Author: Charles Milton Ling
Date: 12:39:16 04/12/99
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On April 12, 1999 at 01:02:59, Nacho Bidnuz wrote: >I seriously question the statement that the GM title is inflated. Although I >haven't heard any arguments that Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand and the rest of >today's top ten or so players would do poorly against the best players of twenty >or thirty years ago, many have said that today's "ordinary GM's" would have been >nobodies in the old days. > When I look around I see guys like Shaked, Norwood, and the rest of the >under-2600 GM crowd who seem to be no worse than the average GM's of the old >days such as Evans, Lombardy, Keene, etc. Maybe Fischer at his peak was good >enough to beat God at HIS peak, but that doesn't mean that the number 200 player >today isn't as good as or better than the number 80 player in Fischer's day. >Sometimes I feel like I'm arguing with the sort of people who think Babe Ruth >was the greatest simply because they were 16-year-old baseball fanst in 1927. > >Nacho What it simply boils down to (for me) is this: If you are a GM and there are over 500 people in the world who have a statistical expectancy to win against you, you really should ask yourself how "grand" you are. It is not necessary to ask the unanswerable question "then and now - how do they compare?"; that is a separate matter. A GM in the 50s and 60s was one of the top (choose a low two-digit number, it will depend on the year selected) players in the world, and everybody knew it, saw it, and respected it. Charley
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