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Frustration with that was what led Bobby Fischer to propose Fischer Random Chess, which randomizes the starting positions of pieces (within some parameters) to make memorizing opening books infeasible. But it never really caught on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess

That's a very interesting solution to the problem. I wasn't aware of that, really neat. Thanks!

I vaguely recall reading about a computer chess tournament in the 70s where one program did not have an opening book and was optimized for making moves quickly. Its opponents would use their opening books to make lightening-fast moves early and then take much longer per move later in the game.

This program was beating much "better" programs because it would open in non-standard ways and while the other programs didn't play the non-standard openings particularly poorly, they weren't tuned to manage their time wisely and would use tons of time early in the game, then run into time trouble later.

I don't think that would work today any more, the amount of hardware that is thrown at this problem because of the publicity involved is immense, so a smaller contender would be outperformed even if they came up with a wild and unanticipated strategy.

I think it came as a surprise to everyone back then. Given limited storage, the opening dictionaries were probably restricted to the most likely opening sequences, especially when playing against other programs with opening dictionaries. Today you could probably just expand the dictionaries to include many of the unlikely opening sequences and couple that with a fine-tuning the investment in each move taking the clock into account.

So here is a question for HN. What is a good boardgame which has

(1) rich tactics (2) does not need "memorizing openings" type efforts to be good at or where such strategies don't work. (3) is easy to set up and play (4) has some online community

I don't pay chess these days for much the same reasons as jacquesm. Miniature wargames are fun but a bear to setup and tear down. Most popular boardgames aren't very rich tactically, mostly dependent on luck/die rolls etc.

I guess Go would be a good choice but I can't get anyone to play with here and/or teach me some interesting tactics :-|. I know the rules but don't quite "get" it yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960

Chinese chess is fantastic. It's strategically rich, but much harder to screw yourself in the opening than with regular chess. It's also different enough to be delightful to learn for people who already enjoy chess. Two examples that really charmed me:

1. There is a jumping piece which attacks by leaping OVER pieces and landing on whichever piece is on the far side. It's possible to defend against this piece by moving other pieces into and out of the path between it and it's target, effectively redirecting the attack.

2. Kings cannot face each other on the board, or leave a very small 3x3 section of their territory. This complicates endgame, but makes your king more powerful in locking off the options of your opponent.

Arimaa is a game that you can play with a chess set. Its designed to be easy to learn but hard for computers to play. There is an unclaimed cash prize for the first bot to win the annual open tournament. Google 'arimaa' to find the rules.

Sorry to hear you ran into that. It sounds like a terrible environment to try to learn chess in.

But you can get quite good without spending much time at all studying openings. I hate studying openings, and I'm definitely better than most of the people who cram openings. Learn how to play chess well -- what you wanted to do anyway -- and learn just enough of the opening to get to a playable middlegame position (playing less-aggressive openings makes this much easier, and allows you to figure it out based on general principles), and skill, not memorization, will make the difference.

(Just in case you, or anyone else reading, were thinking of taking it up again.)

P.S. I wouldn't want to play the Caro-Kann either. ;-)

I pretty much gave up on it, the only thing I still enjoy is teaching kids to play and one guy from Amsterdam I occasionally play, we're fairly evenly matched so it's almost always interesting.

I learned to play when I was about 6 years old, my neighbour was a very good player (I believe master class, but not sure, it is very long ago), he gave me Max Euwe's books and I dutifully worked through them, we would play for days on end, and I loved it, the guy must have had amazing patience (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370499 ).

In school I was pretty much unbeatable until I met Arno Bezemer, a kid living about 4 houses down the road, he taught me a definite lesson in humility, I didn't win a single game for the first year and half and even when I did win it was usually only because he was distracted or had a really bad day, he taught me a tremendous amount about chess.

He enticed me to join the club and I lost almost all interest very shortly after that, I think I only played in that club for about 6 months, and it killed any interest I might have had in competitive chess.

Eventually Arno became the strongest player in Amsterdam, he's in the top 100 players for the Netherlands, ranks 3637 for the world.

But he's dedicated his life to it, I don't think I could do that.

http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=1001396

edit: corrected the author of the books I learned to play with.

Update, check out this kid: http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=24116068

#97 in the world, only 16 years old. That progress up the rankings chart is amazing.

For you or anyone else that dislikes the memorization parts of Chess, you may find Arimaa (http://arimaa.com/) interesting. Personally I also like it better than chess because of the somewhat more simple/elegant rules while still leaving a game that seems to have a large strategic depth.

Of course it also has a great hacker aspect of being very difficult for computers, but I think that's really only a rather marginal side issue. The game really is a fun game to actually play.