Perspective helps Immelman as he takes Masters lead
AUGUSTA, Ga. — The scar stretches the length of a tap-in putt, from the side of Trevor Immelman’s rib cage toward the middle of his lower back.
Sergio Garcia asked to see it. A lot of the pros did. Immelman has pulled up his shirt for more surgery show-and-tells than he can count.
“Public indecency,” said Immelman.
This is your Masters leader. An upper-body flasher.
Immelman can sort of joke about it now. But only sort of.
A year ago he was grinding and ralphing his way around Augusta National. Thank you, stomach parasite — the one that caused Immelman to lose 25 pounds in three weeks.
Eight months later, his childhood doctor in South Africa was telling him to see a specialist. There was another problem.
The MRI was done on a Thursday morning. That night he was told about the tumor, which was hiding under his right rib cage. The surgery was performed the following Tuesday. And it wasn’t until two days after the operation — the longest two days of his life — that Immelman learned the growth was not cancerous.
Immelman will always remember Dec. 18, 2007. That was the day a surgeon dragged a scalpel across his side and back. And once the meds and morphine wore off, it also became the day Immelman’s priorities underwent a realignment.
“I’m so competitive and I’ve played this game since I was 5 years old and all I’ve ever wanted to do was win golf tournaments,” said Immelman, 28. “I kind of felt like it was a speed bump, really, you know? Because I just wanted to keep going. But I realized it could get taken away from you real fast.”
The truth is, Immelman lucked out. Some wake-up calls come too late. Immelman received a scar and a scare, but at least he’s smart enough to understand his own mortality.
Tags: 2008, masters, results
As randomb0y said, It gets exponentially harder for a computer to win on larger boards…A supercomputer is not going to help you.
They don’t do it because it’s “more difficult and gives them more respect”, they do it because once you’re in the lead it’s better to play safe moves which retain your lead instead of big risky moves.http://senseis.xmp.net/?RichMenShouldNotPickFights
Well yes. Writing a Go playing program isn’t a lot harder in many ways than writing a chess-playing program. The exponential growth of the problem-space as time increases or as the board increases in size is what makes it hard.
When playing amateurs, professionals often do try to win by a small amount out of politeness.
The point is, humans don’t look for moves in games in the same way as computers do.Well, it’s an interesting philosophical question whether our subconscious thought processes are equivalent to extremely rapid tree-pruning. But better players don’t play better by planning an extra couple of moves ahead.The great chess master Capablanca was asked how many moves ahead he saw. He replied “one - but it is always the right move”.
But that argument begs the question