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Chess tactics explained

chesstactics.org

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Re: Chess tactics explained

#121

Post by Kaibeezy »

honkdaddy wrote: post #93
Kaibeezy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

You know... no, not recently. I can see from many of the comments here that chess seems to have found a way to mitigate, so maybe I’ll give it another go. Thanks to you and sjcsjc for the encouragement.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#122

Post by racl101 »

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…

I think like just like mathematics, cryptography, computer science and movies like The Imitation Game for example, those who are initiated and curious would gravitate towards the subject as they probably would have eventually, and those who are not, will just be happy to watch the movies, shows or other pop culture about it.

I do not believe it would draw more people than usual because with any endeavour, eventually the wonderment disappears for some people when they realize they gotta put in some work to continue going down the rabbit hole. Many drop off and become observers but not active participants.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#123

Post by baryphonic »

This is good stuff. I want to start teaching my kids to play chess, but the problem is I'm not great at it myself due to lack of practice. And when I read names of well-known tactics, I tend to get lost. Being able to learn them for playing with my kids and then teaching them the names would be useful.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#124

Post by gnulinux »

justarandomq wrote: post #104
tromp wrote: post #19

Train your chess tactics at https://lichess.org/training/ For me, the challenge is solving 15 consecutive problems correctly to turn the bottom bar all green. I also enjoy the 5 daily problems at https://www.chess.com/puzzles/rated

Long-time player here. Strangely enough, the hardest part of these exercises is the uncomfortable brief moment of getting acquainted with (or being teleported to) a random board position.

A couple days ago I was really captivated solving chess puzzles on lichess and I encountered a particular puzzle that didn't make sense to me (my puzzle rating is ~1800). Then I realized it's white to move, and I've been pondering on black moves for the last 10 minutes... Mistakes a human mind can make while playing chess really surprise me, even while doing another intellectual activity like programming, learning math, reading a book etc you don't realize how notoriously prone your brain to errors until you have an objective measure to compare your reasoning to. Fascinating.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#125

Post by colmvp »

joelthelion wrote: post #63

If you prefer learning by practicing, Lichess has a great introduction to most tactical patterns: https://lichess.org/practice Once you start mastering them, you can try real problems on Lichess as well ( https://lichess.org/training ), or try solving as many as you can in five minutes ( https://chesscup.org/ ), it's a lot of fun!

To be honest, I find Lichess tactics to be a bit too obvious in the sense of not requiring as much foresight into what the opponent might do, at least in comparison to Chess Tempo which may have say, a fork but it requires more steps to get there. I'm not a great player, but I find myself generally more stumped by Chess Tempo tactics puzzles than Lichess.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#126

Post by matsemann »

I have recently bought chess books through the Android app "Forward Chess". It's very nice, as all the boards and games described inside become clickable and interactive. No longer do I have to set them up manually or try to see all the lines in my head. As a beginner that makes it easier to focus on the crux of what the book is trying to teach me. I can highly recommend it. There are demo-books one can download for free to test the concept.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.forwardche...

Re: Chess tactics explained

#127

Post by gk1 »

thiago_fm wrote: post #97
srtjstjsj wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That's called an addiction, or more generously an obsession.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#128

Post by gnulinux »

Michael_Sieb wrote: post #95

Big fan of chess! Who watches Hikaru's YT videos? Full of awesome tactics.

I watch Hikaru pretty regularly, he's an entertaining streamer, but I'm not sure about the value of watching his video for chess knowledge. He plays these really baffling chess variants (like all pawns + queen vs IM opponent) in hyperbullet (30 secs) or bullet (1 min) like in one of his streams he went on for minutes about how he hates 3+1 because it's "too serious". As someone who exclusively plays 15+10 or 30+20, his streams really just feel like watching a video game stream to me, since it's impossible to understand "the chess" at that speed for a mere mortal like me.

For chess, I prefer watching e.g. agadmator's YT channel. I stop, think, roll back pretty frequently. I can rarely solve his puzzles ("feel free to stop the video..." parts) but without stopping and thinking for a min, I can't even understand the position lol.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#129

Post by watwut »

Buttons840 wrote: post #109
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…

> as I'd never be sure my opponent wasn't just putting the moves into a computer and playing whatever it told him to play. As mentioned, cheaters are detected and banned. But from another perspective, cheater or not doesn't matter. You know you are playing against someone you have a statistical chance to beat. Same thing in Starcraft where people use map hacks. Who cares? The ranking system matches you with people yo…

Cheating in chess typically means using engine. There is big enough difference in how engine plays and how human plays for it to make game less fun.

Pls, it is quite natural for humans to care about notion of fairness. How and why we loose matters.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#130

Post by harryposner »

faceplanted wrote: post #44
fabian2k wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you're playing at something like 3000-3500 ELO. That's very, very far from subtle. And that is something you can detect by analyzing the games, a human won't pick the engine moves all the time.

I've never looked into it myself but when I was graduating someone in my graduating classes final project was a cheating detection system for chess that essentially ran your moves through a variety of different chess AI's like stockfish such and over the game built up a tally of matching moves for each system, and if you matched one too closely flagged you as cheating. I asked the guy how he would cheat against it an…

Lichess’s cheat detection is open source (like everything else on the site) [0]. The training dataset isn’t public, though, and it’s practically undocumented. If you look in the `modules/game` directory, though, you’ll get an idea of what sort of data that goes into the model. Besides the engine analyses, it also looks at the time spent on each move (the `Emt` type is short for elapsed move time).

[0] https://github.com/clarkerubber/irwin

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