Sunday, November 10, 2013

Former glories

BBC, yesterday:


What is a "former grandmaster"?

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

A grandmaster who has retired

Jonathan B said...

Is still a Grandmaster

Anonymous said...

These days although the GM title is for life it was not always so. It was necessary to get a GM norm every 5 years or one's title became dormant. Thus damned the former title holders were listed with an asterisk again their names. This happened to several and Sunnucks's Encyclopaedia has a list.

ejh said...

There was actually supposed to be an image appearing in this post. I have no idea where it got to. I might add it tomorrow if I get the chance.

Jack Rudd said...

I'd have a dormant IM title if that were still the case.

Anonymous said...

Does it really matter

Jonathan B said...

2,000+ posts in and you've just started asking that?

ejh said...

Nothing really matters, as a group of notable Seventies philosophers memorably put it.

I see the image is displaying today. So was Blogger having a Sunday off?

Anonymous said...

So all that you wanted to say in this post was that the BBC should have used the word retired instead of former; very exciting.

Anonymous said...

I would hope what the BBC really meant was retired World Champion. You would hope it would know that GK was more than just an ordinary GM.



RdC

ejh said...

While I guess to some degree it's a him or her rather than an it, in so far as it's the journalist concerned who's got it wrong. But there's a couple of things one might say about that - first, that it's a shame the BBC couldn't find somebody who knows about chess to write a piece about chess, and second, that you have to ask (as I did here why it's OK for this particular field to be written about without sufficient subject knowledge. That's my gripe aboiut coverage of chess genrally - not that this or that error is made (there are always errors) but that it doesn't seem to matter. I think this is something that should concern us, not on grounds of pedantry or delight in error-spotting, but because accepting lower standards for our field that would be aceptable in another is not only abject, but in the long term damaging to our status and standards.

Anonymous said...

Lord K aka Voldemort is more than an ordinary GM - like most archetypical villains, his arrogance lead to his downfall.