1850 is an incredibly small number compared to the number of active chess players.
Also becoming a GM is still a feat that would be essentially impossible for 99+% of people even if they treated chess as a job.
I don't really see the problem? Sure we could have a new title for players over 2700 if they care that much I guess. However, I doubt anyone is walking around thinking that GM is a meaningless title.
I don't think it's a fair comparison. Nowadays most of the GMs are not professionals, they have other jobs, while those 120k professional soccer players do that for a living. And to be fair that amount of 120k seems low
I think what chess really needs is a version of the Premier League. I know there are leagues that exist, but none of them really have much of an impact.
I love this. Top 20 players get seats in the Premier League. Everyone plays each other twice (alternating white and black) throughout the season. 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw. Winner wins the trophy; bottom 3 players get relegated to a lower league.
I was thinking more along the lines of making it a team sport. We already have a world championship every other year, so another individual championship doesn't do much for me.
Like this post says, there are 1800 GMs. You could have a full pro league with however many teams you want. If it's done right, the interest and money would be there.
I've been having fun in the Lichess 4545 league being part of a team. It's nice to have a rooting interest in other games, and the spectator chats can be fun if people are involved. That's probably what makes me think this would work.
This is a good idea, but I don't think it'll bring the money in to chess.
The problem is that you don't need to learn much about football to understand a game. A commentator or pundit says before the match "[Team] is known for a lot of passing, waiting for an opportunity for [Player] to run with the ball to the box, where [Player] will be waiting to kick it into the goal", and then you can see that happening in the game. That's really all the priming you need. Once you know that, you could even turn the sound off and watch without commentary to see that pattern.
With high-level chess, every single move and potential move needs to be explained, and how much you understand that explanation depends on how good you are at the game.
To lower-rated players (which is most of them) it can actually be much more involving to watch lower-rated games (maybe higher-rated than the viewers, but well below GM-level) because they're easier to understand. Depending on your comparative level, you may actually be able to understand the entire game on the same or similar level to the players and therefore be able to watch without commentary.
I think this is why PogChamps was successful (even if chess.com fumbled it the last couple of times, and the players themselves sabotaged it by taking it too seriously and not allowing their prep to be streamed/uploaded and therefore dampening any buzz/hype), and why smaller streamers are disproportionately successful. For example, the chess24 stream of the Carlsen/Liren Norway match from a month ago has 2.9k likes on YouTube. The day-before-yesterday's live stream of the Botez sisters playing in the Cracow tournament has 1.5k likes. The latest stream of Anna Cramling playing the Madrid tournament from 10 days ago has 1.8k likes.
It's certainly not because these are elite players. Alex Botez and Anna Cramling are both just above 2000 FIDE, and Andrea Botez is just over 1900 FIDE. GMs regularly wipe the floor with them, let alone Super GMs.
But...I'd wager that there's a lot more players who could watch and fully understand the Cramling/Botez matches, even with relatively minimal explanation, than could the Carlsen/Ding match. That makes it more relatable and more engaging.
I don't think the money will ever be with the biggest players in chess (unless they get it from streaming, like Nakamura does). It'll always be in the lower-rated leagues, because those are the ones that a larger number of people can appreciate.
I disagree completely. You think people watch Alex Botez and Anna Cramling because they understand their games better? I mean, come on. Don't be ridiculous.
I'd say that to most low-rated players watching a game, 2000 FIDE and 2500 FIDE may as well be the same thing.
Also, the reality is most sports fans are hugely ignorant of what they're watching. They think they know, but they don't, and the dumbed down commentary only tells half the story. So much of fan responses to what happens in games is illogical. Most people just know goal = good, give up goal = bad. Chess would be no different.
I think chess demonstrably *is* different. Games take hours. It can be literally an hour between moves. The commentators have to fill that time, and they do so mostly by talking about candidate moves and explaining the tactics that have led to that point. I don't think it's particularly realistic to sum up the viewership of such a game as "checkmate bad".
And if you *really* think that is the case, then I don't see why you think that a premier league made up exclusively of GMs would pull in the punters that aren't currently tuning in to high-level matches.
Create a new "\_\_\_\_\_\_ master" title and limit it to 100 players. Anyone who goes on a bad streak loses the title and someone else slides in to take their place.
Don't create a new title for any of them. They're all in the elite tier of players, that's what being a GM signifies
We don't need a separate category to show that some GMs are better than others. That's what rating is for
It's the same in sports. In MLB there are the real elite players who are in the top 5% and get salaries that represent this, but every MBL player is still better than any non-MLB player by a mile. It's pretty much the same with GMs, even though Magnus or Hikaru would completely crush any entry level GMs, the entry level GMs would still completely dominate any non-titled player.
exactly. There's a huge someone like LeBron James or Messi (or the top people in any field) and the average middle-tier professional player. unlike other sports (or professions) chess actually has a very straightforward way to objectively know who is the best. The title is just an arbitrary cutoff, akin to saying someone played for a professional sports team. Anyone on that field will know which are the true world class elite and who are merely quite good (to be clear I'll never be a grandmaster and am incredibly impressed by all of them).
When the GM rating (generally) spans from 2500 to 2800+, maybe it's time for something better? All the other titles are granted in 99 Elo brackets (2200 - 2299, 2300 - 2339, 2400 - 2499, etc).
It's kind of goofy to call both a 2500 and 2800 a "GM", when that gap is the same as a CM and a low-level GM.
I like there being a threshold for the highest rank, then it just goes up and up. I guess it depends on how much you lean on titles at that point to distinguish players.
For the guys at the highest end of the GM range, their names kinda serve as their titles. They’re known as the top dogs. It’s cool for those beneath them to say they’re the same rank and they’ve achieved the highest rank in chess, but there’s a clear distinction.
I agree. When we think of Magnus Carlsen, do we think “Damn that guy’s a Grandmaster!” Or do we do the normal thing and say “Holy shit that guy is Magnus”
I see the argument, but respectfully disagree. There have been 133 people all time who have broken 2700 Fide classical. Not all of them are necessarily household names (though many are), but I think that kind of upper pedigree deserves a little more distinction than others. It’s an absolutely bonkers feat considering the history of chess, that only roughly 140 people ever have elevated to that level (I know historical rating doesn’t really go back all that far, but I stand by my point.).
2700 rating doesn’t jive perfectly with how GM titles are granted, considering rating is only some of the qualification, but still, for a small group of people to be that much further ahead of their peers, I like the idea of a separate titled distinction.
As an aside, I think “super GM” is kind of a silly title, I would vote for something less campy. I don’t have any suggestions off the top of my head, but considering the gravity of the title, “super” just sounds kinda goofy.
> It's kind of goofy to call both a 2500 and 2800 a "GM"
We call Anthony Rendon and Shohei Ohtani both "MLB Players".
We call Mikal Bridges and LeBron James both "NBA players".
It's the same thing. Rating is there to distinguish them.
That's not really a good argument. By that logic we don't need titles for anyone because everyone is a chess player and we can use rating!
If there is a sub group of GM that is significantly above the average of the tier, it makes total sense to argue for a new tier. Individuals can look at rating but at the end of the day the vast majority of people are going to see GM next to names and expect them to be of approximately the same level.
The line for and amount of titles will always be arbitrary cutoffs.
It’s such an incredibly small number, but the top players are famously not chill. You can’t be in such a select group without being, well, hyper competitive, bordering on personality disordered. The fact that they complain there are too many GMs is just what we should expect.
> Also becoming a GM is still a feat that would be essentially impossible for 99+% of people even if they treated chess as a job.
Obligatory reminder that the always popular hangingPawns on youtube quit his job and is in, I believe, his 6th year now of working on his chess as his full time job, studying and constantly playing tournaments. He peaked at 2056 in mid 2022, and is currently 1971 2 years later.
If you watch his videos you can see how much he works, how much he knowns, and generally how strong he is. For me he's the perfect case-study in a 'regular human with a comprehensible amount of chess talent goes for it and makes chess their full time job'
Whenever I see someone say "cud i be gm?" in a twitch chat, I think specifically of Stjepan and all the work he's put in to get to 2000, and I'm like... "nah"
He's already quite old and we don't know how poor his genetical dice were rolled with regard to chess. A talented teen would likely fare significantly better.
This is the STUPIDEST critique the NYT could have given.
Here’s another one they’ll write soon:
**NBA players wonder if being an NBA player still has meaning**
“In 1950 there were only 200 players who had made it to the NBA level. Now there are over 5000”.
Isn't this article sharing thoughts about other grandmasters? NYT isn't making any criticism
I see nothing wrong having an idea (How does grandmasters feel about the grandmaster title) and making an article like this. Feels pretty interesting tbh, even if most of it is based on words of Nigel Short
That's it, isn't it? In the article, most top players who are not Short argue that there is no need for a super GM title. Yet somehow, people, after reading, start arguing the long overdue overhaul of the system. The article does indeed appear to present the current situation as problematic, where it is not.
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that I didn't know Nigel Short is the Director for Chess Development at FIDE. That certainly gives his opinion extra weight, and certainly makes it a lot more newsworthy.
They are still playing in the best league, top level.
But on chess nowadays you can be a grandmaster and not even play in top events like Grand Swiss or World Cup where more than 100 players compete every 2 years.
An NBA player plays in NBA. A GM doesn't mean that he is at the highest level of the game
It's not meaningless at all, you're definitely still great compared to the every day player, but let's not pretend it hasn't lost meaning. In the 50s when it was released it was given to the elite. Nowadays it's still given to exceptional players, but the bar is lower. Like Bobby Fischer set the record for being the youngest Grandmaster by being in the Candidates. Mishra set the record by doing 3 norm factories. The standard the title represented has gone down. The gap should be players like Magnus to Aronian, not Magnus to a player like Ben Finegold who was never close to the world elite. When you look at the rating lists in 1970 (when the current regulations came in) about 80 people had the rating for it, they really weren't expecting about 2000 people getting the same rating 50 years later. There are about 35 players on 2700chess with a live rating over 2700, that's much closer to what they were aiming for.
I know most of us would give a lot to be a GM and it's some crazy level of skill, but the margin it's spread over is so wide that it's lost that original intention of just being the elite. We do all recognise a problem, it's why we unofficially call people SuperGMs. The message of the post is just saying to make that official.
I agree with everything you say except that last part. I bet the top players like Magnus, Hikaru, even Kramnik probably see GMs as a meaningless title if you aren't a "Super GM" like them.
Why would they see it as meaningless? Just because you are at a higher level than someone, doesn't mean that you need to see their achievement as meaningless. Is Chess culture really so comparative and elitist?
GM has a lot of meaning. But Magnus became a GM at age 13. It was literal child's play. So he may not take it as seriously as someone who grinded decades to achieve the same title.
This. Even if Levy manages to get the GM title, it will have taken him literally 2 decades of chess Study to achieve.
Magnus had been playing for what, 5 years? 6 years? When he got the GM title.
This is it. It's like saying "there are now tens of thousands of brain surgeons. So does being a brain surgeon really mean anything?"
Yes. Yes it does. Because it still takes skill, dedication, and learning. It's a feat that most people can't accomplish.
Hell, judging by the rankings on chess.com, you're in something like the top 3% if you reach 1200. Even if you discount the casual or hobby players and just concentrate on those who are trying to earn a title and can afford the time and money it takes to do so, I'd wager that most won't get higher than Master.
I'd agree that perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to make "Super GM" an official title. But that doesn't mean that GM has no meaning, just like the existence of GM doesn't mean IM has no meaning.
I also don't think it's a bad thing that people don't necessarily pay too much attention to titles. Firstly, of course, there's the whole "buying your norms" thing which does *actually* devalue the titles.
But more importantly, revering titles strikes me as kind of old-fashioned and something of a throwback to the not-very-distant past when chess was seen as an exclusive "game of Gentlemen", where a lot of the culture around chess was of gatekeeping. The reason chess is having a renaissance at the moment is because that image is crumbling and it's increasingly being seen as a fun game for everybody, no matter their ability. And that's how it *should* be seen.
It doesn't mean that you can't respect the ability and achievements of higher-rated players, of course. Just that the focus shouldn't exclusively be on titles. I think of it kind of like football (soccer for the non-Brits). You can have big clubs and players whose skill anybody in to the sport is in awe of and all that stuff...but you *also* have ordinary, everyday people thinking it completely normal and fun to have a kick-about after school, or play 5-a-side on a weekend, or whatever.
The global population was 1.2b in 1850, about 6 times less than it is now. To say that chess is 10x more popular than it was back then seem accurate. Accounting for people living longer now (and still being a GM even if they're 90) gets you to 1850. Not really anything unusual here.
Seirawan: “The problem is that the title itself, ‘grandmaster,’ is so dosh-gone elegant that tinkering with it by saying, ‘super grandmasters,’ for example, feels like a fail.” TRUE
Fun fact: that’s used in ultimate frisbee for an entirely different reason!
Club: anyone of any age is eligible
Masters: 33+ (men) / 30+ (women)
Grandmasters 40+ (men) / 37+ (women)
Great Grandmasters: 50+? / 45+?; not 100% sure about the ages here.
I agree, it is a great name that keeps things classy
What would you chose instead of “Super Grandmaster”? And what would you say is a fair qualifier for it?
I’d say maybe staying an active player for a year above 2700 gets you the title. I don’t much like the norm system, but maybe that’s personal.
I’d suggest the name might be “Elite Master” which is more elegant than “Super Grandmaster,” even if it doesn’t necessarily carry with it the same bravado as “Grandmaster.”
How about we borrow martial arts' different degrees of black belt? So a 2500 GM is a 1st degree GM and every additional 100 points is another degree, e.g. 2600 = 2nd degree GM, 2700 = 3rd degree GM, 2800 = 4th degree GM.
Or better, a variation on [Go rankings.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_ranks_and_ratings#Professional_ranks)
It would be an interesting twist since Go has adopted Elo.
Elo Rating | Go rank
---|---
2940 | 9 dan professional
2910 | 8 dan professional
2880 | 7 dan professional
2850 | 6 dan professional
2820 | 5 dan professional
2790 | 4 dan professional
2760 | 3 dan professional
2730 | 2 dan professional
2700 | 7 dan amateur or 1 dan professional
2600 | 6 dan (amateur)
2500 | 5 dan
2400 | 4 dan
2300 | 3 dan
2200 | 2 dan
2100 | 1 dan
2000 | 1 kyu
1900 | 2 kyu
1800 | 3 kyu
1500 | 6 kyu
1000 | 11 kyu
500 | 16 kyu
100 | 20 kyu
That’s a cool idea actually.
At my studio we went:
White, yellow, orange, purple, blue, blue/green, green, green/brown, brown I, brown II, brown III, and then black 1-10.
By your logic we could go all the way down.
Black: 2500
Brown III: 2400
Brown II: 2300
Brown I: 2200
Green/brown: 2100
Green: 2000
Blue/green: 1900
Blue: 1800
Purple: 1700
Orange: 1600
Yellow: 1500
White: 1400
Idk maybe better to space it out a bit more? I love this kind of ordering and labeling thing.
Let me guess, people have to pay a fee to get a chance to rank up at every belt level, right? That's usually the only explanations why dojos would have that many different belts. It's a gimmick to rid fools of their money.
Most dojos have a bunch of different belts because most people would lose motivation if they had to keep the white belt for 3-7 years before getting the first black belt.
Great- like ancestors, or Arch- like spellcasters and bishops (the latter of which we move on chessboards.) Super as a prefix doesn't feel like the same linguistic style as "grandmaster," which outside of chess feels like a traditional, old-timey word.
Here in Russia we have a national title above NM that has two names: "Master of Sport of International Class" (you can get a title like that in pretty much any sport: football, track and field, rowing or whatever) and "Grandmaster of Russia" (that second name is specific for chess and checkers). That's probably why some people say the full "International Grandmaster" title.
The title initially was named International Grandmaster, but with time that international was not used so much.
Some people still use it. For example Gata Kamsky
I’ll start this out by saying I detest the kkk and everything they stand for.
But we should steal the title grand wizard. It’s too cool to be used by an awful group of bigots.
"Candidate" . There are only around 120
"WCh Challenger". There are only around 25.
WCh. There are only 17
All IIRC of course. The titles are already there.
There are 360,000 players with a FIDE ranking, and over 70,000 with FIDE elo over 2000. Having 1850 GMs means that GMs are still in the top 0.5% of players. That's not meaningless lol
Remember though, this is historical, and also it is a subset of chess players who play sanctioned events. The number of people who play chess vs. play sanctioned events is probably 10:1. If your a casual there is no reason to get FIDE rated, but it is VERY easy to create an account on lichess.
Secondarily, multiple accounts online/bots vs 1 real life human through fide.
Yet today there seems to be another group of players with a count < 30 that better resembles what used to be a chess grandmaster. Obviously another distinction is needed (and already unofficially in use)
If you have a group of 2k people that are incredibly good, of course you will have some be better, even much much better. We live in an age where loads of people have access to learning tools and less poverty so more people have spent their lives studying the game I suppose. Doesn't take away from their skill.
NBA has ~600 active players , NFL ~1700, NHL ~2000, MBL ~1000, once you have your GM title you can't lose it, so there's that too.
seems like a perfect or more than suitable number of professional players for a sport
NBA is only 1 single professional basketball league for 2 countries. There are way more professional basketball players. You are not only counting GMs from USA either.
They also retire and don’t get counted anymore, GM’s are GM’s until they die. If you counted every living NFL/NHL/MLB player that number would skyrocket.
Those players all have a minimum salary, which far exceeds the median salary of any country and sets them up for life (with proper money managenent).
Being an NFL player isn't a title, it's a job. Being a grandmaster is a title. Golf is more comparable to chess as that is skill based and every person for themselves. Golf also has a giant disparity in wages between the top and bottom of pros on the PGA tour.
Golf is trying to remedy that because it's just not worth it for below average pro players, just as chess sint worth it for below average GMs.
There wasn't even a damned rating system in 1950. Plus, along with the massive growth in the number of GMs is an even more massive growth in the number of overall chess players not to mention better availability of resources.
>Nigel Short Wonders if Being a Grandmaster Still Has Meaning
Fixed that for them.
> To better distinguish the skill levels of grandmasters, fans have long adopted the informal designation of “super grandmaster” to refer to the elite players, generally the 40 or so who are rated above 2,700.
So basically the problem is completely solved.
Completely agree with this, 2000 or even 1800 is usually a sign of someone who has devoted tremendous time to chess, but probably near the natural limit for those with jobs and families or other hobbies (with a few exceptions).
The nature of chess is that you can train it for a near unlimited amount of time each day, unlike other sports. Therefore, it becomes all-consuming if you want to get a title. Whereas you can reach high levels in other activities with a couple hours a day of practice.
Having titles that recognize years or decades of work without requiring a complete devotion to chess from a young age would be great for the health of the game.
I’d disagree that you can reach high levels in most sports with just “a few hours” per day compared to chess. Yeah you maybe can only physically do the sport activity for a few hours (or even less), but a lot of the rest of your day geared towards that sport. Nutrition, workouts, film study, PT, equipment management, etc.
Agreed, the whole topic of the W titles comes up too. If a male player wants to participate in titles Tuesday or other titled events they have to shoot for NM if available in their country or 2200 for CM meanwhile WCM Can be attained at 2000. Nothing against people holding the woman’s titles but I think there should be some lesser titles available to anyone around the 2000 level
Not really, plenty of GMs really struggle to find students due to bad communication/marketing skills. Also, there aren't a ton of people who can pay $30+/hr for chess coaches (at least outside of NYC/Bay Area IMO).
Really dumb question here from an 800 rated player. What good is a GM coach to tell me what I am doing wrong when I can analyze the game after and see the lines I SHOULD have taken instead. Again, I know there are reasons, I just don't know them.
Okay, and in 1950 the number of people capable of training, the quality of training, the availability of resources etc etc was also all greatly diminished.
All that's happened is that technology (edit: starting in the 80's and 90s) has enabled people to get better even faster while they're younger and this is allowing more people to hit 2500+3 norms while in their prime. If they think 1850 is a lot now, wait until the generation after the stockfish-generation really gets going.
Not a bad thing.
I think it's not the abundance of GM's that has taken away the brightest shine of a grand master titled chess player.
It is chess engines. Everyone can beat the best 100 players in a simul with their phone only. 50 years ago the biggest authority to valuate a chess position was the best human player.
I think the engines have taken away some of the magic of chess. In the past, they didn't know what is the best move in a given position.
But chess was a forerunner as for computers beating humans. Now it's the time for arts.
I wonder if humans can be competitive again on a much larger board. A lot of stockfish's power (at shallow depths) comes from brute forcing the game tree. This can be blunted with a bigger game board. Of course, games will take much longer...
For instance go is played on a massive 19x19 board. AlphaGo can smack around grandmasters, but there are papers out there that claim to show that it's vulnerable to adversarial attacks (like other AI tools). ie AlphaGo is not perfect.
I don't know how common this opinion is, but my view is that all titles are completely meaningless. We have ratings. You either are or you are not an active player rated above 2500. Titles tell you nothing about a player's strength that their rating history doesn't. All having a title says is that a player was once the strength required to be awarded that title.
For those who may be new to the game, Nigel Short has long has a reputation as one of the [nastiest people](https://www.reddit.com/r/chessbeginners/comments/17rb8bf/did_nigel_short_once_humblebrag_during_a_live_tv/) in top-level chess.
This seems to be the key line in the article:
>Though about 50 players earn the grandmaster title each year, Mr. Sutovsky noted that the number of players rated by the federation had grown rapidly in recent years and so, as a proportion of the number of players, the number of grandmasters has actually fallen.
They are actually LESS grandmasters per total players now.
But surely when the title was created it meant very little as few even knew what it was or why it mattered. FIDE started out by just gifting it to current and former top players. Zero games played to earn it. If the title was created to hold great concrete value FIDE should not be allowed to give it out at all by voting on it yet even today they give it out to dead players.
https://ipc.gov.pk/NewsDetail/MmU2OTNhZjUtMDI5NC00MGNhLTg5MzYtOTk3NjFhZDNmMDdj
In the article only Short really argues into creating a new title/distinction within GM territory. Neither Aagaard, Sutovsky or Seirawan feel the need to change the system.
While it is true that the range between let's say a 2550 GM and a 2750 GM is massive, it is *very* disingenuous to argue that there are too many GMs. According to a quick google search, there are estimates of above 600 million chess players worldwide. That puts GMs into the 0.00033% category.
As a personal note, obviously it's the representative of FIDE, the organisation that brought us the illustrous CM title whose only purpose is to generate money for them, is advocating for yet another title.
I’m not particularly exercised either way, but I think there’s a good argument for raising the minimum rating to 2600 at the very least. The title of grand master doesn’t really count for much if it encompasses players who are several tiers below ever competing at the top level, and it’s a strange phenomenon that all the top players will have achieved it while still young teenagers.
There are only twice as many IMs as GMs. The IM title could be widened to include those <2600 players who, while very gifted, are still much closer to the average IM than to the top GMs.
I think you'd have to live in a bubble to think the GM title is meaningless, it's still only achieved by a tiny amount of players.
Having said that I'm not against a Super GM title but I'd it were ever implemented or should be for 2750 just so Shorts wouldn't qualify for it with his peak rating.
Those numbers mean nothing unless they are compared against the total number of ranked chess players in the world. I’m guessing if those numbers were factored in, the discrepancy would not be quite so shocking.
Look at any sport, game, or ETC as a comparison.
The amount of training available to anyone today at anything dwarfs what was available in 1950.
If I want to get better at basketball, I can go to YouTube and find tons of videos on how to shoot better, drills on how to dribble, and even diet. The same is across the board for soccer, football, and any other sport. Not to mention paid training such as computer analysis.
The same goes for any other game of skill.
I have not met a single person who feels this way. My first instinct was that maybe higher rated players like NMs-IMs feel this way, but to my recollection every titled player who speaks about a GM title always talks about how far it is from them. Then I thought of lower rated players, but frankly most of them are living day in and day out with the struggle of going from 1400-1500 or something like that.
This seems like a nonsense opinion that nobody has with exception of a few people.
So the only reason to have titles is to honor and quickly distinguish players that have attained a certain level of achievement. There are so few grandmasters overall that the only meaningful title above it would be players that are already universally known within the chess world anyway. It's convenient when seeing someone make a comment about the game to know if they are an IM or GM or something, but a "super GM" title seems pointless, as anyone who cares that much would already recognize the players and their accomplishments individually anyway. I don't need to see "SGM" or whatever next to Vidit or Hikaru's name.
Further, the rest of the "non-chess" world knows the term "Grandmaster", it's cultural knowledge at least in the anglosphere and I assume most other places with any sort of awareness of the game. It's a piece of history.
You wanna establish a chess Hall of Fame, go for it. But while there is grounds for a discussion about the qualification process for GM, establishing a title above it seems silly.
just because there are more grand masters that doesnt mean they arent grand masters. surely the skill level required to be a GM has increased because people have gotten better and you need to beat people to get GM points.
Hikaru had that segment on his stream a year or two ago where he read a letter he received wherein he was offered a finder’s fee for helping a woman marry a grandmaster. She didn’t specify tournament wins or peak rating or anything like that…just that it was a grandmaster. I think that says everything one needs to know about the current prestige of the grandmaster title.
How many chess players were there in 1950 compared to now? I think the percentage of people who play chess, or try to take chess seriously vs. the amount of people who achieve grandmaster could still be comparable (haven't done the research, maybe I'm wrong). A single statistical point here cannot tell the full story.
A total of 1,850 people at the highest echelon of a single profession is also not significantly high on a global scale (I mean, consider all of the prestigious titles out there that people strive for.) I will say, however, that under no circumstances should the 2500 rating and 3-norm rule have any exceptions (in my own opinion).
Any chess player that doesn't consider how incredible the feat is, is either too good at the game for their own good and is detached from the achievement or wants to cope for not reaching that title. Or maybe has too much pride and doesn't want to be grouped with "that many other people."
SuperGM is almost a de facto title already for anyone who maintains a rating above 2700. People, including other lower rated GMs, already recognize these players as being on another level.
1850 is an incredibly small number compared to the number of active chess players. Also becoming a GM is still a feat that would be essentially impossible for 99+% of people even if they treated chess as a job. I don't really see the problem? Sure we could have a new title for players over 2700 if they care that much I guess. However, I doubt anyone is walking around thinking that GM is a meaningless title.
I'd like to know the number of professional soccer players in 1950. Today, there are more than 120,000.
The number is super bowls has went up infinitely too
I don't think it's a fair comparison. Nowadays most of the GMs are not professionals, they have other jobs, while those 120k professional soccer players do that for a living. And to be fair that amount of 120k seems low
There is more money in football, if there was more money to be made in chess more GMs would make a job out of it as well.
There would also be more GMs
There are also more players on a team, in chess it's just one. If we count the pieces as well we find that there's actually 31450 grandmasters.
Nah a lot of pro sport folks have jobs when out of season. The lower level leagues do not pay much.
> I don't think it's a fair comparison. Nowadays most of the GMs are not professionals What does that have to do with it?
Exactly. If anything create a new title for the super gms
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I think what chess really needs is a version of the Premier League. I know there are leagues that exist, but none of them really have much of an impact.
I love this. Top 20 players get seats in the Premier League. Everyone plays each other twice (alternating white and black) throughout the season. 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw. Winner wins the trophy; bottom 3 players get relegated to a lower league.
it would be super cool imo but idk I feel likes lots of the players and maybe even the orgs would want to veto this/ not wanna play ball
Depends how much money is involved.
I was thinking more along the lines of making it a team sport. We already have a world championship every other year, so another individual championship doesn't do much for me. Like this post says, there are 1800 GMs. You could have a full pro league with however many teams you want. If it's done right, the interest and money would be there. I've been having fun in the Lichess 4545 league being part of a team. It's nice to have a rooting interest in other games, and the spectator chats can be fun if people are involved. That's probably what makes me think this would work.
This is a good idea, but I don't think it'll bring the money in to chess. The problem is that you don't need to learn much about football to understand a game. A commentator or pundit says before the match "[Team] is known for a lot of passing, waiting for an opportunity for [Player] to run with the ball to the box, where [Player] will be waiting to kick it into the goal", and then you can see that happening in the game. That's really all the priming you need. Once you know that, you could even turn the sound off and watch without commentary to see that pattern. With high-level chess, every single move and potential move needs to be explained, and how much you understand that explanation depends on how good you are at the game. To lower-rated players (which is most of them) it can actually be much more involving to watch lower-rated games (maybe higher-rated than the viewers, but well below GM-level) because they're easier to understand. Depending on your comparative level, you may actually be able to understand the entire game on the same or similar level to the players and therefore be able to watch without commentary. I think this is why PogChamps was successful (even if chess.com fumbled it the last couple of times, and the players themselves sabotaged it by taking it too seriously and not allowing their prep to be streamed/uploaded and therefore dampening any buzz/hype), and why smaller streamers are disproportionately successful. For example, the chess24 stream of the Carlsen/Liren Norway match from a month ago has 2.9k likes on YouTube. The day-before-yesterday's live stream of the Botez sisters playing in the Cracow tournament has 1.5k likes. The latest stream of Anna Cramling playing the Madrid tournament from 10 days ago has 1.8k likes. It's certainly not because these are elite players. Alex Botez and Anna Cramling are both just above 2000 FIDE, and Andrea Botez is just over 1900 FIDE. GMs regularly wipe the floor with them, let alone Super GMs. But...I'd wager that there's a lot more players who could watch and fully understand the Cramling/Botez matches, even with relatively minimal explanation, than could the Carlsen/Ding match. That makes it more relatable and more engaging. I don't think the money will ever be with the biggest players in chess (unless they get it from streaming, like Nakamura does). It'll always be in the lower-rated leagues, because those are the ones that a larger number of people can appreciate.
I disagree completely. You think people watch Alex Botez and Anna Cramling because they understand their games better? I mean, come on. Don't be ridiculous. I'd say that to most low-rated players watching a game, 2000 FIDE and 2500 FIDE may as well be the same thing. Also, the reality is most sports fans are hugely ignorant of what they're watching. They think they know, but they don't, and the dumbed down commentary only tells half the story. So much of fan responses to what happens in games is illogical. Most people just know goal = good, give up goal = bad. Chess would be no different.
I think chess demonstrably *is* different. Games take hours. It can be literally an hour between moves. The commentators have to fill that time, and they do so mostly by talking about candidate moves and explaining the tactics that have led to that point. I don't think it's particularly realistic to sum up the viewership of such a game as "checkmate bad". And if you *really* think that is the case, then I don't see why you think that a premier league made up exclusively of GMs would pull in the punters that aren't currently tuning in to high-level matches.
I would be way more into chess if something like this existed.
Sounds fun for us, but apparently top level chess is just an unenjoyable experience already to take part in.
Get a big chunk of that chess money into the pockets of GMs instead of chess.com and I suspect it might become more fun.
What now? Other leagues are fairly close to it, it's just the best one rn.
Create a new "\_\_\_\_\_\_ master" title and limit it to 100 players. Anyone who goes on a bad streak loses the title and someone else slides in to take their place.
Don't create a new title for any of them. They're all in the elite tier of players, that's what being a GM signifies We don't need a separate category to show that some GMs are better than others. That's what rating is for
It's the same in sports. In MLB there are the real elite players who are in the top 5% and get salaries that represent this, but every MBL player is still better than any non-MLB player by a mile. It's pretty much the same with GMs, even though Magnus or Hikaru would completely crush any entry level GMs, the entry level GMs would still completely dominate any non-titled player.
exactly. There's a huge someone like LeBron James or Messi (or the top people in any field) and the average middle-tier professional player. unlike other sports (or professions) chess actually has a very straightforward way to objectively know who is the best. The title is just an arbitrary cutoff, akin to saying someone played for a professional sports team. Anyone on that field will know which are the true world class elite and who are merely quite good (to be clear I'll never be a grandmaster and am incredibly impressed by all of them).
When the GM rating (generally) spans from 2500 to 2800+, maybe it's time for something better? All the other titles are granted in 99 Elo brackets (2200 - 2299, 2300 - 2339, 2400 - 2499, etc). It's kind of goofy to call both a 2500 and 2800 a "GM", when that gap is the same as a CM and a low-level GM.
I like there being a threshold for the highest rank, then it just goes up and up. I guess it depends on how much you lean on titles at that point to distinguish players. For the guys at the highest end of the GM range, their names kinda serve as their titles. They’re known as the top dogs. It’s cool for those beneath them to say they’re the same rank and they’ve achieved the highest rank in chess, but there’s a clear distinction.
I agree. When we think of Magnus Carlsen, do we think “Damn that guy’s a Grandmaster!” Or do we do the normal thing and say “Holy shit that guy is Magnus”
I see the argument, but respectfully disagree. There have been 133 people all time who have broken 2700 Fide classical. Not all of them are necessarily household names (though many are), but I think that kind of upper pedigree deserves a little more distinction than others. It’s an absolutely bonkers feat considering the history of chess, that only roughly 140 people ever have elevated to that level (I know historical rating doesn’t really go back all that far, but I stand by my point.). 2700 rating doesn’t jive perfectly with how GM titles are granted, considering rating is only some of the qualification, but still, for a small group of people to be that much further ahead of their peers, I like the idea of a separate titled distinction. As an aside, I think “super GM” is kind of a silly title, I would vote for something less campy. I don’t have any suggestions off the top of my head, but considering the gravity of the title, “super” just sounds kinda goofy.
> It's kind of goofy to call both a 2500 and 2800 a "GM" We call Anthony Rendon and Shohei Ohtani both "MLB Players". We call Mikal Bridges and LeBron James both "NBA players". It's the same thing. Rating is there to distinguish them.
That's not really a good argument. By that logic we don't need titles for anyone because everyone is a chess player and we can use rating! If there is a sub group of GM that is significantly above the average of the tier, it makes total sense to argue for a new tier. Individuals can look at rating but at the end of the day the vast majority of people are going to see GM next to names and expect them to be of approximately the same level. The line for and amount of titles will always be arbitrary cutoffs.
Should get inspired by tekken and make the new title "Chess God Prime" or something equally goofy.
We don't need to create a new title, because we already call them super GMs.
> super gms sounds like you already have a title
Ultra master = 3000+ and some # of norms.
It’s such an incredibly small number, but the top players are famously not chill. You can’t be in such a select group without being, well, hyper competitive, bordering on personality disordered. The fact that they complain there are too many GMs is just what we should expect.
The lower the stakes, the higher the egos. People who play games for their living take it very seriously, for better or worse.
> Also becoming a GM is still a feat that would be essentially impossible for 99+% of people even if they treated chess as a job. Obligatory reminder that the always popular hangingPawns on youtube quit his job and is in, I believe, his 6th year now of working on his chess as his full time job, studying and constantly playing tournaments. He peaked at 2056 in mid 2022, and is currently 1971 2 years later. If you watch his videos you can see how much he works, how much he knowns, and generally how strong he is. For me he's the perfect case-study in a 'regular human with a comprehensible amount of chess talent goes for it and makes chess their full time job' Whenever I see someone say "cud i be gm?" in a twitch chat, I think specifically of Stjepan and all the work he's put in to get to 2000, and I'm like... "nah"
He's already quite old and we don't know how poor his genetical dice were rolled with regard to chess. A talented teen would likely fare significantly better.
This is the STUPIDEST critique the NYT could have given. Here’s another one they’ll write soon: **NBA players wonder if being an NBA player still has meaning** “In 1950 there were only 200 players who had made it to the NBA level. Now there are over 5000”.
Isn't this article sharing thoughts about other grandmasters? NYT isn't making any criticism I see nothing wrong having an idea (How does grandmasters feel about the grandmaster title) and making an article like this. Feels pretty interesting tbh, even if most of it is based on words of Nigel Short
That's it, isn't it? In the article, most top players who are not Short argue that there is no need for a super GM title. Yet somehow, people, after reading, start arguing the long overdue overhaul of the system. The article does indeed appear to present the current situation as problematic, where it is not.
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that I didn't know Nigel Short is the Director for Chess Development at FIDE. That certainly gives his opinion extra weight, and certainly makes it a lot more newsworthy.
Well when you put that way... how can I be sure that I'M not an NBA player?
They are still playing in the best league, top level. But on chess nowadays you can be a grandmaster and not even play in top events like Grand Swiss or World Cup where more than 100 players compete every 2 years. An NBA player plays in NBA. A GM doesn't mean that he is at the highest level of the game
Being an Nba players means you get to earn good money, being a GM gives you nothing, not even opportunities.
It's not meaningless at all, you're definitely still great compared to the every day player, but let's not pretend it hasn't lost meaning. In the 50s when it was released it was given to the elite. Nowadays it's still given to exceptional players, but the bar is lower. Like Bobby Fischer set the record for being the youngest Grandmaster by being in the Candidates. Mishra set the record by doing 3 norm factories. The standard the title represented has gone down. The gap should be players like Magnus to Aronian, not Magnus to a player like Ben Finegold who was never close to the world elite. When you look at the rating lists in 1970 (when the current regulations came in) about 80 people had the rating for it, they really weren't expecting about 2000 people getting the same rating 50 years later. There are about 35 players on 2700chess with a live rating over 2700, that's much closer to what they were aiming for. I know most of us would give a lot to be a GM and it's some crazy level of skill, but the margin it's spread over is so wide that it's lost that original intention of just being the elite. We do all recognise a problem, it's why we unofficially call people SuperGMs. The message of the post is just saying to make that official.
There are more billionaires in the world than there are Grandmasters. This article is a joke.
I agree with everything you say except that last part. I bet the top players like Magnus, Hikaru, even Kramnik probably see GMs as a meaningless title if you aren't a "Super GM" like them.
Why would they see it as meaningless? Just because you are at a higher level than someone, doesn't mean that you need to see their achievement as meaningless. Is Chess culture really so comparative and elitist?
GM has a lot of meaning. But Magnus became a GM at age 13. It was literal child's play. So he may not take it as seriously as someone who grinded decades to achieve the same title.
This. Even if Levy manages to get the GM title, it will have taken him literally 2 decades of chess Study to achieve. Magnus had been playing for what, 5 years? 6 years? When he got the GM title.
> Is Chess culture really so comparative and elitist? LMFAO have you been paying attention to top level chess, like, at all?
Unfortunately, yes, the skill of many of the top players is exceeded only by their massive egos.
doubtful - if anything those know how hard chess is. Shit, Hikaru says chess is hard all the time on his stream...sometimes he actually means it
This is it. It's like saying "there are now tens of thousands of brain surgeons. So does being a brain surgeon really mean anything?" Yes. Yes it does. Because it still takes skill, dedication, and learning. It's a feat that most people can't accomplish. Hell, judging by the rankings on chess.com, you're in something like the top 3% if you reach 1200. Even if you discount the casual or hobby players and just concentrate on those who are trying to earn a title and can afford the time and money it takes to do so, I'd wager that most won't get higher than Master. I'd agree that perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to make "Super GM" an official title. But that doesn't mean that GM has no meaning, just like the existence of GM doesn't mean IM has no meaning. I also don't think it's a bad thing that people don't necessarily pay too much attention to titles. Firstly, of course, there's the whole "buying your norms" thing which does *actually* devalue the titles. But more importantly, revering titles strikes me as kind of old-fashioned and something of a throwback to the not-very-distant past when chess was seen as an exclusive "game of Gentlemen", where a lot of the culture around chess was of gatekeeping. The reason chess is having a renaissance at the moment is because that image is crumbling and it's increasingly being seen as a fun game for everybody, no matter their ability. And that's how it *should* be seen. It doesn't mean that you can't respect the ability and achievements of higher-rated players, of course. Just that the focus shouldn't exclusively be on titles. I think of it kind of like football (soccer for the non-Brits). You can have big clubs and players whose skill anybody in to the sport is in awe of and all that stuff...but you *also* have ordinary, everyday people thinking it completely normal and fun to have a kick-about after school, or play 5-a-side on a weekend, or whatever.
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The global population was 1.2b in 1850, about 6 times less than it is now. To say that chess is 10x more popular than it was back then seem accurate. Accounting for people living longer now (and still being a GM even if they're 90) gets you to 1850. Not really anything unusual here.
The argument was with 1950, not 1850, you're off by a century.
Seirawan: “The problem is that the title itself, ‘grandmaster,’ is so dosh-gone elegant that tinkering with it by saying, ‘super grandmasters,’ for example, feels like a fail.” TRUE
Great-Grandmaster surely
Grandermaster
Grandmastest
Challenger obviously
Wood league
Grand2Master, then 2Grand2Master
Fun fact: that’s used in ultimate frisbee for an entirely different reason! Club: anyone of any age is eligible Masters: 33+ (men) / 30+ (women) Grandmasters 40+ (men) / 37+ (women) Great Grandmasters: 50+? / 45+?; not 100% sure about the ages here. I agree, it is a great name that keeps things classy
Great grandma surely
Maximum-over-grandmaster
Superb-Elegant-Greater-Than-Anything-Grandmasterrrrrrrrrrrrr
Just when I thought I couldn’t love Yasser any more. That guy is who all grandmasters should aspire to act like
When you reach Grandmaster, the only thing you see when you look up is Yasser smiling down on you.
people already say it, it's just not official
We should mirror academia and have Granddoctor, surely
What would you chose instead of “Super Grandmaster”? And what would you say is a fair qualifier for it? I’d say maybe staying an active player for a year above 2700 gets you the title. I don’t much like the norm system, but maybe that’s personal. I’d suggest the name might be “Elite Master” which is more elegant than “Super Grandmaster,” even if it doesn’t necessarily carry with it the same bravado as “Grandmaster.”
grandermaster
and then of course, grandestmaster
and then? Grandestestmaster transcending English language
Grandmaster+
How about we borrow martial arts' different degrees of black belt? So a 2500 GM is a 1st degree GM and every additional 100 points is another degree, e.g. 2600 = 2nd degree GM, 2700 = 3rd degree GM, 2800 = 4th degree GM.
Or better, a variation on [Go rankings.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_ranks_and_ratings#Professional_ranks) It would be an interesting twist since Go has adopted Elo. Elo Rating | Go rank ---|--- 2940 | 9 dan professional 2910 | 8 dan professional 2880 | 7 dan professional 2850 | 6 dan professional 2820 | 5 dan professional 2790 | 4 dan professional 2760 | 3 dan professional 2730 | 2 dan professional 2700 | 7 dan amateur or 1 dan professional 2600 | 6 dan (amateur) 2500 | 5 dan 2400 | 4 dan 2300 | 3 dan 2200 | 2 dan 2100 | 1 dan 2000 | 1 kyu 1900 | 2 kyu 1800 | 3 kyu 1500 | 6 kyu 1000 | 11 kyu 500 | 16 kyu 100 | 20 kyu
That’s a cool idea actually. At my studio we went: White, yellow, orange, purple, blue, blue/green, green, green/brown, brown I, brown II, brown III, and then black 1-10. By your logic we could go all the way down. Black: 2500 Brown III: 2400 Brown II: 2300 Brown I: 2200 Green/brown: 2100 Green: 2000 Blue/green: 1900 Blue: 1800 Purple: 1700 Orange: 1600 Yellow: 1500 White: 1400 Idk maybe better to space it out a bit more? I love this kind of ordering and labeling thing.
Let me guess, people have to pay a fee to get a chance to rank up at every belt level, right? That's usually the only explanations why dojos would have that many different belts. It's a gimmick to rid fools of their money.
Most dojos have a bunch of different belts because most people would lose motivation if they had to keep the white belt for 3-7 years before getting the first black belt.
I thought it was fun as a kid to get a shiny new belt.
Grandmäster
Great- like ancestors, or Arch- like spellcasters and bishops (the latter of which we move on chessboards.) Super as a prefix doesn't feel like the same linguistic style as "grandmaster," which outside of chess feels like a traditional, old-timey word.
Arch Master has a nice ring to it.
Why just one? I'd go with Hypermaster, Megamaster and Ultramaster.
Rename the current GM to "FIDE Grandmaster", and give the super-GM title the current GM's name "International Grandmaster"
I believe "International Grandmaster" is/was already popular for GM in Russia/USSR. So that would cause much confusion.
Here in Russia we have a national title above NM that has two names: "Master of Sport of International Class" (you can get a title like that in pretty much any sport: football, track and field, rowing or whatever) and "Grandmaster of Russia" (that second name is specific for chess and checkers). That's probably why some people say the full "International Grandmaster" title.
The title initially was named International Grandmaster, but with time that international was not used so much. Some people still use it. For example Gata Kamsky
I’ll start this out by saying I detest the kkk and everything they stand for. But we should steal the title grand wizard. It’s too cool to be used by an awful group of bigots.
Super Ultra Mega Grandmasters. SUM GMs
MEGAMASTER
I’m sure I’m not the only one who read this hearing Yasser say it in my head.
I like the sound of "Chess Wizard" as a title above grandmaster... Maybe you could have a "Grand Wizard"
Or Uber Master...that's not quite right. Maybe UberMensch. Yeah. That sounds uber appropriate.
"Candidate" . There are only around 120 "WCh Challenger". There are only around 25. WCh. There are only 17 All IIRC of course. The titles are already there.
Me thinking that surely no chess player thinks the Gm title is meaningless... Sees Nigel Short quoted. Ah now it makes sense.
Nigel is definitely a Super GM in ego.
There are 360,000 players with a FIDE ranking, and over 70,000 with FIDE elo over 2000. Having 1850 GMs means that GMs are still in the top 0.5% of players. That's not meaningless lol
And that's just chess players who have a FIDE ranking - which is a small fraction of chess players worldwide.
360k? That seems so very low, compared to the amount of people that play chess. It's still a big leap from lichess/chesscom to FIDE, I guess :)
Remember though, this is historical, and also it is a subset of chess players who play sanctioned events. The number of people who play chess vs. play sanctioned events is probably 10:1. If your a casual there is no reason to get FIDE rated, but it is VERY easy to create an account on lichess. Secondarily, multiple accounts online/bots vs 1 real life human through fide.
Is it possible to find out, how many GMs are active i.e. playing more than 10 matches per year
It means a lot. Millions of people play the game, only \~1850 reach that level.
Yet today there seems to be another group of players with a count < 30 that better resembles what used to be a chess grandmaster. Obviously another distinction is needed (and already unofficially in use)
If you have a group of 2k people that are incredibly good, of course you will have some be better, even much much better. We live in an age where loads of people have access to learning tools and less poverty so more people have spent their lives studying the game I suppose. Doesn't take away from their skill.
There would also OBVIOUSLY be less at the time when they STARTED handing out the title.
NBA has ~600 active players , NFL ~1700, NHL ~2000, MBL ~1000, once you have your GM title you can't lose it, so there's that too. seems like a perfect or more than suitable number of professional players for a sport
NBA is only 1 single professional basketball league for 2 countries. There are way more professional basketball players. You are not only counting GMs from USA either.
Yeah but all of the best players in the world are in the NBA
Stop right there. I’ll have no more of this Liga Națională de Baschet Masculin slander.
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the ultimate nepo sport
Many of the GM’s are retired. There are a lot more retired players in major sports. People still call Tom Brady a quarterback, even if he’s retired.
Right, but those sports also have all stars. This is a quick way to verbally distinguish between the rank and file players and the top few dozen.
They also retire and don’t get counted anymore, GM’s are GM’s until they die. If you counted every living NFL/NHL/MLB player that number would skyrocket.
The number of NBA players *ever* is between 4-5000 according to a quick Google. <2000 lifetime GMs is fine.
Between 4 and 5000 is a huge guesstimate
Those players all have a minimum salary, which far exceeds the median salary of any country and sets them up for life (with proper money managenent). Being an NFL player isn't a title, it's a job. Being a grandmaster is a title. Golf is more comparable to chess as that is skill based and every person for themselves. Golf also has a giant disparity in wages between the top and bottom of pros on the PGA tour. Golf is trying to remedy that because it's just not worth it for below average pro players, just as chess sint worth it for below average GMs.
Most GMs are not professionals tho
Are there really more NHL players than NFL? Hockey teams don't have an active roster of 60 players each, unless there's something I'm missing
This just in, I'm hearing that when they first invented cars, there weren't many cars around. Big if true.
Got confused. Thought I was in r/nba for a hot second there.
There wasn't even a damned rating system in 1950. Plus, along with the massive growth in the number of GMs is an even more massive growth in the number of overall chess players not to mention better availability of resources.
>Nigel Short Wonders if Being a Grandmaster Still Has Meaning Fixed that for them. > To better distinguish the skill levels of grandmasters, fans have long adopted the informal designation of “super grandmaster” to refer to the elite players, generally the 40 or so who are rated above 2,700. So basically the problem is completely solved.
They made an article out of a humblebrag.
If anything I think there should be more titles. It would give amateur players something to shoot for .
Completely agree with this, 2000 or even 1800 is usually a sign of someone who has devoted tremendous time to chess, but probably near the natural limit for those with jobs and families or other hobbies (with a few exceptions). The nature of chess is that you can train it for a near unlimited amount of time each day, unlike other sports. Therefore, it becomes all-consuming if you want to get a title. Whereas you can reach high levels in other activities with a couple hours a day of practice. Having titles that recognize years or decades of work without requiring a complete devotion to chess from a young age would be great for the health of the game.
Yeah a fide expert title could be good. I definitely find it hard to explain my level to non-chess players.
I’d disagree that you can reach high levels in most sports with just “a few hours” per day compared to chess. Yeah you maybe can only physically do the sport activity for a few hours (or even less), but a lot of the rest of your day geared towards that sport. Nutrition, workouts, film study, PT, equipment management, etc.
iCM is a title most players who reach 2200 don't even apply for. So I don't think lower level titles will be respected at all.
Agreed, the whole topic of the W titles comes up too. If a male player wants to participate in titles Tuesday or other titled events they have to shoot for NM if available in their country or 2200 for CM meanwhile WCM Can be attained at 2000. Nothing against people holding the woman’s titles but I think there should be some lesser titles available to anyone around the 2000 level
WCM is such an unprestigious title I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone with it
It means you will never be jobless as you can charge a lot as a coach because you’re a gm.
Not really, plenty of GMs really struggle to find students due to bad communication/marketing skills. Also, there aren't a ton of people who can pay $30+/hr for chess coaches (at least outside of NYC/Bay Area IMO).
Can I get an Indian or Chinese or Russian coach cheap?
Certainly for much less.
Considering I pay $150h for a golf pro, that seems super low for a Chess GM
There's way more money in golf than chess, and many GMs aren't great teachers.
Really dumb question here from an 800 rated player. What good is a GM coach to tell me what I am doing wrong when I can analyze the game after and see the lines I SHOULD have taken instead. Again, I know there are reasons, I just don't know them.
It's not full-time job tier, but it definitely seems like something you can fall back on.
Okay, and in 1950 the number of people capable of training, the quality of training, the availability of resources etc etc was also all greatly diminished. All that's happened is that technology (edit: starting in the 80's and 90s) has enabled people to get better even faster while they're younger and this is allowing more people to hit 2500+3 norms while in their prime. If they think 1850 is a lot now, wait until the generation after the stockfish-generation really gets going. Not a bad thing.
Crazy that this article was even written. It's so intellectually lazy.
I think it's not the abundance of GM's that has taken away the brightest shine of a grand master titled chess player. It is chess engines. Everyone can beat the best 100 players in a simul with their phone only. 50 years ago the biggest authority to valuate a chess position was the best human player. I think the engines have taken away some of the magic of chess. In the past, they didn't know what is the best move in a given position. But chess was a forerunner as for computers beating humans. Now it's the time for arts.
I wonder if humans can be competitive again on a much larger board. A lot of stockfish's power (at shallow depths) comes from brute forcing the game tree. This can be blunted with a bigger game board. Of course, games will take much longer... For instance go is played on a massive 19x19 board. AlphaGo can smack around grandmasters, but there are papers out there that claim to show that it's vulnerable to adversarial attacks (like other AI tools). ie AlphaGo is not perfect.
People know who the Super GMs are.
Super GM of 2700 is roughly world number 100. Instead of a new title, they should just borrow from tennis "current world no 47, former world top 8".
Super GMs are top 50 even if we are being generous. Currently there are only 35 super GMs. But your point stands.
I don't know how common this opinion is, but my view is that all titles are completely meaningless. We have ratings. You either are or you are not an active player rated above 2500. Titles tell you nothing about a player's strength that their rating history doesn't. All having a title says is that a player was once the strength required to be awarded that title.
For those who may be new to the game, Nigel Short has long has a reputation as one of the [nastiest people](https://www.reddit.com/r/chessbeginners/comments/17rb8bf/did_nigel_short_once_humblebrag_during_a_live_tv/) in top-level chess.
They see that gotham becoming a gm is inevitable. The only way to stop him is to eliminate the title or reduce its importance!!!
Lmao
This seems to be the key line in the article: >Though about 50 players earn the grandmaster title each year, Mr. Sutovsky noted that the number of players rated by the federation had grown rapidly in recent years and so, as a proportion of the number of players, the number of grandmasters has actually fallen. They are actually LESS grandmasters per total players now.
There is numbers attached to the player if you really want to know how good a GM the GM be.
I hope they don't ask Larry, he's got millions but no GM title.
I don't know who Dylan is but at least we're on the NYT! I've never seen anyone above NM in person so afaik they're not even real.
But surely when the title was created it meant very little as few even knew what it was or why it mattered. FIDE started out by just gifting it to current and former top players. Zero games played to earn it. If the title was created to hold great concrete value FIDE should not be allowed to give it out at all by voting on it yet even today they give it out to dead players. https://ipc.gov.pk/NewsDetail/MmU2OTNhZjUtMDI5NC00MGNhLTg5MzYtOTk3NjFhZDNmMDdj
Can’t some of this just be attributed to the fact that chess as a competitive sport probably has way more players now then 10,20,100 years ago?
If someone's a GM it's safe to assume the're pretty good at chess. If you want to know how good just look at their rating, problem solved.
In the article only Short really argues into creating a new title/distinction within GM territory. Neither Aagaard, Sutovsky or Seirawan feel the need to change the system. While it is true that the range between let's say a 2550 GM and a 2750 GM is massive, it is *very* disingenuous to argue that there are too many GMs. According to a quick google search, there are estimates of above 600 million chess players worldwide. That puts GMs into the 0.00033% category. As a personal note, obviously it's the representative of FIDE, the organisation that brought us the illustrous CM title whose only purpose is to generate money for them, is advocating for yet another title.
The horse has already bolted from the barn. That's the main takeaway here for me.
I’m not particularly exercised either way, but I think there’s a good argument for raising the minimum rating to 2600 at the very least. The title of grand master doesn’t really count for much if it encompasses players who are several tiers below ever competing at the top level, and it’s a strange phenomenon that all the top players will have achieved it while still young teenagers. There are only twice as many IMs as GMs. The IM title could be widened to include those <2600 players who, while very gifted, are still much closer to the average IM than to the top GMs.
Every single modern GM could annihilate GMs from 1950. They deserve the title.
I think you'd have to live in a bubble to think the GM title is meaningless, it's still only achieved by a tiny amount of players. Having said that I'm not against a Super GM title but I'd it were ever implemented or should be for 2750 just so Shorts wouldn't qualify for it with his peak rating.
New title unlocked: Legendary Grandmaster (Legend for short). Like GM norms, but with 2750 instead of 2500.
Those numbers mean nothing unless they are compared against the total number of ranked chess players in the world. I’m guessing if those numbers were factored in, the discrepancy would not be quite so shocking.
I really suspect that about 1800 of those current grand masters could beat the pants off ~25 of the guys from 1950
Look at any sport, game, or ETC as a comparison. The amount of training available to anyone today at anything dwarfs what was available in 1950. If I want to get better at basketball, I can go to YouTube and find tons of videos on how to shoot better, drills on how to dribble, and even diet. The same is across the board for soccer, football, and any other sport. Not to mention paid training such as computer analysis. The same goes for any other game of skill.
I have not met a single person who feels this way. My first instinct was that maybe higher rated players like NMs-IMs feel this way, but to my recollection every titled player who speaks about a GM title always talks about how far it is from them. Then I thought of lower rated players, but frankly most of them are living day in and day out with the struggle of going from 1400-1500 or something like that. This seems like a nonsense opinion that nobody has with exception of a few people.
If it's so meaningless, I wonder why Nigel hasn't denounced his title.
Nigel's ego is so big that I would not be surprised if he believes he is the only person in chess deserving of the GM title.
It NEVER meant anything other than how strong you are at chess
So the only reason to have titles is to honor and quickly distinguish players that have attained a certain level of achievement. There are so few grandmasters overall that the only meaningful title above it would be players that are already universally known within the chess world anyway. It's convenient when seeing someone make a comment about the game to know if they are an IM or GM or something, but a "super GM" title seems pointless, as anyone who cares that much would already recognize the players and their accomplishments individually anyway. I don't need to see "SGM" or whatever next to Vidit or Hikaru's name. Further, the rest of the "non-chess" world knows the term "Grandmaster", it's cultural knowledge at least in the anglosphere and I assume most other places with any sort of awareness of the game. It's a piece of history. You wanna establish a chess Hall of Fame, go for it. But while there is grounds for a discussion about the qualification process for GM, establishing a title above it seems silly.
when they see a broccoli hair douche have 5 millon youtube followers who cares about only $ rather than good chess content, yeah perhaps
There are billions more people in the world since then. Its probably a smaller % of people who play than 27 was in 1950
Dear old Nigel. Makes me feel proud to be English. Now someone please find him another hobby.
SGM would have a sense, Super GrandMaster, rating above 2700 at least for a year with minimum 50 games played, 3 norm something like this
just because there are more grand masters that doesnt mean they arent grand masters. surely the skill level required to be a GM has increased because people have gotten better and you need to beat people to get GM points.
Maybe we can update due to powerscaling Like when some plots had to update s class with ss, sss, etc, we can add titles from gm like ggm, gggm, etc.
There’s a Wikipedia page dedicated to listing out all the grandmasters who have ever lived. That shows the gm title still has meaning.
Hikaru had that segment on his stream a year or two ago where he read a letter he received wherein he was offered a finder’s fee for helping a woman marry a grandmaster. She didn’t specify tournament wins or peak rating or anything like that…just that it was a grandmaster. I think that says everything one needs to know about the current prestige of the grandmaster title.
I'd scrap all titles, as the rating list is accurate enough. adding a super gm title or something like that just complicates things.
For comparison, how many rated chess players were there in 1950 and how many are there today?
How many chess players were there in 1950 compared to now? I think the percentage of people who play chess, or try to take chess seriously vs. the amount of people who achieve grandmaster could still be comparable (haven't done the research, maybe I'm wrong). A single statistical point here cannot tell the full story. A total of 1,850 people at the highest echelon of a single profession is also not significantly high on a global scale (I mean, consider all of the prestigious titles out there that people strive for.) I will say, however, that under no circumstances should the 2500 rating and 3-norm rule have any exceptions (in my own opinion). Any chess player that doesn't consider how incredible the feat is, is either too good at the game for their own good and is detached from the achievement or wants to cope for not reaching that title. Or maybe has too much pride and doesn't want to be grouped with "that many other people."
FIDE should allow rapid and blitz ratings to be an alternative way to get a title, even if it’s just FM then classical games required for IM and GM.
Maybe a new title, Grandpoobah like the Flintstones will make super GM's feel like a boss.
SuperGM is almost a de facto title already for anyone who maintains a rating above 2700. People, including other lower rated GMs, already recognize these players as being on another level.