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Yes you can enjoy the game below 2000 if you play people at the same level as you. When you blunder the opponent will occasionally blunder back at below 2000. I've had really enjoyable games where I got to make strategic decisions like doing an exchange sacrifice because the opponent decided to lock away his queen. Or the opponent that "Fischered" his bishop by grabbing a rook pawn and me getting use of light squares again. When both of these things happened the win wasn't clear and you needed to think more long term than just finding the right tactical sequences. But granted it isn't happening every game.

there's a lot of pleasure in mechanical exercise, it's the reason people go to the gym or play starcraft. You don't really need to be good at chess to get fun out of calculating chess moves. It's true that it's like solving puzzles, but puzzles are very popular! It's like working out for your brain. Even at the GM level by the way chess is really 99% tactics. It's not like some 4X strategy game, it's by its nature almost always concrete.

And because everyone can blunder at low level play a blunder doesn't mean you lose the game. It's with higher ELO that the game starts to become more punishing.

And you definitely can get to a good strength as an adult. 2000 is strong club level, which if you really want to do it is a few years of dedicated training. And even at your average club rating of say 1700-1800 you can play decent games.

People are definitely surprised when they blunder mate in one. But after it happens and the pieces are knocked to the floor, perhaps seeing what you did wrong and understanding it quickly is a feature of the game rather than a bug. This allows faster learning cycles, a feeling of mastery, and progress towards the 2000+ level. Don't forget the competitive dynamic too. Can you learn faster and do better over time than your opponents? This is motivating to many. I certainly enjoyed improving rapidly vs my peers in high school.

I would add that, having now reached 2000+ myself years ago, the same punishing tactical dynamics apply at master level and it's harder to continuously make progress. At some point all chess players turn to other activities, often ones that are more creative, because chess does become repetitive in the confines of the 64 squares. Of course, it's still near-infinitely variable, but the contours of games and the player's progress within them are somehow bounded. Within the last year, I've made a serious effort to switch to Go.

Chess really isn't for everyone always, and as AlphaZero shows, it may not be for any one either... us mere mortals will struggle along, occasionally indulging in puzzle brain crack, and sometimes making meaning out of the journey. In the right context, it can be enjoyable too.

The conclusion of the book states that rather than being viewed as unilaterally boring, I hope chess can be respected and appreciated by all, just like chocolate. You don't have to personally like chocolate, but that doesn't mean it's intrinsically bad, and many people do like it :)

On the one hand yes, I find chess a miserable hobby sometimes for these exact reasons. On the other hand, I think it’s been a hugely valuable life lesson and a boon to my focus and willpower. But I don’t understand how you can think chess isn’t satisfying to weaker players. An attack that comes off, even if it’s unsound, is one of the most beautiful things in gaming for me.

That is not unique to chess - at the amateur level, I think pretty much every single board game and competitive video game is decided by "blunders" - obviously sub-optimal tactics, bad "micro" in strategy games and other mistakes that are obvious to the players nearly immediately and can be trained away.

It is a matter of your own frame of mind whether that stresses you... And it is probably quite idiosyncratic to people! I get stressed out by trying and failing to optimally micromanage build orders and scouting in games like Warcraft/Age of Empires, but I am happy to go with the flow with frequent blunders in chess...

It's the same in sports too. A blunder in Tennis means you missed the ball. A blunder in Football (Soccer) means you gave possession to the other team. A blunder in Jiujitsu means you get choked out. The joy of these games don't come from not making any blunders; it's making less and less blunders each and every game. If I wrestle with someone and beat them time and time again, there's little fun in that. If I wrestle with someone and lose time and time again, that feeling of elation when I train my hardest and eventually beat them is incomparable.

Chess is a delightful game for a number of reasons. It's wonderful for all the reasons puzzles are; the sense of achievement when you solve one. That "aha!" moment, where all that calculation clicks. It's wonderful because of the competition; it's one of the few that have a system where you can accurately track your progress over time outside of major competition, ie. online chess. You can see your rank climbing day-by-day. It's wonderful because you effectively get a coach for free; modern engines can give advice on moves, tell you where you went wrong, and what was a more optimal move. That's something you'd have to pay an arm and a leg for in any other sport or game. I started learning and playing chess at the beginning of quarantine, and it's one of the most fulfilling things I've done competitively since doing sports at university.

This is true in everything competitive though. How do non-pros enjoy sports, or competitive video games, or anything. The action itself can be fun. The improvement itself can be fun.

> As GM Ben Finegold said, when you show a sub-2000 player what he did wrong he's not surprised; he just didn't see it, didn't calculate it.

I don't see why the reaction should be different between an amateur or a pro here. In either case they just didn't see, or know the existence of, the move. The only reason it may be surprising to a higher level player is because the ego has lead them to believe they should have seen it.

I disagree it's true in everything. I haven't made an exhaustive survey of everything, but I have one counterexample: competitive StarCraft at a low level is always determined by who has the best strategy, not the best execution ("micro" in the lingo.)

A really slow player who understands the strategy but can't execute many actions quickly will consistently beat a faster player that has little strategic sense but a faster trigger finger.

The reason for this is, in my amateur judgment, that the slower player with better strategic sense will manage their resources (both time, space, and in-game resources) orders of magnitude more efficiently than the happy trigger finger.

Edit: I should clarify that I'm talking about StarCraft: Brood War. I just realised there's been a sequel and I don't know if what I've said is true for it.

If appeal didn’t exist for novice or average players then nobody would be over 2000 eventually and the chess would not exist as a (popular) game.

Chess is mainly for enjoyment. It doesn't really matter what your level is because you're playing with people the same level as you.

I'm sure football isn't fun if it's played against pro's but a kick around with friends would seem fine.

You should try lichess. You lose quite a few games until the game understands your level but it's great fun.

What a bunch of elitist nonsense.

"I can't understand the appeal of programming for the average programmer. Unless you are advanced >2% of leetcode there is nothing really "deep" about it. It's about solving simple puzzles and you have to think like a computer, simply evaluate datatype and if-conditionals."

> Yes, if you reach 2000 elo the game becomes very strategic but 99% of people won't reach that

This is fine, since most beginners consider tactics to be more exciting than strategy anyways.

I mean, yes you can blunder but so can your opponent. There’s some fun to a scrappy game where both players aren’t great and the advantage switches between the two constantly. If anything it’s more dull at the top level where a pawn can determine a game.