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How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

alexcrompton.com

101–110 of 320 posts

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#101

My dad was a master chess player in my country when I was growing up so I know all the moves but I never had the interest to go further than that. So what I really need to study are the famous openings and the responses to various openings. Seems like a memory game. Computer games were always more fun.

This is why I've been avoiding chess. Anything that feels too memory intensive just doesn't seem fun to me. It's not creative strategy it's just rote memorization. Same goes for Rubik's cubes.

Yeah I'll play the shit out of a Civilization game. That's like "3D chess" in a way because every unit has their own moves, you're restricted by the hexagonal board, you have to know which unit to use in which context.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you able to confirm there isn’t a typo here? You’re 7?

with comments back past 2018 i think it's safe to say its a typo xD

Maybe they started to procrastinate in HN when they were 2.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#104

"Only about 10% of players ever gain more than 100 points, and only about 1% of players gain more than 200 rating points given years." This seems like a wild claim. On chess.com I've gone from 500 to ~1050 in a handful of months without any real study, just some light YouTube watching. 500->800 felt like all it took was learning a few openings and not blundering pieces. 800-1050 felt like it came mostly from getting…

I mostly played blitz with openings where queen is moved in the first 3 moves and got to ~2000 (no proof, sorry). I didn't study chess at all outside of playing it intensely for 1-2 years. Of course, my end game was also very bad. It was such a frustrating fun I had to stop.

There are of course players that know how to fully exploit mistakes in the bad openings, but when you're rated so low, openings rarely matter, especially if the opponent has to exploit a weird opening you have.

There's many more patterns related to pinning, tempo, that are worth much more for quick rating progress.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#105
>get started and keep going.

My personal opinion is that this is the most important. There's so many things you can focus on, sometimes we forget that we need to just spend more time actively focusing on chess to get better.

I think actively focusing makes a huge difference. Playing a 2+1 while watching netflix is completely different than 5+3, fully committing.

Lastly, I think if you find the part of chess you like most then lean into that! I love endgames, so I spend 75% of my time studying those. I might not be the best off for it (~1675 Lichess), but I like it, so there :)

My workplace has a chess league which is really cool and useful to keep wanting to practice.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will never be anymore. AI simply outperforms humans at increasing rates. When in doubt, for a specific game a narrow AI can be trained up. For the current 1-2 years you can have a shot at physical/sports games, since robots are lagging behind AI capabilities, quite a lot.

Robots can’t even carry enough energy to play a physical/sports game, even if their AI was perfect and cost zero energy itself. There’s no imminent tech that will change this. We have many years. I’d love to be wrong about that, but I’m probably not. Check out Robocup for superhuman speed miniature soccer games. But the games are small and short. The humanoid games are much less well developed.

Probably we differ here on the timespans, thats okay :-)

Personally I explicitly do not expect robots to actually have human-like shape but rather be optimized for the thing they do, which can change the energy requirements or otherwise things that might look "unfair" to humans. Usually this is one of the key reasons where different timelines come from in discussions, where people assume that a humanoid robot needs to be build that does the same movements like humans but somehow better/faster/... while I differ on that point.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#107
post #43

> Like most people, late last year I watched the Queen's Gambit. That's a... bold statement.

Not the only bold statement in the article. >But I'm a smart guy (hi white male privilege) It's amusing to see someone go mask off and call non-whites low IQ like that.

Oof, when you try to be self-deprecating and acknowledge your privilege and it's still racist.

You either believe there's white male privilege, and the author is correct, or you don't, and he... has a different opinion than you?

I'm not going to go more into it because I dislike framing this clear class problem as a race problem, but I wanted to point out the erroneous reasoning.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#108

Is there a well known strategy game where AI doesn't have better chances to win than a human? Is there possibly, math wise, that such games exist? I kind of dislike not having a chance when playing against bots.

Don't play against bots then. There's plenty of people online to play against at any moment of the day.

Maybe I read the wrong forums but this particular hangup ("machines can do it better so what is even the point?") seems to be quite unique to chess as a hobby. I've never seen someone on an athletics tournament complaining that the sport is no longer fun because a cannon could throw the spear much farther than even the best athletes, or that they no longer enjoy going to the gym because a construction crane can lift much more than they will ever be able to. Chess is at its core a game of rigidly applying rules, pattern matching, and applying a depth-first search on as deep a search tree as you can manage. It should hardly be a surprise that computers can do that extremely well.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#109
Fun to see GM Axel Smith mentioned, I used to be his student as a teenager, when he was still an IM. Great teacher and just a wonderful person overall. I can vouch for his methods, even if I was a teenager when I practiced them.

This is a great article on how to improve chess as a beginner, from the perspective of a former beginner. Basic recognition of patterns is the bedrock of tactical calculation. And focusing on problems that can be solved quickly is a good strategy for building it.

I do want to champion the cause of harder problems though, because there is more to calculation than pattern recognition. And this will become more and more important above the very impressive 1500 the author managed to reach.

Calculation is a conscious mental process that needs training in its own right. It involves the ability to visualise board states, remember where you are in the game tree, enumerate candidate/forcing moves and threats, heuristics like the method of elimination. None of these can be trained purely through these simpler problems, only through slowly taking your time applying all these techniques. This is why blitz rarely leads to an improvement in your base ability. The only way to build out your ability beyond what you can immediately recognise is to really struggle with positions you can't solve in 8 seconds, or even 8 minutes. This happens naturally if you play longer time controls(and actually spend your time). It's also tremendously helpful to join your local chess club and work through some problems with a stronger player to guide you. That's also a lot more fun to most people.

Learning chess doesn't have to be just a lot of rote exercise. You can also read books on positional chess, pawn structures, endgames, and openings. No, they don't decide games as much as tactical mistakes but they certainly influence games profoundly whether the players are aware of them or not. And a more "holistic" approach can be more motivating.

Re: How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

#110
post #68

Is there a well known strategy game where AI doesn't have better chances to win than a human? Is there possibly, math wise, that such games exist? I kind of dislike not having a chance when playing against bots.

I've found playing against weaker bots you lose on the sort of human nature of weaker players. In particular humans tend to have a bit of an internal narrative, but weaker chess bots tend to just throw in shitty moves. It's pretty well known that bots resort to cheating to win at stuff like Civ. I'm sure there's a patch out there that removes the cheating, and you can stomp on computers there.

Civ evo [0] applies the same rules to AI and human players. It is supposed to have a very strong AI. Also, AI does not have a personality (friendly, aggressive, etc.); it just wants to win. Unfortunately, I could never bring myself to learn this new variant.

[0] http://c-evo.org/

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