Allow me to try to answer the original question based on grandmasters that I know. (I haven’t met Carlsen myself.)
Just a note that chess is something he enjoys, is naturally good at and will make him a millionaire (if he isn’t already.)
He will also get fame, especially in Norway. People like World Champions!
So he’s not likely to attempt anything else.
Having said that, you did ask the question, so here’s the best I can do…
As I said Grandmasters have excellent concentration (especially under pressure and for long periods), good memory, ability to spot patterns, work unsupervised and prepare thoroughly.
If they take the time to study, they normally get excellent degrees. (At one point most of the English team had degrees from either Oxford or Cambridge.)
This suggests they would do well in:
finance (trading)
mathematics
writing books (on chess)
online poker
However chess is not a social game and chessplayers are not usually strong in inter-personal skills.
I know of grandmasters who have cut back on chess to:
become stockbrokers
play online poker (a lot)
set up and floated companies (stockbroking, chess and bridge)
lecture in mathematics + similar subjects at University
Then I’ve gotta ask…what do you play? If you’ve played “thousands of games” and have only repeated twice, that means there are 998 opening lines you’ve played. I’ve got to know what opening repertoire can have that many lines in it.
Wait, are you counting transpositions as repeats or not?
ETA: Since I’ve got you on the line, one more question- how much do you know about openings you don’t play? I’d ask my college coach, a USCF master, about Sicilians as Black and he’d say “the best Sicilian is 1…e5”, i.e. his repertoire.
Um, I think your assumption about numbers of openings is flawed!
As White, after 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nf6 I play 3. Bc4 (hence no Ruy Lopez.)
Depending on what Black does, I can get:
Two Knights Defence
Evans Gambit
Hungarian Defence
Against the Sicilian, I used to play 2. Nc3 and 3. f4.
Now I play 2. c3 (hence no open Sicilians.)
By move 10, all these games have diverged - because I’m avoiding the heavily analysed lines…
I’ve sat next to some very strong players (and sat in on their post-mortems), read chess magazines for decades (and I also walk around a lot during my games), so I’ve picked up some knowledge of openings I don’t play through ‘osmosis’.
For example in the the Sicilian, one of my colleagues used to play the Dragon (and wrote a book on it), another was ready for the Poisoned Pawn and a third played the Lowenthal.
P.S. Do you still think ‘geniuses are made, not born’?
I mentioned the Soviet Union program for chess, where despite intensive coaching almost all players failed to reach the standards of a Karpov or a Kasparov.
I think there’s a Pyramid effect, where if the numbers playing chess increase, then the standard of the top few rises also. And those few are geniuses.
I certainly think that mastery is mostly about nurture and not nature. Genius I find to be a loaded term (particularly in chess which many people think of as some kind of IQ test).
The soviet union did invest a lot in chess and as a result was utterly dominant for many years. I believe at one stage there was an explicit rule that only a certain number of soviet players could qualify for the (world champion) candidates tournament, because otherwise the tournament may have been almost all soviet players.
Of course though, when any game or skill becomes professional, one must compete with others who have spent thousands of hours practicing. And the world only cares about the top handful.
So aptitude can make that 1% difference that separates out champions from obscurity.
What Mijin said. It’s true for certain values of ‘genuis’. If you’re dealing with the top of the top of the top, then everyone has studied intensely for decades and aptitude will break the tie. But the fact remains that anyone of sound mind can be an IM if not a GM, provided they put in the time and effort required.
Talking to my doctor about my running, at some point he went on about the fact that some elite athletes have mitochondria that do their thing a ‘few standard deviations from the norm’. This is apparently a rather rare thing, something I probably do not possess even if I am above average (which itself is questionable), and which has a huge impact on an individual’s athletic performance. Basically, an elite athlete has to be born gifted.
I don’t see why chess would be different. It amounts to making a sport of mental abilities. Yes, lots of practice will do anyone lots of good. But without ‘the gift’, a person won’t make it to the tippy-top.
I’d like to see your evidence for these ‘facts’.
Firstly you need to define ‘superstar’ (in chess, since that’s what we’re discussing.
There are over 1,000 Grandmasters. Are you saying that being one of the World’s 3,000 or so IMs makes you a ‘superstar’?
Next comes the Soviet program, which involved the prestige of the ruling body:
Right after the revolution, an almost military organization took care of the teaching of chess, which was seen as an essential element of the “popular education”. Under the direction of Nikolaï Krylenko (a People’s Commissar for Justice who was close to Lenine), chess clubs were founded everywhere: in factories, in kolkhozy and, especially, in the “Young Pioneer Palaces”. The Young Pioneer Palaces were youth centres for the creative work and sport training of Young Pioneers and other schoolchildren. Trainers were designed to find and teach new talents. … Before the war, there were already more than one million players registered in clubs.
By 1955, there were over two million serious chess players in the USSR.
the Central Chess Club in Moscow had over 10,000 chess books and over 100,000 index cards of opening theory.
In 1955, there were 16 grandmasters in the Soviet Union.
In 1966, there were 3,540,000 registered chess players in the USSR.
In 1969, there were 32 grandmasters in the Soviet Union.
So here we have massive Government resources to encourage chess talent from an early age, resulting in millions of players.
As I expect you know, there weren’t many opportunities to make money or travel in the Soviet Union (apart from being in the ruling body!) Soviet grandmasters were subsidised by the state, could travel abroad and even got special State pensions.
And with all this, they managed less than 50 grandmasters.
You mention the Polgar sisters. A truly remarkable family. However only two of the sisters (Judit + Susan) made GM and (as far as I remember) only Judit ever got a rating above 2600.
(I would be happy to describe Judit as a superstar.)
As for ‘But the fact remains that anyone of sound mind can be an IM if not a GM, provided they put in the time and effort required’, I’ll finish on a personal note.
In one round of a prestigious Swiss tournament, I played a Russian FIDE Master (I’m also an FM.) After the game we compared notes. Both of us put in 10,000 hours on chess as teenagers, and played regularly for decades since then. Neither of us made it to IM. Are you saying we’re not of sound mind?!
I don’t mean to answer for Chessic, but I think the takeaway from things like the 10,000 hour rule is that good nurturing is far rarer than natural ability. By that, I mean that talent, even what we often call genius, is pretty ubiquitous. What we lack is the ability or opportunities to nurture that innate talent in productive ways. I would not be surprised to learn that there are lots of kids that have Magnus’s innate ability in chess, but didn’t/don’t have the exposure, training, and/or resources.
As much as the interview tried to make it seem as though he was a effortless genius who stumbled on to this track, they glossed over him practicing intensely prior to his matches alone and with coaches, and traveling with his father who has completely dedicated himself to making Magnus great. Those things are more responsible for what makes him great far more than his genes. In most ways, the term genius speaks more to a person’s circumstances and opportunities than it does the person.
There are 1,500 active NFL players and 750 or so active MLB players, so let’s say a superstar is in the top 1,000, so a GM. I don’t really know anything about your situation in life, so I can’t say why you’re not an IM or GM, but did you start with a coach at age 5? Did you put in 40-50 hours a week practicing? Has it been a full-time job since then? I said “If you put in the required time and money,” and I’m sure if we asked GMs, they’d say it’s a lot more than 10,000 hours required to reach their level.
I think the term “genius” is utterly useless. Even if we could isolate the genetic aspects of intelligence (and that’s not clear) and even if we show that it was a single ability and not a group of mental abilities which are important to different extents in different intellectual activities (which is also not clear), it still wouldn’t be a useful term. It seems to imply that there is some sort of a dividing line in people, where anybody above a certain level in intelligence is utterly untouchable compared to the mere peons below them in intelligence. Intelligence is a continuous spectrum. There’s no dividing line at which there’s some clear distinction between those below it in intelligence and those above it. It’s like claiming that there is some height which divides those above it and below it into two different groups.
Worrying about genius is apparently a Western thing (and particularly an American thing). If you ask most Asians about how good they’ve done in a particular intellectual subject, they will tend to talk about how hard they worked at studying it. If you ask most Americans, they will tend to talk about whether they are smart enough to understand the subject. Obviously, the degree to which one has success in any intellectual subject depends to some extent on intelligence and to some extent on how hard one has worked. No one knows precisely how much of each is important.
Most of what’s been discussed in this thread is irrelevant to the OP’s question. No, there doesn’t seem to be any real evidence that being good at chess requires anything more than (some set of) intellectual abilities and working hard at it. The evidence seems to show that a chess prodigy could probably drop chess and take up some other field and do well.
To put this into perspective, in 1969 there were only 75 GMs worldwide. That’s a remarkable proportion of the world’s chess geniuses to coincidentally happen to be born in a country that embraces chess.
And that number doesn’t tell the whole story, as soviet GMs were disproportionately represented at the very top of the rankings. They held the world championship for almost 25 years, then (after a 3 year interruption by Fisher) for another 25 years after that.
But there’s another factor why “only” half of all GMs were russian: there were restrictions on travelling out of the USSR. Anyone that wasn’t winning soviet tournaments (and therefore wasn’t a potential world champion) would have had difficulty getting permission to leave the country, and therefore would have fewer chances to pick up GM norms.
I notice that had to qualify your argument by assuming this hypothetical absent musician is a composer. But what about violinists? Let’s take Glenn Dicterow, the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. He’s a violinist in an orchestra, one of several. If he doesn’t exist, someone else takes his place. So is this wonderful and talented musician not contributing to create a better world? I suspect his fellow orchestra members would say he is, and so would the thousands of patrons of the NYP. Or forget the concertmaster, what about the hypothetical Joe Fiddlesticks in the back row of the violin section. Is he, despite his lack of star power (um, relatively speaking… I doubt Dicterow is all that big a star to most people), wasting his existence just because he’s not actually creating anything but rather one of many?
Or let’s get less hifalutin’. A highly skilled welder, construction worker, traffic cop, CPA, schoolteacher, lawyer, doctor (not a researcher, just your average GP) – all of them are replaceable by scores of others just as skilled. Do they contribute to the betterment of the world? Who are you, or any of us, to say they aren’t? To the people to whom their contributions directly affect, damn straight they are.
But those aren’t mere entertainers, you may say. Well, entertainment, however one contributes to it, is important to many of us. I think the belief that someone whose work is solely involved with entertaining others in some fashion is basically wasting his or her life leaves us with a world that’s significantly less interesting and delightful.
On a different subject, this conversation regarding innate genius versus hard work reminds me of this:
In short I think it’s both nature and nurture, innate ability and practice, that makes a chess player, ballerina, basketball star, writer or sculpter what he or she is. If Marcus chooses to stop playing chess, I imagine his ability to focus and strategize would transfer over to many fields that require those talents – assuming he’s as interested in whatever field we’re talking about.
That was just to make it simpler. If you take a different violinist, then that violinist is not available for some other orchestra. So there is a loss of value. If he was not going to play in another orchestra anyway, then yes, you could take out at least one violinist without losing anything.
My argument is not that entertainment is not important. Just that sports stars aren’t near as important as their wages imply. (This goes for anything where the wage is decided by a sort of tournament.)
And the replacement quarterback is likewise not available for some other football team. Both the musician and the athlete are, basically, entertainers, and so have qualitatively the same fundamental value.
But the thing is that the difference in salary between the best session musician in the world, and the 1000th best session musician is not that big, while the difference in salary between the best quarterback and the 1000th best quarterback is huge. I don’t see a reason that it would make a particularly big difference in entertainment if the players are in a game are just slightly worse, especially not a difference of the magnitude that the differences in overall salary would imply. So sports starts are overpayed with regards to their contribution to society, whereas session musicians are probably not.
Couple of things:
It’s not anywhere near certain right now that Carlsen is “better” than Aronian, Kramnik or Anand. Despite having a higher ELO.
The 60 Minutes piece was too worshipful for my tastes, although I understand that building up Carlsen’s significance helps to make the feature seem important. He’s young, fairly good looking, from an unlikely Western European country, and one of the five best players in the world, but he isn’t dramatically better than the world’s other great players.
The nature vs nurture argument seems absurd to me. Cite-wise, Wikipedia has the The New York Times Magazine giving a consensus view that IQ ratings are 85% determined by heredity, with the genetic influence becoming greater as the person grows to adulthood. (I know IQ can’t be defined beyond “does well on IQ tests” and I know it’s not chess, but it’s a well studied mental ability.)
Anecdotally, teachers will tell you that kids display a huge range of seemingly innate abilities and interests. Some people work hard on music and never become more than competent. Others treat it as a fun activity and play a variety of instruments with little effort. Not many 8 year olds play and compose like Mozart, not matter how intensely they’re trained.
Carlsen is commonly viewed as NOT being in the ranks of the highly motivated chess players. The guy in 60 Minutes calls him lazy. I presume that’s a relative term, but it makes it sound like many of the top 200 players could regularly beat him if effort was what mattered most.
Because a great many more people are interested in watching the best quarterback than the 1000th best, but the number of people who want to listen to any given musician varies much less. Seriously, if you think that the tickets to a pro sports game cost too much, then you’re free to not go. And if you don’t think the tickets cost too much, then you don’t actually have a problem with their salary after all, since you’re willingly paying it.