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Chess tactics explained

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Re: Chess tactics explained

#231

Post by JakeTheAndroid »

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…

> - Cheaters don't stay in low ratings for long. If they aren't detected, they'll be out of your rating in no time, like in 2 or 3 wins. This reduces the chance you'll encounter cheaters, because if a cheater plays 100 games but only 2 of them are in your rating bracket, you're unlikely to ever match against them anyways.

If only this applied to Counter-Strike or other FPS. While those that are trying to hack discretely rise to Global fast, there are a lot of cheaters that aim to stay in high Silver or low Nova. Add this to the fact that many cheaters suck at cheating, they can absolutely get stuck in lower ranks because they tactically cannot outplay better opponents without blatantly cheating.

This is a bit different from cheating in Chess and Starcraft where mechanical skill and the design of the game makes cheats less impactful. Like, cheating in Dota is really just wider POV, complete map awareness and spell casting macros. But those are just a few aspects of the game. In FPS games, the mechanical skill weighs so heavy that you will have a bad time at any rank against any cheater.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#232

Post by pushrax »

klank wrote: post #225
birken wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A few signs:

- taking a while to make an obvious move, especially in the endgame, where there might actually be only one move that makes any sense to make

- taking a very consistent amount of time between moves

- shuffling pieces around in a way that doesn't really accomplish anything but also doesn't cause anything bad

- playing normally, then a big pause and they go offline for a bit, then come back and start playing much better (connecting the client to an engine)

Re: Chess tactics explained

#233

Post by klmadfejno »

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!

I've never been good at chess, nor felt like I was making any progress on paper chess problems. Not that I really tried to solve them.

But lichess training was really engaging for me. I played it for a few hours, and I found the format of the problems and the ui nice in a way that let me solve things pretty quickly. I like that all of them are formatted as "do the best moves", and yet some of them end in checkmate, while others end with just getting a really favorable trade.

It felt like 90% of the plays involved making a check, and then using the forced response to gain an advantage. Is that representative of actual play though? I get that you can't make a deterministic puzzle unless there's a fairly deterministic right answer and path to get there. But what fraction of good chess thinking resembles solving these kinds of puzzles?

Re: Chess tactics explained

#234

Post by magicalhippo »

MaysonL wrote: post #216
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.…

And Magnus just lost! In the final of the Skilling Open there were 7 decisive games out of 10 - 8 rapid games followed by a 2 blitz game tiebreak.

Cheers for spoiling that...

Re: Chess tactics explained

#235

Post by birken »

klank wrote: post #225
birken wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The way to detect an obvious cheater is when somebody rated like 300-400+ rating points below you, a matchup which generally only occurs in tournaments or the like (normally you wouldn't be paired down to such a large extent), plays incredibly well and beats you. And then you do computer analysis and you see they played near flawlessly. You look at the move timing and make really complicated and deep moves instantly. Then you look at their game history and see they played their last few games nearly perfectly. Then you report them and your rating points are refunded a few minutes later.

Lower rated non-chess players, the kind that are most likely to cheat, can't just pretend to be higher rated people because they don't know what moves are suspicious and which ones aren't. And if you think they'll just cheat for the first few moves and then turn the computer off... it really just doesn't work as well. If they actually have no idea what they are doing they'll still lose, and it's super suspicious anyways based on move timing and computer analysis.

And to my original point, if I were an 1800 player and wanted to sneakily cheat to be a 2000 player, I probably could pull it off, because that is close enough to my skill level that I could pretend. Maybe by using an opening book to make sure I'm getting great positions out of the opening. Maybe by only turning the computer on during certain key positions. But again, if I did this consistently, I'd get a 2000 rating and now I'm going to be matched up against 2000 rated players, and from their perspective I'm just a 2000 player. And what have I gained? I now have to cheat to even be competitive in a casual chess game, whereas if I just had my true rating I could just play normally which would be easier and more fun. This is why sneaky cheating just isn't very common, because the only people capable of doing it really have no incentive to do it. The only people who think cheating would be fun are the people who are easiest to detect.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#236

Post by geebee »

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…

Not bad! Yeah, wouldn't be surprised if those are part of the detection algorithm.

I would take longer to detect a cheater who is a bit more sly and only cheats on 5% of moves or less (the odds that someone would match a particular engine 99% of the time its pretty much zero), but over time, yeah, this would work.

I suppose another way to put its is that it's difficult to detect this sort of cheating from a single game, but not difficult to detect it in 100 games.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#237

Post by geebee »

jsackmann wrote: post #224
saghm wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ab…

Yes, that's what I meant. Agassi accuses Tarango of doing this as a junior in "Open".

Re: Chess tactics explained

#238

Post by megameter »

JakeTheAndroid wrote: post #231
rococode wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> - Cheaters don't stay in low ratings for long. If they aren't detected, they'll be out of your rating in no time, like in 2 or 3 wins. This reduces the chance you'll encounter cheaters, because if a cheater plays 100 games but only 2 of them are in your rating bracket, you're unlikely to ever match against them anyways. If only this applied to Counter-Strike or other FPS. While those that are trying to hack discret…

The question of what could be done about FPS cheating has been on my mind a bit lately. Yesterday while on a walk I had this thought that it's really because the shooting mechanic is in an awkward metaphorical compromise between the genuine mechanics of aiming and firing, and a symbolic representation of such.

If you actually had to play these games by holding a gun level with controlled muscle motions, it would be hard to cheat because even if you could insert a computer in there to automatically control your muscles, it's a fairly complex AI problem to make them move correctly.

In comparison a purely symbolic form would be like how most role-playing systems do it: you declare that you shoot at a target, and then perhaps there is some dice rolling done to determine if you do.

All an aimbot does is distill the vocabulary of mouse aim into the more symbolic form and automatically trigger certain symbolic responses. Someone who has played online FPS long enough develops a sense of when they are playing with these "symbolic adversaries" because even if they've dialed down the bot so they are merely "skilled", they start playing aggressively, with the assumption of fluent shooting to back them, while real players will hedge and look for a wider set of advantages, making more use of the game's vocabulary even if they can shoot through clutch scenarios. Cheater-vs-cheater matchups tend to suck the air out of the room as both sides flail about, eliminating the non-cheaters while never getting clear advantage over each other.

But then you look at a game like Rocket League, and it gets away with having more a discrete mechanism for moving and hitting, because not only is it all indirect through physics interactions, it's not clear what the right move is symbolically either. You can't win just by chasing the ball or by hitting the other players.

And there's a path for making shooting in FPS complex in that way, too - make all the targets large, trivial to aim at - and then ramp up factors that make it both indirect - slow projectiles, bounce - and symbolically complex, with various target prioritization and vulnerability mechanisms that deny simply spamming the headshot verb.

Re: Chess tactics explained

#239

Post by sabujp »

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 think as people start getting vaccinated and are able to start traveling again, chess will again take a back seat to other leisure options

Re: Chess tactics explained

#240

Post by sabujp »

longtimegoogler wrote: post #214

Personally, I recommend Go over Chess. I've played both not well and I enjoy Go more. Chess is extremely tactical and calculation oriented. One blunder and the game is over for the most part in Chess. While in Go, reading is also incredibly important there are other aspects to it that make the game richer, IMO.

i haven't played enough go at all, but is go blitz a thing? If so i might give it a go, but I just don't want to spend 45 mins per side per game
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