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Chess tactics explained

chesstactics.org

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Re: Chess tactics explained

#171

Post by bluGill »

YinglingLight wrote: post #108
thiago_fm wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Chess is like Boxing. Pays nothing. The workload is insane, the natural talent is insane, your competition is global. Only the very top 0.5% get name recognition (money). And like Boxing, these athletes could get paid more had they devoted their life literally ANY other pursuit with their work ethic and talent. With far less punishment involved. Concept of Talent Stacking: https://personalexcellence.co/blog/talent-st…

Unlikely at the top levels. The top chess masters are taking home a better income than the average college graduate. Sure CEOs take home more, but typically not until later in life. If you can get great chess is a good career.

Of course few get great. Even if you don't get to great, many people make a satisfactory amount of money from chess (mostly teaching), so there are options.

Also, you can switch at any time when you realize how hard the competition is. Your study habits to get good will do you well in other positions so there is no loss failing so long as you get out soon enough. There is a reason many pretty good players quit after high school: they had fun now it is time to settle down. Some play once in a while, but it is no loss. Unlike boxing where a few knockouts and you may be mentally unfit to do anything with your life.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#172

Post by tsbinz »

YawningAngel wrote: post #154
whimsicalism wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the only sort of cheating suggested in this thread that wouldn't be caught, but wouldn't actually be that helpful.

It's pretty helpful for the average human. Most people can't blast out 15 moves of theory correctly for every possible opening, so you'd avoid a lot of bad middle games or losses to traps. It probably isn't as helpful to a grandmaster, but that's true of engine analysis in general

Unless you're very careful I think it should be detectable at those levels. If someone is taking the same amount of time when playing some rare and tricky opening line as they are when playing the QGD, that's pretty fishy if they don't have the level where you have a big variety memorized.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#173

Post by bluGill »

mci wrote: post #16

> This site teaches chess in words. > It assumes you know only how the pieces move and builds step-by-step from there. Do not get me wrong: TFA is a fine and useful book for an intermediate player but the above claims are overselling it. They are equivalent to telling you that learning the x ^= y; y ^= x; x ^= y; trick will make you a better programmer while being silent on what copy-and-paste programming, magic cons…

I'm going to differ with you and all the other (so far) replies: you start with end games. Until you can solve simple mate in one puzzles there is no point in going farther as you will never be able to win. You then study tactics (which is what most others are saying start with), and more complex endgames.

The above is the Soviet school from the 1920s. There is a reason it produced (and continues to produce) so many great chess players: it works.

I suspect many of the other replies to your post agree with me, they moved a step beyond the basics in their replay because there are so many tactics to learn that they still find lack of tactics is their personal limit to greatness and so that is where they are working.

I think

Re: Chess tactics explained

#174

Post by mactrey »

drw wrote: post #106
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.

Something we work very hard on at chess.com is the rating of the individual tactics puzzles. Some of you might enjoy looking at the distribution of our puzzle ratings. Truly hard problems are precious, and we would always like to have more at the high end. The distribution is multimodal because puzzles of different lengths have different modes. +----------------+---------+ | ratings_band | count | |----------------+-…

This is interesting and it makes me really want to see the 5 4000+ puzzles...

Re: Chess tactics explained

#175

Post by dragontamer »

46756e wrote: post #132
watwut wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, although this is speculation, I imagine its less of an issue because cheaters would get board somewhat easily. I mean whats the fun in copying what a machine says to win chess games against strangers? Its not like its people they know who might be impressed and if they cheat then their ranking will rise far above their skill, so if they wanted to play a real game, they would then be crushed.

> I mean whats the fun in copying what a machine says to win chess games against strangers?

I mean, what's the fun in beating everyone in Overwatch / PUBG / Fortnite / Quake / Doom / etc. etc. with an aimbot?

To win. Because cheaters find winning fun, even if they're not doing it on their own skill. I obviously disagree with the mindset, but cheaters disagree with me (and clearly continue to use aimbots / chessbots / whatever to rack up "their wins").

Generally speaking, their excuses are along the lines of "I don't have the reaction speed of others", or "I don't find games of reaction fun" (etc. etc.). Similarly, a chessbot user would almost certainly say "I don't like having obvious blunders in my games, and a chessbot prevents me from missing obvious blunders".

---------

I mean, Centaur Chess is a thing. Human + Computer, if you really wanted to fight fair. But these cheaters don't go towards Centaur Chess servers, they stay on human-only servers and just wanna have an advantage on the opponent. Soooooo... yeah. That's their decision.

There's chess tournaments of 24-hours a move, no holds barred. (IE: Chess AIs are allowed to assist you). If you really wanted "blunder free chess", people can play in those communities. Those who continue to use computer-assistance on human-only servers are simply cheaters in my book.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#176

Post by noxvilleza »

geebee wrote: post #151
Buttons840 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Are cheaters really detected and banned? My guess is that there's a lot of lower grade cheating. Here are a few ways that would be difficult to detect: Run a position analyzer only to alert you to the existence of a strong move that you haven't noticed. Don't use it to find the move, just to alert you to when your position is strong. For instance, you might see that your position score is +10, but not realize why - t…

A lot of cheaters are detected and banned, but like you say there's probably a lot of 'minor cheaters' not caught.

The issue really is the group who are detected and banned - they just sign up with a new account, and then carry on crushing players until they're banned again. The average game quality in this situation is pretty poor - because the rating of a player is very far from their true skill.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#177

Post by mlyle »

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…

> It's a shame that the advent of the internet has simultaneously increased your chances of finding someone to play with remotely but, at the same time, [for me anyway] pretty much removed all inclination to do so, 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.

Cheaters are ranked way too high to play with us ordinary mortals :D This is mostly a problem with those who are really strong.

On the other hand, people who insist on running out their entire clock when they clearly lost everything moves ago.. those salty people are common at the low ranks :P

Re: Chess tactics explained

#178

Post by noxvilleza »

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…

It's "Elo" (not an acronym). There is the Computer Chess Rating List (https://computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/rating_list_all.html) which has the current rating, on some predefined hardware.

The easiest way to do what you're discussing is just giving less evaluation time to the engine - slowly increasing it. If you wanted it to be even better you could calibrate multiple engines to make an even smoother (but changing underlying evaluation).

Re: Chess tactics explained

#179

Post by trianglem »

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.…

Vishwanath Anand did the same for chess in India when he was number one for about a year.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#180

Post by noxvilleza »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #65
MauranKilom wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blunders computers make and that human players make are/feel very different. I wouldn't expect to last long if I were cheating on, say, lichess.org by playing out the moves of a mix of engines at various ratings.

You could still use computer assistance which could suggest several different moves with explanations, and you could just pick one of those, maybe not necessarily the best move. Basically computers can give good hints for you. Pretty sure this type of thing would be undetectable.

An easy way to detect cheaters is to look at overall accuracy as some aggregate metric of deviation from 'optimal' (as per the engine(s) used). This could just be a average of squares of centipawns lost per move, or classifying moves like how chess.com does (brilliant/best/excellent/good/inaccuracy/mistake/blunder/missed-win) and then looking at average distributions from this.
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