The Palm Beach Post, West Palm Beach, Florida, Sunday, April 10, 1994 - Page 749
Chess Becoming More Theory Than Fighting Mettle, Creativity
With an increasing number of first-rate grandmasters competing for larger prizes, chess bears little resemblance to the game for gifted amateurs that it may have once been. One striking change: Data bases with tens of thousands of games have become standard equipment for today's tournament players.
At his first news conference after returning to chess two years ago, Bobby Fischer observed:
“Chess is becoming more and more memorization… They're analyzing the different openings now to the endings.”
As a remedy, he suggested “shuffling the first row of the pieces by computer and this way you will get rid of all the theory.”
Fischer, of course, had been away from the game for 20 years. But ex-world champ Anatoly Karpov — one of the more active players in the game — voice a similar complaint a few months ago. Understanding of the game and fighting mettle played a smaller role than before, he said, while the need for opening preparation had indeed escalated.
But Karpov's 18-year-old compatriot, Vladimir Kramnik — ranked among the top five players in the world — seems more bothered by the brutal struggle demanded by many of today's chess events than by the demands of keeping up with chess knowledge.
“They (qualifying tournaments for the world championship) are not much fun. You have to fight all the time. That's not what I like. I like to play and not to think about points. Nobody cares about creativity in these tournaments.”
After playing in such an event in Groningen, Holland, during December, the exhausted teenager complained: “I think that I couldn't survive another qualification tournament.”