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Chess tactics explained

chesstactics.org

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Re: Chess tactics explained

#191

Post by ndiddy »

noxvilleza wrote: post #176
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…

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.

Lichess (a popular chess site) combats this issue by not actually banning cheaters. Instead, the cheater is not notified that they were caught and is still able play or create games, but they're only matched to other cheaters.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#192

Post by bradly »

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 wondered if the popularity of 'The queen's Gambit' would lead to a brief infatuation with chess in the popular imagination

According to Google interest in learning Chess has tripled because of The Queen's Gambit: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=how%20to%20play%2...

> I'd never be sure my opponent wasn't just putting the moves into a computer and playing whatever it told him to play

I play regularly on online and it really isn't an issue. I'm sure an opponent or two has cheated, but to me it doesn't matter. Either way I just play the board. If it happens I'm just playing a harder game and maybe learning something new. My rating isn't important enough to me that a game or two lost to cheating is not a big deal. I've also had Chess.com reverse games a month later that they have detected the player as cheating.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#193

Post by philsnow »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #92
saeranv wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

chesstempo is neat because they have ELO-like ratings for tactics puzzles. It's the first place I saw such a thing.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#194

Post by bradly »

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 really interesting! Thanks for sharing. What are the average number of moves per puzzle in the top groups? Do they all end up being 5+ moves or can there be 2800+ puzzles with only 2 or three moves?

Re: Chess tactics explained

#195

Post by 8note »

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…

In shorter time controls the cheater is giving you an advantage. Even if they can get a good position, they'll spend too much time looking back and forth and inputting moves

Re: Chess tactics explained

#196

Post by SamBam »

aasasd wrote: post #73

CC-ND explicitly allows format conversions, so I'll go ahead and ask: has anyone made an epub of this site-book?

And speaking of modifications, it would be nice to have a version where the puzzles are one-click away from the section at hand. I keep feeling like I'm missing something. I don't understand why the puzzles are on their own page, let alone their own domain, so if I'm in a section and I want to do a puzzle I need to click back to the main site, click on the puzzle site, then find the equivalent chapter heading, and then dive into a puzzle.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#199

Post by noxvilleza »

ndiddy wrote: post #191
noxvilleza wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lichess (a popular chess site) combats this issue by not actually banning cheaters. Instead, the cheater is not notified that they were caught and is still able play or create games, but they're only matched to other cheaters.

A bunch of video games do this ('shadow banning / shadow pooling') - with varying degrees of success. A lot of the cheaters still just create new accounts every so often.
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