Reskilling for the Wheat and Chessboard Problem

After Morphy in the 1850s and Fischer in the 1970s, Magnus Carlsen, too, hopes — upon the wings of Netflix and by the grace of the fictional Queen Beth Harmon — to incarnate the miracle of a worldwide chess boom. But, unlike his great predecessors, Carlsen faces a much harder challenge, as Leonard Barden writes in his The Guardian chess column of November 20, 2020: “This boom is improbable because it coincides with a contrasting disaster for over-the-board chess. All levels from grandmaster tournaments to weekly club nights have been ruined by COVID-19. Face-to-face games with a human opponent are rarer occurrences than they were during the two world wars”. In spite of their glory, however, both Morphy and Fischer lost their wars in the end (the Civil War and the Cold War), and both ended up spending their young lives in loneliness and isolation. On the contrary, Carlsen is still interested enough in his own happiness. So who knows? Whatever the virus may be up to, he could just be the man who triumphs over Sissa’s impossible odds.