Chess is just poker now
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
You need 'subterfuge and misdirection' in the sense that (as the world no-1 puts it), it's a semi-bluff...a weird/not-really-analysed position, but that will still end up in a draw if the opponent responds appropriately.
Lex: "Is there a sense in which it's ok to make sub-optimal moves?"
Magnus: "You HAVE to, because the best moves have been analysed to death, mostly."
This is true of every sport, every single record always gets broken, because techniques and nutrition and training and everything improve. A world no 100 tennis player could easily beat a world no 1 from 50 years ago.
How is that bad or like poker? It just means the game is evolving. It might also mean more psychological games. The tennis analogy works here too, there's plenty of that in there too.
The whole premise just doesn't make sense to me. Because you have to psychologically think about your opponent, that makes the game worse?
Just that you are forced to make suboptimal moves. If you make optimal moves then your opponent will have analysed the position before and the game will end in a draw, which is a dissapointing result for whoever plays white.
Not necessarily. If black has a higher ELO rating then white is happy to draw and may aggressively seek a draw.
I think the problem is that seeking draws makes chess boring. And that it’s realistic for someone ranked well below another player to force a draw, while it’s near impossible for the lower ranked player to win outright. So you end up with a wide range of players seeking stalemates and a small minority looking for a win, but not at the expense of a potential loss.
If 'perfect' play--that we're approaching with engine analysis--results in a draw, you need to do something non-optimal and unexpected in order to get your opponent out of their engine prep and into thinking mode.
Whether it's better or worse is a different argument. Some find it a bit 'dry' in that there are often less blunders, dazzling tactics, and sacrifices because both sides now know the optimal approach. It's much more of a war of attrition in high-level, long time-control games. As an aside, that's potentially why bullet and other such chess is so popular...there isn't time to deeply analyse, so it's intuition, challenging positions, blunders, and less 'standard' play.
Not quite true; you can break ELO records by performing equally well in a larger pool of people-with-ELO-ratings.
> An eephus pitch in baseball is a very high-arcing off-speed pitch. The delivery from the pitcher has very low velocity and often catches the hitter off-guard.
The pitcher essentially lobs the ball at the hitter [1]. Major league players are so focused on hitting extremely fast and/or curving pitches that they whiff or stand idle at a pitch that your ten-year-old nephew could probably clobber. It's a risky pitch, because if the batter is able to adapt, they can hit a home run. The power of the pitch is entirely that it's unexpected.
I know it's not a perfect analogy, since chess players have so much more time to react to any sub-optimal moves.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eephus_pitch [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikLlRT2j7EQ
Incoming speed makes significant difference to exit velocity.
If you were going for max distance, you would want 100 mph pitches.
In home run derby, they are optimizing for ability to get a good repeatable swing with enough power to go over the fence. If they were playing in a park with like 440 ft fence, they would need faster pitches.
The distance the ball flies has a lot more to do with bat speed than ball speed (something like 5mph for 1mph, if I recall correctly).
What you want to do is perhaps start with this random strategy, determine the realtive strength of your opponent, and only move to an exploiting strategy if they are weaker than you. If they throw Rock 40% of the time, you should throw Paper 40% of the time. If you were to enter a RPS tournament playing randomly, it is unlikely that you would reach the end. You need to exploit.
In Poker Cash Games, people just play the Nash and when opponents make flat-out mistakes they yield a little bit of profit. Do this enough with high enough stakes and it works out, even if its extremely boring. But this won't work in Poker Tournaments, where you only get payouts for top 10%, weighted heavily towards winning. So what happens in Poker is what happens in RPS - you attempt to find exploits, and your opponents attempt to find exploits in your play. In turn each of the players are attempting to move the environment of the play towards a position where they know it well and can find those mistakes.
If deviating from the Nash yields better results than the penalty of deviating because in that environment you are stronger than your opponent, you should take it. As this article points out, the same is true in Chess. And as you point out, this is also true of the Eephus pitch.
When your opponent is the one doing the analysis. It makes perfect sense to me that anything your opponent is prepared for is less optimal than it would be otherwise.
Move A.
Move B.
From the best knowledge we have from our best engines, A is the better move (though I don't think we have formally proven such yet).
But if you play A, you are playing your opponent in a game of memorization.
If you play B, your opponent loses any memorization advantage. Thus they must play based on ability other than memorizing responses.
For a player whose memorization ability is equal or worse than their ability to play based on other ability, choosing move B is clearly the worse option. But if the player is one whose memorization is better than their other abilities at chess, then playing B means fighting them in an area they are worse at. The advantage of this can easily outweigh the disadvantage of move B compared to A in general.
Imagine a military commander choosing an engagement over terrain more familiar to their side even though it is a worse engagement if both sides had equal knowledge of the terrain, because the terrain knowledge more than compensates for the negatives.
Hans' explanation made sense, even if he was wrong in his first interview and it came off weird.
I think that’s what Magnus is saying is that if you play by the book you go from opening to end game without much creativity or challenge.
So, the top “creative” players will try to go off script to make their top “book smart” opponents have to think on the fly.
But even in mid-game, it might mean that if you know that your opponent prefers open / tactical positions, for example, you try to force a closed position, even if it may be slightly suboptimal.
This goes at least back to Bobby Fischer. With the minor difference that instead of computers he was up against teams of Soviet Grandmasters. It's why he created Fischer Random chess where the pieces on the backrow are randomized. That (mostly) eliminates memorization and forces players to rely on their own creativity.
There was probably not a more booked-up player than Fischer in his prime, something he seemed to try to make people forget. Famously when asked about a young Soviet prodigy by the Soviets, Fischer responded that the kid was good, but that there was a better player in their women's division who had more signs of promise. Many of the Soviet masters had no idea who Bobby was talking about; but Bobby was reading all Soviet chess literature and magazines to stay up to date.
That said, FRC is pretty interesting.
That's what parent said. Fischer wanted to get the memorization out, since memorization makes the game unplayable for someone who doesn't have The Knowledge.
The board state is always known. Magnus is saying that at the top level, grandmasters know how to force draws in all of the lines that incorporate best-move, second-best-move, etc. That means that if you want to pull off a win, you have to incorporate unstudied lines that will force your opponent to calculate rather than draw from memory/experience.
This is why playing against a maniac (seemingly random and not respecting bluffs or equity) is very difficult because if they get lucky enough times, they are able to "break the game" by getting the opponent to be extremely risk averse OR take on more risks.
I believe this is what Magnus is referring to, its that making yourself unpredictable by questionable moves and no longer playing in a way that has been taught.
For example the common strategy is to go all in with strong pairs like AA, KK but someone beats it with a totally random garbage hand (52o, 37o) and does so repeatedly, no theory can help you win against somebody who is just repeatedly lucky and brash.
This is less about playing mindtricks and bluffing, but more 'mundane'.
I.e. a decent player will know all the good mainlines of popular openings, and end up in 'comfortable' positions (among other things due to computer analysis).
The metagame is to prepare a non-garbage sideline, that your opponent is not so familiar with. Nobody at a high rating plays 'questionable' variations on purpose, in order to bluff. The resulting positions would be much too punishing.
Post-game thoughts from the players:
Inteviewer: "Let me pull you back; so you didn't understand the position, and so you still felt like you were scared to go into a piece-up situation?"
Alireza: "Yeah so, I just trusted him. (he shrugs) I just wanted to make a move.. and play a bit more you know (laughing)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT9orNSgk5w&t=55s
Niemann: "You have to understand, when I play the move Qg3, this is a purely pyschological move."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJZuT-_kij0&t=780s
Whether or not Niemann did cheat over the board, this shows that even top players can be susceptible to this kind of bluff.
But if you make a suboptimal move, then you are going down a path that is less analyzed and thus you are likely to have an analytical advantage.
So while the board state is well known, what your opponent has researched is not known, or partially known (since players have favorites and predispositions).
So you're taking a game where your opponent has the upper hand, and you're playing highly suboptimal moves with the intent of putting your opponent in a position where they have to pick between a rock and a hard place:
- either they have to sit quietly and knowingly take your straight-up lies, or
- they are forced to play suboptimal moves themselves to call your bluffs.
- they see through your bluff, and punish you for it
So, it is a risky endeavor, since you don't know the mind of your opponent.
And so it makes sens to only take such risks when your opponent has the upper hand, as you mention.
But then you become predictable — when you behave erratically, people know you are in your death throes, and not a real threat.
So, you have to mix some erratic behavior in when you are in a strong position, too, to keep them guessing. But then you are weakening your game overall...
And on and on it goes (:
It's like an arms race, but circular rather than one-directional.
Both games rely on disguising the real play you want to make. Slow playing the best hand in poker, or making non-standard moves in chess to throw your opponent off.
You see this in all sports/games. In basketball/football a team will run their best player away from the real play. In Jiu-Jitsu I'll fake a choke I have no intention of seriously trying in order to force someone to defend and move their arm - which is what I wanted the whole time.
It's amusing how people feel bluffing in poker is the human element, but top poker AIs bluff more frequently than most humans
Good bluffs are when your range beats your opponent's range. Which gets back to your point, which is that you can do some pretty awful things to someone when your hand is outside the range they're putting you on
He was notorious for doing just this. He would make what have now been engine analyzed as sub-optimal moves but which lead to such complex and dynamic positions that his opponent would eventually slip and he would exploit their error in dramatic fashion. This is one reason why he is considered one of the most creative attacking players ever.
You still see the general creative spirit in certain top players like Rapport, Mamedyarov, Firouzja, though. Magnus is particularly boring to watch, but it's what makes him great. Fischer was not so different, and felt that Tal was overly creative for the sake of being creative, rather than good.
IM Marc Esserman is probably one of the more exciting players to watch, but he's not a GM, though he arguably plays at GM strength often. He's the author of Mayhem in the Morra, well worth reading if you like Tal's spirit. Esserman is inactive OTB unfortunately, but he does stream chess online.
I don't like bullet, but 15-minute and 3-5 minute chess is wonderful to watch.
This strategy worked really well against other students' bots, but not terribly well against the students themselves. I'd be interested to see if it worked better/worse against pro players who think more algorithmically/analytically.
The bot hit a bug that chose a strange move, and since kasparov couldn't figure out what the line was, he resigned. If he analysed the board instead of what the bot was thinking, he would have won easily
The bug move (a rook) was in game 1. It was inconsequential to the game result. The position was already lost for Deep Blue. It made a random move because everything had the same outcome of losing. The bugged move simply made it lose sooner. Kasparov knew this and there was no controversy.
In game 2, Kasparov set a trap, offering a sacrifice of two pawns for great positional improvement. Kasparov thought Deep Blue couldn't calculate far enough ahead to see the positional improvement, but it did. This made Kasparov suspect and accuse IBM of human intervention in the computer's moves.
The fatal move (a knight sacrifice by Deep Blue) was in game 6. Kasparov deliberately played an opening with a known weakness, that he thought the computer wouldn't find as it wouldn't sacrifice material and calculate far enough ahead to see the positional advantage. Deep Blue found it. Kasparov again accused IBM of human intervention. The Deep Blue team then said they had added this variation into its opening database just before that game, pre-analyzing that line deeper since Kasparov had previously played it in game 4. There was some dispute as to whether the rules for the competition were intended to allow IBM to modify Deep Blue during the match.
There’s very seldom a single, obvious move that makes sense. The level of chaos in chess is still sufficiently high to make it an interesting game, even when you study all the available opening theory.
Who says it's bad that you now have to "engage in subterfuge, misdirection, and other psychological techniques"? Surely that just makes the game into a real sport and more exciting for viewers. Besides - hasn't the psychological aspect always been a part of chess? Maybe the most interesting aspect?
(Of course, there is no evidence of cheating, but arguably Carlsen's unsporting conduct is also the dark side. But anyway, none of this is new to high level chess.)
This reminds me of something I think I came up with in Blitz and Bullet games a decade ago and coined the name: a “time sac”.
It is when in the middlegame I make a dubious sacrifice (positional or material) — some possibly cool combination or a move that makes the opponent think in time pressure. It is not a bluff because it MIGHT work out, but I am not sure.
This works mostly in games without an increment. The idea is to make them get much lower on the clock than me, so even if I end up with a slightly worse position or down material, I can easily hold it until I win on time.
My opponents in chess, even over 2100 often got nerd swiped with this! Hahahaha
https://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=2346 https://www.sirlin.net/articles/solvability
Now whether chess really IS more about calculation these days is a difficult question to answer. It might just be that it values a different kind of calculation or skill than the past. Given the deep preparation necessary for someone to be a chess professional, I'm biased towards (micro-edit: believing that...) more calculation _is_ necessary for high level performance, and psychology is more gimmicky.
The difference is that poker isn't a game of complete information, chess is. This means that, technically, there is a _right_ answer in chess. With the ambiguity of poker, and other games, that leaves room for psychology to be more natural.
I don’t think those comments from Magnus support the point in this article at all really.
The best games have bluffing, IMO.
Whereas Chess, even AI chess, is far from solved.
Also at the most obvious level, poker is random, the strategies are over a long series of deals. Cepheus won't ever magically find a way to make its 2-7 off work against your pair of Aces, you will always make that too expensive to continue, but it wins overall because next hand it's not going to pick up garbage. Whereas every Chess game begins the same, so a hypothetical solver would just always beat you.
Not deceptive playing tactics, deceptive metagame strategy. Trick your opponent into preparing against lines you never play and you gain an advantage. Leverage transpositions to play the openings you are most comfortable with but trick your opponent with the unexpected move order.
It's all about getting your opponent out of book ASAP. Do that and you can nullify any advantage they may have had from preparing against every game you've ever played using an engine to explore the lines.
It actually is analogous to poker but not really poker as most people know it. It's analogous because poker is also done by training with engines; and you often want to make moves you know are suboptimal from your training because you believe it will exploit the opponent's suboptimal play.
Essentially, it telegraphed too much information to the chess engine to analyze. Unlike humans, chess AI isn't intimidated by aggressive play, there is no psychological edge in doing so, and only an informational disadvantage.
Kasparov changed his strategy to a more passive and defensive one, and was able to win some matches after that. Someone who follows chess more closely than I do may need to confirm or provide more info, my memory of this is a little hazy.
But I'm not sure the analogy to poker is apt, because in chess both players can see all the "cards" at all times and all the moves and decisions in real-time. The unknown is which player can see more steps ahead, and exploit that knowledge to gain an edge before their opponent sees it too.
* Round 1: negotiate the starting position, aka 'and now we have a new game of chess'
* Round 2: play chess using prep. generally only one side fully benefits during this phase.
* Round 3: play chess
Computers mostly impact human chess in round 2. It's not just as if you had every human super GM working for you for X years, X as large as you want; the ideas from computer analysis go beyond that. The role of humans in round 2 is looking at computer lines and deciding if the ideas might be transferred to human chess.
Computers do not seem to inform/impact the game of poker as much, absent cheating. Computer cheating, though, where you are aware of the computer's complete evaluation of a position, would seem to be less impactful w/r/t poker than with chess. A computer (eg: Stockfish) crushes a super GM without mercy. So I have issues with saying 'X is just Y' now, because it seems to be different on both ends.
If you decide that the three round structure above is problematic, Fischer 960 dramatically changes rounds 1-2. But that's a different game.
With 960 possible starting positions, opening line memorization is far beyond current human capacity.
There have been some recent Random Chess tournaments with high level GMs like Magnus and they’re pretty fun and entertaining. Chess.com has some great live coverage and analysis of these events as well as classical chess tournaments.
Yeah but the fix doesn't come for free, you're giving up a lot in exchange. Which is why 960 isn't a replacement for classicial, it's another chess variant that people play in addition to classical chess.
If anything it sounds like a way to emphasize how to play positions you’d otherwise never possibly see in classical chess.
Imagine a match in classical chess between a 2600-rated plyaer who has spent time preparing their classical openings and a 2800 rated player who hasn't prepared at all - the 2800 player will still have a large edge. Now imagine the same scenario for a 960 game where the lower-rated player has spent 4 days evaluating the opening with an engine and the high-rated player hasn't - in this scenario the advantage from the engine prep is much bigger. The mix of novelty + opportunity to prepare is such that from a game theory perspective the whole thing becomes prepare-or-lose if their overall chess strength is reasonably close otherwise.
In the comments for this video about netdecking :
(The main issue IMHO is how it can warp non-competitive play.)
It's nice to think of high ranked players playing chess the way my friends and I do: distracted, stoned, and just sort of improvising, but I'm realizing now that for good players it's waaay more about the prep and theory than just playing by "feel".
That won't stop the rote memorization, just dampen its impact. At the Super GM level, they have lines memorized to around 12 moves (sometimes more). If everything were to switch to Fischer Random, then maybe they'd only have lines memorized to 9 moves or something but it wouldn't preclude them from memorizing things.
You're implying that 3 moves (12 minus 9) corresponds to ~960 less lines to memorize. Sure, that might be applicable when tacking moves on to the end of a line you already have memorized (though I would certainly argue 3 moves would result in far less than 960 new lines, maybe 20 lines max). But when you're moving these 3 new moves to the beginning instead of the end, as you must in Fischer Random, then you do see true combinatorial explosion. You'd have to study far far more to have theory developed for every starting position.
I don't think so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess
> The random setup makes gaining an advantage through the memorization of openings impracticable; players instead must rely more on their skill and creativity over the board.
It's not just the 960 unique starting positions, but then each of those if given enough analysis probably has 2-4 optimal 1st moves for white, plus 3-5 optimal 1st move responses for black. That's roughly 5,760 - 19,200 optimal 1st move pairs, which is a lot to memorize to just get you to the 2nd move.
At the GM level, a traditional opening is anywhere from 5 - 15 moves long before you might see a non-trival expectation of deviating from explored lines, so memorizing 960 openings to any reasonable level of depth quickly becomes highly impractical.
Nowadays, solvers have basically removed decisions from preflop play, but include randomization of certain moves (E.g., raise 1/3 of the time, call 50% of the time, fold 17% of the time). Then, on certain boards, you can tell the solver which sizes you want it to be available to it (e.g., 1/3 pot, 1/2 pot, 2/3 pot, full pot, 2x, etc.) and it will give you an unbeatable play style under those conditions. And so on. The game isn't solved and no human without real-time assistance would be able to play perfectly, but solvers have fundamentally changed how people prepare and play, and those who haven't studied the solutions get destroyed. An old guard has been left behind, and nerdy people who can work sims have risen to the top.
The article here explains how a similar thing has happened to chess. Like the article states, some have whined that this "removes creativity" from chess. Poker players have argued the same thing: what it takes to become the best is simply now different. You must study hard, and if you can execute what you study, you can be a great player without having a great "poker mind." In reality, the game is so complex that you still need a great poker mind to navigate the parts of the game tree which you haven't studied, just like in chess.
Undoubtedly this will change WHO decides to invest their time into becoming great chess players, and the personalities of the best players will be different. But it always struck me as sour grapes to whine that you can no longer be the best without studying the game more scientifically. Basically every game has been "moneyballed," including Chess, and people are leagues better at every game than they ever have been. We should welcome that.
Which makes it a different game. Whether that's good or bad depends on what about the games you find appealing. Personally, these changes make the affected games boring to me.
The article is a bit silly. I had the feeling reading it that the writer has little understanding of how classical chess is played, nor of poker for what it’s worth.
This is so much more efficient that the only limitation is on how much energy and capacity the player has for rote memorization, rather than how much time it takes for the team of humans to work out the best lines.
Sure, computer analysis has marginally changed how some openings are viewed and sure you can now get an engine evaluation of all the variations of some obscure line in a matter of seconds but novelties remain rare at the top level. Stockfisch is extremely strong because it can play near perfect positional play and can establish micro-advantage through deep calculation not because it fundamentally changed how chess theory is viewed.
AlphaZero might be the sole exception to my point. It did indeed show that modern chess was neglecting some strategical concept but to be honest it was more a rehabilitation of old ideas than a pure novelty.
But nowadays Stockfish and Leela have both caught up and surpassed AlphaZero.
The only two instances I've seen an actual 'supercomputer' mentioned in recent Chess news has been: * Ian Nepomniachtchi using Zhores (which is questionable given that the institute which runs it [Skolkovo] has Arkady Dvorkovich [chairman of FIDE] as it's chairman). I remember researchers questioning if Zhores was even suitable for the type of calculations which engines care about, so this looks like some PR move more than anything. * There was a rumour a few years ago that Magnus Carlsen had some secret/private access to a Norwegian supercomputer. No real confirmation of this rumour occurred.
Both AlphaZero and Leela Zero (by their design and very optimal evaluation functions) also require much less evaluation - so they can naturally evaluate further.
> Elite chess has always involved rote learning, but “the amount of stuff you need to prepare, the amount of stuff you need to remember, has just exploded,” Sadler said.
> Engines can calculate positions far more accurately and rapidly than humans, so there’s more material to be studied than ever before.
Two sentences later you have this gem: “What once seemed magical became calculable; where one could rely on intuition came to require rigorous memorization and training with a machine. Chess, once poetic and philosophical, was acquiring elements of a spelling bee: a battle of preparation, a measure of hours invested.”
Well, that’s patently untrue. Chess has always been a battle of preparation far before the advent of computer. The rosy paste described just doesn’t exist. High level play has always required memorising books of theory and going through decades of past games. That’s what chess is. It’s a game of pattern recognition and memorisation.
If I wanted to be provocative, I would say that the article seems to imply that computers have turned chess from an interesting game into a boring one while in actuality it has always been boring but with more mystic.
It's possible to return chess to that realm of pure thought over memorization -- chess variants!
I suggest Duck Chess [0], whose inclusion of an invulnerable shared piece which each player moves on their turn (the "duck") renders most chess strategies incoherent.
A less formal alternative coalesced in university -- get a bunch of (inebriated) people together to watch the (inebriated) chess match. Their role is to loudly count down from 5. It is in this time that you must make your move, or your opponent will make it for you. The combination of time-crunch and looseheadedness prevents the recall of how castling works, let alone more complex gambits.
Well done parody. I'm laughing
For a mediocre player like myself, the advent of chess software that understands the game at a deep GM level has made studying chess fun. I can play computer opponents over and over, rapidly trying out the variations and seeing the outcome. I can ask for help, I can see what I'm doing wrong. I can easily spend an hour solving chess puzzles that improve my tactics.
To me, really not a good player, I enjoy chess more than ever; the article seems not to understand how chess software impacts the game.
The game of chess has no doubt changed because of chess engines. And maybe for the negative at the top end. But I think you're right, it's probably a lot more positive change in the middle. I have long since known that I am not capable of beating a chess engine in regular play, but that doesn't mean I don't benefit from the loss.
Must be hard for a professional if you not only compete against human creativity but sheer computing power.
Just like Dall-E, it's fun if you can't paint not so much if it's your source of income.
Yes, the game is evolving. Two hundred years ago the queen could sometimes hop like a knight, depending where you played. Somewhere around hundred years before that, game description went from beautiful prose like "The white king commands his owne knight into the third house before his owne bishop" to much drier abbreviated form. And some decades ago computers began to become serious players.
All of these changes are interesting, worthy of discourse and not always for the better, but what is the authors actual point? Vague moral panic?
You are telling me single-minded, rote-learning based play is something that came about with engines and not with say, chess being used as a proxy fight in the Cold War or during the rise of the idea of actually treating chess players like athletes instead of calling them gamblers (like in Morphy's time)?
And how is chess like poker because of that? Because you can cheat and computers are good at it? I mean I can also use a modern tech to cheat at football, F1 racing, solitaire or coin-flipping..
Maybe someone can enlighten me what I am supposed to take away from this...
This doesn't seem to take into account that many people enjoy learning and memorizing sequences and tricks. It's actually fun to learn patterns and sequences that have clever underpinnings and lead to surprising results.
As another commenter said, there exist many variants exactly for the purpose of getting back to pure logic-level reasoning about positions. If that's what you want, go for it. Chess 960 for example is explicitly designed for that.
But despite the existence of all these variants and other games, people still predominantly continue to play 'Chess', with its classic starting position and rules, and I would suggest that one of the things that keeps drawing people back is that there is sufficient "space" in the game for life-long learning, while providing a common and stable "interface" that allows everyone to exchange knowledge and build up a shared experience of learning and mastery.
That on top of this there still most definitely exists a layer of strategy and "principles", not just memorization, is another aspect that will always draw people back to the game. A lot of these principles that have been developed and taught for hundreds of years go out the window with variants -- which is fine, it's fun to discover new games too, but sometimes you want to benefit from the knowledge and wisdom of experts, and the only way to do that is to play the same game as them.
Very well said. This is exactly why I prefer traditional Chess. I really enjoy the rich platform I can dig into for years and years. I'm not likely to ever pursue becoming a GM and I don't mind.
If the goal of playing chess is to develop, refine, and challenge one's own decision-making process in which someone can apply those principles elsewhere in life off-the-board, then cheating like this is cheating yourself.
If the goal of sports, like chess, is to inspire others in the human civilization on what's possible, to uplift everyone, to reflect the best of humankind, then cheating like this cheats all of us. We're basically saying the best of humankind cheats rather than demonstrating virtue and character through sportsmanship.
And lastly, in the domain of war and warfare, there's a proverb that, if you are not cheating, you're not trying hard enough.
The accusation was that IBM made modifications to Deep Blue between games. That's not cheating but then it's not exactly Deep Blue vs Kasparov anymore.
It’s a very small amount of people who have decided to consecrate an inordinate amount of time completely mastering a game and whose main focus in life is playing it competitively against each other.
It’s a lot like elite athletes but more nerdy and with longer career.
If anyone’s looking to pick up chess, it’s a pretty good time to do it even if the people making a living out if it aren’t enjoying it anymore. It used to be that computers would only crush you without helping, but now they’re able to point at your mistakes and show you where the game shifted from one player to the other.
Maybe what we need is to run it like duplicate bridge -- have tournaments where you face off against an opponent starting from a random position, that may be a winning or losing position, and see how you do against other players faced with the same setup.
I do admit though that watching top level chess is often times really boring. The moves are really predictable and at the same time really hard to understand. Blitz and Bullet games are actually far more enjoyable (when replayed on slower mode), because if a player makes an inaccuracy I can understand the punishing move (or it can be explained to me rather).
If you want a more dynamic board game though, I do recommend Go. I at least still enjoy watching top level go in a way that I don’t with chess.
But people who enjoy modern Western international chess seem to want to see that one single version of the game optimized. Which is fine, I suppose. Though it would be nice if we saw more alternatives (granted, there are currently some popular alternatives like blitz chess).
I don't know a single person who believes that Marcell Jacobs won the 100m dash in Tokyo legitimately, and that's a sad thing.
fyi poker gets mentioned in last paragraph and is barely even connected to chess.
ie, you can use AI to cheat in chess and poker, and there have been cheating scandals in both... therefore chess is poker now <question mark>
What's starting to shift in chess isn't tech but the culture, largely driven by the social media around it, the livestreaming medium where now much of it takes place in real time, and so on. Chess isn't becoming like poker, it's just becoming like any other sport that gets the entertainment sector treatment, including increasing amounts of drama.
It reminds me a little bit of a recent thread on how Substack allegedly revolutionized writing. There also it wasn't substack, which is basically a blog generator with a payment button, but the social networks around it that create all of the new dynamics. I expect a lot more cheating allegations, personal feuds, played up controversy not because of technology that affects the game itself but because of tech that changes how the game is broadcast and how people participate in it.
The author's premises are also highly exaggerated. For starters, the game of chess has not stopped evolving, because our chess engines continue to get stronger and stronger. The strongest engines of today can crush the older engines from a few years ago. This goes to show that even the elite machines haven't completely figured out chess; the smarter engines are going to continue to push the chess meta forward. In that sense, chess creativity and intuition hasn't stalled. We've just reached the point of collective knowledge that only machines can improve on chess theory.
Second, it's not like GMs are playing bad or losing moves to bluff the opponent. In most opening positions, there are at least 3 or 4 moves that could be played to still maintain winning or drawing positions. When GMs pick "suboptimal lines", they're picking maybe the 3rd or 4th best option that's still objectively a good and viable move from an engine's POV. Nobody is playing bad or losing moves on purpose, that simply does not work in chess.
Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory, there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now real games... are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.
~ John von Neumann
https://newsletter.altdeep.ai/p/how-poker-and-a-spaceship-im...
The dominance of computers has made human creativity redundant; optimal strategies for beating other humans ironically involve suboptimal moves that may have a psychological dimension, similar to poker. [This isn't actually a remotely new strategy though computers have influenced human play.]
Although the article doesn't directly reference it, Hans Niemann in his emotional interview reacting to the unevidenced accusations of him cheating against Carlsen pointed out that one "weak" move against another opponent in the tournament had been chosen by him specifically because of it's psychological pressure.
Update: Niemann interview link, as requested:
Is this the level of analysis expected from a grandmaster?
I guess someone needs to write an article Poker is Just Poker Now
Nobody plays perfectly. Engine prep only goes so far. The draw rates in chess are in part due to both sides being human; many opportunities are missed. An engine will tear apart any human even from an inferior position, so there's plenty of play in that margin
Here's a message- you get to be a serious authoritative news source, or you get to post unsubstantiated jokes about anal beads. You don't get to do both. Every single word in this article is untrustworthy now, because I don't know if it's serious, or just a reddit shitpost that The Atlantic decided to repeat.
If I am an ok player and memorize a complex line and a handful of tricks I can beat enough players to raise my rating. If I leave that line my rating will fall. Am I a better player?
The player rating systems might benefit from a “play style diversity” or “flexibility of approach” indicator to expose players that rely on one-weird-trick traps.
As for the rating system, ELO is very practical for matchmaking and numerous games have adopted it (including MOBAs, RTS, FPS games).
[1] https://thethoughtfulgamer.com/2017/03/09/first-order-optima...
Sure you can score based on flexibility, but the people who work hard on staying competitive knows at heart all ratings are just an approximation anyways. Just work on fundamentals, get good, and don't sweat the numbers. Not a problem worth fixing imo.
This is more what I wanted from the article: https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-carlsen-niemann-affair
Lack of any random element implies that the number of scenarios is finite; huge, very huge, but finite.
When matches were played by mail (mail as in postal service, not email), and the most passionate players subscribed to specialised paper magazines, it was a kind of huge that you could be excused for confusing with infinity.
But internet and computers have changed the playing field enormously, and now that huge has showed for what it always was: huge, but finite.
Chess is dead.
Also it sounds like should replace all of my servers with powerful shoe computers to take advantage of the "upgrades in commercial hardware" that they mentioned.
His peculiarly nervous and odd body language
Having jumped over 200 points in a few months, which is a world of difference up at ~2500
Fluttering and nonsense in post-interview trying to explain his moves and train of thought when playing
And the fact that he has been caught cheating twice recently
Generally both sides play to win, but if you play to draw instead (by playing 'sub-optimal' moves etc) you paradoxically have a better chance of winning.
From what I can understand, chess at the highest of human levels is just using an engine to find tricks and traps 30+ moves into a given match. Anywhere about 2000+ rating or above, most people will play a relatively fixed number of openings that have been explored to death time and time again. It's now about psychological hacks that can be be backed up by deep engine analysis. "If at move 45 in a Sicilian Dragon game I play sub-optimal move X instead of optimal move Y, my opponent might make a sub-optimal response which will open up a specific square or hang a piece 10 turns later according to AlphaZero or Stockfish".
I can see why Magnus is kind of bored by it.
To me, Fisher Random (Chess960) solves this by eliminating opening theory almost entirely. Crazyhouse Chess is also a blast, but it too is hampered by theory as there are fewer competent opening moves than standard chess and there's even less room for creativity. Crazyhouse960 is by far my favorite variation of chess, because there's no endgame to solve towards and little to none opening theory to draw from. Shame nobody plays it these days - if you're so inclined, come join over at PyChess.org and play a few rounds!
Chess and poker both require memorization or at least very strong understanding of the early game. In chess this is openings and has been required for as long as I can remember. In poker this is preflop play. Poker extends this a bit into flop play, but already on the flop there is a lot of opportunity for creativity because there are countless strategies that are indistinguishable from one another within reasonable precision targets.
As you descend deeper into the game tree for turn and river play we enter into territory that cannot be memorized due to number of possibilities and the increasing impossibility of having perfectly executed all the way to the current decision point. This opens up a lot of room for creativity and exploitation.
In the highest levels of chess, psychological fortitude and physical fitness are also important.
The whole idea in poker is to make the most right plays that on average should get you the win. Its management to chances.
There are no hidden information in chess, if you play better moves you will win.
And while there are factors that affect selection of best chess moves, you can hardly claim that the other guy got lucky.
While poker does have a significant element of chance in a given hand, it's no accident that top players consistently make more money over the long run.
Knowing how much to bet based on your odds of winning a hand, figuring out what your opponent's hands could be based on how they're betting, etc. all take skill. There's a reason poker AI can consistently beat humans over the long run, a feat that would be impossible if poker was all about chance.
In fact, poker AI was a difficult area to create software in precisely because the game is one of imperfect information.
That's a good point about the cash game format.
But tournament format often forces players into multiple all-ins over the course of the tournament. This leads to a much more luck based outcome.
Has this actually been verified, at least in the modern era (last 10 or so years)? Yes, you see the same guys on TV and to a lesser extent, final-tabling multiple tournaments. But these guys are often on TV because they are entertaining, not necessarily great (or consistently-winning) players. They typically all have external sources of income (sponsorships, poker training, commentary, casino ambassador, company owners, etc) and most reduce volatility by buying and trading pieces of each others' action. In addition, for tournaments, some guys are able to simply enter way more events, which naturally leads to more final tables, but you're not seeing all the losses and bust outs.
All I'm saying is that it's not the same as the 70s through 90s where the skill gap was so huge that yes, certain players could (especially by going on the road and playing private games) absolutely dominate. I think winning consistently today is more of an illusion and some short-term luck.
Winning consistently today relies on being as close as you can to this "game-theory optimal" strategy. As skill gaps decrease chance certainly plays a larger role, but AI analysis of poker has indicated that there are ways to improve your odds and gain an edge.
Maybe you missed it. Humans are now using deceit to trick opponents trained by AI. While they may not "look at" their opponent, they are using similar strategies deployed in poker such as bluffing/misdirection/cloaking etc.
If this were true, then the recurrent Pocker champions must be the luckiest persons in the world, luck is undoubtedly an element, but there are many ways to influence other variables of the game.
"In that context, cheating scandals may be nothing less than a natural step in chess’s evolution. Poker, after all, has been rocked by allegations of foul play for years, including cases where players are accused of getting help from artificial intelligence. When the highest form of creativity is outfoxing your opponent—as has always been true of poker—breaking rules seems only natural."
I'm ruling this "clickbait" because while the core idea is reasonable, that is clearly a very weak way of phrasing it solely done to be in service of a clickbait title. Without the need for clickbait it's trivial to phrase that in a better way.
Poker on the other hand, by being random, means that you can mindlessly play the mathematically optimal strategy. Eventually your opponent will be put in a tough spot by pure randomness.
The difference is that chess is deterministic and poker is not. Chess skill means being able to forcefully convert a winning or drawing position. Poker skill means optimizing your chances of winning.
Not only is it possible to beat weaker opponents in chess by playing the best moves (contrary to your assertion), it happens all the time over the board. Weaker players are more likely to play moves that transforms the chess game from a win/draw to a draw/loss for them. There isn't a single human or engine alive that can consistently secure a draw against every opponent.
And it's possible for a poker player to mindlessly play the mathematically optimal move and still lose. Poker IS a game a chance, so they could just get unlucky.
It is decidedly not skill.
Physical "tells" are largely a myth in poker, particularly in high-level poker. Please don't speculate wildly on things with at most a novice-level understanding.