo had raised three adopted daughters, none of the three related to each other, and they had the same success as his actual daughters, then I'd be a lot more impressed with his "geniuses are made, not born" thesis. As it is, I'm pretty sure he and his wife were passing on some good genes (for chess anyway) whether they like it or not.

both Polgar and Fischer have Jewish ancestry, too, and if there's any genetic predisposition to chess strength then the Ashkenazi Jews must have a lot of it.

You are completely missing the point. My point is that the child of Kasparov and Polgar would be no better at chess to start out than the children of any two other reasonably intelligent people. But if you took the child of Kasparov and Polgar and taught them go their entire life and never showed them chess then they randomly walked into a chess game, they wouldn't be any good.

If your point is that children who have never seen a chessboard aren't going to be very good at chess when they play their first game, I doubt you'd get much argument. In your earlier post you appeared to be making a much stronger claim.

Well, being related to Bobby Fischer could have a lot to do with being good at chess - its no guarantee but I'd like your chances. The fact that you'd have to develop your potential before you'd be good at chess doesn't diminish the importance of Fischer's genetic contribution.

If greatness isn't "anything more than intense study", anyone could be a great chess player. Have any child study as intensely as Carlsen did and they'd be great! Of course, you don't really mean that.

Fisher unlike everyone else had an IQ of 187.

IQ, like everything else can also be trained...

Its pretty much like any other test, like math or language, except that this one is called Intelligence

To a certain extent. But two people who are identical in every respect (personality, attitude, environment, physical appearance, diet, etc.), except that one has an IQ of 180 and the other has an IQ of 115, are never going to wind up achieving the same things. To say otherwise is pure foolishness.

All I was saying was that Bobbys chess training turned out to be excellent practice for that IQ-test he took

Also remember that everything about Bobbys IQ-test comes from pretty much one source (Albeit a reliable one.). All other teachers he had remember it to be lower.
The test result is not stored or saved anywhere, we dont know how it was constructed and it was also a childs test, which means it was pretty far from an adult test in difficulty level.

Actually, this is pretty much exactly what I meant. I made a distinction that obviously someone who is very unintelligent won't ever have the same potential as someone who is a genius. But yes, given a certain level of intelligence, I could make anyone a GM.