Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Well, Garry Kasparov was no fool and same with Carlsen. I don’t know. He was way above everybody in his generation. He did not have the prep that the Russians had. He worked on his own. He was not working with a team. The Russians had all this communication and coaches and everything. By the way, I was representing the US in the World Junior Championships and things like that. It was a big disadvantage that you didn’t have a trainer or a coach organizing information. Fischer was doing that at the highest level. He must have been, by far, the best over-the-board player then. Not player. Just someone, if you would sit down with them at the board and show them your game, the claim I’ve heard is that Fischer was a more astute analyst even than Kasparov. Kasparov might have been the better player, but just willing to put his entire mental energy into over-the-board analysis, sitting there. I think that’s part of the Fischer legend. It’s part of the legend. He was amazing. I played against, really, all the top players then with the exception of Spassky. They were all phenomenal, but they weren’t all equally good calculators. The best calculator I ever played was actually a Yugoslav player who reached second or third, named Ljubojević. He beat me. I don’t know, I was 16 years old. To try to salvage some ego, I said, “What if I did this? What were you going to do?” And I showed him my best. I thought it was just like a great variation. I don’t remember how long, 10 moves. He goes, “Mm-hmm, but then I do this. Actually, it’s this,” and he goes something, 15 moves. I never played Fischer. He wrote an article about me once, as you know, but I never played him. Of course, I could well imagine it would be the same. I’m not sure I could tell the difference with Kasparov, Carlsen at that level.…

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