Chess tactics explained | Hacker News Reader

Chess tactics explained

chesstactics.org

583 pointskensai264 comments

I wondered if the popularity of 'The queen's Gambit' would lead to a brief infatuation with chess in the popular imagination. The fact I've seen about 3 chess related submissions on HN recently, where I don't recall ever seeing one before, suggests it does.

I used to enjoy a game of chess back in the day, although I was never very good. And I always imagined myself playing chess with a remote opponent by post when I was a dusty old man [as featured in a few period dramas].

It's a shame that the advent of the internet has simultaneously increased your chances of finding someone to play with remotely but, at the same time, [for me anyway] pretty much removed all inclination to do so, as I'd never be sure my opponent wasn't just putting the moves into a computer and playing whatever it told him to play.

It absolutely re-kindled my interest in chess. I played as a child, but never took it seriously. Got a chess board for my 4-yo, but unfortunately she isn't a prodigy. Who'd have thought. Still has fun arranging the pieces and make up stories with them, though. And I'm playing on the Chess.com app. The puzzles especially are a neat way to get your brain running, and they're a better attention sink than Twitter / HN.

The vast majority of grandmasters didn't play chess at age 4.

That's incorrect. I did a lot of ending puzzles and knew a lot about openings and variations at age 5, learned mostly because a father of a friend was very enthusiastic about it.

I quit playing around age 7 because some kids there were really out of my league and there wasn't enough government or support for me to continue playing given that I wasn't the best. I still play to this day, but mostly amateurish and very sporadically.

Of course if you just want to do it for fun, it's fine. But if you can to become a GM and make a living playing chess, the bar is pretty high and it's very likely that you suck.

You can start to play a bit later and become a GM, but it's a big gamble with your future.

Most people I know who continued with chess nowadays are in the low 2K range, one made it to IM... all share extremely good memory and logical thinking and could just have been instead a lazy CS student and get top grades, eventually become a software engineer and enjoy a good life. But instead have a shitty life playing the same game all over again and have a hard time leaving it now to do something else, as it's the thing they dedicated their whole life to.

Chess is like Boxing. Pays nothing. The workload is insane, the natural talent is insane, your competition is global.

Only the very top 0.5% get name recognition (money). And like Boxing, these athletes could get paid more had they devoted their life literally ANY other pursuit with their work ethic and talent. With far less punishment involved.

Concept of Talent Stacking: https://personalexcellence.co/blog/talent-stack/

Work ethic ok but talent is domain-specific, isn't it?

Read on Magnus Carlsen[0] and Josh Waitzkin[1] - both have top spots in other fields, (and I'm sure others do too, these are from memory). Either talent is less specific than you'd think, or work ethic is more important than you'd think.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen#Personal_life

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Waitzkin#Martial_arts

I don't see this with Carlsen. Fantasy football? Well ... Waitzkin may be successful in martial arts but still that's the exception not the norm.

Also I would claim that talent is domain-specific insofar that very few people have a mental and a physical talent at the same time. For instance there are professional athletes who are very good in some other sport but I know of no one who is also very good at chess.

You may discard Fantasy Football, but it is not easy to be a top player - there are thousands of people who spend a few hours a day practicing, and have been for years. It’s been a while, but when Magnusen rose from “not playing”’to the top spot it was impressive and unusual.

Emanuel Lasker was iirc a very noted mathematician. As I mentioned, this is from memory. I’ve known a person who had both made the national swim team as a 19-year old, and was a national bridge champion in his thirties (not in the US).

I don’t know to separate talent from work ethics, but my layman’s impression is that that these aren’t simple, and definitely not independent, measures across fields.

The Polgar sisters are the counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

In what way are they? I can only see that they are good at chess.

The point is that they didn't come from some "Chess Prodigy" family. There wasn't some "talent" laying there that they picked up. And, even among the sisters, Judit wasn't the one with the most "talent".

Judit's level and achievements were due to training and persistence.

Still they might have a talent for chess and not for ballet for instance. It might be otherwise but that was my claim and the Polgars don't refute it.

Also the Wikipedia page says she was a "chess prodigy". From my personal experience I strongly doubt that you can make every five year old child a chess player who wins blind matches against grown-ups only through hard work.

"Prodigy" simply means you hit your 10,000 hours as a child.

And the "youngest grandmaster" title simply keeps moving downward, so apparently you can convert random 5 year olds into chess experts.

I really don't understand why people still cling to the notion of "talent" in intellectual pursuits. It's pretty clear that "number of hours" is what places you in the top echelons.

When you assume 8 hours a day straight work 10.000 hours means 3.42 years including weekends. I'll claim that's impossible (not to say inhumane) to do with a child.

That's probably a little aggressive, 4 hours a day is more typical.

Go take a look at the history of Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, or Hikaru Nakamura.

Unlikely at the top levels. The top chess masters are taking home a better income than the average college graduate. Sure CEOs take home more, but typically not until later in life. If you can get great chess is a good career.

Of course few get great. Even if you don't get to great, many people make a satisfactory amount of money from chess (mostly teaching), so there are options.

Also, you can switch at any time when you realize how hard the competition is. Your study habits to get good will do you well in other positions so there is no loss failing so long as you get out soon enough. There is a reason many pretty good players quit after high school: they had fun now it is time to settle down. Some play once in a while, but it is no loss. Unlike boxing where a few knockouts and you may be mentally unfit to do anything with your life.

Magnus Carlsen, the world champion, learned the rules of the game at 5 years old. Hikaru Nakamura started playing chess at age 7.

> But instead have a shitty life playing the same game all over again and have a hard time leaving it now to do something else, as it's the thing they dedicated their whole life to.

That's called an addiction, or more generously an obsession.

Something we work very hard on at chess.com is the rating of the individual tactics puzzles.

Some of you might enjoy looking at the distribution of our puzzle ratings. Truly hard problems are precious, and we would always like to have more at the high end. The distribution is multimodal because puzzles of different lengths have different modes.

  +----------------+---------+
  | ratings_band   | count   |
  |----------------+---------|
  |   100-199      | 5320    |
  |   200-299      | 2542    |
  |   300-399      | 31542   |
  |   400-499      | 10282   |
  |   500-599      | 4539    |
  |   600-699      | 7644    |
  |   700-799      | 6017    |
  |   800-899      | 5288    |
  |   900-999      | 5109    |
  | 1000-1099      | 5187    |
  | 1100-1199      | 4905    |
  | 1200-1299      | 4369    |
  | 1300-1399      | 8164    |
  | 1400-1499      | 8969    |
  | 1500-1599      | 8430    |
  | 1600-1699      | 8007    |
  | 1700-1799      | 7795    |
  | 1800-1899      | 8143    |
  | 1900-1999      | 9116    |
  | 2000-2099      | 10551   |
  | 2100-2199      | 10261   |
  | 2200-2299      | 7057    |
  | 2300-2399      | 2446    |
  | 2400-2499      | 1225    |
  | 2500-2599      | 1067    |
  | 2600-2699      | 1055    |
  | 2700-2799      | 964     |
  | 2800-2899      | 888     |
  | 2900-2999      | 881     |
  | 3000-3099      | 917     |
  | 3100-3199      | 434     |
  | 3200-3299      | 282     |
  | 3300-3399      | 144     |
  | 3400-3499      | 206     |
  | 3500-3599      | 131     |
  | 3600-3699      | 104     |
  | 3700-3799      | 86      |
  | 3800-3899      | 114     |
  | 3900-3999      | 42      |
  | 4000+          | 5       |
  +----------------+---------+

Ah, thanks. That explains how you manage to have so many available. I like the progressive / adaptive mechanism as well, it keeps the challenge at the right level. Thanks for a great product.

There were some issues (crashes) with the videos on iPad, but I assume you’ve seen that in your logs already.

The iOS team doesn't see any recent crashes that associate to viewing videos.

If you want to follow up, feel free to email me your chess.com username and the approximate date when you had trouble; the team could look up crashes which happened to that username.

Both my personal and chess.com email addresses are in my profile.

This is interesting and it makes me really want to see the 5 4000+ puzzles...

I am not sure that the 5 specific puzzles maxed out at the 4000 also represent the very best, most fun, and most insightful. Sometimes the reason a puzzle comes up as an extreme outlier is somewhat obtuse, and we are more inclined to remove the puzzle after we see how users interact with it.

For example https://www.chess.com/puzzles/problem/568140 is mostly rated 4000 because ...Qe1+ is so compelling that it pulls in even excellent players, while there's an easy material pickup on the board.

But there are exceptional puzzles throughout the 3000s, like 3500-rated https://www.chess.com/puzzles/problem/769056 , which absolutely anyone can follow, but few can solve on the first try.

why is Qe1+ compelling? It pushes the king to greater safety and activates the rook. If the correct move is e3, then I think that the problem with a 4000 rated puzzle is that the prior is so strong that players feel like they can ignore the obvious moves. You should try just resetting the rating of that puzzle and see it ends up in a different spot.

We sometimes do that. I'm resetting that puzzle down to 1480.

Really love your chess puzzles, I play Puzzle Rush most days! If you can share, how many puzzles do you add each month? Are they mostly hand-generated or do you have some nifty way of deriving puzzles from real games automagically? Would also be really cool if a puzzle rush spread out puzzle types more it feels like there is heavy clustering of a specific problem type at key rating ranges: early puzzles (1-6) are very commonly back-rank checkmates; 9-12 are discovered check, etc - it would be nicer if the problem meta-tags were not re-used a lot within a single run.

Last month we added 2800, the vast majority automatically derived, though we also prize expert review.

We are thinking of doubling that rate next month.

I'm not sure much can be done about the predominance of certain puzzle types in the very early Rush puzzles. Would you prefer more hung pieces?

But in the later levels, mixing it up by themes/tags is an interesting idea, about which I will make some measurements.

Yeah overall some theme diversity. Would also be interested to know the median Elo rating by tag - since that'd serve a good sort of table-of-contents of order for people to learn chess tactics.

What is also pretty interesting would be a (fuzzed) per-tag Elo rating on the user - so they can see which themes you are good/bad at relatively (for example, if you constantly get problems on Trapped Pieces wrong your rating on those problems would be lower than your average Puzzle Rating).

Yes, the rating differs by theme quite a bit.

  +-------------------+------------+
  | theme/tag         | mdn_rating |
  |-------------------+------------|
  | Opposition        | 1725       |
  | Passed Pawns      | 1494       |
  | Rooks on Seventh  | 1408       |
  | Pawn Endgame      | 1353       |
  | ...               | ...        |
  | Smothered Mate    | 549        |
  | Stalemate         | 533        |
  | Mate in 2         | 436        |
  | Mate in 1         | 399        |
  +-------------------+------------+

I also like the idea of showing the user's +/- for each theme. Though the data for some themes is better than data for others.

Why such a large number? Do players really go through thousands of puzzles a month, and remember them all?

If you produced fewer, would that increase the proportion with expert review?

Casper Schoppen broke all the previous records in puzzle rush (a mode where you get to solve as much puzzles as possible in 5 minutes) by memorizing most of high rated puzzles. After that chess.com decided to add a lot of new ones.

https://www.chess.com/article/view/puzzle-rush-confirmed-rec... https://www.chess.com/news/view/new-puzzle-rush-chess

Although I don't think there were lots of players who tried to use this tactic among all the ones who occasionally train on chess.com.

This is really interesting! Thanks for sharing. What are the average number of moves per puzzle in the top groups? Do they all end up being 5+ moves or can there be 2800+ puzzles with only 2 or three moves?

There certainly can be short difficult puzzles, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I think the current 4000-rated puzzles look like outliers and may be removed.

  +----------------+---------+-------------------+
  | ratings_band   | count   | avg_move_count    |
  |----------------+---------+-------------------|
  | ...            |         |                   |
  | 3000-3099      | 917     | 3.9400            |
  | 3100-3199      | 434     | 4.1244            |
  | 3200-3299      | 282     | 4.2766            |
  | 3300-3399      | 144     | 4.7500            |
  | 3400-3499      | 206     | 4.9515            |
  | 3500-3599      | 131     | 4.9237            |
  | 3600-3699      | 104     | 5.0481            |
  | 3700-3799      | 86      | 5.3256            |
  | 3800-3899      | 114     | 6.4035            |
  | 3900-3999      | 43      | 5.9302            |
  | 4000+          | 5       | 1.6000            |
  +----------------+---------+-------------------+

Thank you for sharing the information.

By the way... I really enjoy chess.com. The recent addition of getting to retry your game mistakes is really cool. I'd love to see those kept overtime and be able to retry them all in a random order later.

Definitely on the roadmap.

Chess has always been an occasional topic on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

You should not be afraid of cheaters online. In the lower rating levels the chances to meet one are pretty slim. You can probably have hundreds or thousands of wonderful games before you meet one and probably you would not even recognize it.

What you meet more often are people that let their time run out to annoy you. Just realize it's only about internet points, resign and have a new good game.

Have fun playing (maybe).

chess.com's messaging is the opposite of "chances are slim". but they emphasise that they take the issue seriously, albeit with a low false-positive rate. https://www.chess.com/article/view/online-chess-cheating

From the comments, it seems there's also the risk that you'll think cheating occurred, when instead you just missed stuff.

Interesting article. They do however say nothing about the rating of said cheaters (or I missed it).

What I stated before was that it is unlikely in the lower rating levels and I stand by that. If someone cheats he will gain rating fast and leave the lower rating groups.

And yes people also tend to accuse other of cheating if they lose. :) As long as you are not a competitive player the best you can do is to just play and try to improve your own play and have fun.

In other words, you would have to be rather bad at cheating to maintain a low rating.

Chess competition is driven by various rating systems which match people fairly well. Computers are very much better than beginner to intermediate players.

The computers are much better than even the best humans though by several hundred rating points (as in, the world #1 would still lose 90+% of their games). The engines being so strong makes the anticheat detectors job easier to statistically find inhuman play before the account reaches a high rating.

I believe what happens is most people are 800-1200, many of them decide to cheat at some point rise quickly a few hundred points and them are banned. To be higher rated than maybe 1600 or so you've played more games which also gives more statistical evidence for the cheat detector so less likely you're consistently cheating without getting caught.

That said, there's probably some amount of higher rated cheating that is just smarter than playing every engine move and harder to detect (though chess.com says they have banned a bunch of GMs for cheating)

Ah, I meant that while they could have said "we're confident only x% of games have cheating, it's not as bad as you'd worry it is", they 'own' it and say "we know it's a problem, we all know a cheater, we try hard to stomp it out".

Add that chess had already seen a remarkable resurgence this year, before the Queen's Gambit.

https://thenextweb.com/gaming/2020/09/13/the-classic-game-of...

https://www.insider.com/online-chess-has-surged-during-quara...

I absolutely loved the Queen's Gambit, but the root comment has it a bit backwards. It really seems like the Queen's Gambit came at a remarkably opportune time, just as chess was re-emerging into the popular mindspace.

>as I'd never be sure my opponent wasn't just putting the moves into a computer and playing whatever it told him to play.

Their ELO would likely be higher than yours if they did, so you wouldn't be matched with them.

> I wondered if the popularity of 'The queen's Gambit' would lead to a brief infatuation with chess in the popular imagination.

There are some indicators that yes, that show has increased interest in learning chess.

For example, check the Google search trend for "learn chess" over the last 12 months, or even 5 years to ensure it is no periodic increase of interest:

https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?q=learn%20chess

Wow ! That's amazing !

COVID lockdowns had already started the chess surge, for example look at the numbers for chess streams on Twitch: https://twitchtracker.com/games/743

I started playing in June after reading this: https://www.wired.com/story/hikaru-nakamura-twitch-chess/

There was some sorts of renaissance of chess in twitch community. All the big streamers were playing chess for some reason. Not sure what happened there, might be related somehow to Hikaru Nakamura starting to stream and growing pretty big. But that was before "Queen's Gambit".

It was tied to the beginning of Covid lockdowns as well. Chess has had a very strong year in terms of numbers coming to the game. Queen's Gambit seems to have exploded that again.

Here's what happened. Excerpt from the wikipedia page [0]:

> PogChamps is an online amateur chess tournament hosted by Chess.com. Players in the tournament are internet personalities, primarily Twitch streamers. PogChamps takes place over the course of two weeks and has a prize pool of $50,000.

Basically, very strong chess players trained twitch personalities for a few days, and then had them play against each other.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PogChamps

I'm perhaps in the same boat. Played a lot as a child but very rarely nowadays. I am a member of chess.com but haven't played in a while.

I think the better players tend to play a quicker timed game to better avoid bot activity. Personally I prefer a more slower game, particularly because I'm out of practice.

'The queen's Gambit' has definitely lead to a rise in chess popularity [0] and I as well assumed this submission was a side effect of that.

In mid-November, more than 100,000 new members registered for Chess.com each day. This is roughly five times higher than average.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/the-queens-gambit-netflix-on...

You might end up playing a cheater at some point (though it's uncommon). But you're much more probable to end up playing someone better and you'll think they're a cheater..

Look at this livestream where Magnus Carlsen, the world champion, is logged in under another account and crushes Jan Gustafsson (another grandmaster) and he can't believe it's a human playing him :) (or at least suggests he is skeptical)

https://youtu.be/Ka5sh6hBvSI?t=219

> I wondered if the popularity of 'The queen's Gambit' would lead to a brief infatuation with chess in the popular imagination

It did for me. Hadn't played chess for decades. After watching this show, my gf wanted to learn and it renewed my interest in the game. Not sure I want to go down this rabbit hole though...

> It's a shame that the advent of the internet has simultaneously increased your chances of finding someone to play with remotely

It works very well. I played a few games on lichess (recommended in the comments of another HN thread). I could find opponents who played at my level in a matter of a seconds.

There are also tons of youtubers who do a good job explaining strategies and such. It seems Chess never goes out of fashion, still a cool game!

It's amazing the amount of resource you can find nowadays. Back in the day, it was extremely limited. I remember I had a couple of books from my grandfather, plus a few friends I was playing with, and "chess master" on Amiga and that was it.

There are also youtubers who do a good job of convincing people they are good teachers, but real chess experts look at their explanations and think "sure if I make the right stupid moves that complex tactic gets you some material, but why would I make those moves when you created a forced mate in 2 with a different move"

I'm definitely down that rabbit hole now. Online chess has cut into the time I used to spend reading and playing music, but I'm an amateur at all those things. Plus, I've started playing more with my kids in the evening. I'm sure I'll get back over to music and the "long novels I need to read" project eventually, and no real harm.

Brief infatuations can have a lasting tail, and I hope that's what happens here, for chess, which really is a phenomenal game. Kind of like archery and "the hunger games", the initial bump isn't sustainable, but there may very well be a lasting increase in interest.

I don't think the chance of cheating is a serious issue if you're playing at a low level online. You're generally matched against playes with a similar rating, and someone using a computer heavily would drastically inflate their rating. Which also increases the chance at detection significantly.

Computers are scary good at chess, it's not exactly invisible if you use them to cheat. If you're a beginner it's also quite hard to understand why the computer makes certain moves, so if you just sprinkle in some computer moves in your game it's likely you might just fail to capitalize on those moves because you don't understand their purpose. The computer also plays some quite non-human moves at times, which is also likely to draw attention if someone is cheating a lot.

I'm not saying people don't cheat online in chess, but I don't think it's anywhere near prevalent enough to ruin the game.

I suppose if you are really cheating, you wouldn't sprinkle in some computer moves. You would just move your pieces in the computer game exactly as your human opponent does. Then you move your own pieces in the human game exactly as the computer does in the computer game.

Then you're playing at something like 3000-3500 ELO. That's very, very far from subtle. And that is something you can detect by analyzing the games, a human won't pick the engine moves all the time.

I've never looked into it myself but when I was graduating someone in my graduating classes final project was a cheating detection system for chess that essentially ran your moves through a variety of different chess AI's like stockfish such and over the game built up a tally of matching moves for each system, and if you matched one too closely flagged you as cheating.

I asked the guy how he would cheat against it and his suggestion was basically finding chess engines with variable "skill" levels and varying it over the game, essentially pulling out miraculous recoveries or having a good start but then forcing your AI to try to select a win state a few turns later than optimal but using the same heuristics, so it's still practically unbeatable but drags people along a bit longer to disguise itself.

Also I don't know if this exists, but is it possible to tune an AI to a specific ELO to begin with? If so you could set it to gradually ramp up over a long time so it looks like you're steadily improving over months or years and get to the top, but I imagine that wouldn't appeal to the people already willing to cheat anyway.

The blunders computers make and that human players make are/feel very different. I wouldn't expect to last long if I were cheating on, say, lichess.org by playing out the moves of a mix of engines at various ratings.

You could still use computer assistance which could suggest several different moves with explanations, and you could just pick one of those, maybe not necessarily the best move.

Basically computers can give good hints for you. Pretty sure this type of thing would be undetectable.

You can also just use the computer for the opening. If you don't have a certain opening, or response to a certain opening memorized, just use a computer. The difference between a memorized opening and what a computer would suggest is basically nil.

This is the only sort of cheating suggested in this thread that wouldn't be caught, but wouldn't actually be that helpful.

It's pretty helpful for the average human. Most people can't blast out 15 moves of theory correctly for every possible opening, so you'd avoid a lot of bad middle games or losses to traps.

It probably isn't as helpful to a grandmaster, but that's true of engine analysis in general

Unless you're very careful I think it should be detectable at those levels. If someone is taking the same amount of time when playing some rare and tricky opening line as they are when playing the QGD, that's pretty fishy if they don't have the level where you have a big variety memorized.

> It's pretty helpful for the average human. Most people can't blast out 15 moves of theory correctly for every possible opening, so you'd avoid a lot of bad middle games or losses to traps.

Yeah, although at that level lots of people are also getting into good positions, having no idea why it is good, and losing it.

I think the problem here is that chess engines are going to recommend 'non-human' moves at any point of the mid/endgame. And these 'non-human' moves could be the first/second/third best moves according to the engine. You'd have to have to have decent understanding of the game to realize what moves aren't going to blow your cover. I am confident over the long run anti-cheating software could pick this up in most cases. But also what are the incentives for someone to cheat at online chess over the long run? It wouldn't be that interesting for more than a couple days to get a quick thrill of beating a bunch of people in my opinion.

Explaining the moves is a very difficult problem, in a sense the "line" (series of moves) the computer recommends as best for both players is the explanation. Translating that information into, say, english, or some sort of useful graphical format, would be a pretty novel feature.

https://decodechess.com/ does that kind of thing.

An easy way to detect cheaters is to look at overall accuracy as some aggregate metric of deviation from 'optimal' (as per the engine(s) used). This could just be a average of squares of centipawns lost per move, or classifying moves like how chess.com does (brilliant/best/excellent/good/inaccuracy/mistake/blunder/missed-win) and then looking at average distributions from this.

Lichess’s cheat detection is open source (like everything else on the site) [0]. The training dataset isn’t public, though, and it’s practically undocumented. If you look in the `modules/game` directory, though, you’ll get an idea of what sort of data that goes into the model. Besides the engine analyses, it also looks at the time spent on each move (the `Emt` type is short for elapsed move time).

[0] https://github.com/clarkerubber/irwin

It's "Elo" (not an acronym). There is the Computer Chess Rating List (https://computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/rating_list_all.html) which has the current rating, on some predefined hardware.

The easiest way to do what you're discussing is just giving less evaluation time to the engine - slowly increasing it. If you wanted it to be even better you could calibrate multiple engines to make an even smoother (but changing underlying evaluation).

Generally how bots play is that you have a good engine, and every so often it'll pick a random move or a lower scored move to lower the difficulty. The frequency of the random move increases as the difficulty is lowered. The engine detector would likely find that since the number of non engine moves would still be quite high.

Something like Leela trained for less time could produce a lower Elo bot. I can't imagine it will look very human for its skill level though. Like, being a 1600 while consistently playing 600 level one move blunders because it hasn't figured out how bishops move yet.

This still doesn't get you past the other common detection system: click stream

As a human player you can combat that by keeping the position closed for as long as possible. If you’re playing on short time controls with no increment then your opponent will be wasting a lot of time transferring their moves back and forth to the computer. Then when their time gets really low they will panic and have to play the moves on their own, without computer assistance.

That's doesn't solve the problem of avoiding an unfun bad game.

I sometimes play online and for some reason I frequently stumble upon users who cheat in all kinds of ways. From using a computer (it's easy to tell when all moves regardless of difficulty take exactly the same time to make) to baiting me to play a 3-min game and then changing it to 30-min right before I accept the game. The only reasonable explanation is that they are trying to harvest ranking to "transfer" it to another account. Regardless of the motivation is does suck out the joy for me.

I have a completely opposite experience (on chess.com). Playing a lot of games lately at a low level, never stumbled upon a cheater.

I would imagine those that cheat at online chess wouldn't stay at a low level for very long.

I play only anonymous games not rated in lichess.org as. I like that it takes virtually one second to find an opponent match in my time control (5m+0).

My play level is around 1800-1900 FIDE (last Classic game played some 10 years ago though), and it is true that I win a lot more than I lose (so I guess that the crowd in Anonymous mode must be somewhere 1400-1900 FIDE), but I still enjoy the games. You can tell by the moves that opponents are more often than not club-level players, and I like not having any idea of what level my opponent has, so I focus on what happens on the board.

What I do not like is that, at least in anonymous mode, some players abandon the game without resigning, sometimes just a few moves still in the opening if they get a slightly worse position. Also for some reason some players play deliberately bad in the opening. Maybe they like the idea of a comeback, but I don't like it when it happens.

>and I like not having any idea of what level my opponent has, so I focus on what happens on the board.

You might like lichess's 'zen mode' in non-anonymous play, which hides everything except the board (inc. opponent name and rating) while you are playing.

Thanks, I will sign up and give it a try. This way opponents will probably be more often my level (which I guess it means I will lose a lot more).

I play on lichess and in the last 6 months I've had at least 5 different games annulled because the opponent was banned for cheating. It certainly happens.

It's very common in the 1400-1600 band but not much outside of that in my experience.

Accused of cheating online (scrabble, chess, trivia) so often, I just had to stop playing pickup games. Now I only play with friends.

Was this recently? Unless you're an absolutely exceptional chess player, both Chess.com and Lichess are filled with enough good players that I'd be surprised if you flew through the ranks quickly enough to be accused of cheating :)

You know... no, not recently. I can see from many of the comments here that chess seems to have found a way to mitigate, so maybe I’ll give it another go. Thanks to you and sjcsjc for the encouragement.

I experienced that with Scrabble (and as you, only play with friends now), but not with Chess. But then I'm not very good at Chess (rapid rating c 1300 on chess.com)

> as I'd never be sure my opponent wasn't just putting the moves into a computer and playing whatever it told him to play.

100% sure, probably not however all the major online chess sites operate anti-cheat systems and heuristics plus dedicated teams.

I play a lot online and nearly always look at the game with a computer afterwards and you can see that it was a human game (or someone been very clever with how they used the engine).

I mean if you where a GM playing in a ranked tournament with a prize fund I could see the concern but at our level computer cheats are much easier to spot.

google trends can help answer your question: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=chess,fort...

> as I'd never be sure my opponent wasn't just putting the moves into a computer and playing whatever it told him to play.

That's less of a problem than you might think. The reason being that most online chess systems will give you an Elo rating and use that to match you up to similarly rated potential opponents.

Anyone that was using a computer to play for them would quickly gain a high rating and so either be matched against really strong players who stand a chance of beating the computer or others doing the same thing.

Give online chess a go, it's great.

Never been good either but I was occasionally playing when I was younger and The Queen's Gambit did get me back into Chess.

On Chess.com the post game report gives you the move accuracy which is, I guess, some kind of standard deviation compared to what a chess engine would play. Never seen someone having a very high suspicious score, at least at my level.

I think the incentive to cheat online at chess wears off quite quickly, there's not a lot of glory. When someone cheats and wins a round of Counter Strike or other only game their win is immediately seen by many people. It's also relatively easy through analysis to spot a not so subtle cheater so auto-bans weed out the few cheaters left.

> I used to enjoy a game of chess back in the day, although I was never very good. And I always imagined myself playing chess with a remote opponent by post when I was a dusty old man [as featured in a few period dramas].

> It's a shame that the advent of the internet has simultaneously increased your chances of finding someone to play with remotely but, at the same time, [for me anyway] pretty much removed all inclination to do so, as I'd never be sure my opponent wasn't just putting the moves into a computer and playing whatever it told him to play.

I play on ICCF servers that are the past postal federation. Centaur games (Human + Computer help) are allowed with large time clock (50 days for the first 10 moves, and so on). I play for my fun and taking my time to dig into the problems of the position without hurry. You have to be registered at your national federation to play there but it is fun and very different of the general online chess experience which tends to be centred around blitz games.

[Spoiler Warning]

As a person who can barely play chess The Queen's Gambit was a good show not because of the chess, but because it was a show about a women where everything went well. There was foreshadowing and all, but all went well in the end.

It was very wholesome.

Sure, it was about chess, but it could have been any sport, really.

the character work is sublime.

As an actor myself, I was very impressed. They played chess like chess players. Each move had a meaning to them. They told a story just with the way they touched the pieces. The emotions were both powerful and tightly contained, which I find more exciting than the kind of big, showy acting that usually attracts the most attention.

It was an exercise in intention and specificity, things that get drilled into you in acting classes but rarely so clear.

I don't know if neglect, abuse and addiction is "going well". but she did overcome all the adversity to win in the end.

I really enjoyed it, but she had a pretty rough time of it.

I find this is the case with most sports (soccer, dancing, iceskating, etc) movies. They are mostly about character building and overcoming challenges -- the actual sport is barebones and could be mostly swapped for any other.

I still enjoyed Queen's Gambit a lot. It did foreshadow but then subvert some common tropes.

I thought that was the biggest weaknes. The challenges all feel small and made up. The depiction of substance abuse is just strange. It's like a teenagers dream of how it is to become a chess pro with some small speed bumps to not make it too blatant. As for the sport, her career was more similar to that of boxer than a chess player.

So? It made the sport look interesting.

Interesting - I thought it was about a damaged woman who had a period of sobriety and was able to win a championship.

I suppose it depends on what we imagine happens after the series ended. I don't see her going back to Kentucky and making red headed babies with the creepy journalist.

I wondered this as well. Once she was at the top of her game, what would the rest of her life look like?

She could have some rematches with Borgov and other Russian champions, presumably winning most of them and maybe losing a few. And after that? Teach? Go back to drugs? Wait until a new child prodigy can challenge her?

She wasn't happy playing that talented Soviet kid. He isn't going away and neither is the rest of the Soviet team. It's pointed out earlier that the Soviet Union pays its players, while she is going to have to scrape by on tournament winnings and Christian charity offers with strings attached.

There's no way she's recovered from her addictions, she bought sedatives while in the USSR and only just managed to keep herself from taking them.

She has a cold, off-putting personality which is probably going to loose it's luster once her novelty has warn off. Her mother probably suffered from mental illness and there seems to be a reasonable chance she inherited it. There's a discussion that happens midway though the series about all the Chess grandmasters who lost their minds, which feels prophetic.

This absolutely rekindled my interest. I used to play as a young girl (pre-teen) and enjoyed it but as I got older didn't feel welcome in the chess club. It's nice how they show on TV that girls who wanted it just got in there and be involved but the reality was not as easy.. (hopefully it's easier now, the 80s was not kind to girls with a nerdish bent).

I've started reading chess openings and tactics as a way to send me to sleep, on one of those chess sites that sets up a play for you. I don't think I'll ever play chess again - time is limited and I don't think anyone would suffer playing with me given what I've forgotten - but I'm enjoying learning strategies again. It's great stuff for the brain.

I've put the Chess Tactics site on my weekend-lazy-reading list. Who knows, maybe I find my way back to playing games again.

Try chess.com or lichess.org! You're automatically matched with someone of your skill level, and can play games from 1 to 10 minutes (each).

I highly recommend Chess Tempo for tactics training. A large database of problems drawn from grandmaster games, insightful user commentary per problem, and a full classification of each problem by the type of tactic e.g. attraction.

chesstempo is neat because they have ELO-like ratings for tactics puzzles. It's the first place I saw such a thing.

Alot of those puzzles are damn hard, ELO ratings there are legitimate.

I feel that chess Tempo has really given me tools to recognize recurring tactical motifs in actual play.

I can also vouch for lichess.org

It's free software (https://github.com/lichess-org), and you only need web browser to play [1]. Even Magnus Carlsen and many other top Grandmasters play there.

As for cheating, all games are checked for computer play, so even if you can occasionally lose a game or two from a cheater, he will be caught, and you will get back your rating points (if you care).

[1] Dunno what they are using for latency adjustments on lichess, but it seems to work fine. No external software necessary, unlike chess servers of yore: https://www.freechess.org/Help/HelpFiles/timeseal.html

There's a pretty good Stockfish app available for free

How realistic are the various apps at simulating, say, a 1200-ranked human player?

I'd love at app that really plays at my skill level, but my experience with older software was that the computer "dumbed itself down" simply by playing completely silly moves at times. (Of course, I played silly moves as well, so maybe it was accurate... But it didn't feel that way.)

Stockfish can play a pretty convincing ~1200-1400uscf game. (At least for that rating range 30 years ago.) It won't start making egregiously dumb moves until it's in the "If I were a person I'd resign, but I'm a computer so here take all of my material before you checkmate me" phase, though many of its opening choices are obviously third- or fourth-best.

You can avoid 99% of cheaters by not logging in on lichess but you're at the mercy of much less appropriate matchmaking. You can also play at faster or less unusual time controls.

I think the show is part of a zeitgeist that was already there.

Streaming & such is popular. Famous GMs like Magnus & Naka are charismatic and extremely online. There are some great sites to play on these days, especially lichess. Lockdown makes for more game time. Chess is on an upswing.

It's an old game, I bet there have been a lot of peaks and troughs.

chess.com is pretty good about catching people who cheat with computers, as well, there is an ELO system, so people cheating without getting caught would be rated much higher than you.

I think if you thought of reasons to play chess, instead of reasons not to, you could just enjoy yourself rather than complain about nothing!

Lichess.org is a good site for playing other humans, and they have bot detecting measures built in. Not to say it's impossible you're facing a computer but most of the time very unlikely

> I wondered if the popularity of 'The queen's Gambit' would lead to a brief infatuation with chess in the popular imagination

There is no question about that: https://www.insider.com/netflix-queens-gambit-spike-interest...

COVID + that show have only helped I’d say.

It’s a fun game at all skill levels. Learning fundamentals (don’t hang pieces, sone tactics, a few openings) is an investment but not a huge one and can get you pretty far very fast. So you see rapid progress in the first couple months of playing.

Of course it’s at around that point you need to decide if you want to continue to invest for exceedingly fewer gains or just sort of be happy being a mediocre player that will go 50-50. And by all means a mediocre player is very good (like someone who can golf at near scratch level) but there’s a lot of really good players globally.

About postal chess, Woody Allen wrote a quite enjoyable short story. The Gossage—Vardebedian Papers. http://maxxwolf.tripod.com/woody.html

Honestly, why even worry if your opponent is cheating? You can learn equally well regardless. Just worry about what you do; as long as you're not cheating it's not a waste of time.

> as I'd never be sure my opponent wasn't just putting the moves into a computer and playing whatever it told him to play.

As mentioned, cheaters are detected and banned.

But from another perspective, cheater or not doesn't matter. You know you are playing against someone you have a statistical chance to beat. Same thing in Starcraft where people use map hacks. Who cares? The ranking system matches you with people you have a chance to beat. The challenge lies before you, and unfair advantages or not, there is good reason to believe you can succeed if you play your best game. Play to improve, play to have fun. Sometimes you will lose, no matter how strong you become this fact remains. And if you ever reach a point you believe you can only lose due to cheating, seek mental help.

Cheating in chess typically means using engine. There is big enough difference in how engine plays and how human plays for it to make game less fun.

Pls, it is quite natural for humans to care about notion of fairness. How and why we loose matters.

Yeah, although this is speculation, I imagine its less of an issue because cheaters would get board somewhat easily.

I mean whats the fun in copying what a machine says to win chess games against strangers?

Its not like its people they know who might be impressed and if they cheat then their ranking will rise far above their skill, so if they wanted to play a real game, they would then be crushed.

> I mean whats the fun in copying what a machine says to win chess games against strangers?

I mean, what's the fun in beating everyone in Overwatch / PUBG / Fortnite / Quake / Doom / etc. etc. with an aimbot?

To win. Because cheaters find winning fun, even if they're not doing it on their own skill. I obviously disagree with the mindset, but cheaters disagree with me (and clearly continue to use aimbots / chessbots / whatever to rack up "their wins").

Generally speaking, their excuses are along the lines of "I don't have the reaction speed of others", or "I don't find games of reaction fun" (etc. etc.). Similarly, a chessbot user would almost certainly say "I don't like having obvious blunders in my games, and a chessbot prevents me from missing obvious blunders".

---------

I mean, Centaur Chess is a thing. Human + Computer, if you really wanted to fight fair. But these cheaters don't go towards Centaur Chess servers, they stay on human-only servers and just wanna have an advantage on the opponent. Soooooo... yeah. That's their decision.

There's chess tournaments of 24-hours a move, no holds barred. (IE: Chess AIs are allowed to assist you). If you really wanted "blunder free chess", people can play in those communities. Those who continue to use computer-assistance on human-only servers are simply cheaters in my book.

> Cheating in chess typically means using engine. There is big enough difference in how engine plays and how human plays for it to make game less fun.

I've pondered moving to something different-but-close to get again the beginner fun, like shogi.

Also, there's more variety of movement with the lances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi#Movement

I had a Romanian stats teacher that sneered at Americans' preoccupation with fairness. She would say, "Why do you use this word fair? Life is not fair. It is a useless idea."

It is not a useless idea. Fairness is something one can choose to strive for, notwithstanding that one will inevitably fall short of perfection. Much like proficiency in chess.

That seems merely like a way of perpetuating unfairness.

I don't know the story, but it sounds like the teacher was in a position of power and someone said she was being unfair. Retorting "life is unfair" when you, yourself, are the agent causing unfairness simply inflicts needless pain. For what -- to teach the lesson that life is unfair?

As a parent, I try to parent my kids fairly. I try not to show favoritism. I try to recall which kid had the last cookie most recently. Obviously the kids sometimes don't agree with me and claim I am being unfair, but by valuing fairness at the very least I am trying, and modeling for them a world where they value fairness in turn.

(Of course, note, people may value different things. Fairness is its own category in the moral foundations theory[1], and some people rank it as less important than, say, authority or purity.)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory

This was a graduate level class and the teacher did not believe in partial credit. Someone had missed a sign and thought their B was unfair.

I agree, kids should be treated fairly and taught to treat others fairly. However, I think it is just as important to teach children resilience in the face of unavoidable adversity. It’s important to feel feelings, but to not let them poison you. Learning to get over a breakup, or an injury come to mind. I’d like to stress unavoidable adversity, in contrast to crimes like discrimination, battery, fraud, etc.

So, my harping on “life isn’t fair” is an indirect and misleading way of saying, “it’s important to be resilient”. I apologize for posting my comment without more context.

That sounds like much different situation. It was not about cheating and getting unfair advantage at all.

It was about stopping infinite debate about "what is fair" and "what are ideals rules" just so that one kid can get better grade. E.g. the claim that it is unfair was already motivated reasoning and your teacher perceived/treated it that way.

I am from former soviet blog and really, what teacher said is normal way to shut up bullshit complains. And yes, there is way more cheating in schools too amd bad teacher can get away with more.

But, the notion of fairness is important to both students and teachers.

And yet, Romania still distinguishes between little league, high school, and professional athletics; men's and women's athletics; etc. I'd guess they have some sort of anti-trust laws. Theft is still a crime, right?

I'm pretty sure everybody values fairness at some level.

  >I had a Romanian stats teacher that sneered at Americans' preoccupation with fairness. She would say, "Why do you use this word fair? Life is not fair. It is a useless idea."

I can see the point of that, to a certain extent.

We [well most of us] are brought up to play fair and with a deeply inculcated sense that it's shameful to cheat and that "cheaters never win". Then [in my case anyway], when we get a bit older and more worldly wise we realise that there are people everywhere, richer and more successful than us. Not because they're better or cleverer but because they went to the right school, or they knew the right people, or they had the right parents, or they could use money and/or influence to get out of trouble. That, in essence, they didn't have to play by the same rules as the rest of us. And, isn't that by definition "cheating"? In this case, cheating at life. I sometimes think maybe I'd have achieved a lot more, without the burden of having such a heightened sense of morality and fair play as I do.

I'd never contemplate cheating when playing a game for enjoyment though. Because that enjoyment comes from the self-satisfaction of getting a wee bit better each time. I think in most sports/hobbies/games the old cliché is true. In the end, you're competing against yourself. So there's no point in cheating.

Thing is, what you call unfair or cheating is only true when 1: the rulebook says so, 2: one is caught doing it, 3: when the evidence is indisputable & the interpretation of the rule is agreed upon.

Many big strides forward in sports are accomplished by re-interpreting understanding of said rules and coming up with possibilities that others have not yet thought about.

Take the Ten Commandments as example. Easy enough, at first glance. But the interpretation has been going on for about 6000 years with no end in sight.

Isn't it argued that the English legal system (a form of enforce fairness) was responsible for the extent of it's Empire and was carried over in American success?

> Pls, it is quite natural for humans to care about notion of fairness.

Yes, but should we give up things we enjoy because the possibility for unfairness in that thing exists?

We may never know whether someone is using a chess engine assistant, but by observing what we can, their moves and game records, we can objectively argue that the match is fair. Statistically speaking, you have about a 50% chance to win. Is that unfair?

Are cheaters really detected and banned? My guess is that there's a lot of lower grade cheating. Here are a few ways that would be difficult to detect:

Run a position analyzer only to alert you to the existence of a strong move that you haven't noticed. Don't use it to find the move, just to alert you to when your position is strong. For instance, you might see that your position score is +10, but not realize why - this would indicate it's a good time to put in more thought. You might be missing a subtle blunder.

Use lookup moves only for unusual positions to avoid traps in early games. Many eccentric openings are losing propositions against a skillful player who can sidestep the landmines, but are unfamiliar enough that an opponent either 1) falls into the trap, or 2) burns a lot of time avoiding the trap. A cheater could rely on a computer only so far as to avoid the traps, then play normally. Would that be detected?

Another cheater move would be to use a computer analyses only when things get sticky. Just for the occasional move. This is a cheating tactic in tennis, too. An unksilled cheater "hooks" constantly when it doesn't matter. A skilled cheater does it only on a critical point. You can call out a line judge, but with the advantage secured, the cheater can appear scrupulous for the remainder of the match (making the person who called the official out appear to be a high maintenance player). That said, over time in high level tournaments, officials often do see the pattern and a reputation eventually develops.

Another "advantage" of these cheating methods is that cheaters are usually not totally "drooling at the mouth evil laugh sinister people", I think people could use the methods above and lie to themselves that the weren't "really" cheating. Cheating, like most sin and trespass, often results from temptation and self-deception rather than a determinedly insidious mind.

I'm only a little bewildered that people cheat and do these things (or worse). I personally hate the idea that my actual real rating in an in-person game would tank compared to my online record, and I love the human aspect of the game. But it does seem relatively easy to sidestep an algorithm that simply checks for inaccuracies. My guess (hope) is that these algorithms are probably more sophisticated than that. Fraud detection is fascinating to me, but unfortunately this is one of those situations where the algorithm probably does have to be somewhat obscure.

EDIT: it just occurred to me that I have done all these things when I play against a computer - though chess.com builds this capacity into computer games (not human games, of course).

I think most people who actually want to cheat regularly on online chess also lack the skills to set up a highly effective and stealthy way to do so.

There are a lot of obvious cheaters that you can catch by looking at move times.

This is correct. I've played many thousands of games online and have run into obvious cheaters fewer than 5 times, and in those cases it is obviously obvious.

If somebody is cheating so stealthily, why do I care? Their rating will reflect whatever cheating they stealthily do. Remember: If the cheater won every single game, they would be caught immediately, so if their rating is around mine, then whatever cheating they are doing roughly makes them a player of my skill level. It really makes no difference to me if the person I'm playing is actually weaker and cheating to simulate my skill level or actually my skill level.

And from their perspective, what is the point? If you are a 1500 player and can cheat to be an 1800 player, what are you gaining from that? Wouldn't you rather play other people that are your skill level? And if you are a beginner (<1000) that is trying to pretend to be a higher rated player, you just won't have enough understanding of chess to pull it off stealthily.

The cheating thing is just not a major issue for casual online chess.

> in those cases it is obviously obvious.

Would it be possible for you to describe what it feels like to encounter an obvious cheater in chess? Is it simply who quickly they move, the strength of their moves, both, and/or something else?

A few signs:

- taking a while to make an obvious move, especially in the endgame, where there might actually be only one move that makes any sense to make

- taking a very consistent amount of time between moves

- shuffling pieces around in a way that doesn't really accomplish anything but also doesn't cause anything bad

- playing normally, then a big pause and they go offline for a bit, then come back and start playing much better (connecting the client to an engine)

The way to detect an obvious cheater is when somebody rated like 300-400+ rating points below you, a matchup which generally only occurs in tournaments or the like (normally you wouldn't be paired down to such a large extent), plays incredibly well and beats you. And then you do computer analysis and you see they played near flawlessly. You look at the move timing and make really complicated and deep moves instantly. Then you look at their game history and see they played their last few games nearly perfectly. Then you report them and your rating points are refunded a few minutes later.

Lower rated non-chess players, the kind that are most likely to cheat, can't just pretend to be higher rated people because they don't know what moves are suspicious and which ones aren't. And if you think they'll just cheat for the first few moves and then turn the computer off... it really just doesn't work as well. If they actually have no idea what they are doing they'll still lose, and it's super suspicious anyways based on move timing and computer analysis.

And to my original point, if I were an 1800 player and wanted to sneakily cheat to be a 2000 player, I probably could pull it off, because that is close enough to my skill level that I could pretend. Maybe by using an opening book to make sure I'm getting great positions out of the opening. Maybe by only turning the computer on during certain key positions. But again, if I did this consistently, I'd get a 2000 rating and now I'm going to be matched up against 2000 rated players, and from their perspective I'm just a 2000 player. And what have I gained? I now have to cheat to even be competitive in a casual chess game, whereas if I just had my true rating I could just play normally which would be easier and more fun. This is why sneaky cheating just isn't very common, because the only people capable of doing it really have no incentive to do it. The only people who think cheating would be fun are the people who are easiest to detect.

A lot of cheaters are detected and banned, but like you say there's probably a lot of 'minor cheaters' not caught.

The issue really is the group who are detected and banned - they just sign up with a new account, and then carry on crushing players until they're banned again. The average game quality in this situation is pretty poor - because the rating of a player is very far from their true skill.

Lichess (a popular chess site) combats this issue by not actually banning cheaters. Instead, the cheater is not notified that they were caught and is still able play or create games, but they're only matched to other cheaters.

A bunch of video games do this ('shadow banning / shadow pooling') - with varying degrees of success. A lot of the cheaters still just create new accounts every so often.

Technically they get a warning label that they use computer assistance (dunno if they themselves can see this or not). Players can still play them if they choose. They just open new accounts though.

They also ‘refund’ the rating hit you took from losing to the cheater. I think it works pretty well.

Most of your proposals can be detected by statistics:

- [...] just to alert you to when your position is strong. Oh, so you are a player that never misses a win? Hmm...

- [...] avoid traps in early games. Now you are a very strange player that never blunders during openings but blunders normally later on. Suspicious.

- [...] just for the occasional move. How do you know what move is that? Are you implying you never make _big_ blunders (but make plenty of non-huge ones)? Also suspicious.

In general, there are many signals you can collect. If other users are complaining about a player then you analyze them, and if your signals say "suspicious" then... you caught a cheater. If nobody complains about a particular user you don't do anything because it just doesn't matter.

It seems like most of these would just detect when a player was unusually strong, which of course unusual things are suspicious but they can also be the case that some people are unusually strong.

The point is that in chess there's some variance between the opening/tactics/strategy/positional strength of players at the same level, but not _that_ much difference.

To cheat convincingly you have to boost all those facets at the same time, because otherwise you'll just give yourself out. For instance, nobody is extremely sharp at tactics but severely lacking (human-understandable) strategy.

Engines will help you in opening and tactics, but not too much in the positional/strategy game (they make good moves, but oftentimes it is just impossible for humans to understand them without very deep study, meaning they would never be casually played in an online game).

Another example, regarding cheating but only on the openings: even GM's make mistakes during openings. If you play openings at that strength level but then you often lose won endgames it is clear to anybody who knows the game that you are cheating (because opening theory is much wider than the standard endgame theory).

Finally, since you are not at the level you pretend to be whilst cheating, it gets very very complicated for you to know what you can or cannot get away with.

Not bad! Yeah, wouldn't be surprised if those are part of the detection algorithm.

I would take longer to detect a cheater who is a bit more sly and only cheats on 5% of moves or less (the odds that someone would match a particular engine 99% of the time its pretty much zero), but over time, yeah, this would work.

I suppose another way to put its is that it's difficult to detect this sort of cheating from a single game, but not difficult to detect it in 100 games.

> Another cheater move would be to use a computer analyses only when things get sticky. Just for the occasional move. This is a cheating tactic in tennis, too. An unksilled cheater "hooks" constantly when it doesn't matter. A skilled cheater does it only on a critical point. You can call out a line judge, but with the advantage secured, the cheater can appear scrupulous for the remainder of the match

OT, but as someone who knows basically nothing about tennis, how does cheating work? Are there illegal ways to hit the ball or something?

Not OP, but they're referring to situations when players call their own lines. (Virtually all amateur matches.) If you are horrible (or blatantly biased) at calling lines, your opponent can call the tournament referee, and you may end up with a line judge. But that takes time, and only happens after you aggravate your opponent. If you wait until a key moment to make a bad call in your favor, your opponent won't be able to reverse it, even if they call the referee and get a third party to call the lines for the rest of the match.

This is a particularly big issue in competitive junior tennis, unfortunately.

Yes, that's what I meant. Agassi accuses Tarango of doing this as a junior in "Open".

Two other points about cheating relevant to non-expert players:

- Until expert level you most likely won't to be able to notice in real-time that you're playing a cheater. You'll be blundering and getting out-positioned regularly against legitimate players, so it's hard to notice that for one game a cheater played a perfect game against you, because most likely you made clear mistakes in that game. This is different for experts because they mostly stop making minor mistakes, so they have cause for suspicion when they know they played a strong and consistent game but still got destroyed. You also won't be strong enough to really recognize that some moves are "inhuman", especially because you'll be playing against folks who make weird/wrong moves all the time, whereas experts can sometimes tell if moves are computer-like (typically because there is a natural and obvious move to make and the cheating move is marginally stronger but hard to find).

- Cheaters don't stay in low ratings for long. If they aren't detected, they'll be out of your rating in no time, like in 2 or 3 wins. This reduces the chance you'll encounter cheaters, because if a cheater plays 100 games but only 2 of them are in your rating bracket, you're unlikely to ever match against them anyways.

Keeping those things in mind, and knowing that reaching expert level (~2000+ elo) takes many years and is unachievable for most adults, online cheating becomes a minor concern at best for anyone who's picking it up as a hobby in adulthood.

This is 100% true and cheating concerns evaporate (or are confirmed) when one analyzes a game with an engine. Its enlightening to take that game where you're "sure" the other person had computer assistance into an engine and see all the blunders you both had made.

> - Cheaters don't stay in low ratings for long. If they aren't detected, they'll be out of your rating in no time, like in 2 or 3 wins. This reduces the chance you'll encounter cheaters, because if a cheater plays 100 games but only 2 of them are in your rating bracket, you're unlikely to ever match against them anyways.

If only this applied to Counter-Strike or other FPS. While those that are trying to hack discretely rise to Global fast, there are a lot of cheaters that aim to stay in high Silver or low Nova. Add this to the fact that many cheaters suck at cheating, they can absolutely get stuck in lower ranks because they tactically cannot outplay better opponents without blatantly cheating.

This is a bit different from cheating in Chess and Starcraft where mechanical skill and the design of the game makes cheats less impactful. Like, cheating in Dota is really just wider POV, complete map awareness and spell casting macros. But those are just a few aspects of the game. In FPS games, the mechanical skill weighs so heavy that you will have a bad time at any rank against any cheater.

The question of what could be done about FPS cheating has been on my mind a bit lately. Yesterday while on a walk I had this thought that it's really because the shooting mechanic is in an awkward metaphorical compromise between the genuine mechanics of aiming and firing, and a symbolic representation of such.

If you actually had to play these games by holding a gun level with controlled muscle motions, it would be hard to cheat because even if you could insert a computer in there to automatically control your muscles, it's a fairly complex AI problem to make them move correctly.

In comparison a purely symbolic form would be like how most role-playing systems do it: you declare that you shoot at a target, and then perhaps there is some dice rolling done to determine if you do.

All an aimbot does is distill the vocabulary of mouse aim into the more symbolic form and automatically trigger certain symbolic responses. Someone who has played online FPS long enough develops a sense of when they are playing with these "symbolic adversaries" because even if they've dialed down the bot so they are merely "skilled", they start playing aggressively, with the assumption of fluent shooting to back them, while real players will hedge and look for a wider set of advantages, making more use of the game's vocabulary even if they can shoot through clutch scenarios. Cheater-vs-cheater matchups tend to suck the air out of the room as both sides flail about, eliminating the non-cheaters while never getting clear advantage over each other.

But then you look at a game like Rocket League, and it gets away with having more a discrete mechanism for moving and hitting, because not only is it all indirect through physics interactions, it's not clear what the right move is symbolically either. You can't win just by chasing the ball or by hitting the other players.

And there's a path for making shooting in FPS complex in that way, too - make all the targets large, trivial to aim at - and then ramp up factors that make it both indirect - slow projectiles, bounce - and symbolically complex, with various target prioritization and vulnerability mechanisms that deny simply spamming the headshot verb.

Chess has been popular on HN for more than a year. It was popular before covid lockdowns. Covid lockdowns have done a ton for chess popularity. Then queen's gambit is very approachable without chess knowledge. It's a perfect storm.

There is at least a correlation.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

I think like just like mathematics, cryptography, computer science and movies like The Imitation Game for example, those who are initiated and curious would gravitate towards the subject as they probably would have eventually, and those who are not, will just be happy to watch the movies, shows or other pop culture about it.

I do not believe it would draw more people than usual because with any endeavour, eventually the wonderment disappears for some people when they realize they gotta put in some work to continue going down the rabbit hole. Many drop off and become observers but not active participants.

Wow! --that got a lot of replies, for one of my comments!

Thanks for all the interesting info. I'll probably have a go at online chess again, after reading all the assurances about how cheating is discouraged.

After all these years and never having been that good to start with, I'd probably be on an ELO rating so low I'd be paired against a hitherto undiscovered tribesman from the depths of the Amazonian rainforest, who'd never seen a chess board before...

...and still lose.

I play a lot of online chess, and for the most part I don't believe I've played cheaters simply because I win often enough, and I'm not very good.

I can't rule out that maybe some people check a move or two with an engine in the endgame, but at the same time that just doesn't matter. I don't play chess to win. I play to get better at chess. And that will happen either way.

The learning resources provide by a good online chess site are fantastic today. Puzzles, interactive lessons, instant analysis of your games as soon as they are over. I don't think there's ever been a better time to learn chess.

unlikely at any low ratings imo, also you can look at post-game analysis. not a reason for not playing!

Hottake: regardless of chance of detection, the incentive to bother cheating for most online play, e.g. at chess.com, is close enough to zero to not worry about it.

Probable that there are sociopaths who will do it, but, the 99% case is good faith players interested in a match for compatible reasons.

TQG reminded me I used to play every day, recreationally; I'm finding chess.com quite nice.

Cheaters are ranked way too high to play with us ordinary mortals :D This is mostly a problem with those who are really strong.

On the other hand, people who insist on running out their entire clock when they clearly lost everything moves ago.. those salty people are common at the low ranks :P

> I wondered if the popularity of 'The queen's Gambit' would lead to a brief infatuation with chess in the popular imagination

According to Google interest in learning Chess has tripled because of The Queen's Gambit: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=how%20to%20play%2...

> I'd never be sure my opponent wasn't just putting the moves into a computer and playing whatever it told him to play

I play regularly on online and it really isn't an issue. I'm sure an opponent or two has cheated, but to me it doesn't matter. Either way I just play the board. If it happens I'm just playing a harder game and maybe learning something new. My rating isn't important enough to me that a game or two lost to cheating is not a big deal. I've also had Chess.com reverse games a month later that they have detected the player as cheating.

In shorter time controls the cheater is giving you an advantage. Even if they can get a good position, they'll spend too much time looking back and forth and inputting moves

not playing chess because someone might be cheating is like not living in a house because someone might rob it. You can't make this argument in the absence of the numbers.

i think as people start getting vaccinated and are able to start traveling again, chess will again take a back seat to other leisure options

You don't have to wonder: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=chess,quee... - data seems to point it that way

Due to Magnus Carlsen, chess has had a major boost here in Norway. His major tournaments are covered in detail on TV with commentary by chess experts, which makes it quite approachable and exciting to watch.

Given the inevitable slow parts of the game, the experts have time to explain the position on the board, and show how the variations can play out etc. They've somehow managed to turn chess into a spectator sport.

If per chance they're not geoblocking it, you can get a flavor of it here[1].

Currently there's the Champions Chess Tour (online), which gets several hours of coverage each day they play.

[1]: https://www.tv2.no/sport/11799097/

As an aside, for very good analysis of current Chess games (as well as older sagas around certain legends of the game), I heartily recommend checking out agadmator's Youtube channel[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/AGADMATOR

Agadmator is a very charismatic speaker but he does very little analysis. He mostly just moves the pieces and says the moves.

> Agadmator is a very charismatic speaker but he does very little analysis.

It's good enough for the vast majority of chess players. Most chess players are casual fans. They aren't interested in deep analysis. And besides, if you want analysis, you wouldn't want a youtube channel but stockfish or other chess engines and work through it yourself.

> He mostly just moves the pieces and says the moves.

Not true. Sure he tells you the moves but he provides analysis for the good parts. He provides highlights which is what people want. Nobody is going to sit through a detailed analysis of an 8 hour game.

I thoroughly enjoy Stjepan Tomic's channel "Hanging pawns" (on YouTube) for more detailed analyses than Agadmator. Videos are long but excellent and (i find it an advantage that) he doesn't go with the latest hypes around chess only (i.c. Queen's Gambit tv show)

My two favorites: John Bartholomew https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnBartholomewChess and Gotham Chess https://www.youtube.com/c/GothamChess/

Not just Norway! Magnus is kind of charismatic and very online. Great champion in terms of promoting the game.

He, and other streamer GMs like Naka in the US and others have really made chess streaming. Televised tournament play by day, lichess hyper bullet matches by night.

I've been watching high class matches on TV all my life, but usually with sound turned off. Comments are usually just computer analysis read out loud and background trivia like "he played similarly 2 years ago against XY" don't provide any benefit to me.

That's not how the Norwegian broadcasts have been, at all. Three different producers have been trying different stuff, and made it really approachable. First it was NRK (the national channel, like BBC for norway) and VG (the biggest newspaper) that both made their own live coverage. And now lately TV2 (biggest paid channel) is also in the game.

The coverages usually consist of a panel with a chess expert and a professional commentator/host, and then various other guests swapped each day. Mostly one celebrity and one other chess player. Then when a move is made it's discussed for some time and variants shown (not just computer analysis read out loud....), mostly by the professionals not looking at a computer. And then the guests can ask noob questions that's also what we viewers are wondering about ("why not just do X") and the chess experts show why.

Then it may be twenty minutes to the next move, so the discussion becomes like a chess-focused talk-show for some time until the next move is made. Or if it's speed chess, that kind of talk is in the 15-20 minutes between each game.

I'm actually going to miss having the speed chess world championship this christmas. Almost become a tradition watching that with the family.

That's how I know chess broadcasts. For me the signal to noise ratio is simply not favorable, I rarely learn from the comments because they cater all levels of players, not just mine. I found it more worthwhile to replay the moves at my computer and ask it: "why not just do x?".

Vishwanath Anand did the same for chess in India when he was number one for about a year.

And Magnus just lost! In the final of the Skilling Open there were 7 decisive games out of 10 - 8 rapid games followed by a 2 blitz game tiebreak.

Cheers for spoiling that...

If you prefer learning by practicing, Lichess has a great introduction to most tactical patterns: https://lichess.org/practice

Once you start mastering them, you can try real problems on Lichess as well (https://lichess.org/training), or try solving as many as you can in five minutes (https://chesscup.org/), it's a lot of fun!

Does lichess practice have anything about fundamental principles? Like another commenter mentioned here, control the center etc. It looks like the current selection is mostly tactical, which will help with puzzles, but the fundamentals are missing (which will help with the basics of an actual game).

To be honest, I find Lichess tactics to be a bit too obvious in the sense of not requiring as much foresight into what the opponent might do, at least in comparison to Chess Tempo which may have say, a fork but it requires more steps to get there. I'm not a great player, but I find myself generally more stumped by Chess Tempo tactics puzzles than Lichess.

That depends on the strength of the puzzle? I find them pretty difficult once you get above 2000 or so.

I think the chess puzzles are what could shine in this book:

http://www.chessproblems.org/ (it is the Chess Quizzer from the OP)

I have tried a few, and I enjoy the explanation of the solutions in plain English. Short and clear.

I've never been good at chess, nor felt like I was making any progress on paper chess problems. Not that I really tried to solve them.

But lichess training was really engaging for me. I played it for a few hours, and I found the format of the problems and the ui nice in a way that let me solve things pretty quickly. I like that all of them are formatted as "do the best moves", and yet some of them end in checkmate, while others end with just getting a really favorable trade.

It felt like 90% of the plays involved making a check, and then using the forced response to gain an advantage. Is that representative of actual play though? I get that you can't make a deterministic puzzle unless there's a fairly deterministic right answer and path to get there. But what fraction of good chess thinking resembles solving these kinds of puzzles?

Tactics are really important on amateur play. Perhaps the most important thing. If you know a few basic principles (move each piece at most once in the opening, control the center, etc), and you can spot tactics, you will reach a quite high level. Heck, even ignoring strategic principles at lower levels, as long as you have good tactical vision you will go quite far ahead because the opponent will make mistakes.

There are not always "tactics" in chess games in the sense of having a move sequence being considerably better than any other one. Nevertheless, when there are, there are factors that limit your opponent's choices and one of these factors is a check.

I also really enjoy the "Magnus Trainer" app:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnus-trainer-train-chess/id1...

About the author: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Farnsworth

Interesting profile. Law school dean. Books on law, chess, and classicism.

His writings on chess tactics are immediately actionable for novices.

His books on classicism (and one on stoicism) employ a really unique technique: he puts forth an abstract point, then stands on the shoulders of many giants to support and thoroughly make it very tangible. All dressed up and presented with his personal commentary to make his lessons his own.

Train your chess tactics at https://lichess.org/training/

For me, the challenge is solving 15 consecutive problems correctly to turn the bottom bar all green.

I also enjoy the 5 daily problems at https://www.chess.com/puzzles/rated

never thought to keep doing puzzles until the green bar is fully green. Nice idea!

Long-time player here. Strangely enough, the hardest part of these exercises is the uncomfortable brief moment of getting acquainted with (or being teleported to) a random board position.

A couple days ago I was really captivated solving chess puzzles on lichess and I encountered a particular puzzle that didn't make sense to me (my puzzle rating is ~1800). Then I realized it's white to move, and I've been pondering on black moves for the last 10 minutes... Mistakes a human mind can make while playing chess really surprise me, even while doing another intellectual activity like programming, learning math, reading a book etc you don't realize how notoriously prone your brain to errors until you have an objective measure to compare your reasoning to. Fascinating.

Mercifully Lichess actually tells you who has the move. ChessTempo didn't (you have to figure it out from who moved last,) and thereby made this feeling of disorientation much worse than it had to be.

It's a moment that actually requires paying attention to. Occasionally I find myself unable to find a winning move. To the point where I just try all possible legal moves. And they all fail! That's when I realize the last opponent move was actually a pawn move that can be captured en passant:-(

I find the lichess puzzles do not scale up like the other chess puzzle sites do.

I have a 2150 puzzle and definitely not a 2150 normal rating.

chesstempo.com has the best library of free tactics puzzles IMO. They also support alternate puzzle modes like blitz (time to solve affects your rating) and mixed (some positions require finding the only defensive move which doesn't lose).

A link I discovered in the last chess story on HN has become a very regular daily distraction: https://lichess.org/training/

Works well on mobile also.

I used to think computers “ruined chess” because it felt like the mystique was removed from the game. However it has made watching high level tournament play really enjoyable. You can see in real-time the effect a players move has on the advantage. And of course when a amusing your own games you can see move by move how the advantage moved. And then comparing your comparatively very low level games to GM’s and really seeing, quantitatively how good GM’s are.

I’ve seen many games where advantage rarely moves at their level. Just every move, many non-obvious, holding it tight as they struggle to keep their heads above water.

Looks like good information for beginners, but the hardest part of chess, for me, is the opening and how to play from move 4 onwards. It is less obvious why a strong position is a strong position early on, unless your opponent makes some very poor choices.

I feel that this is something that ChessNetwork (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCDOQrpqLqKVcTCKzqarxLg) explains very solidly in most games he covers.

Even at the high levels all openings are played. That basic e4 (pawn in front of the kind moves forward 2 squares) is the most popular for a reason, but all possible first moves are played from time to time. Looking for tactics and trying to make them work will serve you at all levels until well after 2000.

I started playing this year and the first game I won (after playing about 30) was after I watched this video[1]. I made nearly every mistake he advised against. My openings are fairly good now for a beginner, working on tactics now. I'd recommend watching the whole playlist. Also doing puzzles daily really helps you to spot stuff faster when playing.

TL;DW - Develop your pieces, you need your whole team to play effectively.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21L45Qo6EIY

There are certain metrics that can be used.

Pieces developed onto unattacked squares, squares under control (because more attackers than defenders), undefended pieces, a balance of control on the white/black or both, open files, half open files, open diagonals, half open diagnals, pawn structures, doubled pawns, isoated pawns, pawn islands.

It's a nuanced thing, it's also largely how chess engines evaluate a position - it's not something humans can do because to do all of the above would take too long however strong players get an intuitive grasp of all of that and more and use it to assess a position.

Typically in the opening you'd want to develop your pieces, control the center and move your king to safety. There are a lot of lectures for beginners covering opening strategies. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh4sO1ICS_Q

If anyone has interest in practicing these, there is some nice software: CT-Art that was just a tremendous help to me. It focuses on "motifs", where instead of most puzzles that ask you to "find the next move" you see the position a few moves out from the desired pattern so you learn to recognize what it looks like and learn to steer it into that pattern when it's not staring you in the face.

They (Chess King) have many apps that overlap in functionality, it can be a bit confusing... I think that probably they have a separate app for every course, but all the courses are also available in a single app.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ct-art-4-0-chess-tactics/id113...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chess-king-tactics-puzzles/id1...

PS. This app is also mentioned in this article/HN post:

https://www.gautamnarula.com/how-to-get-good-at-chess-fast/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6791742

Personally, I recommend Go over Chess. I've played both not well and I enjoy Go more. Chess is extremely tactical and calculation oriented. One blunder and the game is over for the most part in Chess.

While in Go, reading is also incredibly important there are other aspects to it that make the game richer, IMO.

i haven't played enough go at all, but is go blitz a thing? If so i might give it a go, but I just don't want to spend 45 mins per side per game

Yes. Although, there aren't the extremes in chess like the bullet variations that I am aware of.

My favourite chess tactic is one I learned early on when learning the game. I didn't see book opening as fun as might as well just set the game up that way and play from there. So I kinda did my own thing and if I played anybody who would template play book openings (many do) then going against that start and busting it would see them out of their comfort zone and me having a fun enjoyable game. I did win fair few and chess tournaments in my youth but been decades since played that it's almost a crime. Sadly finding people to play who don't get into a hissy fit if you don't do the book-opening they want to play was always an issue.

I was never very good at chess because while playing most of my attention was on designing a program to play the game for me so I could be lazy.

This is good stuff. I want to start teaching my kids to play chess, but the problem is I'm not great at it myself due to lack of practice. And when I read names of well-known tactics, I tend to get lost. Being able to learn them for playing with my kids and then teaching them the names would be useful.

There's also apps if your kids are into that... check out the Magnus Trainer (has much free content) : https://www.playmagnus.com/en

It starts at a very easy level with the basics of chess.

> This site teaches chess in words.

> It assumes you know only how the pieces move and builds step-by-step from there.

Do not get me wrong: TFA is a fine and useful book for an intermediate player but the above claims are overselling it. They are equivalent to telling you that learning the

    x ^= y;
    y ^= x;
    x ^= y;

trick will make you a better programmer while being silent on what copy-and-paste programming, magic constants, or hardcoded data are and how to avoid them. While novice chess players are naturally attracted to brilliant combinations, they will have no chance to play them without knowing how to gain positional advantage.

> Strategy and tactics both are important, but tactics are more important.

> If you're a whiz at strategy but not much good at tactics, you will have trouble winning or having fun because your pieces will keep getting taken.

I beg to differ. You should first learn how to supercharge your pieces by controlling the centre, putting rooks on open files, co-ordinating your bishop pair, keeping a strong pawn structure, etc. Two oldie but goodie books that teach these principles and are available as PDF's are Capablanca's A Primer of Chess [0] and Nimzowitsch's My System [1].

EDIT: memorizing openings ⊄ strategy. I understand strategy as applying good principles regardless of your opponent's moves, and tactics as calculating (mostly) forced move sequences. Also, strategy does not have to be dull. Playing a gambit and attacking Black's f7 weakness is a strategy, albeit one that can hardly succeed without tactical thinking.

[0] https://archive.org/details/aprimerofchess (this particular edition uses the outdated descriptive notation)

[1] https://archive.org/details/my-system-2020

I think this book is for pre IM level and I think you can do well by learning tactics rather than remembering all the 15 length opening sequence. It is fine if you miss a tempo if you can attack when you need to. Of course in GM level classical chess missing few tempos could be equal to a loss and structure is very important. A Primer of Chess and Nimzowitsch's My System are targeted for IM/GM.

Thank you for the reply. I do not advocate "remembering all the 15 length opening sequence" either.

> A Primer of Chess and Nimzowitsch's My System are targeted for IM/GM.

This is an interesting assertion. How about you take a peek into either book?

I believe the opposite is true. Most chess teachers will agree that tactics are much more important than positional advantage for lower level players.

For example here's Jeremy Silman talking about it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120205054644/http://www.jeremy...

After learning simple piece development and basic checkmating techniques, it's tactics, tactics, tactics. The positional concepts you espouse like rooks on open files are only useful to lower level players in service of opening up opportunities for tactics. Rather than learning pawn structure directly, he recommends actively sacrificing pawns to open up tactical opportunities. He doesn't recommend ignoring positional concepts of course, but he expects his students to learn them slowly, almost by accident, during focused practice on tactics.

Modern chess engines (pre-NN) even work the same way. Traditional chess engines with limited memory and limited depth search had rich, complex evaluation functions to try to compare the positional strength of a position. Modern chess engines have evolved towards simpler, faster evaluations, instead relying on vastly deeper tactical searches with gigabyte-size transposition tables. It's all in service of tactics.

> After learning simple piece development and basic checkmating techniques, it's tactics, tactics, tactics.

Fair enough, tactics is fun, pretty, and rewarding. I like it, too, and do not advocate avoiding it. But if any of their games lasts till the endgame, it is usually the principles not the tactics that contributes to the victory.

> Modern chess engines have evolved towards simpler, faster evaluations

Alas, modern humans do not undergo Moore's law so your analogy to computer chess can as well be turned upside down: we ought to improve our evaluation function if we want to play better with the limited resources of our brain.

>> If you're a whiz at strategy but not much good at tactics, you will have trouble winning or having fun because your pieces will keep getting taken.

>I beg to differ. You should first learn how to supercharge your pieces by controlling the centre, putting rooks on open files, co-ordinating your bishop pair, keeping a strong pawn structure, etc. [...]

I would disagree. At a rating level below 1300 (where all beginners start) I'm pretty sure that openings don't matter at all and strategy is not very important. Magnus Carlsen, the World Champion, has even suggested that by being only good at tactics you can get to a 2000 ELO rating. If your opponent can look two moves further ahead you will almost always loose. This is also the reason why small children are able to beat seasoned chess amateurs playing at a club level. The children definitely have a limited understanding of the strategy and they don't know a lot of opening theory. But they will outplay you in the middle game.

Thanks for the reply. Since you are the second person who understands the opening theory as a subset of strategy (an alien notion to me), I added a clarification to my post.

It's all well and good controlling the centre, putting rooks on open files, co-ordinating your bishop pair, keeping a strong pawn structure, etc., but if you leave your pieces vulnerable to tactics that your opponent can find and you can't, then it's all for nought.

That's why tactics can be considered more important than strategy.

Strategy becomes more important only when neither player is making tactical blunders.

> if you leave your pieces vulnerable to tactics that your opponent can find and you can't, then it's all for nought.

In my book, {avoiding hanging pieces, placing your pieces so that the opponent cannot pin them} ⊂ strategy, being wary of forks ∈ tactics.

>avoiding hanging pieces, placing your pieces so that the opponent cannot pin them

So maybe I don't understand your mathematical shorthand correctly but those things are definitely not widely regarded to be a part of strategy.

Edit: and if they were we would no longer be in disagreement. So apparently our different views simply come from different definitions.

> and if they were we would no longer be in disagreement.

I tried to explain my (perhaps unorthodox) understanding of strategy and tactics in the last paragraph of my grandparent comment.

EDIT: Now I can see that I was framed into the tactics:strategy dichotomy by the answers to my top-level comment. To get a better verbalisation of my ideas, replace "strategy" with "principles" in all I wrote.

I think you are using nonstandard language. Tactics are short term material wins. Hanging a piece is absolutely tactics, it's a one-move tactic.

You seem to be saying that "defending against tactics" is strategy, which I guess it is, but it's a very tiny strategy that won't fill a "study". Once you know the idea of "find your opponent's best move before you choose your move". There's no more of the strategy to study , you just apply the tactic every turn.

Things like maintaining control of many squares, building a >3-move plan around depriving the opponent's bishop of mobility, and switching between these plans when they are inevitably interrupted, is strategy that takes a lot of time to study.

> You should first learn how to supercharge your pieces by controlling the centre, putting rooks on open files, co-ordinating your bishop pair, keeping a strong pawn structure, etc.

I tend to agree. Based on my (limited) experience, I would say that strategy is akin to a 'feel' for the game and how it should develop, while tactics are entirely necessary, but come more as specific, self-contained, little tools that you should put in your arsenal.

Coming across the theory of Steinitz from [0] has made me look at chess in a different manner: at most levels of play rather than it being tactics or strategy, it is more about avoiding mistakes and waiting, prolonging play till oponenent eventually makes a mistake. My experience in over board play has been in concurrence with that view, one plays carefully parrying the opponent's move, while waiting till they make an inevitable mistake, then one can quickly consolidate the advantage in materials, mostly by cancelling out many pieces and then end game can start, which can be somewhat easily learned compared to other parts of the game.

This is the text of the Theory from [0]:

At the beginning of the game the forces stand in equilibrium.

Correct play on both sides maintains this equilibrium and leads to a drawn game.

Therefore a player can win only as a consequence of an error made by the opponent. (There is no such thing as a winning move.)

As long as the equilibrium is maintained, an attack, however skilful, cannot succeed against correct defence. Such a defence will eventually necessitate the withdrawal and regrouping of the attacking pieces and te attacker will then inevitably suffer disadvantage.

Therefore a player should not attack until he already has an advantage, caused by the opponent's error, that justifies the decision to attack.

At the beginning of the game a player should not at once seek to attack. Instead, a player should seek to disturb the equilibrium in his favour by inducing the opponent to make an error - a preliminary before attacking.

When a sufficient advantage has been obtained, a player must attack or the advantage will be dissipated."

[0] http://exeterchessclub.org.uk/content/theory-steinitz

Exeter Chess Club!!!

I remember this site from 20 years ago, one of the very first open knowledge repositories (chess related) that I had the luck to find back then.

> till oponenent eventually makes a mistake.

Any person(including world champ) makes lot of mistakes and that's why they get badly beat by computers. The thing to know is when the opponent made a mistake and knowing how to attack it to advantage(that is basically called tactic). I wouldn't recognize the mistake of players rated 500+ point above me but a GM could and would punish them.

Indeed. I once posed a question at chess.com, which attracted many comments answering the opposite of my hunch, but after lots of analysis of games I'm pretty sure I'm right:

Looking at the computer-calculated advantage score during a game (e.g. "white is at +1.0"), is it possible to make a move that increases your advantage?

My belief is that, no, as a human it is not possible (at least, virtually impossible) to make a move that increases your calculated advantage. Your advantage is the score calculated with the assumption you make no further mistakes. The best we can do as humans is to keep that score, or (more frequently) lower it.

The game is then won by whoever lowers their advantage the least over the course of the game.

What cemented this for me was watching AlphaZero play against Stockfish. AlphaZero was playing so far outside the realm of what Stockfish could do that it was the only game I ever saw where a player increased their score. Basically Stockfish would say "you made a bad move, you made a bad move, you made a ... wait a second, that's a great move! How did I not see what you were doing!?"

Tactics are more essential for initial improvement than strategy for the simple reason that you cannot execute sound strategic plans if your execution contains tactical flaws.

I'm going to differ with you and all the other (so far) replies: you start with end games. Until you can solve simple mate in one puzzles there is no point in going farther as you will never be able to win. You then study tactics (which is what most others are saying start with), and more complex endgames.

The above is the Soviet school from the 1920s. There is a reason it produced (and continues to produce) so many great chess players: it works.

I suspect many of the other replies to your post agree with me, they moved a step beyond the basics in their replay because there are so many tactics to learn that they still find lack of tactics is their personal limit to greatness and so that is where they are working.

I think

I think elementary tactics are a little more important to chess than a single random bit-twiddling hack is to programming. Not having a basic grasp of tactics and missing simple forks, pins, etc. is really only going to give you a game that's slightly beyond "not hanging pieces".

Anyone good enough to light you up tactically probably also knows at least the Cliff's Notes version of positional play and is not going to develop knights to a3, block their bishops behind an idiotic wall of pawns, or set up a nice doubled isolated pawns for you to murder.

A balanced approach from the start is reasonable.

I have recently bought chess books through the Android app "Forward Chess". It's very nice, as all the boards and games described inside become clickable and interactive. No longer do I have to set them up manually or try to see all the lines in my head. As a beginner that makes it easier to focus on the crux of what the book is trying to teach me. I can highly recommend it. There are demo-books one can download for free to test the concept.

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

If you like these kinds of exercises, try out my checkmate trainer at https://www.checkmatechamp.net/ .

The book must be very old because the notation is not in the currently de-facto standard Algebraic Notation. I tested some random positions but found the book’s solution not totally correct (besides hard to follow). This one for example, where the correct move should be Ne7+ but the book proposed Rxd7... then Nh6+

(FEN) r3r1k1/ppqn1ppp/2p2n2/4pN2/2P5/Q4PPB/PP1R1P1P/3R2K1 w - - 0 1

(could not copy the URL because it’s not permanent)

What I do not enjoy in chess is that many pieces that can cross the whole board in multiple directions.

In shogi, lances and knights only move forward. Gold and silver generals move one tile at a time.

There is 1 bishop and 1 rook per player and no queen. And as a result pieces are not constantly crossing the whole board.

Pawns are more consistent too. The move forward, one tile at a time. No conditionally diagonal moves or 2 tile moves or en-passant.

I often put two engines to play against each other.

This makes for the most boring games ever, with a long endgame and few pieces.

In contrast, human beings are capable of beautiful checkmates and crazy attacks. Without this aesthetic aspect, chess is just not interesting to me.

Having said that, many years ago, with the Chessmaster DOS engine, a Casablanca bot managed a beautiful checkmate. Which is now lost in time.

If you are a weak player, this book will raise your ELO by, like, 200 points in a few weeks. Try it.

> between good players, a one-piece advantage is enough to cause the disadvantaged party to resign.

Is this accurate? I would have assumed that, say, positioning is equally important and a naive "count the pieces" assessment wouldn't hold much value.

The answer is both. Ie, pawns holding the centre of the board have a higher relative value than pawns on the sides. At a very high level, if a player end up resigning because of a one piece advantage it's because they have already processed the next few turns and know there is no way out.

Very accurate, you should trade off pieces quickly when you are ahead, thus solidifying any gains. Also, if you are more than 3 points behind, at least with strong players, it's best that you invest your energy into a new game where you didn't blunder.

Yeah, it means a one-piece advantage (and specifically, a "piece" in this context means a bishop or a knight) with everything else being equal.

It's possible for one side to have a crushing positional advantage that is worth more than a piece, but that's relatively rare. For 90% of quiescent positions reached by strong players where one side has the advantage, "count the pieces" is indeed enough to tell you which side it is.

Yes, to a point. A knight is often considered “less” than a bishop, but trading your bishop that is on the same color as your pawns for a knight that is covering the center is generally a “good trade”.

Or taking a piece that is stuck or unlikely to be a threat while putting your own, possibly lesser piece at risk may be a poor play too.

Game dynamics matter too. Knights do well in closed games where as bishops are nicer in open games. Games tend to open as time goes on though.

And then of course if sacrificing to setup a mate soon - that’s the entire goal of the game so in that situation positioning is quite important.

Counting the pieces is pretty indicative of most games I’d say though. Against poor players you can be down quite a few pieces while setting up a back rank mate the opponent just doesn’t see. But this would never fly at moderate skill levels.

There are exceptions (see other comments), but between good players they almost never allow the other player to get a better position after giving up the piece. That is they see the attempted sacrifice and how much worse (better for the other player) the board is afterwards and don't take it. Thus most piece losses are a blunder, and they know that the opponent knows how to win (unless they make a return blunder, which is unlikely).

That is at the high levels. I play my down positions, because I'm not playing anyone that good. I learn a lot and my opponents often enough will make return blunders I can take advantage of. (I typically lose anyway, but it works out often enough to be worth trying)

One other consideration: in a tournament situation it might be better to resign and take a nap. You can then come into your next game well rested while your next opponent might be worn out from his last game. A loss and a win is better than a low odds chance at a draw but probably a loss and a game that you play tired and so have decreased odds of a win and might lose as well. Psychology like this can be important.

To add to the other answers, part of it is also etiquette. If the only way you could recover a game was your opponent doing a really bad blunder, at a rating where such blunder is very unlikely you should simply resign.

Obviously, you have to take the whole situation in consideration. If the position is very tricky, you would play on even anyway. If your opponent is low on time, then it depends on your opinion on "dirty flagging".

This only applies to the top, as a +3 advantage is definitely not a guaranteed win unless you're at least a titled player.

Big fan of chess! Who watches Hikaru's YT videos? Full of awesome tactics.

I watch Hikaru pretty regularly, he's an entertaining streamer, but I'm not sure about the value of watching his video for chess knowledge. He plays these really baffling chess variants (like all pawns + queen vs IM opponent) in hyperbullet (30 secs) or bullet (1 min) like in one of his streams he went on for minutes about how he hates 3+1 because it's "too serious". As someone who exclusively plays 15+10 or 30+20, his streams really just feel like watching a video game stream to me, since it's impossible to understand "the chess" at that speed for a mere mortal like me.

For chess, I prefer watching e.g. agadmator's YT channel. I stop, think, roll back pretty frequently. I can rarely solve his puzzles ("feel free to stop the video..." parts) but without stopping and thinking for a min, I can't even understand the position lol.

Hikaru's videos are very entertaining. This[0] was pretty fun to see. Not the best example of his instructional videos.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/k34chd/exactly_just_...

GM Daniel Naroditsky's channel[1] is the best instructional I have seen. His speedrun series is very good. He takes the time to stop and explain his thought process while playing the game. And then after few games he does a deeper analysis and answer any questions. The moment that sold me was when he showed how they use chess engine to do preparations at their rating level.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/DanielNaroditskyGM

On a side note, I have been working on a bughouse[2] chess web app in my spare time[3]. It's not ready for HN traffic yet though. Bughouse is not getting a Queen's Gambit anytime soon. But I would love to see more steam behind online bughouse as well. It is my favorite variation. The need for team work and communication makes it very lively.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess [3] https://utopia.buddychess.com/

If you like such exercises but for backgammon, check my site at https://www.bgtrain.com/

I bought physical copies of these books years ago. They are great and Farnsworth consistently does a great job introducing and then reinforcing these concepts.

On the subject of cheating, I have a little different angle.

I am not a great chess player, somewhere below 1500 I'd guess. But I do enjoy playing with other not-very-good players. I am better enough than my children to never lose to them so far. But I would like them to enjoy the game. It doesn't seem very fun if you don't have some reasonable chance to win occasionally.

This creates a situation where I have an incentive to cheat very creatively so that my child has to work for it and doesn't detect the reverse-cheat that allowed them to win.

CC-ND explicitly allows format conversions, so I'll go ahead and ask: has anyone made an epub of this site-book?

And speaking of modifications, it would be nice to have a version where the puzzles are one-click away from the section at hand. I keep feeling like I'm missing something. I don't understand why the puzzles are on their own page, let alone their own domain, so if I'm in a section and I want to do a puzzle I need to click back to the main site, click on the puzzle site, then find the equivalent chapter heading, and then dive into a puzzle.

I found https://github.com/nathanj/predator-epub which worked pretty well.

Thanks!

Though the decision to go via Markdown is weird, since Epub is HTML.

I'd like to note also that the epub is provided in the ‘releases’ section of that repo. Though some three images are missing from it (judging by the messages from pandoc).

I discovered that only after Homebrew installed two different versions of GHC taking up three gigabytes in total, and compiled `cabal-install` and then pandoc for five hours, with two gb of temporary files for 170 mb of output. Well at least I've taken this occasion to clean up some unused apps from the machine.

I'm a little miffed the section headings for chapter 2 on forks doesn't have king forks!

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