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What is Chess? What to think and for how long

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Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#61

Post by ormaybethizzy »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #24
ycombinete wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seneca was of a similar opinion: It would be a lengthy business to mention all the different people who have spent their lives engaged in chess-playing or exercise with ball or the practice of roasting their bodies in the sun. They are not unoccupied when their pleasure form such a busy occupation. No one will doubt that those men are energetic triflers who devote their hours to the study of useless literature - On t…

That's weird, since chess didn't exist when Seneca was alive. Perhaps that's a mistranslation and he was referring to Ludus latrunculorum? [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludus_latrunculorum

Or maybe Senet

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senet

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#62

Post by BurningFrog »

ronyfadel wrote: post #8

Hijacking the comments to ask: what is the best way to get better at chess? (other than “just” playing matches, I’m already doing that)

The trap to avoid is memorizing openings!

It takes a ton of time and brainpower, and doesn't make you a better player once you're outside your memorized moves..

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#63

Post by ckaygusu »

kwikdraw wrote: post #15

For mediocre chess players like me I recommend trying online speed chess for a few months. Bullet chess where each player gets a minute total clock is a completely different game where you move every half second on average. Aggressive playing is rewarded - as long as you get your opponent to waste time thinking. The quick play allows you develop a better sense of positioning, game flow, and end game tactics. When you…

Faster you do something, more you rely on your instincts, and instincts alone do not further your game -- or anything you strive to be good at really -- you need to be mindfully thinking it through.

It might be beneficial to spice things up, but this is in general not a good advice.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#64

Post by armitron »

thefourthchime wrote: post #27
armitron wrote: post #7

Precise thought patterns, acronyms, X seconds per move... This seems like a terrible, robotic way to play chess, at least when it comes to having fun. I've played in excess of 100k games on lichess (mostly 3 minutes, some 5 minute and bullet too, no increments) with my ELO rating being ~2100 and I don't consciously do any of these (whether these or approximations of such still take place unconsciously is a different…

When you look at the board you are calculating moves though yes? You don't just think about puppies and ice cream cones I assume.

Not consciously calculating, there is no effort put into minimaxing. I just look at how the board is set up, focus on the position, the patterns that the pieces dictate, squares that are weak, king position. It sounds like a script but my point is that it doesn't take conscious mental effort, these are mostly intuitive actions.

Of course I wasn't born that way, I've spent years playing chess and it's obvious that these years of playing resulted in a calibrated network of weights in my brain that allow me now to play by feel. My point is more that I didn't perform any structured routines when playing games like the article describes. I kept playing and doing tactics training and my brain did the rest through osmosis. Which leads me to my final point in that tactics and pattern recognition matter and I think, having discussed this with many folks including club players, that they are the best way to rapidly increase one's skill.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#65

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

10xDev wrote: post #29
kwikdraw wrote: post #15

For mediocre chess players like me I recommend trying online speed chess for a few months. Bullet chess where each player gets a minute total clock is a completely different game where you move every half second on average. Aggressive playing is rewarded - as long as you get your opponent to waste time thinking. The quick play allows you develop a better sense of positioning, game flow, and end game tactics. When you…

No, in my experience it forms bad habits such as being severely prone to going for one turn attacks. One turn attacks may be the most common mistake among chess players. Anyone who has learnt to calculate deeper and look for nuances within a position will crush someone who only knows to go for time pressure.

This is true. But the comment above is true as well.

It depends on who you are and where you are at. I have certainly developed a habit for those one-turn attacks you describe. But going from short games back to slow chess and puzzles has been nice because I learned to manage how to think under that pressure.

I’m now learning how to play tennis (another cliché gentleman’s game, I know). What I’m discovering is that it is very similar - there is the simple repetitive and purely textbook aspect of hitting the ball at just the right angle to make it go where you want. And then there is the energy management under time and pressure. So you sort of have to straddle this tension between these two and you gradually descend into just barely holding it together.

My thought here is that ideal chess is very similar. There are the routine strategies, tactics and perfect moves. And then there is this raw impulsive fast paced aspect of just making the least awful move to just survive what is thrown at you with the bits of focus you still have left.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#67

Post by Balgair »

Meta Comment: A lot of the comments here that are about getting better at chess seem to boil down to: Do something other than bog-standard chess. Mess with time limits, do openings, play puzzles, etc.

So, can we get together a good list of websites/apps with links that are these 'not-chess' trainers?

I'll start:

https://lichess.org/training

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Mul...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.FrameOfMin...

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#68

Post by andy_ppp »

My top tip is to only ever play in silence, with nobody and no distractions around, sitting or standing upright. These three things have added 200 points to my rating.

I also find that noticing from intuition (a strange move by your opponent might be a trigger, or a tight position where you want to play strategically might be another) when to spend more time on a move sequence helps a lot.

Taking a mental note that you spent a bunch of time on one move and need to play more quickly is another improvement. But this is also an art that comes with experience.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#69

Post by jmmcd »

That is a great title. For many people, chess is not interesting, now that computers are so good at it. But for me, chess is even more interesting now that we have developed (narrow) AI programs that instantiate more and more parts of what humans do when playing. (I know, humans don't play like computers, but we do things like heuristic board evaluation and heuristic game tree pruning.) So in a game, the player is not only trying to find moves, but is trying to prioritise which trees to explore, based on heuristics and some sense of value of information, and on the relative state of the clock (do you want to go for complications? it depends how much time your opponent has left); is aiming for an overall "style" of game that suits them but not the opponent; and even managing risk (despite the game being deterministic), in the sense that different incomplete game trees might have different (heuristically-estimated) variances of outcomes.

Re: What is Chess? What to think and for how long

#70

Post by ajkjk »

akuro wrote: post #17
keiferski wrote: post #4

I’ve always found Deleuze and Guattari’s comments on chess vs. go to be interesting. Some of the terminology might not make sense if you’re unfamiliar with their work, but I think you can get the general gist: Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the state apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of game pieces, the relations between the p…

Reading this has made me realise that I am nowhere near as literate as I think I am.

The florid writing is an elitist fad; you can express the same idea in much simpler language without losing any meaning.
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