Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

gautamnarula.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–156 of 156 posts

Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#151

Post by V-2 »

ibagrak wrote: post #145
V-2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasted in what sense? What do you consider a better use that could have been made of a great chess player's mind?

It's just a saying I heard a long time ago from one of my professors. He probably meant it in the academic sense, i.e. the person could otherwise use that mental energy to do great research.

This point of view is understandable coming from a scientist, but essentially he could've said the same about van Beethoven or Dostoyevsky :)

Their works please us - not unlike the greatest chess games - but do they broaden our knowledge?

And where lies the value of great research anyway? In its practical appliance?

Grigori Perelman's research on the Poincaré conjecture is beyond brilliant, but has it improved our life more than the Immortal Game (Anderssen - Kieseritzky)?

Or is there innate value in scientific research, which comes solely from the virtue of being scientific? This approach strikes me as para-religious.

Refutation of the Evans gambit is some sort of knowledge as well. It's even peer reviewed :)

Of course it's not useful, but, for instance, is knowing what god was worshipped by the Khori-Tumed tribe 1200 years ago (fruit of hard and deep historical research work as it might be) more useful?

Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#152

Post by xerophtye »

vinceguidry wrote: post #150
xerophtye wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. IMO its not just the exercises that help you write great code (though they MIGHT help in competitive coding like for ACM). Truly beautiful code comes from experience and working with those who have spent years getting that experience. In my current company there is a huge focus on the re-usability and extensibility of the code. We are forced to think of future changes and make sure the code allows changing t…

That's an application of the Dependency Inversion Principle, part of the SOLID methodology. You always want your code to depend on abstract forms rather than concrete ones. By abstracting database calls into a class, you avoid having to constantly write brittle methods digging deep into concrete implementations. One way your company's method might evolve is into the Active Record pattern. You define a class around a…

Well yes, that's what we do too. The logic implementation is in the Business classes. The data classes just read/write from the tables, and return that data to the business class that performs more meaningful functions on it. This way the data can be used in multiple ways by multiple classes without them depending on each other. A change in domain logic would mean a change in the business class, leaving the data class unaffected

Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#153

Post by vidarh »

EdwigePelagia wrote: post #101
V-2 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He seems to be a Class A player: http://chess-db.com/public/pinfo.jsp?id=3012928544 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system#United_States... Also have a look at: http://www.amazon.com/Chess-For-Novice-Player-Beginning/dp/0... (Eidtorial Reviews / About the Author) That's not bad at all. I think he's perfectly entitled to give advice to beginners. They don't really need it coming from a GM, for the same reason…

I actually agree that a GM is not necessarily the best teacher. But there are people with decades of TEACHING experience, and they are the best teachers. He's certainly within his rights to go around saying you should listen to him. Just like every other useless self-help blogger is. The fact that my calling out his authority and credibility seems to rile up so many people says something about the crowd here. The cro…

It's more likely to do with the extremely rude and aggressive approach you have taken, while not giving any examples of actual problems with what he has written.

That you're doing so from an entirely new account, and so either have no track record here or have chosen not to post under your usual account also doesn't exactly point in your favour, as "calling people out" for lack of authority and credibility while doing nothing to establish your own certainly does tend to rile people up.

I'm sure I am not the only one who is left questioning your motives more so than the authority of the poster.

Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#154

Post by vidarh »

EdwigePelagia wrote: post #63
NathanthePie wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as you are someone who has found their way onto this forum, I must assume you: 1. Are competent at reading. 2. Have visited, and used, the internet before. Thus, the answer to your question, "Who is this guy" can be found on his WP site under the tab, 'About'. There, it states that he is: 1. Narula is a 19 year old sophomore at the University of Georgia studying Computer Science and Political Science and 2. Gau…

When someone asks an obvious question, the interpreter of the question has two paths to choose. (a) Assume the author is very stupid and then tell him the very stupid and obvious answer. (b) Interpret the question as rhetorical. People who take (a) are the type of people who think they're smarter than everyone else, but who are actually, in fact, dumber. Usually they lack empathy, are undersocialized, and probably sh…

A reasonable way of addressing this, would have been for you to write a short comment describing what you believe to be better resources, with links, and leave the nastiness out of it. Or a short blog post, and submit it.

As for your question:

> Is this 1800 rated 19 year old really the proper authority to learn how to play chess? Wouldn't a professional chess teacher with decades of experience and a higher rating than 1800 be the correct authority to instruct us on the best methods to learn chess?

My answer to that would be "I don't know". It depends on the material. I have more than enough times seen situations from my own fields of expertise where "professionals" with decades of experience have been shown up by relative beginners to be prepared to blindly accept an appeal to authority. Especially when you are not backing it up with any examples of why you believe his article is not good enough to be suitable to his stated audience.

> HN should just link one of the dozens of much more reputable books on this topic.

So give us a name, or a link, rather than spout vitriol.

Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#155

Post by beerscout »

nsxwolf wrote: post #111

Will anyone here besides me admit they've never won a game of chess, ever, not once? Even against some random little kid who only knows how the pieces move, at Thanksgiving? I have this suspicion that some part of my brain is damaged and I'll never be able to play chess. I've made many attempts at learning, but have never improved over randomly moving pieces around the board. Any advice on a resource that will help m…

You should try playing Losing Chess then: http://www.chessvariants.org/diffobjective.dir/giveaway.html

Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#156

Post by anatoly »

z0r wrote: post #131
anatoly wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the best place to play online, for an absolute beginner?

For an absolute beginner, try running through this first: http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/ Then register an account on KGS - http://www.gokgs.com/ Play games with low time limits (something like 5 - 10 minutes main time and 5 x 30 s overtime) and play a bunch! Ask for reviews on the KGS Teaching Ladder (a discussion room on the server), if you can get a good teacher or two to help early on you can figure out what the game i…

I've followed your advice and have been playing quick 9x9 games on KGS while I'm working through the first "Graded Go Problems for Beginners" book. Thank you.
Post reply on HN