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| Posted by gta3master2987 uskidscompute.com 1/10/2003 19:05:36 play online chess |  Subject: Josh WaitzkinMessage: I was wondering how many people had heard of Waitzkin. For those who don't know, he is a very good chess player... at age 6 he was ranked 1200, at 8 he was ranked 1600, at age 9 he was ranked 1800, and at age 12 he was ranked 2100. He is the youngest player in history to reach the GrandMaster Level, and is very famous. However, I have never seen his name mentioned on this site. I believe he is currently somewhere in his late teens to late 20's... if someone could clarify this, that would be great. So, anyone heard of him? Any other interesting info, includinbg current age and rank? I have also heard that he is very involved with Chessmaster programs; from what I've heard, he goes over some of his matches with Grand Masters in order to illustrate proper/improper strategy... anyways, your turn! |
| Posted by jaflake uskidscompute.com 1/10/2003 19:26:30 play online chess | All I know about Josh Waitzkin Message: comes from the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer" It is a little boring, (its about when he first started and i think its directed at kids) but its fairly interesting. |
| Posted by brobishkin uskidscompute.com 1/10/2003 21:43:27 play online chess | Chess prodigy... Message: Josh Waitztins was one of those young kids that caught the chess publics eye (mainly on the east coast N.Y.)... Trained by Bruce Pandolfini, he amazed the chess world at the age of 10 (I think) by beating a Grand Master... "In search of Bobby Fischer" was inspired by his childhood and his climb at a young age in the east coast chess league... He is much older now but still a contendant in many chess tournaments nation wide... Bro... |
| Posted by r_lawrence uskidscompute.com 1/10/2003 22:51:29 play online chess | Searching for Bobby Fischer .. Message: Was a great movie I thought! Waitzkin has also come out with a book now .. I forget the name, but I browsed through it at a book store once. Very interesting, and auto-biographical in nature. If I had had the money then, I would have bought it. |
| Posted by atrifix uskidscompute.com 1/11/2003 02:14:20 play online chess | Josh Waitzkin Message: Of course, I only heard about Waitzkin through Searching for Bobby Fischer, but he's really not as good as the movie would lead one to believe. Despite being a pretty good player as a kid, he never developed into a stronger player. He is definitely NOT the youngest player to ever reach grandmaster, given that he still has not even reached that mark (at the moment he is 26 years old and still an IM--not sure if he has any GM norms, but his rating, 2464, is too low to qualify him even if he does), and that claim is currently held by the 12-year-old GM Sergey Karjakin. He won quite a few events as a kid and a few in high school, though, although that was nearly 10 years ago. |
| Posted by tulkos uskidscompute.com 1/11/2003 05:22:22 play online chess | Yes, he's still a IM, Message: And he is The chessmaster big person--- It has annotated games by him, of his games, and a whole bunch of other things that come from bruce pandolfini. |
| Posted by certainratio uskidscompute.com 1/13/2003 07:03:56 play online chess | on chessmaster 5500 Message: he gives audio annotations of a few of his games. I found them very instructive. I understood everything he said about the games, and I began playing 1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. exd5 exd5 4. c4!? as White because of these games. I don't know if it's a sound response to the French, though. But yes, it seems as if Waitzkin may have reached a plateau in playing strength. I too thought the movie was not good. Over-dramatic at times to the point of hilarity. Also, another kid villian chess player is created and the final game between the two is laughable-- their remarks to each other, the coach muttering to himself "it's 18 moves deep, but it's there. don't move till you see it. not till you see it." While waitzkin is saying to himself "I don't see it, I don't see it". The kid villain reminded me of the bad guys in the Karate Kid movies. The chess itself was suspect. You can't make out too many moves in the movie, but I think I understood what happened in the final game. Both players were racing their pawns to queening squares (on the a and h files, respectively), and one of their kings was on the a1-h8 diagonal so that when one of them queened with check the other had to move his king out of the way, exposing his own new queen to capture. They both foresaw the pawn race ending, and they both were staring in each other's eyes as they slammed down their last moves, and they were in the national finals, so I found it hard to believe that one of them could fail to see a simple skewer tactic like that coming, even one move before it happened. It was all quite overdramatic and ridiculous. |
| Posted by calmrolfe uskidscompute.com 1/13/2003 08:17:24 play online chess | Gee Message: Am I glad I never got to see that movie !! The world is full of child prodigies that never quite make it when they get to adulthood. If you want to watch a 14 year old kid attempt to break into the top echelon of chess players, watch Teimour Radjabov who is currently playing in the Corus Tournament. He has to face two World Champions and an ex World Champion, plus a whole bucketload of Super GM's (2700 ELO +). This is his big test, he will either sink or swim......... www.corusgroup.com/coruschess/ Kind regards, Cal |
| Posted by honololou uskidscompute.com 1/13/2003 16:44:53 play online chess | certainratio… Message: While the film was not necessarily "Oscar" material, it was not as bad as you described it to be. In fact it is one of the few contemporary films that all members of the family can watch and enjoy. There's no foul language, good acting and a nice story (largely based on fact). Let's face it, its remarkable that Hollywood made a movie about chess to begin with. I'll admit that it was overdramatized in parts but I can forgive that. BTW, I read the book (written by Josh's father a sportswriter) and the "villain kid" character is based on a real-life rival prodigy. The match between them that you described and the final sequence of moves is detailed in the book. My recollection is that this game ended in a draw and not (as depicted in the film) as a win for Waitzkin. |
| Posted by honololou uskidscompute.com 1/13/2003 16:59:05 play online chess | critic Roger Ebert's review… Message: "There was a boy, a chess player, once, who revealed that his gift consisted partly in a clear inner vision of potential moves of each piece as objects with flashing or moving tails of coloured light: He saw a live possible pattern of potential moves and selected them according to which ones made the pattern strongest, the tensions greatest. His mistakes were made when he selected not the toughest, but the most beautiful lines of light." From The Virgin in the Garden, by A. S. Byatt Child prodigies are found most often in three fields: chess, mathematics and music. All three depend upon an intuitive grasp of complex relationships. None depends on social skills, maturity, or insights into human relationships. A child who is a genius at chess can look at a board and see a universe that is invisible to the wisest adult. This is both a blessing and a curse. There is a beauty to the gift, but it does not necessarily lead to greater happiness in life as a whole. The wonderful new film "Searching for Bobby Fischer" contains in its title a reminder of that truth. Bobby Fischer was arguably the greatest chess player of all time. As a boy, he faced and defeated the greatest players of his time. In 1972, after a prelude of countless controversies, he won the world chess championship away from the Russians for the first time in years. Then he essentially disappeared into a netherworld of rented rooms, phantom sightings, paranoid outbursts and allegiance to a religious cult. He reappeared not long ago to win a lucrative chess match in Yugoslavia, for which he was willing to lose his citizenship. His games are models of elegance and artistry. His life does not inspire envy. "Searching for Bobby Fischer," a film of remarkable sensitivity and insight, tells a story based on fact, about a "new" Bobby Fischer - a young boy named Josh Waitzkin (Max Pomeranc) who was born with a gift for chess, which he nurtured in the rough-and-tumble world of of chess hustlers in New York's Washington Square Park. His parents are at first doubtful of his talent, then proud of it, then concerned about how he can develop it without stunting the other areas of his life. The film is the first intelligent one I can remember seeing about chess. That is the case even though no knowledge of chess is necessary to understand it, and some of the filmmaking strategies - such as showing most of the moves at lightning speed - simply ignore the periods of inaction in games. It is intelligent because it is about the meaning of chess, a game that has been compared to war and plundered for its lurking Freudian undertones, and yet is essentially just an arrangement of logical outcomes. In the film, Josh learns the moves by watching them played in the park. At first his parents, Fred and Bonnie Waitzkin (Joe Mantegna and Joan Allen), are even unaware he can play, and there is a sweet scene in which the boy allows his father to win a game, to spare his feelings. Josh's first teacher is a black chess hustler named Vinnie (Laurence Fishburne), who uses an in-your-face approach and advises unorthodox moves to throw an opponent off. Eventually Fred becomes convinced his son needs more advanced tutelage, and hires the brilliant but prickly Bruce Pandolfini (Ben Kingsley), a difficult case - but then all good chess players are difficult cases. The difference in strategy between Vinnie and Bruce is much simplified in the film, and comes down to whether you should develop your queen at an early stage in the game. For the film, the queen is just a symbol of their opposed styles; the movie is really about personalities, and how they express themselves through chess. The screenplay by Steven Zaillian, based on Fred Waitzkin's autobiographical book, is best when it deals with the issues surrounding competitive chess. Is winning, for example, the only thing? Is chess so important that it should absorb all the attention of a young prodigy, or is his development as a normal little boy also crucial? Why does one play serious chess in the first place? There is a cautionary moment when Fred Waitzkin sees his first professional chess tournament - an ill-fitted room filled with players, mostly men, mostly silent, bending over their boards as if in prayer - and is warned that this is the world his son will inhabit. By the end of "Searching for Bobby Fischer" we have learned something about tournament chess, and a great deal about human nature. The film's implications are many. They center around our responsibility, if any, to our gifts. If we can operate at the genius level in a given field, does that mean we must - even if the cost is the sort of endless purgatory a Bobby Fischer has inhabited? It's an interesting question, and this movie doesn't avoid it. At the end, it all comes down to that choice faced by the young player that A. S. Byatt writes about: the choice between truth and beauty. What makes us men is that we can think logically. What makes us human is that we sometimes choose not to. |
| Posted by soikins uskidscompute.com 1/14/2003 05:14:17 play online chess | Joshua Waitzkin Message: I have heard of him. I have Chessmaster 7000 and he is really their big man. But I guess his strength is exagerated, it is more a PR trick. They just want to make him look like a really strong player to sell more Chessmaster CD's. At the begiinning, lookoing at Waitzkins analysis of his own best games, I thought, that he is really strong. And he is, thought, an IM only. I searched for his games in my database and found some really interesting, but only from the midnineties, but the games were against really strong GM's, like Korchnoi, Adams and others. Waitzkin proved that he is a good player, but I don't know wether he got to be a GM. And I also haven't seen his games lately, I think he is inactive now. One thing I rally don't understand about him -- his name is Joshua, not Josh, why he hides it? PR? soikins |
| Posted by certainratio uskidscompute.com 1/14/2003 07:51:31 play online chess | ... Message: I stick to my opinion. overdramatized to the point of distraction. but yes, a good family film. |
| Posted by nwadvana uskidscompute.com 1/14/2003 09:48:48 play online chess | He dosent hide it Message: Maybe he likes being called Josh.. Prob? |
| Posted by honololou uskidscompute.com 1/14/2003 16:56:42 play online chess | I'm afraid… Message: that if they made a movie about chess without overdramatizing it, nobody would see it. |
| Posted by kamikazelb uskidscompute.com 1/21/2003 09:04:41 play online chess | Message: mayb josh didn't make it in chess or had better things to do then to become a GM, but one thing is for sure, he is a gr8 teacher, and i've learned a lot from his games. i finally understood the damn white and black square things. but his french defense style kills me, i prefer to play it like it is (when i'm white) |
| Posted by blueredux uskidscompute.com 2/17/2003 23:11:47 play online chess | Two more cents Message: Josh maintains his own website at: www.joshwaitzkin.com I enjoyed the movie, and I think I forgave the obvious watered-down versions of the chess scenes and argot since I was (and still am) a beginner, but also because I saw it as less about chess than as a father's relationship with his son, and the father's struggle to try and draw the line between supporting his son's chess and becoming an obsessed father pushing his son to win. But I thought this movie was, as far as Hollywood movies are concerned, fairly conscientious about its portrayal of chess. I read an article about how they auditioned a number of kids to play Josh, but no child actor could really "look" like they were playing. So instead they scoured scholastic chess tournaments and cast a real chess player. I think I also read that Max Pomeranc was one of the top 100 chess players in his age group at the time, but I could be wrong about that. Compared to a number of TV shows and movies I've seen where the chess board is turned the wrong way, or the pieces are incorrectly placed, or the chess player will ruminate dramatically for about fifteen seconds and then announce checkmate, I thought this movie didn't do all too badly. But I guess anything (overly-)simplified for the masses looks laughable to the initiated. As a computer programmer, I need only think of the computer-related scenes in, say, "Mission Impossible" to remind myself of this fact. |
| Posted by av8bndiace02 uskidscompute.com 2/18/2003 05:49:29 play online chess | Josh Message: I'm very new to the chess world and I have the Chessmaster 8000 Cd. Josh has given me one of my most valuable lessons yet (the King and Pawn endgame). And I really liked the movie it actually gave me the idea to get a chess clock and play speed chess. I don't know if I'm learning anything But I'm having a lot of fun. Thanks Josh, lARRY |
| Posted by gibo uskidscompute.com 2/18/2003 21:38:28 play online chess | Message: waitzkin is just an IM though not a GM he has also been in a lot of the chessmaster software he does work on endgames in that book |
| Posted by married81901 uskidscompute.com 2/18/2003 22:40:05 play online chess | Josh Waitzkin Message: A movie is meant to entertain. And the movie did just that. The movie was not supposed to be an instructional video on tournament chess, so let's look at it in its proper prespective. The overall theme of the movie was that there is more to life than chess. So even if Josh never became a GM or IM or any M, as long as he turned out to be a well rounded individual he is victorious. My son was an avid player of the "TOMB RAIDER" game, but did not like the movie, because he was too busy punching holes and comparing the two. We chess lovers have a tendancy to do the same whenever we see chess movies. I don't know JOSH personally, but he strikes me as a person who could talk about more than opennings and defenses. |
| Posted by longrange uskidscompute.com 2/19/2003 10:11:15 play online chess | josh waitzkin Message: i played on my high school chess team at the scholastic nationals when waitzkin was in his teens and had the opurtunity to meet him and play some speed chess against him.he is quite a nice fellow and a great player. |
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