Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chess tactics explained

chesstactics.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 271 posts

Re: Chess tactics explained

#201

Post by SubiculumCode »

philsnow wrote: post #193
SubiculumCode wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alot of those puzzles are damn hard, ELO ratings there are legitimate.

I feel that chess Tempo has really given me tools to recognize recurring tactical motifs in actual play.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#202

Post by tomlu »

colmvp wrote: post #125
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.

That depends on the strength of the puzzle? I find them pretty difficult once you get above 2000 or so.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#203

Post by drw »

mactrey wrote: post #174
drw wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I am not sure that the 5 specific puzzles maxed out at the 4000 also represent the very best, most fun, and most insightful. Sometimes the reason a puzzle comes up as an extreme outlier is somewhat obtuse, and we are more inclined to remove the puzzle after we see how users interact with it.

For example https://www.chess.com/puzzles/problem/568140 is mostly rated 4000 because ...Qe1+ is so compelling that it pulls in even excellent players, while there's an easy material pickup on the board.

But there are exceptional puzzles throughout the 3000s, like 3500-rated https://www.chess.com/puzzles/problem/769056 , which absolutely anyone can follow, but few can solve on the first try.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#204

Post by drw »

bradly wrote: post #194
drw wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There certainly can be short difficult puzzles, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I think the current 4000-rated puzzles look like outliers and may be removed.

  +----------------+---------+-------------------+
  | ratings_band   | count   | avg_move_count    |
  |----------------+---------+-------------------|
  | ...            |         |                   |
  | 3000-3099      | 917     | 3.9400            |
  | 3100-3199      | 434     | 4.1244            |
  | 3200-3299      | 282     | 4.2766            |
  | 3300-3399      | 144     | 4.7500            |
  | 3400-3499      | 206     | 4.9515            |
  | 3500-3599      | 131     | 4.9237            |
  | 3600-3699      | 104     | 5.0481            |
  | 3700-3799      | 86      | 5.3256            |
  | 3800-3899      | 114     | 6.4035            |
  | 3900-3999      | 43      | 5.9302            |
  | 4000+          | 5       | 1.6000            |
  +----------------+---------+-------------------+

Re: Chess tactics explained

#205

Post by thom »

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.

Technically they get a warning label that they use computer assistance (dunno if they themselves can see this or not). Players can still play them if they choose. They just open new accounts though.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#206

Post by whimsicalism »

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

> 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.

Yeah, although at that level lots of people are also getting into good positions, having no idea why it is good, and losing it.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#207

Post by the_af »

nineplay wrote: post #141
k__ wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Spoiler Warning] As a person who can barely play chess The Queen's Gambit was a good show not because of the chess, but because it was a show about a women where everything went well. There was foreshadowing and all, but all went well in the end. It was very wholesome. Sure, it was about chess, but it could have been any sport, really.

Interesting - I thought it was about a damaged woman who had a period of sobriety and was able to win a championship. I suppose it depends on what we imagine happens after the series ended. I don't see her going back to Kentucky and making red headed babies with the creepy journalist.

I wondered this as well. Once she was at the top of her game, what would the rest of her life look like?

She could have some rematches with Borgov and other Russian champions, presumably winning most of them and maybe losing a few. And after that? Teach? Go back to drugs? Wait until a new child prodigy can challenge her?

Re: Chess tactics explained

#208

Post by drw »

noxvilleza wrote: post #185
drw wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ver…

Last month we added 2800, the vast majority automatically derived, though we also prize expert review.

We are thinking of doubling that rate next month.

I'm not sure much can be done about the predominance of certain puzzle types in the very early Rush puzzles. Would you prefer more hung pieces?

But in the later levels, mixing it up by themes/tags is an interesting idea, about which I will make some measurements.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#209

Post by freakpower »

SamBam wrote: post #184
secondcoming wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Stockfish can play a pretty convincing ~1200-1400uscf game. (At least for that rating range 30 years ago.) It won't start making egregiously dumb moves until it's in the "If I were a person I'd resign, but I'm a computer so here take all of my material before you checkmate me" phase, though many of its opening choices are obviously third- or fourth-best.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#210

Post by 8note »

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…

Generally how bots play is that you have a good engine, and every so often it'll pick a random move or a lower scored move to lower the difficulty. The frequency of the random move increases as the difficulty is lowered. The engine detector would likely find that since the number of non engine moves would still be quite high.

Something like Leela trained for less time could produce a lower Elo bot. I can't imagine it will look very human for its skill level though. Like, being a 1600 while consistently playing 600 level one move blunders because it hasn't figured out how bishops move yet.

This still doesn't get you past the other common detection system: click stream

Post reply on HN