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Chess tactics explained

chesstactics.org

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Re: Chess tactics explained

#221

Post by beagle3 »

ofrzeta wrote: post #157
YinglingLight wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Work ethic ok but talent is domain-specific, isn't it?

Read on Magnus Carlsen[0] and Josh Waitzkin[1] - both have top spots in other fields, (and I'm sure others do too, these are from memory). Either talent is less specific than you'd think, or work ethic is more important than you'd think.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen#Personal_life

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Waitzkin#Martial_arts

Re: Chess tactics explained

#222

Post by chordalkeyboard »

rococode wrote: post #215
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…

Two other points about cheating relevant to non-expert players: - Until expert level you most likely won't to be able to notice in real-time that you're playing a cheater. You'll be blundering and getting out-positioned regularly against legitimate players, so it's hard to notice that for one game a cheater played a perfect game against you, because most likely you made clear mistakes in that game. This is different…

This is 100% true and cheating concerns evaporate (or are confirmed) when one analyzes a game with an engine. Its enlightening to take that game where you're "sure" the other person had computer assistance into an engine and see all the blunders you both had made.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#223

Post by saghm »

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…

> Another cheater move would be to use a computer analyses only when things get sticky. Just for the occasional move. This is a cheating tactic in tennis, too. An unksilled cheater "hooks" constantly when it doesn't matter. A skilled cheater does it only on a critical point. You can call out a line judge, but with the advantage secured, the cheater can appear scrupulous for the remainder of the match

OT, but as someone who knows basically nothing about tennis, how does cheating work? Are there illegal ways to hit the ball or something?

Re: Chess tactics explained

#224

Post by jsackmann »

saghm wrote: post #223
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…

> Another cheater move would be to use a computer analyses only when things get sticky. Just for the occasional move. This is a cheating tactic in tennis, too. An unksilled cheater "hooks" constantly when it doesn't matter. A skilled cheater does it only on a critical point. You can call out a line judge, but with the advantage secured, the cheater can appear scrupulous for the remainder of the match OT, but as someo…

Not OP, but they're referring to situations when players call their own lines. (Virtually all amateur matches.) If you are horrible (or blatantly biased) at calling lines, your opponent can call the tournament referee, and you may end up with a line judge. But that takes time, and only happens after you aggravate your opponent. If you wait until a key moment to make a bad call in your favor, your opponent won't be able to reverse it, even if they call the referee and get a third party to call the lines for the rest of the match.

This is a particularly big issue in competitive junior tennis, unfortunately.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#225

Post by klank »

birken wrote: post #189
pushrax wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

> in those cases it is obviously obvious.

Would it be possible for you to describe what it feels like to encounter an obvious cheater in chess? Is it simply who quickly they move, the strength of their moves, both, and/or something else?

Re: Chess tactics explained

#226

Post by drw »

noxvilleza wrote: post #217
drw wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah overall some theme diversity. Would also be interested to know the median Elo rating by tag - since that'd serve a good sort of table-of-contents of order for people to learn chess tactics. What is also pretty interesting would be a (fuzzed) per-tag Elo rating on the user - so they can see which themes you are good/bad at relatively (for example, if you constantly get problems on Trapped Pieces wrong your rating…

Yes, the rating differs by theme quite a bit.

  +-------------------+------------+
  | theme/tag         | mdn_rating |
  |-------------------+------------|
  | Opposition        | 1725       |
  | Passed Pawns      | 1494       |
  | Rooks on Seventh  | 1408       |
  | Pawn Endgame      | 1353       |
  | ...               | ...        |
  | Smothered Mate    | 549        |
  | Stalemate         | 533        |
  | Mate in 2         | 436        |
  | Mate in 1         | 399        |
  +-------------------+------------+
I also like the idea of showing the user's +/- for each theme. Though the data for some themes is better than data for others.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#227

Post by Normille »

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."

  >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."
I can see the point of that, to a certain extent.

We [well most of us] are brought up to play fair and with a deeply inculcated sense that it's shameful to cheat and that "cheaters never win". Then [in my case anyway], when we get a bit older and more worldly wise we realise that there are people everywhere, richer and more successful than us. Not because they're better or cleverer but because they went to the right school, or they knew the right people, or they had the right parents, or they could use money and/or influence to get out of trouble. That, in essence, they didn't have to play by the same rules as the rest of us. And, isn't that by definition "cheating"? In this case, cheating at life. I sometimes think maybe I'd have achieved a lot more, without the burden of having such a heightened sense of morality and fair play as I do.

I'd never contemplate cheating when playing a game for enjoyment though. Because that enjoyment comes from the self-satisfaction of getting a wee bit better each time. I think in most sports/hobbies/games the old cliché is true. In the end, you're competing against yourself. So there's no point in cheating.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#228

Post by bryanrasmussen »

kilburn wrote: post #218
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…

Most of your proposals can be detected by statistics: - [...] just to alert you to when your position is strong. Oh, so you are a player that never misses a win? Hmm... - [...] avoid traps in early games. Now you are a very strange player that never blunders during openings but blunders normally later on. Suspicious. - [...] just for the occasional move. How do you know what move is that? Are you implying you never m…

It seems like most of these would just detect when a player was unusually strong, which of course unusual things are suspicious but they can also be the case that some people are unusually strong.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#229

Post by nineplay »

the_af wrote: post #207
nineplay wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

She wasn't happy playing that talented Soviet kid. He isn't going away and neither is the rest of the Soviet team. It's pointed out earlier that the Soviet Union pays its players, while she is going to have to scrape by on tournament winnings and Christian charity offers with strings attached.

There's no way she's recovered from her addictions, she bought sedatives while in the USSR and only just managed to keep herself from taking them.

She has a cold, off-putting personality which is probably going to loose it's luster once her novelty has warn off. Her mother probably suffered from mental illness and there seems to be a reasonable chance she inherited it. There's a discussion that happens midway though the series about all the Chess grandmasters who lost their minds, which feels prophetic.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#230

Post by 29athrowaway »

What I do not enjoy in chess is that many pieces that can cross the whole board in multiple directions.

In shogi, lances and knights only move forward. Gold and silver generals move one tile at a time.

There is 1 bishop and 1 rook per player and no queen. And as a result pieces are not constantly crossing the whole board.

Pawns are more consistent too. The move forward, one tile at a time. No conditionally diagonal moves or 2 tile moves or en-passant.

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