Originally posted by gaychessplayerI very much doubt that. the whole way how top players relate to chess has changed completely. the old champs were in essence amateurs if you compare them with the modern professional players. chess was something they did in addition to their 'real' jobs, now the job of the top players is playing top level chess. it makes all the difference.
I don't think that the players of yesteryear would be better than today's stars, but I think they'd be just as good because, in my humble "A-player" opinion, chess is mostly about pouncing on tactical opoportunites and not allowing the opponent the same opportunities. Fischer himself marveled at how "modern" Staunton's games were!
Morphy had a thoro ...[text shortened]... y, even though he didn't have a treatise like Nimzovich's "My System" to learn from.
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Originally posted by wormwoodI disagree. The brightest minds are always the brightest minds. Those brightest minds already have well beyond basic knowledge. If anything their uniqueness would give them an edge if they were given time to learn the modern game(which I doubt would take a year).
I very much doubt that. the whole way how top players relate to chess has changed completely. the old champs were in essence amateurs if you compare them with the modern professional players. chess was something they did in addition to their 'real' jobs, now the job of the top players is playing top level chess. it makes all the difference.
Originally posted by Orange PeelI don't think it has anything (or much) to do with brightness. Think of it this way .. the language of chess has changed in the past 200 years. As allegory; it's like saying the old masters were native english speakers but the modern masters are native spanish speakers. In both cases the alphabet (pieces/rules) are the same but the vocabulary and grammar have changed. Is it possible for an intelligent english speaker to learn spanish fluently in a year? Of course! But it will take decades more to understand the particular idioms of the new language and that is where the old masters would get caught over and over again .. in the subtle nuances of chess at master level that has developed over the past 200 years. I think in particular the modern study of the endgame would be hard to get a handle on in a year. Remember, all of the modern theory is intuitive to the modern masters, they don't have to think about it, it is ingrained in them from thousands of games. Any practitioner of a skill that is learned in a relatively short time will struggle against someone that can intuitively use that skill, the difference in natural intelligence would need to be considerable to compensate.
I disagree. The brightest minds are always the brightest minds. Those brightest minds already have well beyond basic knowledge. If anything their uniqueness would give them an edge if they were given time to learn the modern game(which I doubt would take a year).