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Chess is booming among teens

polygon.com

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Re: Chess is booming among teens

#41

Post by somenameforme »

jacooper wrote: post #11

I visted my relatives recently, and i was shocked. At first I though it was a new clash of clans type of trendy game, but its actually chess! The teenagers have chess.com installed everyhere and are challenging each other nonstop, sometimes with real chess boards too! There's social pyramid starting to form, with one of the younger ones conquering the game with no clear challenger, its football but for people who don…

I'd argue that it's always been football for people who don't like football. What's really changed is that now it's also football for people who do like football! During online events Magnus was often seen watching football (and other sports) [1] on TV while simultaneously playing big money online events. His rest days during live events were often turned into sports days.

This has really always been the case, for instance you even had players like Simen Agdestein [2] who was a professional football player and a chess grandmaster - at the same time, but chess has been hounded by dumb and inappropriate stereotypes. You don't need to smart to play, you don't need some amazing memory, or whatever else. It's just a really awesome, enjoyable, and deeply satisfying and rewarding game.

[1] - https://youtu.be/6Xdeg-PZOMg?t=16024

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simen_Agdestein

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#42

Post by Lammy »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #22
jacooper wrote: post #11

I visted my relatives recently, and i was shocked. At first I though it was a new clash of clans type of trendy game, but its actually chess! The teenagers have chess.com installed everyhere and are challenging each other nonstop, sometimes with real chess boards too! There's social pyramid starting to form, with one of the younger ones conquering the game with no clear challenger, its football but for people who don…

> its football but for people who don't like football. What's football for people who don't like football or chess? :)

Clam Blitz

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#43

Post by pavo-etc »

jrpt wrote: post #32
BurningFrog wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest thing is that now you can find someone of similar strength to play with in 20 seconds!!

You could do that 10-15 years ago too though. Chess.com has been around a long time.

Wasn't always in your pocket though

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#45

Post by bsder »

raincole wrote: post #30
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #20

Chess is having its soccer moment now. Here is why: 1- The entry cost has fallen dramatically. Before at a minimum you'd need to afford a chess set and a couple of books. Now, all you need is a parents phone. This is similar to soccer, where the entry cost is any ball you can find. 2- its egalitarian. Your size, sex, height, and even age do not matter. This has always been true but now its more pronounced with apps b…

My question about online chess is: why aren't people feeling that their opponents are cheating? I don't play chess. But in other online games, like FPS, the players always complain about cheaters. Then why isn't it a problem with chess.com? It's much easier to cheat with online chess than an FPS game, no?

1) A lot of "cheating complaints" in multiplayer games are simply people that suck. There was an article a while ago that examined several of these kinds of games and most people made the most absolutely basic blunders.

2) FPS games have a lot more degrees of freedom to cheat. There is network lag, hidden information, aimbots, etc. Chess, by contrast, has no hidden state and everything is contained on the server. The only way to cheat is simply to play better moves than your level.

3) Cheaters get bumped up in level quickly and wind up against people who can flag them for cheating. Almost all of the master level chess players can identify suspicious "computer" moves. Most systems have a way to flag a game or move for review. Finally, computers can deeply analyze the games and look for behaviors that don't match "humans".

4) The flip side of that is that amateurs blunder so much that they wouldn't be able to tell even if they got cheated against--by and large.

Jerk behavior tends to be far more problematic than cheating. For example, if you get a winning position, it's not uncommon for an opponent to stop playing but make you wait the rest of the time to count the win. You will bump into this, and it will annoy you way more often than cheaters.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#46

Post by kweingar »

One thing I haven’t seen yet in these comments: the cheating scandal brought a lot of attention to the game. It was a great story to pique a young and curious imagination:

- chess is a board game in my closet next to parcheesi and backgammon but it turns out there are chess professionals who play high stakes games

- computers are so powerful that they can beat the best chess players, and you can use a computer to cheat

- the allegation is that a professional chess player managed to receive some kind of covert signal to tell him the right moves. It’s like a spy movie

- the drama continued to unfold with deep statistical analysis of prior games, $100 million lawsuits, and more

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#48

Post by localplume »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #20

Chess is having its soccer moment now. Here is why: 1- The entry cost has fallen dramatically. Before at a minimum you'd need to afford a chess set and a couple of books. Now, all you need is a parents phone. This is similar to soccer, where the entry cost is any ball you can find. 2- its egalitarian. Your size, sex, height, and even age do not matter. This has always been true but now its more pronounced with apps b…

[dead]

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#49

Post by brobinson »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #4
sdwr wrote: post #3

This is wild. Chess feels old-school and boring to me. Don't understand how it's competing with modern sources of entertainment.

Because chess offers more variety in strategy than "rush A", "rush B", "they're going squeaky", "rotate". It's particularly fun in-person, and shockingly, the generation coming up likes to look at screens less and less, and apparently isn't keen on smartphones.

CS at a high level is like chess where you can't see your opponent's pieces most of the time. At low levels, it's basically what you described. Check out a pro game on Twitch some time. Every time I watch pros play, I learn a new lineup for util, angle to hold, runboost spot, etc.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#50

Post by chongli »

somenameforme wrote: post #41
jacooper wrote: post #11

I visted my relatives recently, and i was shocked. At first I though it was a new clash of clans type of trendy game, but its actually chess! The teenagers have chess.com installed everyhere and are challenging each other nonstop, sometimes with real chess boards too! There's social pyramid starting to form, with one of the younger ones conquering the game with no clear challenger, its football but for people who don…

I'd argue that it's always been football for people who don't like football. What's really changed is that now it's also football for people who do like football! During online events Magnus was often seen watching football (and other sports) [1] on TV while simultaneously playing big money online events. His rest days during live events were often turned into sports days. This has really always been the case, for in…

Yeah. The only thing you really need to be great at chess is to play a lot, on longer time controls, and to analyze your own games.

It’s such a common stereotype that chess is all about memorizing openings, like cramming for exams the rest of your life. It’s not. Cramming is all short term memory and people tend to forget everything a few weeks after the test. That doesn’t work in chess.

Great chess players have everything in their long term memory. They can rattle off openings and transpositions like nobody’s business. But they didn’t just study that stuff yesterday. They built it up over years of playing and calculating during games and analyzing the results. It’s much more akin to a great violinist who can play the Sibelius by heart than it is some high school kid cramming for the SAT.

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