from Chessbase.com – published 11/29/2014

My cmnt: If you read this entire article in Financial Times you will hear from the greatest female chess player of all time why she quit playing chess competitively. Bottom line: she is not a man. She wanted to have children, a family and to pursue other interests. Contrary to Lib-think women cannot have it all. No one can.

My cmnt: Men give up certain things to concentrate on their work. Women give up certain things to concentrate on their children. Each is necessary and important. Neither is more important in the grand scheme of things. In God’s accounting each will be remembered and rewarded by Him for doing what He made you to do. Men trying to be women or women trying to be men is an abomination in the sight of God and ruinous to the human race.

My cmnt: Men certainly run the world but they do not spend most of its money – women do. Most of what men do is to impress women. The hand that rocks the cradle actually rules the world. Men are what their mothers make of them. But boys raised exclusively by women (think of our American ghettos) are mostly and often doomed. Boys need a father to guide and discipline them. Good fathers are absolutely essential to producing the next generation of good men.

The World Chess Championship in Sochi finished a week ago, but news reports of this achievement and result have not died down. Even the Financial Times has devoted space to analysing the result and interviews people like Judit Polgar on Carlsen’s strength. Playing him feels like drowning,” she said. “It’s frightening is to see him close to 2,900 points”. Judit thinks he can play even better.

His victory was, as Frederic Friedel, co-founder of the Chessbase chess software company, put it, “like a tennis player turning up to Wimbledon with an ancient wooden racket – and winning”. [Carlsen] does not rely on computer analysis nearly as much as his opponents and pays relatively little attention to opening theory. “With the modern computer age, there are some new ideas,” he said a couple of years ago. “But the principles are basically the same… I try not to over-focus on preparation.”

The result of this old-school approach has turned modern chess on its head. Whereas computer analysis has raised the relative importance of the opening for most players, Mr Carlsen has relegated it. He looks instead to win a game later on via the steady and patient accumulation of sometimes almost imperceptible advantages. “The space that chess occupies is so gigantic that in spite of all the computer work done today, you can get out of it,” says Mr Friedel, who occasionally chaperoned Mr Carlsen at tournaments when he was a teenager. “Magnus goes off into sidelines… then he just outplays people. It is extraordinary and amazing.”

Read the full article on the FT news page. On the day of publication this was the second-most read report on the FT news page.