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Chess tactics explained

chesstactics.org

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Re: Chess tactics explained

#91

Post by jlg23 »

magicalhippo wrote: post #14

Due to Magnus Carlsen, chess has had a major boost here in Norway. His major tournaments are covered in detail on TV with commentary by chess experts, which makes it quite approachable and exciting to watch. Given the inevitable slow parts of the game, the experts have time to explain the position on the board, and show how the variations can play out etc. They've somehow managed to turn chess into a spectator sport.…

I've been watching high class matches on TV all my life, but usually with sound turned off. Comments are usually just computer analysis read out loud and background trivia like "he played similarly 2 years ago against XY" don't provide any benefit to me.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#92

Post by SubiculumCode »

saeranv wrote: post #70
telesilla wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This absolutely rekindled my interest. I used to play as a young girl (pre-teen) and enjoyed it but as I got older didn't feel welcome in the chess club. It's nice how they show on TV that girls who wanted it just got in there and be involved but the reality was not as easy.. (hopefully it's easier now, the 80s was not kind to girls with a nerdish bent). I've started reading chess openings and tactics as a way to sen…

Try chess.com or lichess.org! You're automatically matched with someone of your skill level, and can play games from 1 to 10 minutes (each).

I highly recommend Chess Tempo for tactics training. A large database of problems drawn from grandmaster games, insightful user commentary per problem, and a full classification of each problem by the type of tactic e.g. attraction.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#93

Post by honkdaddy »

Kaibeezy wrote: post #84
fabian2k wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the chance of cheating is a serious issue if you're playing at a low level online. You're generally matched against playes with a similar rating, and someone using a computer heavily would drastically inflate their rating. Which also increases the chance at detection significantly. Computers are scary good at chess, it's not exactly invisible if you use them to cheat. If you're a beginner it's also quit…

Accused of cheating online (scrabble, chess, trivia) so often, I just had to stop playing pickup games. Now I only play with friends.

Was this recently? Unless you're an absolutely exceptional chess player, both Chess.com and Lichess are filled with enough good players that I'd be surprised if you flew through the ranks quickly enough to be accused of cheating :)

Re: Chess tactics explained

#94

Post by esrauch »

fileeditview wrote: post #8
rgoulter wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

chess.com's messaging is the opposite of "chances are slim". but they emphasise that they take the issue seriously, albeit with a low false-positive rate. https://www.chess.com/article/view/online-chess-cheating From the comments, it seems there's also the risk that you'll think cheating occurred, when instead you just missed stuff.

Interesting article. They do however say nothing about the rating of said cheaters (or I missed it). What I stated before was that it is unlikely in the lower rating levels and I stand by that. If someone cheats he will gain rating fast and leave the lower rating groups. And yes people also tend to accuse other of cheating if they lose. :) As long as you are not a competitive player the best you can do is to just pla…

I believe what happens is most people are 800-1200, many of them decide to cheat at some point rise quickly a few hundred points and them are banned. To be higher rated than maybe 1600 or so you've played more games which also gives more statistical evidence for the cheat detector so less likely you're consistently cheating without getting caught.

That said, there's probably some amount of higher rated cheating that is just smarter than playing every engine move and harder to detect (though chess.com says they have banned a bunch of GMs for cheating)

Re: Chess tactics explained

#96

Post by bluGill »

seamyb88 wrote: post #43

Looks like good information for beginners, but the hardest part of chess, for me, is the opening and how to play from move 4 onwards. It is less obvious why a strong position is a strong position early on, unless your opponent makes some very poor choices.

Even at the high levels all openings are played. That basic e4 (pawn in front of the kind moves forward 2 squares) is the most popular for a reason, but all possible first moves are played from time to time. Looking for tactics and trying to make them work will serve you at all levels until well after 2000.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#97

Post by thiago_fm »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #80
sudhirj wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely re-kindled my interest in chess. I played as a child, but never took it seriously. Got a chess board for my 4-yo, but unfortunately she isn't a prodigy. Who'd have thought. Still has fun arranging the pieces and make up stories with them, though. And I'm playing on the Chess.com app. The puzzles especially are a neat way to get your brain running, and they're a better attention sink than Twitter / HN.

The vast majority of grandmasters didn't play chess at age 4.

That's incorrect. I did a lot of ending puzzles and knew a lot about openings and variations at age 5, learned mostly because a father of a friend was very enthusiastic about it.

I quit playing around age 7 because some kids there were really out of my league and there wasn't enough government or support for me to continue playing given that I wasn't the best. I still play to this day, but mostly amateurish and very sporadically.

Of course if you just want to do it for fun, it's fine. But if you can to become a GM and make a living playing chess, the bar is pretty high and it's very likely that you suck.

You can start to play a bit later and become a GM, but it's a big gamble with your future.

Most people I know who continued with chess nowadays are in the low 2K range, one made it to IM... all share extremely good memory and logical thinking and could just have been instead a lazy CS student and get top grades, eventually become a software engineer and enjoy a good life. But instead have a shitty life playing the same game all over again and have a hard time leaving it now to do something else, as it's the thing they dedicated their whole life to.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#98

Post by esrauch »

colechristensen wrote: post #12
fileeditview wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting article. They do however say nothing about the rating of said cheaters (or I missed it). What I stated before was that it is unlikely in the lower rating levels and I stand by that. If someone cheats he will gain rating fast and leave the lower rating groups. And yes people also tend to accuse other of cheating if they lose. :) As long as you are not a competitive player the best you can do is to just pla…

In other words, you would have to be rather bad at cheating to maintain a low rating. Chess competition is driven by various rating systems which match people fairly well. Computers are very much better than beginner to intermediate players.

The computers are much better than even the best humans though by several hundred rating points (as in, the world #1 would still lose 90+% of their games). The engines being so strong makes the anticheat detectors job easier to statistically find inhuman play before the account reaches a high rating.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#99

Post by slx26 »

jyriand wrote: post #10
Normille wrote: post #2

I wondered if the popularity of 'The queen's Gambit' would lead to a brief infatuation with chess in the popular imagination. The fact I've seen about 3 chess related submissions on HN recently, where I don't recall ever seeing one before, suggests it does. I used to enjoy a game of chess back in the day, although I was never very good. And I always imagined myself playing chess with a remote opponent by post when I…

There was some sorts of renaissance of chess in twitch community. All the big streamers were playing chess for some reason. Not sure what happened there, might be related somehow to Hikaru Nakamura starting to stream and growing pretty big. But that was before "Queen's Gambit".

Here's what happened. Excerpt from the wikipedia page [0]:

> PogChamps is an online amateur chess tournament hosted by Chess.com. Players in the tournament are internet personalities, primarily Twitch streamers. PogChamps takes place over the course of two weeks and has a prize pool of $50,000.

Basically, very strong chess players trained twitch personalities for a few days, and then had them play against each other.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PogChamps

Re: Chess tactics explained

#100

Post by bfgoodrich »

fileeditview wrote: post #4
Normille wrote: post #2

I wondered if the popularity of 'The queen's Gambit' would lead to a brief infatuation with chess in the popular imagination. The fact I've seen about 3 chess related submissions on HN recently, where I don't recall ever seeing one before, suggests it does. I used to enjoy a game of chess back in the day, although I was never very good. And I always imagined myself playing chess with a remote opponent by post when I…

Chess has always been an occasional topic on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... You should not be afraid of cheaters online. In the lower rating levels the chances to meet one are pretty slim. You can probably have hundreds or thousands of wonderful games before you meet one and probably you would not even recognize it. What you meet more often are people that let their time run out t…

Add that chess had already seen a remarkable resurgence this year, before the Queen's Gambit.

https://thenextweb.com/gaming/2020/09/13/the-classic-game-of...

https://www.insider.com/online-chess-has-surged-during-quara...

I absolutely loved the Queen's Gambit, but the root comment has it a bit backwards. It really seems like the Queen's Gambit came at a remarkably opportune time, just as chess was re-emerging into the popular mindspace.

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