Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or "Yeah it's called Taaalk.co with 3 As"
Even if you say that, a not insignificant number of users are still probably going to type either taalk.co or taaaalk.co to start with.
A .co domain costs that much?
How To Think About Chess
31–40 of 51 posts
Re: How To Think About Chess
#32Good conversation at about my level (read: plays a bit, but not necessarily well). I've noticed that many new players seem to obsess on their Openings, while my skills are very much the Endgame (I'm great at holding multiple logic trees in my head, which becomes an asset late in a game when you can pursue these to a checkmate). Basically, if I can survive 15 moves against comparably skilled players, I will win. But t…
Is there a playstyle of chess where both players agree to skip the opening, just setting up the board as if the opening were played "by the book" by both players and going from there? It seems like that'd be much better for getting amateur-level players practice in their middlegames, since they wouldn't need to worry about perfecting the opening before they could even attempt it.
The slight variations in the opening tend to be important to the middlegame that follows. You can set up the pieces 8 moves into mainline Ruy Lopez, for example, but if you start from exactly that position every time then you just end up with a "second opening" after that point. Randomizing the start position is possible but undermines the whole "pure battle of intelligence, no chance involved" shtick that is part of chess' appeal.
Fundamentally with the exponential fanout of the moves but a relatively small set of choices initially, there's always going to be a point where the game transitions from "likely to be an exact position I've seen before" to "likely to be something new, but similar to previous games".
Re: How To Think About Chess
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the format and the content as well, but the domain name and company name seem pretty terrible, if I'm to be honest. Imagine explaining it to a friend or prospective user. "Yeah it's called Taaalk, just go to taaalk.co" "What, talk.co?" "No, you need 3 As." user types 3 more As "Taaaalk.co is giving me a 404." "Sorry, you needed 2 more As, let's start over." "Taalk.co?" "Just google 'talk'. Actually, wait, don'…
Yeah, but who shares URLs with their friends by speech these days? In fact, who really speaks?
Filthy peasants.
Re: How To Think About Chess
#34My 2 cents, and somewhat related: everyone should read Josh Waitzkin's The Art Of Learning [1].
[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Art-Learning-Journey-Performance...
Re: How To Think About Chess
#35I have an expert level rating. I agree with everything in the content. My games are very similar to what he describes. I have not memorized many openings. I just know a few moves in common openings and how to respond to a few quirky responses to them. I want to get to the middle game or out of my opponents memory as quickly as possible. I also sometimes deliberately make some opening weak moves to get out of opponent…
I'm a pretty bad player (mostly playing with my 7yo son), and I totally agree about the blunders thing. The most effective way to learn how to avoid them IMO is to play a lot against good algorithms - that might not play hard tactically at the easier setting, but never make stupid moves or fail to detect my own stupid mistakes. You can't win these games by lucking out :)
Not all computer chess programs behave like this, some of them, at the easier levels make stupid mistakes, or don't take advantage of my own oversights. I try to avoid these. Playing against other amateur players that don't always take full advantage of your stupid mistakes doesn't train you well enough for this.
Re: How To Think About Chess
#36I have an expert level rating. I agree with everything in the content. My games are very similar to what he describes. I have not memorized many openings. I just know a few moves in common openings and how to respond to a few quirky responses to them. I want to get to the middle game or out of my opponents memory as quickly as possible. I also sometimes deliberately make some opening weak moves to get out of opponent…
I am a terrible player, but I absolutely love playing. One of my biggest problems is making a move and them immediately seeing the err of my ways. It's beyond bizarre how quickly I'll realize what a shitty move I have just made right after I take my hand off the piece. I'd say I have a few decent tactics that I sort of lean on, but, like you pointed to, if my opponent does something to break me from that memory, my g…
This. I take my hand off the piece and immediately resign. Allowing a single 'undo-last-move' play would help my game a lot.
Re: How To Think About Chess
#37Some diagrams and actual moves would have been very useful to help explain the concepts he talked about.
As it is, I am left with no idea what "attacking the king in the midgame" really meant to him. Did it mean sacrificing material for a mate, or a more standard development?
Most midgame analysis use the concepts of force, space, and time[1], and he didn't even mention these terms, so I was left confused.
I am not sure what my level is, but pretty much all I did in my two years in prison was play chess, and in my relatively short stay, I became around the 5th best player "on the yard" and was able to play at the specific table where only the best players could play.
There were over 1500 inmates at the facility I was at, and at least half of them played chess as it was one of the only board games readily available, so playing at that table was no mean feat.
We would play for $1 a game and it became my "hustle" (a hustle in prison is something that allows you to make money doing something of value, like making some else's rack (bed), or sneaking food out of the kitchen etc).
Anyway, I digress...I try to play at coffee shops when I can these days but I find often the existing players seem snobbish and its hard to find a game with the better players.
Re: How To Think About Chess
#38The article's good. However, the comment about experts not getting to the endgame as often as non-experts is likely wrong. I don't have the data either, but I'm fairly experienced at chess, and in my experience high level games get to an endgame moderately often, but amateur games almost always end before an endgame. Amateurs typically don't even know how to play an endgame, because they rarely get to it so they don'…
Agreed: the higher level the players, the more endgames. Think of two people fighting on a balance beam. The weaker the fighters, the greater the chance that one of them is going to slip off the beam (make a blunder that is punishable) earlier in the fight.
Re: How To Think About Chess
#39I like this. I've been getting back into chess as of lately and I keep a board on my desk while I do work on my laptop. Here's my strategy for playing 'solitaire chess' as I call it - I make a move, then I move a poker chip to the side whose turn it is, I go back to doing whatever I was doing on my laptop for a while (until I forget the game entirely), then I return and make another move. Then I rinse and repeat this…
You'd want to be careful with that, Stefan Zweig has a novella about a guy playing chess against himself in his head who loses his mind! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Royal_Game
Re: How To Think About Chess
#40As a person of color, I really got this:
"At the very very highest levels winning with black is really quite an impressive achievement, and black will often go into a game playing for a draw. The advantage of the first move is very pronounced, and sets the tone for the entire game, with white generally calling the shots. Attempts by black to generate active counterplay are often very risky. "
"So the aim when black is to survive and make sure you're doing enough sensible things to not get exploited because of the disadvantage of moving second."