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Chess tactics explained

chesstactics.org

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Re: Chess tactics explained

#181

Post by Buttons840 »

watwut wrote: post #129
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…

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.

> Pls, it is quite natural for humans to care about notion of fairness.

Yes, but should we give up things we enjoy because the possibility for unfairness in that thing exists?

We may never know whether someone is using a chess engine assistant, but by observing what we can, their moves and game records, we can objectively argue that the match is fair. Statistically speaking, you have about a 50% chance to win. Is that unfair?

Re: Chess tactics explained

#182

Post by freeopinion »

On the subject of cheating, I have a little different angle.

I am not a great chess player, somewhere below 1500 I'd guess. But I do enjoy playing with other not-very-good players. I am better enough than my children to never lose to them so far. But I would like them to enjoy the game. It doesn't seem very fun if you don't have some reasonable chance to win occasionally.

This creates a situation where I have an incentive to cheat very creatively so that my child has to work for it and doesn't detect the reverse-cheat that allowed them to win.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#183

Post by SamBam »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #153
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.

I had a Romanian stats teacher that sneered at Americans' preoccupation with fairness. She would say, "Why do you use this word fair? Life is not fair. It is a useless idea."

That seems merely like a way of perpetuating unfairness.

I don't know the story, but it sounds like the teacher was in a position of power and someone said she was being unfair. Retorting "life is unfair" when you, yourself, are the agent causing unfairness simply inflicts needless pain. For what -- to teach the lesson that life is unfair?

As a parent, I try to parent my kids fairly. I try not to show favoritism. I try to recall which kid had the last cookie most recently. Obviously the kids sometimes don't agree with me and claim I am being unfair, but by valuing fairness at the very least I am trying, and modeling for them a world where they value fairness in turn.

(Of course, note, people may value different things. Fairness is its own category in the moral foundations theory[1], and some people rank it as less important than, say, authority or purity.)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory

Re: Chess tactics explained

#184

Post by SamBam »

secondcoming wrote: post #165
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…

There's a pretty good Stockfish app available for free

How realistic are the various apps at simulating, say, a 1200-ranked human player?

I'd love at app that really plays at my skill level, but my experience with older software was that the computer "dumbed itself down" simply by playing completely silly moves at times. (Of course, I played silly moves as well, so maybe it was accurate... But it didn't feel that way.)

Re: Chess tactics explained

#185

Post by noxvilleza »

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 | |----------------+-…

Really love your chess puzzles, I play Puzzle Rush most days! If you can share, how many puzzles do you add each month? Are they mostly hand-generated or do you have some nifty way of deriving puzzles from real games automagically? Would also be really cool if a puzzle rush spread out puzzle types more it feels like there is heavy clustering of a specific problem type at key rating ranges: early puzzles (1-6) are very commonly back-rank checkmates; 9-12 are discovered check, etc - it would be nicer if the problem meta-tags were not re-used a lot within a single run.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#186

Post by freeopinion »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #153
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.

I had a Romanian stats teacher that sneered at Americans' preoccupation with fairness. She would say, "Why do you use this word fair? Life is not fair. It is a useless idea."

And yet, Romania still distinguishes between little league, high school, and professional athletics; men's and women's athletics; etc. I'd guess they have some sort of anti-trust laws. Theft is still a crime, right?

I'm pretty sure everybody values fairness at some level.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#187

Post by pull_my_finger »

If anyone has interest in practicing these, there is some nice software: CT-Art that was just a tremendous help to me. It focuses on "motifs", where instead of most puzzles that ask you to "find the next move" you see the position a few moves out from the desired pattern so you learn to recognize what it looks like and learn to steer it into that pattern when it's not staring you in the face.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#188

Post by antaviana »

thereisnospork wrote: post #150
antaviana wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I play only anonymous games not rated in lichess.org as. I like that it takes virtually one second to find an opponent match in my time control (5m+0). My play level is around 1800-1900 FIDE (last Classic game played some 10 years ago though), and it is true that I win a lot more than I lose (so I guess that the crowd in Anonymous mode must be somewhere 1400-1900 FIDE), but I still enjoy the games. You can tell by th…

>and I like not having any idea of what level my opponent has, so I focus on what happens on the board. You might like lichess's 'zen mode' in non-anonymous play, which hides everything except the board (inc. opponent name and rating) while you are playing.

Thanks, I will sign up and give it a try. This way opponents will probably be more often my level (which I guess it means I will lose a lot more).

Re: Chess tactics explained

#189

Post by birken »

pushrax wrote: post #163
geebee wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think most people who actually want to cheat regularly on online chess also lack the skills to set up a highly effective and stealthy way to do so. There are a lot of obvious cheaters that you can catch by looking at move times.

This is correct. I've played many thousands of games online and have run into obvious cheaters fewer than 5 times, and in those cases it is obviously obvious.

If somebody is cheating so stealthily, why do I care? Their rating will reflect whatever cheating they stealthily do. Remember: If the cheater won every single game, they would be caught immediately, so if their rating is around mine, then whatever cheating they are doing roughly makes them a player of my skill level. It really makes no difference to me if the person I'm playing is actually weaker and cheating to simulate my skill level or actually my skill level.

And from their perspective, what is the point? If you are a 1500 player and can cheat to be an 1800 player, what are you gaining from that? Wouldn't you rather play other people that are your skill level? And if you are a beginner (The cheating thing is just not a major issue for casual online chess.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#190

Post by SamBam »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #145
billfruit wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming across the theory of Steinitz from [0] has made me look at chess in a different manner: at most levels of play rather than it being tactics or strategy, it is more about avoiding mistakes and waiting, prolonging play till oponenent eventually makes a mistake. My experience in over board play has been in concurrence with that view, one plays carefully parrying the opponent's move, while waiting till they make a…

> till oponenent eventually makes a mistake. Any person(including world champ) makes lot of mistakes and that's why they get badly beat by computers. The thing to know is when the opponent made a mistake and knowing how to attack it to advantage(that is basically called tactic). I wouldn't recognize the mistake of players rated 500+ point above me but a GM could and would punish them.

Indeed. I once posed a question at chess.com, which attracted many comments answering the opposite of my hunch, but after lots of analysis of games I'm pretty sure I'm right:

Looking at the computer-calculated advantage score during a game (e.g. "white is at +1.0"), is it possible to make a move that increases your advantage?

My belief is that, no, as a human it is not possible (at least, virtually impossible) to make a move that increases your calculated advantage. Your advantage is the score calculated with the assumption you make no further mistakes. The best we can do as humans is to keep that score, or (more frequently) lower it.

The game is then won by whoever lowers their advantage the least over the course of the game.

What cemented this for me was watching AlphaZero play against Stockfish. AlphaZero was playing so far outside the realm of what Stockfish could do that it was the only game I ever saw where a player increased their score. Basically Stockfish would say "you made a bad move, you made a bad move, you made a ... wait a second, that's a great move! How did I not see what you were doing!?"

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