OpenChess

Incidentally, what’s your opinion on the computerisation of chess and the fact that quite a long time ago machines surpassed the strength of human play?

It’s hard to give a clear answer, just as it’s also hard to talk about the role of computers in life in general. The computer helps a lot, but at the same time it creates a mass of temptations which are hard to combat. I’ve gone through a bunch of different computer addictions. The last one was playing checkers. I would simply go onto the site and play checkers for hours on end, until you no longer get up from your desk, and have square eyes (Translator’s note: literally – “a square head”). Just today, before coming to this interview, I went onto the site and played a game, lost and told myself: “That’s it! I won’t play checkers anymore! It’s over!” I sensed it was a good sign that I lost the game, and I’m grateful to my opponent for winning. But I don’t play chess on the internet. Obviously I treat chess as something more serious, and therefore I don’t play internet blitz. I know there are grandmasters who play there, but I think it would only do me harm.

But I don’t have any fixed idea that classical chess has exhausted itself. I believe that other types of chess are nevertheless just for fun. You can see that classical chess hasn’t exhausted itself even just by looking at the games from a super-tournament – you’ll find a huge number of mistakes are made by even the best chess players – never mind the rest… So that means the game is essentially difficult, and even more so as new discoveries appear constantly, particularly with help from computers. For example, no-one could previously have imagined that the queen ending with extra g and h pawns is, it turns out, a draw!