Chess variants are fun too, like shogi. Pretty fun to play once you learn the pieces.
And... there's lishogi now. Which means you can play, do exercises, observe games, all in the browser and in English.
Chess is booming among teens
81–90 of 227 posts
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the main reason, besides chess being fundamentally a great and timeless game, is streaming. Popular streamers picked it up and many top level players also started streaming online chess, which can be very entertaining. Often they are playing fast, exciting time controls like 1 or 2 minutes. Chess.com and others brought flavorful tournament coverage and hosted events with guests from outside the chess world. C…
> Chess is born anew for the 21st century. Where are the doomers who said chess was over after being solved by AI?
They're over with the people who said weight lifting was over after cranes were invented, or that athletics competitions would be obsoleted by cars.
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#83Andrew 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.
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#84Prolly cuz most digital games have reduced in conplexity so much it's no more complex than a pachinko machine. Chess sure becomes an intellectually stimulating game again
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#85Re: Chess is booming among teens
#86This is wild. Chess feels old-school and boring to me. Don't understand how it's competing with modern sources of entertainment.
I kinda agree with Bobby on that front: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P349BdHUxlc&t=0s There's too much that's simply memorisation over skills, deep lines leading you down well traversed paths. Creativity and ingenuity suffer. The only real option* if you want interesting games is to make intentionally bad moves so that theory falls apart, and that's only an option against weaker players. You can play with the more…
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 the opponent or other friends from the club. No memorisation required.
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#87My father has always been a chess aficionado, but I got turned off by the fact that he was the only available opponent, and he had 37 years of headstart (it didn't occur to me to go to a chess club). When I was in University, I discovered Go, which felt somehow deeper than chess (I do enjoy the occasional game of chess, but compared to Go it feels like a knife fight vs a military campaign). After school I stopped pla…
Chess is just more interesting to watch.
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#88I've recently started playing chess again a bit (after doing it a bit when I was a teen), and there's an interesting aspect of online chess that I began to realize: When I was young you needed a local opponent to play chess, and that wasn't always easy. Why? Because most people around you were either significantly better (you always loose) or worse (you always win). It's not an interesting game if the outcome is almo…
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 play there. Which is not an issue unless you're literally a super GM.
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#89Chess 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…
1 is funny because a chess set and some books is way cheaper than a phone. The harder part is finding people to play.
True, but a phone capable of running a chess app is essentially mandatory in the West, whereas a board + books is an extra purchase.
Re: Chess is booming among teens
#90I've recently started playing chess again a bit (after doing it a bit when I was a teen), and there's an interesting aspect of online chess that I began to realize: When I was young you needed a local opponent to play chess, and that wasn't always easy. Why? Because most people around you were either significantly better (you always loose) or worse (you always win). It's not an interesting game if the outcome is almo…
Imagine when you discover Lichess!
I find it odd that all my friends & coworkers in the tech industry have ended up on chess.com instead of lichess. Even beyond the fact it's totally free (and free of ads), the architecture itself is super interesting: https://lichess.org/@/thibault/blog/starting-from-scratch/NI...
It must be one of the best examples of a very large scale implementation of features that are simple and easy to understand