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Comment by yarg | Hacker News Reader

I kinda agree with Bobby on that front:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P349BdHUxlc&t=0s

There's too much that's simply memorisation over skills, deep lines leading you down well traversed paths.

Creativity and ingenuity suffer.

The only real option* if you want interesting games is to make intentionally bad moves so that theory falls apart, and that's only an option against weaker players.

You can play with the more restricted time controls - but that only mixes things up by forcing mistakes, not by introducing well considered novel moves.

* There's always Fischer random.

https://thechessworld.com/articles/openings/5-chess-openings...

There's probably a limit as to how bad a move you want to make: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes_Opening

You're probably better of going with dubious openings, rather than actively bad: https://lichess.org/study/FzX9K6ff.

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There's too much that's simply memorisation over skills, deep lines leading you down well traversed paths.
Creativity and ingenuity suffer.

The only real option if you want interesting games is to make intentionally bad moves so that theory falls apart, and that's only an option against weaker players.

Did you watch the world championship this year? It did not at all fit your narrative. The games were very exciting. The players were out of prep early and often. There were a lot of chances being taken, blunders, and mistakes. All this from 2800-level players.

I think people may soon realize that computers can be used for more than just preparing deep lines on well-trodden ground. They can also be used to find the shortest path off the beaten track and into a jungle of a midgame where you and your opponent can just play some chess. I love it!

> There were a lot of chances being taken, blunders, and mistakes. All this from 2800-level players.,.

OK, so fucking up accidentally can also make for an interesting game, but that hardly shatters my "narrative".

They made these blunders because they were in very unfamiliar, double-edged positions. Yes, sometimes nerves got involved but sometimes the positions were just very sharp and complex and they couldn’t find the engine line.

Also, a lot of those engine lines would’ve just made a draw, something a human player would never do when they’re playing with the white pieces in a need-to-win game.

Eh. I don’t care about the chess world champions. I’m not playing them. RTS games suffer a similar problem.

Until you become extremely proficient, you have basically no room to use novel strategies. You will lose to people with better execution on established strategies. And so you don’t do anything but grind execution and it’s pretty boring.

Chess isn’t quite this bad, but I find it pretty boring after a while.

The flip side to your comment, though, is that chess can be highly entertaining for people just getting started, who neither know any established openings or play lines, nor are playing against opponents who do... which describes the vast majority of newcomers to the game.

I would argue that you can get to approaching 1500 ELO without really knowing any theory at all, and just focusing on what "feels" like appropriate control of the board & game dynamics... and again, the vast majority of casual players will likely never move beyond that. But it's still fun, especially when they're able to challenge friends between classes to 3 or 5 minute matches.

I agree. Novice chess is great. Especially with local peers. I find it loses its appeal pretty quick when you start playing in a system like lichess however. Once you stop progressing quickly which is probably around a month or three of interested play.

That may not hold if it’s an established form of social competition where you can earn prestige by being good at it within your local peer group. It would be nice to see more intellectual challenges take that role among young people.

Ofcourse making bad moves will hurt your chances of winning, but Hikaru was able to speedrun to 3000 points on chess.com with the bongcloud opening. So if that is achievable then I have no excuses losing because I chose a bad opening.

You can play dubious openings and do fine all the way up to middling grandmaster level.

Memorisation is not at all important for learning to play chess. It won't make you better at the game. Training your pattern recognition, your positional/endgame/opening understanding will.

Until you're around 1500 real life ELO(which takes years for most people), all you have to do is play the game and enjoy it, analyse it with the opponent or other friends from the club. No memorisation required.

I'd disagree. If you play a line like the Englund Gambit, you are going to get trounced.

A lot of times, Memorization isn't even needed. People develop mental shortcuts for calculation in positional, endgame, and middle game sections.

Things like forcing doubled pawns on the C/F files (depending on your color), calculating whether you can promote before the king can catch up (that triangle strategy). Lucena and a few others.

With a solid opening repertoire that's chosen to force certain openings/sublines you can limit the study needed significantly (and shoot to the moon rating wise).

Sure if you play a bad opening, you'll get problems. Especially if it's just a one trick pony. When I say dubious opening I mean the kind top grandmasters rarely play. I play the Modern Benoni with black. Sure it's dubious and white can get a pretty big advantage. But it's an opening with absolutely endless complexity in terms of the middle games that can arise. It's sharp, difficult to play for both sides, and I enjoy these positions and have played them for years now, with probably thousands of blitz games in the Benoni, and quite a few classical tournament games under my belt. I think all in all I've memorised maybe two or three lines back when I started playing it. The rest is all just my experience and intuition for the various set ups. And guess what, the lines I memorised? They hardly ever occur, because my white opponents never know them and they're the kond of thing you're not gonna find over the board, which is why I memorised them. And I win most of my games in the modern benoni at the 1800 FIDE level.

Point is memorisation is pointless. The way to study an opening is to understand the ideas, possible endgames, tactical and various structures that can arise.

There is a chess variant called Progressive Chess, where the number of moves per turn increases with each turn. In this variant, White starts with one move, then Black plays two moves, White plays three moves, and so on. The players alternate turns, and each time they play, they make one more move than their previous turn. This creates a unique strategic dynamic and requires players to think differently than in traditional chess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_chess

I almost never play chess, but when I play chess I usually play this variant, because it's faster and people don't have any tactics memorised. I'm not even sure if it's possible to memorise in the same manner as regular chess.

> There's too much that's simply memorisation over skills, deep lines leading you down well traversed paths.

And yet, game 2 of the world championship there was a novelty on move 4.

I kind of feel if you think this then you've approached chess all wrong.

Your moves are all about controlling your opponents influence and responses while developing your pieces before situating for a breakthrough or attack.

Interesting games only really happen with decently skilled opponents who know the theory as well as you. The game often only starts getting interesting after move 16+.

Dubious moves and openings are a surefire way to lose.

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