Chess

[Bartmanhomer]

The Carlsen/Neimann chess drama has inspired me to make a chess thread again. So anyway this thread is about everyone's logical board game chess. I haven't played chess for quite a while now and I'm very bad at chess but I did get a few wins now and then. How good are you at chess? :smile:

[Batcathat]

I think I like the idea of liking chess a lot more than I actually like chess. Ever since I was a kid, I've wanted to like it and preferably be really good at it (intellectual vanity, I suspect) but in practice I mostly think it's okay and as a result I'm a very average chess player at best.

I don't think I've actually played regularly since I was in the Swedish equivalent of high school (my school had one of those huge boards where the pieces are like three feet tall that me and my friends used on occasion) which is more years ago than I care to admit.

[Bartmanhomer]

I think I like the idea of liking chess a lot more than I actually like chess. Ever since I was a kid, I've wanted to like it and preferably be really good at it (intellectual vanity, I suspect) but in practice I mostly think it's okay and as a result I'm a very average chess player at best.

I don't think I've played regularly since I was in the Swedish equivalent of high school (my school had one of those huge boards where the pieces are like three feet tall that me and my friends used on occasion) which is more years ago than I care to admit.
Yes. Chess is awesome. I used a Scholar Mate and I won many games against unskilled chess players. It has proved to be very effective so many times. Against skilled and high-level chess players, that's a whole different story.

[animorte]

Anybody else experienced this story? I first got interested in chess around 10 and learned how to play. I brought this interest to my mother who asked me to teach her. Naturally she fooled me with the typical, “what does this piece do again?” Meanwhile running me over several games in a row also with, “wow, I must have gotten lucky!” My brother tried the same thing but I learned my lesson with her, not that it actually helped me win. I just wasn’t surprised that time.

Joined chess club my first year in high school and won the very first tournament (32 entries). That was nice.

A couple years later I witnessed a 6-hour (somehow) interesting game between an 11-year-old and a 30-something-year-old.

I haven’t played in a few years, but I’ve always enjoyed it. I’ve also found other very good games that somewhat resemble it. And I have no interest whatsoever in the drama around professionals, though I did check in on the other thread.

[BaronOfHell]

Compared to someone who doesn't play I'm very good. Compared to someone who plays I'm pretty mediocre.

I think the game is great in moderation, like every other game. It has some unique aspects that I haven't found anywhere else, which is brought forward by the easiness to conceptualize the game, while the amount of potential concepts is too large to oversimplify the game.

This also means that whatever may frustrate me about the game, like the drawish nature combining with me still getting a whooping when playing, is also very predominant. Therefore I also sometimes prefer to play end games practices where the point is to demonstrate a win or draw by best defense. I suppose something similar could be done with openings.

[Radar]

I do not remember, when I learned to play chess, but definitely when I was kid. Did not have many opportunities to play it aside from occasionally at home, but I really liked it. Once I got some chess programs on my computer I could finally play whenever I wanted even if it was not the same as with a real person. With Internet came new opportunities for finding people to play chess with. Nowadays I more often do the puzzles on lichess as they take less time and it is not always easy to fit a whole game or two in a daily schedule - let alone keep the concentration long enough to play well. I also really enjoy game analysis videos done by agadmator on Youtube - sometimes I am even able to guess the key move of the game, which is nice.


I haven’t played in a few years, but I’ve always enjoyed it. I’ve also found other very good games that somewhat resemble it. And I have no interest whatsoever in the drama around professionals, though I did check in on the other thread.
If you like analysing chess games, there are a lot of professional chess players showcasing interesting games in the Internet. Global village makes every niche big enough that it makes sense to create dedicated content. :smallsmile: In fact, chess is somehow becoming popular again thanks to the Internet with people following live streams of famous masters as they casually play etc.


This also means that whatever may frustrate me about the game, like the drawish nature combining with me still getting a whooping when playing, is also very predominant. Therefore I also sometimes prefer to play end games practices where the point is to demonstrate a win or draw by best defense. I suppose something similar could be done with openings.
If the drawish nature is not for you, have you ever tried playing go? In that game draw would be rather difficult to obtain and the complexity is even higher than for chess despite simpler rules.

As for doing away with opening books (I personally find memorizing a bunch of opening lines to be exceedingly boring), Fischer found a good solution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess) with random initial placement of figures.

[animorte]

Compared to someone who doesn't play I'm very good. Compared to someone who plays I'm pretty mediocre.
I think that speaks for the majority honestly, including myself.

If you like analysing chess games, there are a lot of professional chess players showcasing interesting games in the Internet. Global village makes every niche big enough that it makes sense to create dedicated content. :smallsmile: In fact, chess is somehow becoming popular again thanks to the Internet with people following live streams of famous masters as they casually play etc.Thanks, might look into that.

[LibraryOgre]

I've taught my son the basics, because that's all I really know. The way we play is that, after I smack his pieces around the board for a while, he'll ask to switch sides... and then I smack his pieces around the board for a while, showing him what I'm doing the entire time.

[Aedilred]

How good one is is difficult to say with any certainty since it's entirely relative. Fortunately I have some figures I can refer to in my case. My OTB rating is about 1400 (ECF, which is calculated in the same way as the FIDE rating, althogh there is some distortion in the actual rating). Online I mostly play blitz (five minutes, no increment) where my (chess.com) rating tends to hover around the 1100 mark.

I would like to be better but I would need to put some serious effort into doing so and I'm in constant debate with myself over whether it's worth it. The time to do this was probably at school (when I used to play for the school team) but bizarrely at that point relatively little effort was put into training us: we just played games and it seemed to be assumed we would either improve through trial and error or find the learning resources in our own time. At my age there's a ceiling on how good I can get, and the time and effort I would need to put into reaching it is formidable. I don't know if chess is really what I want to be putting that effort into.

With opening memorisation (which I agree is quite boring) I think the only way to do it is to focus on one or two lines. Since I always play d4 as white and the Sicilian against e4 as black, I can largely ignore all the theory on the Ruy Lopez, Giucco Piano, etc. (With that said, I think maybe I should switch off the Sicilian since it's a very theory-heavy line), and if you come up against something unfamiliar, try to force them out of book early. Then you're into the middlegame which is much less prep-reliant. Of course that assumes that you're more competitive in the middlegame than your opponent...

[MCerberus]

Played back up until the end of high school ending up in the intermediary ranks. Good times. Only found out later that St. Louis chess federation school league is relatively huge compared to normal, so got to see a lot of schools during tournaments. One of them had a full 4-tv Halo setup every year.

When I played I favored the London and c5 responses

[Bartmanhomer]

I have played against a grandmaster who used to go to my childhood school and I lost to him. He's that good. :biggrin: