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Chess is booming among teens

polygon.com

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Re: Chess is booming among teens

#71

Post by chongli »

bsder wrote: post #45
raincole wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cheaters get bumped up in level quickly and wind up against people who can flag them for cheating

Yes, and the other side of this coin is sandbagging. Cheaters losing on purpose to keep their rating down. Generally this is also pretty easy to detect because it’s difficult to lose on purpose in a convincing way. Just resigning the game in a non-losing position or blundering mate-in-1 is too obvious and easy to catch. Someone playing the top Stockfish line 20 moves in a row and then blundering their queen just sticks out like a sore thumb.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#72

Post by chongli »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #61
bsder wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. When people do this on Lichess, I spamclick the button that adds 15 seconds to the opponent clock and write "move or resign". Som…

They need a way of flagging this sort of behaviour as well. It should be relatively easy to spot if a person is repeatedly flagging while sitting there for a long time in completely losing positions.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#73

Post by danmaz74 »

10000truths wrote: post #65
danmaz74 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the rating system is fundamental to be able to enjoy the game, and also to lower the impact of cheating: if my rating is 1500 and I play against other players around 1500, I don't care if they are at that level thanks to cheating or not. I only care about being competitive with them and trying to do my best. -- Shameless plug: I recently released a platform to improve tactically with puzzles and spaced repetitio…

You're assuming a steady-state equilibrium. It takes several games for a player to settle into their Elo, and a cheater will have ruined the experience of their opponents in the meantime. You're also discounting the fact that griefers will deliberately create new accounts to continue playing against novice opponents.

How is this different from good (non-cheating) players joining a new website and having to get to their realistic rating? This happens, but as a percentage of games you play it has a very low impact; moreover, platforms usually tell you that a player has a not-yet-established rating with a question mark, eg 1620?

My suggestion is to just stop thinking about cheaters when playing online rated games. I started doing so years ago, and have increased my enjoyment of the game A LOT, without any visible downside.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#74

Post by bawolff »

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.

I mean, i've never understood how people could be entertained hitting a ball with a stick. Different humans like different things.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#75

Post by chongli »

yarg wrote: post #68
chongli wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's too much that's simply memorisation over skills, deep lines leading you down well traversed paths. Creativity and ingenuity suffer. The only real option if you want interesting games is to make intentionally bad moves so that theory falls apart, and that's only an option against weaker players. Did you watch the world championship this year? It did not at all fit your narrative. The games were very exciting.…

> There were a lot of chances being taken, blunders, and mistakes. All this from 2800-level players.,. OK, so fucking up accidentally can also make for an interesting game, but that hardly shatters my "narrative".

They made these blunders because they were in very unfamiliar, double-edged positions. Yes, sometimes nerves got involved but sometimes the positions were just very sharp and complex and they couldn’t find the engine line.

Also, a lot of those engine lines would’ve just made a draw, something a human player would never do when they’re playing with the white pieces in a need-to-win game.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#76

Post by qup »

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…

5 - your parents are really likely to actively encourage it, instead of restricting the amount of time on it

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#77

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

chongli wrote: post #72
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. When people do this on Lichess, I spamclick the button that adds 15 seconds to the opponent clock and write "move or resign". Som…

They need a way of flagging this sort of behaviour as well. It should be relatively easy to spot if a person is repeatedly flagging while sitting there for a long time in completely losing positions.

I think Lichess already does this. When players do this, there's a warning in the chat that repeatedly doing this will result in a temporary ban. I don't know how long the ban is and whether it becomes permanent, since I never do this unless my connection actually dropped.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#79

Post by zpeti »

hannob wrote: post #37

I've recently started playing chess again a bit (after doing it a bit when I was a teen), and there's an interesting aspect of online chess that I began to realize: When I was young you needed a local opponent to play chess, and that wasn't always easy. Why? Because most people around you were either significantly better (you always loose) or worse (you always win). It's not an interesting game if the outcome is almo…

I had a similar experience in jiu jitsu, everyone is way better or way worse, so it’s very frustrating to play usually.

Unfortunately there isn’t an online jiu jitsu platform :)

I’ve also found there’s many many parallels between chess and jiu jitsu, which is really interesting, chess really is a super aggressive combat sport in terms of mental work.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#80

Post by tayo42 »

kweingar wrote: post #46

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 che…

Did he cheat in the end? I couldn't keep up after the internet mob kept going back and forth on who was right and wrong.
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