I found an interesting article over at chessbase.com today. It is the first part of an eventual series that chronicles the teachings of a chess trainer to young, world-class chess players.

This part seems to have application to go players as well, focusing no on pawn placement or chess openings, but rather various psychological factors and the importance of nutrition and exercise in top-level competition. Worth a read.

The article is posted at http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6978.

big article. Do you have any conclusions ?

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sorry for my english - im Marsian

@kgsbaduk: Practice in life what we should practice on the Go board, balance. Neglecting your physical needs impacts your mind, and your game playing ability. To be at the top of your game you must keep your body healthy as well [read: eat right, exercise, sleep well].

As an additional note, we can (and have) debated what innate go abilities impact our playing. I enjoyed his point that there are innate abilities and learned abilities. And even if I don't have the innate abilities of a pro, I can at least learn new abilities to improve my strength.

The first conclusion is that getting strong takes a lot of work. Those who want to make it have to be prepared to put in a lot of time and effort, starting with reading the article themselves.

I found the style of writing in that article a bit strange. It looks something you'd find on lifestyle magazines rather than scientific articles.

"Normally, a specialized food shop can provide a nutritional supplement to meet one's specific needs. Although these supplements are costly, just consider how much harm an illness or sickness can do to your game."

What "specific needs" are these? Why is the writer speaking devils and being so vague?

Next the writer starts to talk about preventing heart disease, which has absolutely nothing to do with chess.

"In practice, all top chess-players belong to the 'Owls' category!"

Citation needed?

Interesting.

There's actually a couple of good reasons why chess players (and go players!) should be concerned about heart disease. The obvious one, of course, is that heart disease is rapidly becoming the #1 killer in industrialized countries, so anyone who lives in one should be concerned about it.

Another reason, though, is that most people don't get too deeply into too many subcultures at once-- lots of people have many hobbies, but generally if there's a hobby you're super-serious about, you want to spend a lot of time on it and think about it every day. And for better or worse, fitness is a set of hobbies more than anything else over here. A shodan might tell you to play one game every day, or to do tsumego for a few minutes when you wake up every morning; it's up to your yoga teacher to tell you to do yoga for a few minutes when you wake up every morning.

And if people are likely to get really deeply into only one hobby at once, other hobbies that they're doing might suffer. I would expect that a random sampling of people who are 1d or higher would be less fit, on average, than a random sampling of amateur tennis players, amateur runners, or Pilates fanatics. I would expect them to be at about the same level as a random sampling of, say, singers or calligraphers. On the same note, if I know that someone is very much into something that's not go, I'll assume that they're just not a very good go player. If someone is training for a marathon, they probably aren't playing an hour-long game every day as well. If someone plans her travel based on yarn stores, and always has a couple of knitting projects going on, I wouldn't expect him or her to be such a great go player either. I know that KGS go is hardly helping my Pilates practice or my recipe collection.

Such prejudices aside, there are physiological reasons why go players should worry about heart disease: strategy games do put stress on the heart. I don't remember where I read it, but a chess player's heartrate is likely to be somewhat elevated during a tournament. (Stands to reason.) Part of being a good go player is not stressing out about things too much, about calmly reading the whole situation. And a lot of how you do that is by practicing at go itself. But it also stands to reason that part of how you can not stress out is by being fit and calm to begin with. Athletes tend to have a lower resting heart rate than non-athletes. Perhaps go players who work out enough to have this athlete's heart can keep their cool better in tense games, because their hearts are conditioned to beat slow and strong.

Of course, a lot of that article was definitely odd. I don't think that go players (or chess players) have unique nutritional needs, and I don't think they need to go to specialty shops to have them met. I think garlic is good for just about anyone's health, unless they don't like garlic, and I don't think that anyone needs to eat salmon or other animal products for optimal health.

That's absolutely true. I have the strange habit of sometimes playing reed-flute between moves when I play slow (more than 30 min per player) games online.

A surprising fact is that whenever there is an exciting fight, and I wait for my opponents move, I can hardly control my breath for playing the flute. That's surprising because if somebody would ask me during that game whether I am stressed, I would definitely answer no.
But my reed-flute clearly tells me that I get stressed.

And that's only for casual online games. Imagine more serious tournament games...




That's not true. Kimchi and ginseng are prerequisits for getting stronger.

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If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

Citations please? Serious medical studies proving this?

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

That was a joke of course , but the previous part of my post was serious.

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If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

I played chess as a kid. I'll always remember breaking my handwatch at 14:00, right at the start of the day game for this particular tournament.
I didn't touch it nor watched it, it simply stopped working at this precise time. I only noticed this after the game.

Changing batteries later didn't help to make it work again. I have no explanation for this, it might be coincindental, but i don't believe it.

We're definitely in worse shape than the tennis players (though our knees are probably doing much better).

As for the rest of it, here's an alternate hypothesis: the bigger division is between people who have will-power or focus and those who don't. Everyone has areas where they're more or less disciplined than others, but there are still correlations. So perhaps dedicated Go players end up more fit than the average, even though they're less fit than competitive athletes.

Which is the truth? Beats me.

Edit changed "go players" to "dedicated go players".

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Occupy Babel!

I'm probably fitter than most (amateur) tennis players and I'm also still improving at go. So I'd go with hyperpape's 2nd hypothesis - when I like a hobby I really like that hobby. As for general go players... in my experience we tend to have at least one more hobby (I have met quite a few go playing jugglers for some reason), so even if we are geeky and sedentary in one place I bet we're about average in general.

Maybe playing board games makes you better at sport - because your heart gets such a good workout during a game.

Its sad, because I'm so much stronger at chess than I am at go.

Before you can read, you need to know what to read. Do plenty of tsumego.