Chess is booming among teens • Hacker News Board

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#121

Post by wongarsu » Mon, May 01, 2023, 8:30 AM UTC

jrpt wrote: post #31

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…

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.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#122

Post by tester756 » Mon, May 01, 2023, 8:31 AM UTC

hammyhavoc wrote: post #4

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.

Because chess offers more variety in strategy than "rush A", "rush B", "they're going squeaky", "rotate". It's particularly fun in-person, and shockingly, the generation coming up likes to look at screens less and less, and apparently isn't keen on smartphones.

LoL is more complex than chess.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#123

Post by joshxyz » Mon, May 01, 2023, 8:35 AM UTC

jonkho wrote: post #83

Andrew 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.

he's controversial in a lot of things (on some things i agree, on some things i dont) but i do agree he did a great job promoting chess too.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#124

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl » Mon, May 01, 2023, 8:38 AM UTC

than3 wrote: post #108

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure if you play a bad opening, you'll get problems. Especially if it's just a one trick pony. When I say dubious opening I mean the kind top grandmasters rarely play. I play the Modern Benoni with black. Sure it's dubious and white can get a pretty big advantage. But it's an opening with absolutely endless complexity in terms of the middle games that can arise. It's sharp, difficult to play for both sides, and I enjoy these positions and have played them for years now, with probably thousands of blitz games in the Benoni, and quite a few classical tournament games under my belt. I think all in all I've memorised maybe two or three lines back when I started playing it. The rest is all just my experience and intuition for the various set ups. And guess what, the lines I memorised? They hardly ever occur, because my white opponents never know them and they're the kond of thing you're not gonna find over the board, which is why I memorised them. And I win most of my games in the modern benoni at the 1800 FIDE level.

Point is memorisation is pointless. The way to study an opening is to understand the ideas, possible endgames, tactical and various structures that can arise.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#125

Post by zpeti » Mon, May 01, 2023, 8:41 AM UTC

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.

It’s kind of exactly why I like it. There’s a reason people have been playing it and it evolved over 1000-1500 years. The complexity and variety is extremely entertaining.

It’s really nice having that sort of depth vs a video game with a set path and story that you follow, or slicing random fruits with your finger.

And the accessibility has obviously gotten insanely good as has been pointed out before in the thread.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#126

Post by sbergot » Mon, May 01, 2023, 8:41 AM UTC

gubby wrote: post #117

GistNoesis wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting point, but of course it’s not possible to create a platform with an average win rate of 80%.

In some video games you may randomly face an AI opponent without the game being explicit about it. That way the average human win rate can be above 50%. I don't know yet if this is good or bad.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#127

Post by McDev » Mon, May 01, 2023, 8:44 AM UTC

tayo42 wrote: post #80

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.

There was never any conclusive evidence. He did file a defamation lawsuit against Magnus though which is still ongoing.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#128

Post by toolslive » Mon, May 01, 2023, 8:44 AM UTC

I have 3 kids (in their 20s) that started playing chess fanatically since last year. They never took interest earlier even while the house is filled with chess books and their dad is a pretty decent player (~fide 2000). I don't know why though, but I'm happy regardless.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#129

Post by stavros » Mon, May 01, 2023, 8:53 AM UTC

qsort wrote: post #88

quijoteuniv wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine when you discover Lichess!

I can't recommend Lichess enough. It's free (freedom & beer), it has no ads , and it's feature-complete. It even has stuff that other websites make you pay for, like post-game computer annotation. It offers a web interface where you can play without even registering an account and free (again, freedom & beer) apps for iOS and Android. The only downside when compared to chess.com is that fewer top-level professionals…

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.

Re: Chess is booming among teens

#130

Post by karmakurtisaani » Mon, May 01, 2023, 8:56 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #54

Fricken wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern sources of entertainment are dressed up in a lot of fluff. Blow all that fluff away and you're left with nothing that is any better than games and stories that have been with us since forever. The kids these days are drowning in novelties of the sort that were scarce to me as a child. It stands to reason they wouldn't be as easily impressed or fooled by such things.

None of however does not lead to liking chess. The game is massively about memorization and drill, with some patina of superior aura on it. At least on lower levels. Like you trying to make everything else sound inferior, plus fluff. It is not true, once you scratch reputation out of chess, you get mundane drills and memorization of situations.

Nah, not really. The beauty of chess is that you can almost equally enjoy it at any skill level. The challenge is almost always the same of calculating and evaluating the position to the best of your abilities. If you find yourself trying to memorize positions, you're either preparing to win the world championship or doing it completely wrong.