Wednesday
Jan302019
Chess.com's Post on Kramnik's Retirement (Includes a Tweet Fit For a Donkey) **Updated**
Wednesday, January 30, 2019 at 11:22PM
It is a gracious post, of course, both in its original text and in the surveyed tweets. (Well, mostly so; there is one notable exception - a garbage tweet from the current owner of the game's highest title.) Hopefully there will be plenty of tributes, and some good books on his career - ideally by the man himself.
**Update** Magnus Carlsen says a little about Kramnik's retirement in the first few minutes of this video interview with Jan Gustafsson.
tagged Vladimir Kramnik
Reader Comments (3)
I seldom comment on issues related to social behaviour on the web, it just seems too depressing,
but like many others I find Carlsen's tweet totally unclassy. I deeply admire his chess, but in terms of sportsmanship and living up to being a role model he could learn a lot from almost any of his colleagues.
"a garbage tweet from the current owner of the game's highest title"
You can't accept it as a joke?
Those guys are doing that all the time on twitter.
[DM: There's a time and place for things. To switch from something that bugs Carlsen to something that bugs me about the chess world: I've criticized the DGT company dozens of times for their refusing to modify their system for recording results, a system which has led to countless game score errors in databases. (Most likely, there are also errors in the recorded results, too - I've seen that plenty of times as well in major events. There it gets corrected because everyone screams about it, but in less prestigious events they're less likely to be fixed.) I've criticized them, but I'd be a horse's rear end (and a bore) if I showed up someday at the DGT CEO's funeral and badmouthed him (or her, whoever it is) about this stuff.
Btw, if you've been a regular reader of this blog since the time of the last Candidates, you'll know that I agree with Carlsen both about wildcards in general and about the unsuitability of Kramnik in particular as the wildcard selection for the 2018 Candidates. I don't like the use of wildcards, and if there was going to be one based on objective merit it should have been Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, who missed qualification in at least two ways by the narrowest of margins. But if "stupid organizer will change his stupid wildcard policy, ha ha ha!" is one's headline when the story is the retirement of one of the game's greatest players, that person is really, really, really missing the point.]
I agree with you and at first I was quite mad at that tweet but now that I have seen his new one... I think it was a joke that misfired. The kind of off hand remark he might say to Kramnik in person where his tone of voice, body language and their past together would make it clear that he was joking with his peer. However, it didn't translate to twitter well obvious.
[DM: I think you're right all the way around.]
Anyways: Carlsen: "I read the book "Kramnik, My Life and Games" & that became one of my very favourite books growing up & I absolutely loved his way of playing, his style & just the richness of ideas in his play, which is still there. I admire him very much & that’s not going to change"
https://twitter.com/chess24com/status/1090990297633427461
[DM: I believe that's from the interview I linked to in the update.]