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| Aug-06-04 | | poktirity: Friend of yours? |
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| Aug-06-04 | | tomh72000: No, no. Mig is quite well known because of his work with ChessBase, and also the now-bankrupt kasparovchess.com. |
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| Jul-22-05 | | farrooj: and check out www.chessninja.com |
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| Oct-27-05 | | aw1988: Potential biography: Kasparov's lapdog. |
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| Dec-16-07 | | Tomlinsky: Greengard isn't rated anywhere near 2300 as far as I'm aware. His loss against Shumowitz, rated 1990, M Greengard vs M Shumowitz, 2003 used for reference in this database lists it as such but his last published rating, from the same year, is 1824 on the USCF ratings list @ http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlMa.... |
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| Sep-28-08 | | zoren: Anyone listen to his broadcast with Svidler?
I thought it was funny that Svidler laughed at none of his jokes. |
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| Sep-28-08 | | socnegoti: <I thought it was funny that Svidler laughed at none of his jokes.> LOL!! |
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| Sep-28-08 | | hitman84: "Laughter arises from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuitable or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex object or assemblage." - Scottish poet and essayist James Beatty |
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| Sep-28-08 | | Jim Bartle: Analysis of humor is not funny, apparently. |
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| Sep-28-08 | | Everyone: Look who's talking! |
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| Sep-28-08 | | rover: "Laughter arises from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuitable or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex object or assemblage." r u serious? |
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| Sep-28-08 | | hitman84: Rover, I find Christian Hesse's articles very interesting on Chessbase. His take on 'Humor in Chess' in one of his previous articles. http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail...
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| Oct-04-08 | | Karpova: Interview with Mig Greengrad by Howard Goldowsky: http://www.chesscafe.com/text/skitt... Mig talks about a lot of different topics - e. g. his favourite chessbook is Botvinnik's "Championship Chess", 1941. An excerpt (on writing books):
<“It’s a marketing game. You can see how it can happen…you have people like
Keene…Schiller…they know a lot about chess, and who knows, maybe they
write a decent book every now and then, but who would know? When you’re
cranking out that many that quickly, who’s going to sift through them all to find
one that’s decent? Keene wrote some good books…his book on Staunton, and he
did a great book on Nimzowitsch…then he went into cranking it out. The same
thing with Reinfeld. Reinfeld wrote some really nice books, then he began to
crank all this stuff. It was one of these British GMs who said that he had written
more books than he read [laughs]. You get all these UK GMs, they get their titles,
never crack 2500 practically, and then settle down with a nice business because
they’re English speakers writing for the largest market. So seven or eight of them
make a living writing these things…it’s kind of scary…it’s certainly nothing of
any lasting value. So much of it is crap or repackaged database dumps. Who
knows, maybe they’re very good writers. Maybe I’m missing something. But
when you look through them, it’s just the lack of content…you can’t produce
something good that quickly. But I don’t begrudge anyone a living. Every once in
a while something good comes out and you’re like, Hey!, this is a nice book. But
you kind of have to shake yourself, because you’re prepared for it to suck.
Yermolinsky’s book [The Road to Chess Improvement] was good…Rowson [The
Seven Deadly Chess Sins] is a good writer.”> |
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| Oct-04-08 | | hitman84: Thanks for that Karpova, I was always interested in knowing the reason behind the demise of Kasparovchess.com <Internet Chess and the Demise of KasparovChess.comGreengard has been profiled or interviewed four times so far in his journalistic
career: Sara Hurst interviewed him for the second edition of her book, Chess on
the Web, Bill Brock interviewed him in 2000 for the Illinois Chess Bulletin, New
In Chess issue number 4, 2002, profiled him on their Q&A page and About.com
interviewed Greengard in one of their live online interviews. It was in this
About.com interview where Greengard spoke about his then recently acquired
post as editor-in-chief at KasparovChess.com. At that time, October 1999,
Greengard was bursting with optimism for KasparovChess, saying such things as,
“We will be the best…You wouldn’t believe our working capital…Many people
with deep pockets think KasparovChess is a winner.”
But today, Greengard believes KasparovChess will not last another six months.
“[The KasparovChess] business plan was made for an era that was ending just as we were starting,” he says. It was an ending era of dot-com exuberance, where
companies believed that if you built a website using enough money, the customer
would come.
KasparovChess was no exception. Even though they had millions of dollars to
start with, and their market research estimated that there are about four hundred to
six hundred million people in the world who know how to play chess, Greengard
explains that there were problems generating revenue. “In Eastern Europe, where
the majority of people play chess, there is very little Internet, very few computers,
and very few credit cards. You’ve got all these people in Russia and Bulgaria who
are asking, ‘Can I use my Star card?’ I’m like, sorry, Visa or MasterCard. We had
people sending envelopes filled with Ruble notes to our Moscow office to sign up
with the Champions Club. As you can see, there is a huge problem there. We
can’t take money from people because the delivery mechanisms aren’t there. So
we can push chess where there’s the Internet, which is America and Western
Europe, or wait for the Internet as it accumulates in Eastern Europe and Russia.
Both are going to happen, but it’s very incremental, and it’s not going to happen
overnight.> |
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| Jul-30-10 | | I play the Fred: So what is Mig up to these days? He hardly ever updates the Dirt anymore. |
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| Jul-30-10 | | MaxxLange: He just had a kid, all his blog updates are like "Hey I know I haven't posted in a while" now |
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| Jul-30-10 | | MaxxLange: Babies ruin everything! AGAIN. |
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| Jul-09-12 | | wordfunph: "You have two choices against Kramnik's Catalan: the long squeeze or the risky breakout. Either way, you die." - Mig Greengard |
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| May-24-15 | | TheFocus: <Few sports have such a deep and complicated world that is completely closed to outsiders. One of the reasons chess has such an intellectual reputation is because if you don't understand chess, you don't understand it at ALL, and this also makes it more attractive to us, the members of the club. It's like speaking a foreign language or liking cauliflower, it puts you into a special group of people that understand something that those out of the group can't> - Mig Greengard. |
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| May-24-15 | | TheFocus: <There aren't fewer draws, fans don't like it, the players don't like it, sponsors don't seem to care, and the chess is much worse> - Mig Greengard (on the faster FIDE time controls). |
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| Feb-06-18 | | Petrosianic: Mig's chief claim to fame (infamy, actually) is how he ran his Chess Ninja message board into the ground. It was a really top notch board for a while with a lot of good posters. One of its weaknesses though was that it had a "Top Posters" counter on the main page that showed the Top 5 posters (as defined by the number of posts they'd written). It also had this one poster named Steve, aka "Chess Fan", who was rated about 1400, and knew virtually nothing about chess (his only chess opinion was that Kasparov was the all-time greatest player). But he had an ego like a Grandmaster, and needed to be the center of attention. His way of achieving this was to be the "Posting Champion" of the board. He'd flood the board with posts with absolutely no content just to have written a post and increase his number on the Top Posters list. He'd post links with no explanation. He'd "Me too" as many posts as possible. He'd write posts congratulating himself for having written so many posts. He did everything but paste in phone listings. Mig Greengard, who was the Worst Board Administrator of All Time, forbade his moderators to do anything about this or other situations, despite numerous complaints. Mig's philosophy was that moderators should maintain order just by being there, but NOT acting. But Mig was also foolish enough to SAY that publicly, which meant that the mods were useless even as scarecrows. Who's going to stop doing something because a moderator says so if they know the moderator's hands are tied? Mig (who was never there) felt that if Chess Fan was annoying, people should just suck it up. But that standard didn't apply to Mig himself. He once banned a poster for a week just for reporting a dozen Chess Fan posts, and those reports ended up in HIS mailbox. "The REST of you need to deal with this, not me!" The posts genuinely violated standards that a renegade moderator who actually cared about the board tried to lay down, but Mig pretended not to understand this. People joked about what negatives of Mig Chess Fan must have hidden away. Eventually all the good posters started leaving. I finally had enough of it, and found one Help forum that allowed you to delete posts after they were made. But those posts still stayed as part of your post count. So one night I (who was in 2nd place on the Post List), wrote and deleted a couple of thousand posts, just to put myself ahead of Chess Fan on the list. The next day CF had a major meltdown, went totally to pieces, and expected everyone who was busy kibitzing the Anand-Toplaov match to drop what they were doing and help him figure out what the heck happened to his Posting Championship!! (He thought it was a glitch, since I didn't have thousands more posts showing in any of the forums). The renegade moderator told me privately that my doing this was the greatest thing anyone had ever done. After the resulting brou-ha-ha, Mig (who never wanted any more to do with the board than he could help) modified the software to take away all post counters. It became impossible to see how many posts anyone had written. I think he thought he was punishing me. Chess Fan still spammed after that, but not as much. Mig finally closed the place down in Summer 2013. He tried to placate the few remaining posters with a promise that it was coming back bigger and better that fall, but nobody took that seriously. To this day, the broken promise to come back in Fall 2013 is still there. He didn't even bother to change that. |
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| Feb-06-18 | | JimNorCal: <Petrosianic>: what a terrific story! |
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| Feb-06-18 | | john barleycorn: <Petrosianic: ... But he had an ego like a Grandmaster, and needed to be the center of attention. His way of achieving this was to be the "Posting Champion" of the board. He'd flood the board with posts with absolutely no content just to have written a post ...> A <saffuna> impersonator? Or the master himself? |
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| Feb-06-18 | | zborris8: The Meltdown is in Wayback Machine: < LOL! > <ChessNinja.com Wayback Machine:[new hot] Icon 5 What Happened?? Pages: 1 2 3 Chess Fan
54 April 01, 2007 05:17 PM
` What Are The Odds Against This Happening? Chess Fan 3 April 02, 2007 06:40 PM> |
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| Feb-06-18 | | Petrosianic: I think that's a different meltdown (he had a lot of them although that was the worst). This definitely happened after March 2008, and was in the middle of a world championship match, which must have been Anand-Topalov. (It's barely possible that it was Anand-Kramnik, but I don't think so). |
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