Jess Willards athletic background

You’re right—you can tell by their clueless opening moves that they’re clearly not good chess players. Gets worse when they give away a piece a few moves later and then fail to see the obvious checkmate threat a few moves after that.

 

Holy ****, are you sure that's real? He made about as many mistakes as it's possible to make in so few moves. He has no sense of how easily a knight can be fenced in by pawns if you don't pay attention, he brought his queen out far too early for no apparent reason and seemingly eager to trade (?) which would have weakened his already bad pawn structure and opened up the center, which he made no discernible attempt to control, and by opening up his flank on both sides he quickly made it impossible to castle on one side and pointless to do so on the other.

Finally, you'd be hard pressed to set up the same number of pieces on the board in such a way as to illustrate a more easily foreseeable checkmate.

 

BIG pimpin'.

 

I'm picturing a Constitutional Convention style thread where Glass City Cobra presides as moderator over delegates from both factions, as they hammer out the official Classic rules for comparing eras.

 

"Why do I have to be John Gay?"

"Cuz you're a fa**ot!"

"Joe, come on. I'll be James Madison, How about that?"

"NO, anudda guy on anudda forum is James Madison. I pick the names. Every time I get one of these capers together everybody wants to be Mista Jefferson and no one wants to back down cuz they don't know eachutha. So I pick."

 

This all may very well be true. But being a good athlete does not neccesarily mean that you are going to be a great fighter.
Mark Gastineau, Ed "Too Tall" Jones, and Michael Grant are just a few examples.

 

I know what you're saying, and I agree mostly. I think beating the program at 1900 or 2100 is pretty darn good imo. All I would comment on is the notion that a move might not "make sense" to a grandmaster. I think some of the best grandmasters of all time, like a Tal or even a Kasparov to some degree made a habit of complicating play to force their foe away from opening theory and set lines of play in the middle game. Tal sometimes did moves that made zero sense, and he didn't even know where his end game was, but he knew that he could outplay people when complication arose, and would sacrifice major pieces to complicate the board. Fischer had a famous comment when he lost to Tal 4 times in a row. It was something like "Even though I lost 4 games in a row, his play wasn't sound and I don't think particularly good". Something like that. The play "didn't make sense" to Fischer, but that was the whole point.

 

Spendin Cheese

 

huh, always thought it was G's.