If you have young kids. There's a pretty nice chess game in Roblox: CHESS!
Chess is booming among teens
101–110 of 227 posts
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#102I 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? :)
I’m curious if you like tower defense games (like plants vs. zombies). Those are pretty much the only games I have been able to interest myself into!
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#103Andrew Tate is a chess player and promoted chess. Andrew Tate was the most internet famous person for a period of time with a huge following in the teen male demographic. Possible cause-effect.
Interesting idea.
It had exploded in popularity way before him, due to the other reasons mentioned; streamers, Queen's Gambit, etc. but the article is focused on a purported post January spike in schools - and considering the baleful influence he's claimed to have in them, it would also therefore seem necessary to factor him in to any analysis here.
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah seems like a trivial issue to fix - first 10 games are for evaluation, heck they can be had even against computer. Very few people are so pathetic/psychopathic to invest so much time into getting a rank and then cheating on real opponents and tank their account quickly. And for those few, just don't care about them, its just a game after all.
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#105This 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…
I kind of feel if you think this then you've approached chess all wrong.
Your moves are all about controlling your opponents influence and responses while developing your pieces before situating for a breakthrough or attack.
Interesting games only really happen with decently skilled opponents who know the theory as well as you. The game often only starts getting interesting after move 16+.
Dubious moves and openings are a surefire way to lose.
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#106My father has always been a chess aficionado, but I got turned off by the fact that he was the only available opponent, and he had 37 years of headstart (it didn't occur to me to go to a chess club). When I was in University, I discovered Go, which felt somehow deeper than chess (I do enjoy the occasional game of chess, but compared to Go it feels like a knife fight vs a military campaign). After school I stopped pla…
Chess is just more interesting to watch.
As somene who prefers playing Go a lot more than chess, this is true. Games are far too long for most people, I do enjoy having a Go game in the background while I work but patiently sitting for 16 hours for a game to finish is not a great sell even if I love the game.
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#107I 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? :)
Starcraft Brood War
Or perhaps Jelle's Marble Runs
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You can play dubious openings and do fine all the way up to middling grandmaster level. Memorisation is not at all important for learning to play chess. It won't make you better at the game. Training your pattern recognition, your positional/endgame/opening understanding will. Until you're around 1500 real life ELO(which takes years for most people), all you have to do is play the game and enjoy it, analyse it with t…
I'd disagree. If you play a line like the Englund Gambit, you are going to get trounced.
A lot of times, Memorization isn't even needed. People develop mental shortcuts for calculation in positional, endgame, and middle game sections.
Things like forcing doubled pawns on the C/F files (depending on your color), calculating whether you can promote before the king can catch up (that triangle strategy). Lucena and a few others.
With a solid opening repertoire that's chosen to force certain openings/sublines you can limit the study needed significantly (and shoot to the moon rating wise).
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#109I'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 think matching by level is quite psychologically destructive, and should be avoided.
People grind for hours and they see no sense of progress as they keep always being around 50% winrate because the stronger they get, the better the opponent get. And inversely they can play drunk chess and still win 50% and burn time pushing random pieces for a little short-term fun.
It probably depends on people but I think the average ratio for people to progress optimally their should be around four wins for one loss. And the loss should be correlated to the way you played. Anything below 80% winrate, means it becomes hard to distinguish the learning signal from the variance of the matching. The brain also need some balance between the carrot and the stick otherwise the ego take a hit.
Rating system also generate some strata artefacts meaning there are levels you can't get past without spending as much time as your opponent on tactics, or openings, and you never get to experience chess on a more strategic level, or deeper understanding level. This mean that most of the fun get extracted out of chess once you get addicted/interested enough.
I think it's much better to play unrated games anonymously against a random pool of anonymous players (eventually with a min level to exclude complete novices), and offer rematch when the games were interesting. You should play to win but your reward signal shouldn't be the win but rather the interestingness of the game for both opponent.
When playing you should try to understand your opponent, his current chess understanding and how it's revealed through his current moves, and construct with the board some situations that will be interesting enough for the both of you to have a good time. Don't play the board. Play the player through the board. A good game should look more like a dance than a fight. You have to infer from a few moves who your opponent is, and how to interact with him in a constructive way.
That's what popular streamer do when they play their viewers (usually friendly and constructive). And that's probably what teens expect when they join chess after viewing a few videos. But instead they get thrown into an adverse destructive pit of soulless addicted grinders.
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#110A couple of years ago, my children’s primary school added a chess club. An hour after school once a week. $20 per ten week term.
Parents quickly worked out this equated to $2/hour childcare and signed up kids that had never before touched a chess board. It was a delightful chaos.