whether you're new to chess or you've been playing the game for a long time at some point you've
probably wondered what is a grandmaster and what are all these other titles about and that's the
point of this video i'm going to take you through the process of achieving the international titles
show you some cool images from tournaments and talk about some cool statistics like some of the
youngest grand masters in the world at the end i will show you the game that clinched
the international master title for me back in 2018 as always you can use the video timestamps
to jump around and see what you want to see let's get into it so first things first fide
federation international desect that is the international governing body of chess
and essentially it is a ranking system which has a rating that quantifies your skill level
okay every country has its own rating system but to achieve these titles you have to go by fides
rules and these at the bottom left are the titles now this is just the rating requirement
for the titles right uh beginning at 2000 all the way up to 2500 depending if you're trying
to become a grandmaster an international master gm and i am also require something called a norm
which we'll talk about later actually they require three norms uh and as you can see before you ask
the question about you know women's titles and the open titles i'm just here to report the facts as
they are as of november 2020. my view uh on kind of this gender gap in chess is the fact that you
know 98 of my viewing audience is male and i would love to see a lot more women competing at the
elite levels uh and for something like the women's title to potentially be a level playing field
uh just an open title for everybody but it causes a lot of debate very heated debate for some reason
um but you know we'll see as the future develops and as we get more kind of understanding of the
issue what happens but a good place to start for everybody would be right here
this is the wikipedia page for the fidei titles uh it has a little bit about the history and
the grandmaster title can be achieved with some weird assortment of tournaments as well as the
international master title but we're going to talk about kind of the the traditional way of doing it
by getting your norms and your rating these stats blow me away over here on the right hand side
the fact that there's only 3 700 ims internationally and 1600 as of january 2020 active
playing grandmasters that is wild to me because i would hypothesize that something like i don't know
50 million people play the game of chess maybe 100 million people maybe not ranked but just you know
play the game of chess in some capacity right like i wouldn't that doesn't seem too insane and that's
a that's a ridiculous statistic uh when it you know when it comes to these international titles
now like i said i am and gm have a separate kind of thing not just the rating now what i'm going to
show you right now is a little bit ugly okay this is straight from the feed a handbook and to break
this down for you it's a nine round event so to to to get a norm one of three norms you need to
fulfill a tournament with a certain performance of at least a certain amount of rounds now this is a
very ugly table the real thing to pay attention to here is how many points you need to score
out of nine rounds okay out of nine rounds depending on your rating range of opponents the
average rating range of the people that you play so if you play an average rating in this category
you would need six and a half points to get an international master norm if you played somebody
in this category right of average rating you would need six and a half and so on and
the worst part about this thing is that there's something called a federation requirement as well
so for example you need to play uh x amount of players not from the country where the tournament
is being organized so you need foreigners i mean basically people who are registered under another
federation there's a few ways of doing this uh to get these kinds of uh norms at these tournaments
okay uh there's two types of tournaments open tournaments which look something like this for
example the gibraltar chess festival okay in the international tournament you know hundreds of
people around the world come to play and you know the thing about an open tournament is that you
don't know who you're going to play every round you just play based on who's ever in your score
group it's a massive tournament so what happens is at the end of a round you know they'll tally
all of the points up they'll put a bracket and you just automatically get chosen against one
of those players so you have no real control you have to consistently do well uh and and if you you
know lose a game next round you'll play someone lower rated and that will mess up your average
and the other thing that you can do is you can play something called a closed tournament a 10
player group of players they get every you know every correct federation ahead of time
and you know the exact amount of points you have to score you also know what color you will play
against which opponent first and that way you can prepare a little bit better there's pros and cons
of both open tournaments are all over the world you can travel the world go to beautiful places
oftentimes if you're not from the same federation and you're titled already they will give you um
a uh you know like a hotel room for free or free entry like anywhere basically um the
benefit of you know that's the benefit of an open tournament uh but obviously that that's a
detriment in terms of you you don't actually know who you're going to play at one moment you have
no control of the pairings it sounds good to play in a closed tournament but in a closed tournament
there's actually a separate problem they're usually really expensive so some norm tournaments
in the united states will charge you an entry fee of like a thousand dollars plus you have to pay
the hotel plus you have to pay uh the you know the uh the flight and everything like that so
one of these close tournaments in the united states if you're chasing a gm norm can easily cost
you fifteen hundred dollars it's a five six day tournament and you play two games every single day
so yeah i mean you can see how the costs can start piling up very very
fast uh these tournaments are like really no joke uh and as you get those three norms
and the rating because as i showed you earlier you need the rating you would apply and then
you get the title i made five i am norms in my life i am norm performances i've never made a gm
norm i get asked this a lot i've never scored well enough for a gm norm and my highest ever
live rating was 2430 as you saw from the table earlier it um you need to be 2500 so i'm not
that close and my current rating is oh we're not even going to talk about my current rating
i told you guys that i would show you a little bit of statistics right so the crazy thing about chess
is that the youngest grandmasters of all time have been 12 13 14. it's terrifying i mean right now
uh there's kids who are like 10 and 11 trying to break these records the worst part about it
is covid because people haven't been playing chess at all this year there have been prodigies around
the world like at 10 11 years old who wanted to become gms and they just haven't had a chance
in 2020 which is absolutely heartbreaking but that's unfortunately the reality of the situation
that's basically all i have you know in terms of the titles uh now you know to get
cm and fm you just have to get the rating to get im and gm you need to get the norm requirements
and as i promised you the last thing that i would share is my game a game that i played in 2018
i had the rating already i was on pace to get my final i am norm it was the eighth round of
the new york international and i was playing a new york resident uh who had come here recently from
uzbekistan uh jurabek hamrakulov very very strong player and uh i had the white pieces against him i
believe at this point he was still in i am maybe gm like 2490. i prepared for a long time and
well d4 knight f6 c4 e6 and he played c5 now c5 is kind of inviting a benoni uh white
generally pushes here black will go something like this play g6 bishop g7 this is called the benoni
defense it's interesting it's complicated and uh it's you know it can lead to all sorts of fighting
chess now my opponent in the game played the move b5 though he did not play ed5 he played b5
this is known as the blumenfeld gambit and it is a really crazy system i knew that he was going
to play it so i tried to do a little preparation but then he surprised me anyway the point is this
if you take on e6 first black will take back and you take the pawn on b5 but what this does
is it gives black a big center with the move d5 and black basically says all right man you've
got these double pawns i'm not really sure what they're doing i'm gonna develop in the center push
and try to smash you early but zero back played bishop to e7 which was a super strange move uh
and i i didn't really know what to do after this i mean i could have maybe developed my
bishop here but i just i just felt like fighting and i decided to sacrifice a pawn with the move e4
now in hindsight i probably shouldn't have done this he took it and then i kind of just said
look he's not castled let me get out early i'm gonna castle quickly get my queen out
but he took and then he didn't even castle he just played a6 and this is such a tricky move so if i
take i'm just helping him develop he can even give me a check and then take back but even if he just
plays like taking with a knight and tries to go to b4 it's not a very pleasant position for me
so in the game i just canceled and when he took i took he played knight c6
and i didn't know where to put this bishop so my logic was that if i put my bishop out to e3
he's gonna play rook b8 and win my pawn and i didn't really like that i mean i can bring it
back to e2 but then i didn't like that his bishop lines up on this diagonal so the reason after
knight c6 i played this move is that i wanted my bishop on c3 i wanted it on the long diagonal and
playing b3 here to put the bishop on the long diagonal wouldn't have worked because he would
have played bishop to f6 and that would have been a problem for me so i played bishop d2
and i sacrificed the b2 pawn now already this is like the weirdest game ever because i literally
have a past pawn he has a central clump like literally look i have no c d or e pawn he's got
he's got some weird pawn clump in the center so i hit his queen queen a3
i can't take on g7 because he's pinning me here so i play queen d2 trying to get over here and if
he castles well let's not forget that this pawn is just hanging on the other side of the board
and suddenly he's in some serious trouble so he plays bishop f6 i traded and now he's got a fork
pawn clump in the center the king is still in the center i played rook d1 threatening to take
he played rook a7 defending i said well i gotta go for it queen h6 hit this try to get in here
giving this away but it doesn't really matter and he played rook f8 and gave me the h7 pawn tell me
this is not the weirdest structure of pawns you have ever seen c5 d7 something like this
and um he plays c4 just saying all right man i'm gonna go get my queen maybe i'll play d5 hit
your queen like this so i played queen h5 check making him block and i centralized my rook i felt
like i should fight down the two two files here my opponent here played rook a5 hitting my queen from
the opposite side of the board now at this point it's move 23 we're both getting very low on time
uh which is kind of common at these these events it was a very complicated position so we
probably have two three minutes with a bonus time per move so i played queen g6
and he played all the way back with his queen to defend himself and here i found an idea which
during the time of the game i thought i was a genius it wasn't such a great move
but to move knight to d2 in the middle of all of this chaos i play a backwards knight move
because i want to move forward in the position he goes knight e5 counter countering me hitting my
queen defending his pawn maybe knight d3 i played all the way back to b1 to try to go down to b8
some exemplary board vision here shown by gotham he goes rook g7 giving his king a little bit of
breathing room i played rookie 3 because in the future i might want to sneak around this way
and i want to you know meet his rook there but here what i had missed is that after
knight to e4 instead trying to go to knight d6 defended by my rook if he plays d5 and i don't
have this anymore i have check king f7 and in this position i can go check king g6 and here i thought
my attack was done because if i play rook up to e3 i mean he can just for example take my pawn
and even if i check him king is just going to hide i mean at best i can get a draw but i thought
maybe i could get something more what i had missed is that after rook takes a2 i have a fork
which is completely ridiculous just calculating that in the game uh and even i mean even with
winning his rook he's gonna get my knight so it's still kind of complicated but that's what
the engine showed rook c3 is what i played i thought it was more practical he played rook d5
and i played knight e4 i invited this trade because i'm trying to get my knight in
he plays d5 and i play check knight comes back to f7 and my knight goes to g3 still in extremely
weird position because i'm threatening knight f5 for example and he can't take because of this
fork that would be so he goes rook g oh sorry he plays king d7 sorry sorry if he had played
rook g5 in this position um then i would have had to route my queen back and come around this way
is what i wanted to say with rook g5 it's a completely insane position but king d7 and that's
what i did i mean i did this anyway i played queen d1 queen a4 trying to meet the king on the other
side of the board because i have no other way to hit the king he goes queen before covering that
and i say okay let's hit these two knight h5 hitting him on both sides of the board rook g5
giving this away because had he played rook g6 in this position i have to move knight f4 and this
is why anticipating your opponent's threat is so important yes you can temporarily stop one threat
but then comes sorry i played the other move then comes the other threat and this is really
bad because now everything is going to fall this is going to fall i'm going to break down
the king's safety and this is just this is simply losing here i mean knight e6 i even have rookie 6
rook f6 for example but in the game he sacked the pawn played king e7 and here for example if i had
played knight takes d5 it looks like it works rook d5 queen d5 oh i'm so smart he can't take my queen
well i'm not wrong he he can't but he can backrank checkmate me so i did not hang that and in this
game i left my knight alone and i played the move h4 counter attacking him not giving him this
counter attacking and now my king has some breathing room he plays rook e5
and now i don't have a choice really because if i move my rook to defend my knight
i miss that he has rookie one check in the game i didn't miss that i traded and now things kind
of calm down a bit c3 i pin the pawn to the queen king d6 and i just pushed my own pawn
he went queen b2 trying to push his pawn through i stopped his pawn he took and i played queen d4
hitting his pawn and at the same time threatening this this this this a million different checks
he played queen b1 i played king h2 he pushed and we had a very funny repetition of moves
here to close the game queen f4 check he has to go here if he plays king e7 i have check
and i'm picking up the pawn actually now still he might be okay but no need to lose your extra pawn
he plays knight e5 and i sneak around and he has a few king moves one is better than the
other if he had played king to c6 for example now i have a very nice move knight takes pawn
and he cannot take back because of queen c8 this is kind of what i was hoping that he
might blunder in a low time situation but he didn't he just went back and
at this point it's just the draw there's there's really nothing i can do unless you know i want
to let him promote which i don't so queen g7 king d6 defending the knight queen f8 and so on
if he goes something like king c8 for example i can still go here because the knight is hanging
and we agreed to a draw and i know maybe you thought oh he was going to win the game and
clinch it no but it was a completely insane game i had to hold my nerves throughout that entire game
and the draw actually sealed me the result the final round of the tournament my result actually
technically didn't matter uh that game ended in a draw as well but 2018 in june i clinched my
final i am norm and a few months later i became an international master uh i have a video on the best
game i ever played that was the game i hit my peak that game came a month after this game so 2018
was a pretty good year of chess for me hope this helps all right uh and if you've made it this far
in the video and you're not yet subscribed to the channel do me a favor and do that i think like 65
of my viewers right now aren't subscribed it'll be pretty cool as we try to chase 200 000 which
is a crazy number and let me know if there's any other concepts of videos that there really aren't
on youtube that you want me to cover i saw that there wasn't a lot of videos on this subject
and so i decided to cover it and i hope it helped i'll see you the next one