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Chess is booming among teens

polygon.com

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Re: Chess is booming among teens

#141

Post by somenameforme »

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?

A huge amount of work is dedicated to busting cheaters. Getting into the minutia of exactly how this is done is outside the scope of this post, but the most obvious one is correlation. Run a correlation check between a suspected cheater's moves and various engines - and see how they matchup. Another would be time expenditure. A guy spending the same time for an only-move and a superhuman tactical sequence is probably not legit. And there's dozens of other metrics you can use to determine 'cheatiness', with the end result being near 100% certainty on whether somebody is or isn't legit.

I'm relatively high rated on chess.com and only run into a cheater every once in a blue moon. Invariably his account tends to be closed, and points refunded shortly thereafter. This wasn't always the case, 'back in the day' chess.com had a major problem with cheaters, but it's clear that at some point they made a serious effort to start flushing out the cheaters - and it's been a big success.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#142

Post by stavros »

stefncb wrote: post #136
stavros wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lichess is amazing, I play there exclusively. However, I am plagued by a terrible bug: the Android app has half a second of lag when opening any screen for some reason. It doesn't matter what connection I'm on, and the website is always instant, but the Android app always takes half a second to load any screen. It's infuriating when you want to view the analysis, or just navigate around the app.

Weird, it's always worked perfectly for me. Now that I think about it I haven't updated in a long time, and after this I probably won't.

I think it may be something about my phone, but who knows. Everything else works fine.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#143

Post by atlantic »

johnchristopher wrote: post #96
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.

I talked to a guy who manages a chess club, and he said it was a combination of Queen's Gambit and Covid lockdowns that boosted interest over the past three years.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#144

Post by dist1ll »

GistNoesis wrote: post #109
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 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 av…

That's a very elaborate way of saying that competitive players should delude themselves to cope with their weak mental game.

> Anything below 80% winrate, means it becomes hard to distinguish the learning signal from the variance of the matching.

Using winrate as a learning signal is your first mistake. You're making a million different decisions per game, and then decide to summarize it with a binary W/L? If you want proper signal, you need to analyze your games on a more fine-grained level.

> And the loss should be correlated to the way you played.

No, it shouldn't and doesn't. Dealing with variance, and things beyond your control is an essential part of developing a strong mentality. Especially when playing in-person.

> The brain also need some balance between the carrot and the stick otherwise the ego take a hit.

If your ego takes a hit from this, you need to get back to the drawing board instead of praying that the world will change to accommodate your issues.

> 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 can't speak to the "lack of stategy", but what makes a game fun to compete in is highly subjective.

> soulless addicted grinders

This is the exact kind of language and attitude I would see from players who plateau hard, and looking for external factors to blame.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#145

Post by blhgrt »

The marketing of chess.com adjacent chess streamers who say they want to "democratize the game" is working.

In this case the result is entertaining and harmless, but the motivation is financial.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#146

Post by [deleted] »

qup wrote: post #76
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

[deleted]

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#147

Post by Pyramus »

quijoteuniv wrote: post #70
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…

Imagine when you discover Lichess!

As someone who plays exclusively on Lichess I find the chess.com bashing, particularly here on HN, a bit short-sighted, in the sense that it's focussed on who provides the better (free) online service to play chess.

If your goal, however, is to popularise the game of chess, i.e. to get more people to play chess, a free online service is only a necessary condition. Chess.com seems to be able to sponsor and organise tournaments, pay content creators/chess players, offer live streams with professional commentators, etc. But also take legal responsibility and stand up to lawsuits.

Interested to hear your thoughts on this. I don't see Lichess being able to provide this type of value, and I'm not sure if they want to or should.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#148

Post by mcv »

I come from a chess family. My dad has been an avid chess player for all his life, with a rating of around 1600. As kids we all went to the chess club, got our chess diploma's, played a few tournaments (my sister won a lot), I won a simultaneous chess game the author of the standard Dutch children's chess book in my youth gave in the shopping center near my home. But after that, I stopped. Played a few games in university who could really humiliate me on the board.

I taught my oldest son both chess and go, and when we played, I never held back, but when he was so far behind he didn't know what to do, he could turn the board around and continue play from my winning position, while I had to salvage his. That was a fun way to play. And then it stopped again.

Last year, my youngest son (now 8) suddenly wanted to join a chess club in our neighbourhood. My oldest (14) says lots of kids are playing chess at his school, though none at his level, so he started playing on chess.com. Instead of watching YouTube videos about video games, they're now watching GothamChess and other chess channels. So chess is hot again in our home. He now occasionally beats me. Making me work harder, to the point that the games between me and my dad are getting a lot closer (though I still lose most).

I can really recommend GothamChess, by the way. His videos are brilliant. Both meme-worthy, exaggerated emotions, deadpan disappointment at some moves, but also extremely educational. He analyses lots of novice games around 600 rating, which is super useful for the many new players, but also still interesting to me.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#149

Post by mcv »

cjonas wrote: post #90
quijoteuniv wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine when you discover Lichess!

I find it odd that all my friends & coworkers in the tech industry have ended up on chess.com instead of lichess. Even beyond the fact it's totally free (and free of ads), the architecture itself is super interesting: https://lichess.org/@/thibault/blog/starting-from-scratch/NI... It must be one of the best examples of a very large scale implementation of features that are simple and easy to understand

What are the differences? I'm not familiar with lichess, but chess.com has tons of bots at various levels that you can play against, and you can have one game per day analysed by stockfish for free (more costs money). I think that's a pretty good deal.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#150

Post by mcv »

wongarsu wrote: post #121
jrpt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was all true ten years ago too so I don’t think that’s it. What changed is the Queen’s Gambit got popular, then covid caused online gaming to become even more popular, and then there were some things that made chess popular recently like chess boxing with streamers on YouTube.

Also Magnus Carlsen being relatable to young people, Hikaru Nakamura ,the world's best best speed chess player, having fun and dishing out sass on YouTube and Twitch, and lots of good commentators and players making great content on popular platforms. Lots of factors built the base that was able to turn the interest from Queen's Gambit into a lasting and growing phenomenon.

Magnus and Hikaru are absolutely fantastic ambassadors for chess. Very relatable indeed, and that does a lot to get rid of chess's old stuffy image.
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