Grandmaster

Not just the regular club events, like you mentioned.

I would say I'm going to fill in the hole running tournaments with IM or GM norms.

Oh, great.

Yeah,

So that's how I learned.

That's the biggest difference between like a just Grand Masters and a strong Grand Masters.

Super GM, yeah.

Yeah.

Like, isn't that...

What's a Grandmaster? What's the Grandmaster ELO? Grandmaster ELO.

2500.

Okay, so you're not a Grandmaster.

Um, oh, wait.

Yo, Caesar, are we playing?

And there's a certain threshold, you know, number for that, so I get that.

But I see GM, and what I think is, oh, okay, Grandmaster, these people know.

I don't care if they're from Bhutan or – ukraine or u.s or whatever they know chess and maybe the other person's better than them isn't better than them it's also a gm but i have i respect for the oh they really know know the game um That's good enough for me.

I don't need to see $2,750 or $2,000.

Even Levy, Gotham Chess.

I know he knows chess, and he's an entertainer, so that's why I see him.

But I also know he's excellent at chess, and I could care less what his elo is or if he ever makes Grandmaster or not.

I mean, there's all these things that we talk about that I'm like, You go to New York City, you play chess with a hustler, he's pretty darn good.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Perpetual Chess.

We've got a really fun interview coming your way with Grandmaster Nikita Vitiugov.

He was one of the top players in Russia.

He's emigrated to England, and now he is one of the top players in England.

They came in 12th.

He is also the author of a fantastic new chess book called Chess Metamorphosis.

It's about his own chess career and his time working on the preparation team of his boy- boyhood friend and rival, Grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi.

It's a beautiful book, great photos, game analysis, behind-the-scenes details.

That guy was a Soviet Armenian grandmaster who was nicknamed the Iron Tigran or the Iron Tiger because he was like, he's known as the hardest player to beat in the history of chess.

And Bobby Fischer actually ended up defeating him in a number of cases.

They also had this one game where there was four queens on the board in a Grandmaster game, and that game ended in a draw, which is kind of insane.

And that was one of my favorite games to study when I was younger as well, and still.

So anyway, before I, I guess, get too far on that stuff, that...

GM now?

Did you ever have aspirations to get to be Grandmaster or are you one? Sorry if I don't know that answer.

No, I'm not.

I kind of I remember briefly considering it and then I started playing rugby and I was like rugby is more fun I sort of you know I sort of fell out of love with it was also I got to I got to I was like 12 or 13 I think just starting secondary school and it became clear like like up to that point I just improved by playing like I basically never studied the game ever and um just played a lot and like occasionally would like talk about the game with someone afterwards but mostly just like play play play um but then it got to a point where it's like that isn't really enough you need to do some work off the tables to get over like a certain level um or to at least get over and like improve at a decent pace uh and i just wasn't really interested at that point i was going to secondary school i had like other interests so it sort of took a back seat and like yeah i started playing it's like playing rugby instead a bit of a change up but yeah i sometimes say like i retired from chess at 14 and that was when i decided to throw in the towel