Who do you pick and what are your reasons?
Both have a killer instinct. Both hate to lose. I really don’t think either one could challenge the other in less than a decade. But if I had to choose I’d pick Jordan because chess has less margin for error.
If he’s as bad at chess as he was at baseball, I’d have to think that Jordan needs to just stick to basketball.
Well, I would go for Laskar or Alekhine to beat either (doesn’t help your question of course).
Really though, it is one sport/ game where more athleticism or better training doesn’t make a difference.
On the other hand, I understand Kasparov has some mad ball handling skills and can hit a 3-pointer blindfolded. He was feared at neighborhood chess tables and basketball courts alike.
Let’s assume they get training from the best coaches in each sport.
Kasparov would never beat Michael Jordan in basketball - ever. Jordan might pull off a 1 in a million match when Kasparov had a bad day.
This is a very simple question. Unless Jordan comes down with some crippling ailment that lands him in a wheelchair, and a cheap unwieldy one at that, there is no way Kasparov ever beats him in basketball. EVER. Full stop.
Jordan seems to be relatively intelligent, so I suppose with elite training, he could eventually beat Kasparov on a bad day. So by default, Jordan wins. Chess proficiency generally requires fewer innate, immutable gifts than professional sports do. So getting very good a chess will always be easier than playing professional basketball at an all-star level (esp. as a nearly 50-year old).
I assume the setup here is that we magically revert them both to their respective primes, and grant them immortality until one of them defeats the other?
If so, then Jordan…but if either one is expected to defeat the other within a normal human lifespan, I’m calling a draw.
Pretty much neither of them is going to beat the other at his own game unless his opponent suffers a stroke, so I give them an even chance.
Getting very good at chess takes about 30 years.
You can still be world-class at chess aged 60, so I’d back Kasparov to beat Jordan first when they’re both that old.
I don’t know, I think there are a wider range of injuries that could incapacitate a basketball player than a chess player. Brain damage would take out both, but the basketball player could also be laid low by things like a broken leg.
On the flip side, it’s much easier to cheat in chess. Your average five-year-old could beat Kasparov, if he were secretly receiving communication from top chess players and/or computers. But no amount of telling Kasparov what to do is going to enable him to out-ball Jordan.
Just to illustrate the yawning gulf between amateur and professional, cricketer George Gunn was once challenged to a single-wicket competition - a cricket one-on-one - by a butcher IIRC. Gunn won the toss and batted first. On about day 3 (!) he volunteered to use the heavy roller (specimen) as a wicket to give the bowler a six-foot target to aim for instead of a nine-inch one. A couple of days later he sportingly retired with about 500 runs to his name to give his exhausted challenger a turn at batting. 
Cheating aside, Jordan vs Kaspa would likely continue until one of the competitors was incapacitated by injury or illness. Top-flight players can easily give a Queen start to the likes of me, and I’m better than most hereabouts. There’s a story about Alekhine travelling by train and being invited to play by a stranger to pass the time, and removing one of his own Rooks before kicking off, just to make the game last a little longer. The stranger protested: “What makes you think you can give me a Rook start? You don’t even know me!”. “Exactly,” said Alekhine; “if I couldn’t give you a Rook start, I would know you.”
I utterly disagree with brickbacon about the innate gifts needed to play top-flight chess; most of the best players I’ve heard of have taken to the game like a duck to water, even if most aren’t quite like Capablanca, who learned how the pieces move by watching his father, teased said father for cheating in a game against a friend and then beat him handsomely the first time he ever played, being then only four years old.
Neither could ever beat the other.
I think this is probably correct.
Nevertheless what I want to emphasise is that everybody can see how brilliant Jordan is at basketball.
However you simply don’t know just how astonishingly good Kasparov is at chess until you analyse his games in depth (or play him.)
Kasparov could easily beat Jordan blindfold (hell, I could do it and I’m rated ELO 400 points lower!)
Kasparov has played clock simultaneous matches against National teams of Grandmasters. He beat the German team 3-1. He beat the Israeli team (average rating over 2600 ELO :eek: ) 7-1 in a double round match.
I organised a clock simul with 9 players against him. We had me and another player rated 2300+ as well as the World U-18 champion and the World Girls U-21 champion. He didn’t do any preparation, was never in any trouble and won 9-0.
It is literally inconceivable that Jordan could ever draw with Kasparov, let alone beat him.
From a theoretical position (i.e. the Elo rating tables), to give himself a chance of scoring 2 points out of 100, with 1 point for a win, 1/2 for a draw, and 0 for a loss, Jordan would need to get within 600 points of Kasparov’s rating (or, say, approximate rating). If Kasparov slipped to 2650 (which might take a little while, but it presumably would happen at some point), this would mean Jordan would need to get to 2050. This doesn’t require super-human ability, but it would be hard for a 50 year old beginner (though I don’t know that Jordan is a beginner). The actual relationship seems more generous, in favor of the weaker player, than the Elo rating system predicts.
It would be interesting to see specifically how things go with 2650 vs 2050, and how often the 2050 player stays around 2050 in the following rating period (so as to adjust for up and comers whose ratings do not reflect their actual strength). One would guess that the 2650 players are less likely to draw or lose against 2050 players than, say, 2500 vs 1900, but seeing that tested would be nice. Also, I would guess that the number of wins would be low, and the vast majority of upsets would be draws, but again, it would good to see that tested. I don’t have access to a database program that I can extract such stats from, at the moment, unfortunately.
I guess I have to ask, what counts as “beating”? If winning one game off of Kasparov counts as winning, what would count as beating Jordan? Getting one basket, winning a game to 7, game to 11 or 21? What happens if Jordan sprains his ankle after going up 2-0?
I’d give Kasparov the edge just on the sprained ankle front, though I suppose Jordan might win a game if Kasparov has the flu.
Jordan would still have about 8 inches on him, have finely tuned basketball instincts and skills, and would likely be in much, much better shape. You can teach chess to a large extent, you can’t teach height. I don’t want to make it seems as though I think chess is easy. But I think it can be learned at a high level to a greater extent than basketball can.
While I general refer to your judgement on matters like this, do you think that if you took 10 years to study under Kasparov himself, and other current great players, you couldn’t eventually beat him even once?
Did you not read my reference to Kasparov (rated around 2800) beating four 2600 players simultaneously?
I am also confident that a 600 ELO point gap is at the limit of accuracy for the ELO system. So I would be surprised if a player 600 points below his opponent could score as much as 2% - and anyway am confident this would be only draws (i.e. no wins.)
As for a 50 year old beginner with no previous interest in chess achieving a rating of 2050 … no chance.
I’ve known keen players who had coaching, read books, played regularly for 40 years and achieved lifetime best ratings of … 1500.
I honestly don’t think you realise what a ‘high level’ in chess means!
I taught myself chess out of a book, then played and studied obsessively for at least 10,000 hours. Once I joined a club and started competitive chess, it took me just 6 years to reach ELO 2200.
I’ve played in the British Championship about 10 times (always scoring above 50%), got the FIDE Master title and achieved a 2390 rating high.
I have never lost to an opponent rated 600 points below me (I’ve drawn once - and for that had to put up with a lot of banter from my team-mates.)
For the last 5 years (I’m semi-retired) I just play in a local League, where I score about 85% (no losses) against players of my strength or less. There’s one Grandmaster in the league (rated 200 points above me.) Over 10 games (we play twice a year), I have 1 draw and 9 losses.
No, I would not beat Kasparov ever. :eek:
Kasparov is absurdly good. One might think off the scale good. But I still want to have a go at some sort of statistical analysis. And it is not absurd to suggest that he will (or would if he kept playing) drop to around 2650 strength.
What about the following argument; Karpov has one of the best tournament victories of all time, dominated chess for about 10 years, and was otherwise right at the top for 20 or so years, so it is inconceivable he could lose a game in less than 15 moves. But it’s not inconceivable, because he has done it. And that is the aspect of the game that is of relevance, the mistakes, not the absurdly good parts.
See the link in my previous post; practice bears out that the player rated 600 points worse scores *better *than 2%.
That may be the case, I don’t know much about adults that start chess. I thought 20-30 year olds could do it, I’m not sure about that, and even if that is the case, maybe 50 is just far, far too late.
The OP doesn’t specifically mention what kind of basketball they’d be playing. Is it HORSE, 1 on 1? If it’s either of those, then I think that Kasparov would win much sooner than Jordan. You can get wildly lucky in HORSE sooner or later. In 1 on 1, it would take longer but sooner or later, Kasparov would get lucky enough just by staying beyond the arch at putting up 3’s.
A bad/mediocre/good chess player cannot beat a grandmaster in the same way because there’s no element of luck involved.