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Chess is booming among teens

polygon.com

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Re: Chess is booming among teens

#91

Post by MisterBastahrd »

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…

These are good points, but there's a social aspect that this misses: there are quite a few twitch streamer personalities who are high level chess players AND can actually hold a conversation. So you've got a lot of kids and young adults who are being exposed to the game through entertainment and want to do it themselves. Hikaru, Magnus, the Botez sisters, etc... they're all highly popular and they all stream on twitch.

Take a look at these chess viewership metrics:

https://www.twitchmetrics.net/channels/popularity?game=Chess

That's 21 different streamers averaging at least a thousand concurrent viewers. On average, it's 12,600 concurrent viewers.

Chess ranks #28 on Twitch when ranking by stream type. This includes games, just chatting, ASMR, and Special Events. It ranks higher than Elden Ring, Rocket League, Destiny 2, and Genshin Impact.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#92

Post by adzm »

bobmaxup wrote: post #36
AITree wrote: post #29

The game of chess has always been popular, but recently it has attracted a lot of interest because of the success of Netflix's "The Queen's Gambit" series. People of all ages, especially teens, have taken a newfound interest in the game as a result of the presentation.

Characters on fantasical drugs having superhuman abilities?

I think you misunderstood a good section of that series if that is your takeaway.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#93

Post by opportune »

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?

Chess AIs are so good that consistently cheating will put you at a very very high rating relative to most players. It’s also very noticeable as AI-suggested moves have very low centipawn loss (in other words, AI-assisted moves are usually recognizably the “best” move/ the same as what a cheat detection AI run by the chess service would suggest). A pattern of regularly making probabilistically unlimely centipawn loss move sequences can be detected. Other heuristics used are mouse moving offscreen IIRC.

A lot of top chess players only play bullet and blitz online where cheating is too hard, you’d have to completely automate it, at which point you are no longer playing a game but just watching an AI play pros until it gets banned.

If you cheat in FPS you still feel like you’re playing the game, just on an easier setting. But with Chess it’s basically just delegating the game to something else. When playing online there is little incentivize to do this.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#94

Post by curun1r »

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…

The other fundamentally different thing is the learning tools. As a kid, I had one book on one opening and I had to sit by a board reading it to make the moves to try to dial in the learning. It was a slow and laborious process. I tried checking out another chess book from the library, but had to return it before I made significant headway. There was also one chess puzzle in the newspaper per week, which was fun, but not enough to really make a difference in my skill level.

Kids today can explore/memorize many openings and cover many more variations because of the online courses, some of which are even free. They can quiz themselves to ensure they dial in the move orders. And they can access hundreds of thousands of puzzles in rapid succession to improve their middle-game tactics and pattern recognition. And that’s not even going into having access to chess engines stronger than any human player to explore lines and learn why bad moves are bad.

All this makes studying the game so much easier, even before you test yourself against an actual opponent.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#95

Post by dmurray »

osener wrote: post #35
sidibe wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been interested in chess because it seemed to be way too much work to be good enough to have fun. Things have gotten much easier now, you can get endless stream of free puzzles that are as fun as any puzzle game and adapt to your skill level... I'm still not that interested in actually playing but it's really the ultimate single player game for phones, always slightly challenging and takes as little or as…

Which app is best for this single player variety of chess? Focusing on bite sized puzzles etc.

Chesstempo has the best content, at least at a middle or higher standard. Chess.com and lichess have more modern UI/UX but haven't perfected the automatic puzzle generation process that Chesstempo seems to have got right many years ago.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#96

Post by johnchristopher »

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…

Is that related to The Queen's Gambit tv show ? During the running and a bit after there was an uptick in players in public spaces.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#97

Post by opportune »

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.

Watch blitz or bullet chess played online and you might understand. These are actual easier played online than in person because it automates pressing the clock and you can set (potentially conditional) pre moves. It’s basically a fast-paced videogame: https://youtu.be/PNQDJdjgkdU

Sometimes I play bullet games for hours straight because it’s very easy to just play one more 2 minute game.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#98

Post by ctenb »

yarg wrote: post #17
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 kinda agree with Bobby on that front: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P349BdHUxlc&t=0s 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. You can play with the more…

There is a chess variant called Progressive Chess, where the number of moves per turn increases with each turn. In this variant, White starts with one move, then Black plays two moves, White plays three moves, and so on. The players alternate turns, and each time they play, they make one more move than their previous turn. This creates a unique strategic dynamic and requires players to think differently than in traditional chess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_chess

I almost never play chess, but when I play chess I usually play this variant, because it's faster and people don't have any tactics memorised. I'm not even sure if it's possible to memorise in the same manner as regular chess.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#99

Post by than3 »

watwut wrote: post #52
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?

Lichess puts a lot of effort into catching cheaters.

No, they really don't.

They use a ML Siamese head network that was donated to them back ~2012. Nothing has changed since then, and they don't prevent people from creating new accounts.

There were issues reported to them in 2016 about the siamese network failing to detect properly in cases where the client-side parameters being passed could be spoofed and held static, and they banned the people who reported it and deleted the posts from their github and the site.

From what I've seen, their team is petty, conceited, and vindictive people.

They make a show of valuing the community, but its just that; a show. When it comes down to actually reporting something responsibly in goodwill; they have no professionalism, and no credibility. They don't want to hear about it; and its easier to silence with the hammer of admin power than anything else.

Incidentally, there were also issues with the paperwork they filed for the charity in France too. You are required to have certain paperwork filed to provide when opening a bank account in France (so you don't comingle charity funds with personal funds). It didn't appear they filed that paperwork when I last went digging. Maybe OSINT will bring something up.

I honestly can't stand false hero worship, they've done nothing to earn respect and a lot to lose any credibility they may have had.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#100

Post by dmurray »

WalterBright wrote: post #60

I did poorly at chess because instead of thinking of my next move I'd be thinking about writing a program to figure out the next move for me. You could call it the "Programmer's Curse".

You and Alan Turing both. He was an appallingly bad chess player, but wrote an algorithm which was more or less minimax, the standard algorithm today. Unfortunately he didn't have hardware to run it on.
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