Why isn't chess popular in Japan?
lichess.org
lichess.org
If you want to play chess-meets-shogi, try the 'Crazyhouse' variant on lichess. I'm often fighting anonymous bullet games while waiting for CI pipelines to finish..
Another problem with Crazyhouse is that you can’t easily play it with a physical chess set. You can only play online, which some of us find hard to enjoy.
[1] http://shogi.pl/ [2] https://disboard.org/server/653255438904590372
- Shops become corporatized, elbow out the mom and pops, and try to minimize loitering. This is combined with the decline of malls in some countries so there isn't really a "hang out" place anymore - community centers shrank and closed down, with the reamining becoming more focused on parents and children, so not quite a place for some 20/30s age single people to mingle. - decline in religious beliefs kn the newer generations mean church or similar sorts of groups aren't an option.
In other words, If you're single and not into a bar scene, the Third Place is nearly impossible to find these days. There are still in theory plenty of places left that I didn't list, but my personal experience reflects a lot of "Bowling Alone". I can be in a cafe or gym, but I haven't felt I was a part of a social experience in such environments since college. It's no different from being behind someone at a cash register; maybe I can get some small talk, but it never translates to a continuing friendship.
> Examples of third places include churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, gyms, bookstores, stoops and parks. In his book The Great Good Place (1989), Ray Oldenburg argues that third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place.
I wonder if there is an online example as well for something like this. I was tempted to say something like forums but I don't think that's the case.
On top of that parks don’t tend to have that many tables (Yoyogi exists but Yoyogi is one park).
Community spaces kinda work but you need a quorum of people who live in the ward, so there’s some startup difficulties there.
Chess isn’t that popular but it’s a hell of a lot easier in many places to just take over a space during sleepy weekend AMs.
It also doesn’t help that my impression of Japan when I went there, was that a lot of these small businesses have room for maybe a dozen people at best.
Coffee shops are smaller these days, but for a small group it can work.
> The coolest month is January, averaging 5.4 °C
Doesn’t sound very cold to me. If anything, I’ve only heard complaints about how hot it often is in Tokyo (and most of Japan, except Hokkaido).
Brisbane has "Comfortable" temperature every single day of the year. Tokyo's winter is cold and Tokyo's summer is hot.
I meant chill in the “not caring that you are playing chess in the place”. Most cafes or restaurants here have express rules against playing card games or the like at tables, for example (for good reason)
This is more of a problem in high traffic areas ofc, but like on the weekend _lots of places_ are high-traffic.
Ultimately the deeper problem is that places like cafes and restaurants are mostly "give us money so we can pay the building's rent". The margins are super thin from the get-go, and rent is so high that places really really really need to cycle through people during peak hours.
High rent means smaller restaurants, means that (say) 4 tables locked in for a long period is a much bigger deal, and the variability is a much higher problem.
Of course if you go to a place that's very empty from the get go and is pretty big, people don't really care. Just that there aren't that many places like that in major traffic centers.
See https://www.tokyocheckmates.com/ for more info.
Got obliterated.
Also then started playing Shogi with him for the first time and while it didn't take that long to triumph with an all pawns handicap, after much effort finally reached being able to win including rooks/bishops. But it was obviously basically cheating since eventually you realize how easy it is to win with handicap be just putting 100% into defense.
Anyways, with those games to me it really felt that Shogi is the more strategic game, having similar mechanics to chess but being more dynamic. Chess in the end, even looking at GM matches, looks like much more pattern matching, i.e., tactics.
So my takeaway from that was that as much as I enjoy chess, Shogi is just the more complex game and its experts may just be able to defeat masters if they cared to because of the otherwise similar mechanics, as one of the anecdotes in the article.
Random share this is just personal but honest feeling from past experience and not an endorsement. Really fun memories.
I've got to admit, since I got kids I moved back from go to chess. Somehow it's more accessible, because everybody here knows chess.
In general I think the two are of comparable popularity in Japan, but I wouldn’t be surprised if real yakuza people do like and play Shogi much more than Go.
The length of the game is also something easily tweaked, just default the board size to 9x9 and offer 13x13 and 19x19.
Obviously they weren't trying to paper over that it was mainly an old person's game in Japan at the time (I would assume it still is, too). But that didn't make it seem less appealing.
Also, the portrayal of foreigners in that series is worth a study in itself.
Chess Shogi Go
Board Size 8x8 9x9 19x19
Branching Factor 35 92 250
Complexity 10^123 10^226 10^360We discuss the numbers for Go in the introduction of our paper https://matthieuw.github.io/go-games-number/AGoogolplexOfGoG...
I find it slightly odd that the game length is calibrated to "reasonable" games but the branching factor is not.
If the goal is to estimate the number of possible games of go, then the calculation would be dominated by the number of long games rather than the number of short games, and very long games are possible.
If the goal is to estimate the number of "reasonable" games of go, then the branching factor should also be much smaller, as most possible moves are not reasonable. Perhaps the logarithm of the branching factor could be estimated as the entropy of some policy model such at that of KataGo.
P.S. I am happy to have received a reply from the mighty Tromp!
PS: I just called Yoshio Kimura "a shogi player" because I don't know anything about shogi, but apparently he was a big deal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshio_Kimura_(shogi)
Beyond that it seems likely that dice games from e.g. Romans, Egyptians, Assyrians were likely the first to spread as those empires spread and the soldiers who played them played them with locals.
According to [1], in Japan, 4.5M people play Mahjong (in Japan you can assume Mahjong means Riichi Mahjong), 5M people play Shogi, and only 1.5M play Go.
Interestingly 21M (!) people play family games, which means party video games, e.g. Mario Kart.
[1]: https://note.com/hasimo1000year/n/n06989a252aa2, it's a random Mahjong player's blog, but it quotes the data allegedly from [2]
By whom?
He certainly had his insanities but some accounts say he was quite sane in his later years, and it must be amusing to be possibly the GOAT and living incognito in a place where chess wasn’t played much.
They also like Go, which I hate.
Absolutely love Mahjong, though. (Thanks Yakuza series!)
To each their own... :-)
What I like about Go, is its combination of simple rules, contrasted with the rich set of ever-more advanced tactics. And (using handicaps) players of different skill can still enjoy a somewhat-balanced game.
There are just a few basic rules (board sizes, placement of stones, groups, freedoms, atari, capture) that are easily explained. Beginners may think it's a simple game then. Wrong!
From these follow more basic concepts like eyes, living/dead groups, effect of corners vs. edges vs. center, snapbacks, etc.
And then you get into more advanced tactics like netting, semi-connected groups, forcing moves, thin/thick positions, Ko fights, responding to opponent vs. just leaving a position as-is & play elsewhere on the board, etc.
Strong players can read ahead further than weaker players, or play more from their intuition ("that position looks weak, let's step in there & take some territory" style).
This is what makes it interesting computationally: it's difficult to evaluate positions, to put a number on how good a move is (although experienced players can easily spot a bad move when they see one), or getting a grip on the # of possible board positions.
So it could take a lifetime to master Go. AlphaGo has thrown another curveball into this.
Other games add complexity through their ruleset, board or # of pieces. Kind of: mastering the rules of the game, vs. mastering the game itself.
So because of that, I refuse to play it. :P
https://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPoss...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230908050506/https://lichess.o...
I live in Yokohama. I wasn’t aware of any chess clubs near me, but a web search turns up one in Yokohama [1] and one in neighboring Kawasaki [2]; there are more than twenty others nationwide [3].
This contrasts, though, with the much larger number of go clubs. There seem to be over thirty in Yokohama alone, including at least three within walking distance of my home. Some go clubs are small, like one on the fourth floor of a building a few blocks away [4], while others are quite large [5].
I learned how to play go in the U.S. in the late 1970s. For a few years after I moved to Japan in 1983, I sometimes played in go clubs around Tokyo. They were an interesting scene: smoke-filled rooms full of middle-aged and older men, many of whom seemed to spend all day every day there, playing game after game. There wasn’t much talking or socializing; often two people would play an entire game without exchanging more than a word or two.
The first go club I ventured into, before I could speak much Japanese, was in Kabukicho on the edge of the redlight district. It was livelier than the ones I went to later, perhaps because, unlike most other go clubs, it served alcohol and was open all night. It seems to have moved to a new location deeper into Kabukicho, surrounded by bars and love hotels [6].
I never got very strong at go—maybe 4 or 5 kyu—and I haven’t played a regular game in many years. But recently, at my daughter’s request, I have started teaching my grandson how to play. It will be interesting to see if he likes it. If he does, I might show him chess, too.
[3] https://japanchess.org/clublist/
[4] https://www.google.co.jp/maps/@35.4749685,139.6245706,3a,75y...
[5] https://www.yokohamaigosalon.com/%E3%83%9B%E3%83%BC%E3%83%A0
[6] https://www.google.com/maps/@35.6962023,139.7020693,3a,75y,9...
Shogi is inferior though to Chess because it takes too long to play with the pieces being returnable.
Go is definitely better than all of them though, at least for me, and yet it's less popular than any game of chess in any country.
Go is not less popular than Chess in China or Korea
I don't know which game of chess is popular in Korea, western or Chinese ones? Or is there a Korean variant? About the popularity of Go/Baduk there I was told that it was because of the three years of mandatory military service and the availability of go boards in the barracks.
Korea has its own variant of Chinese chess, with some interesting rules like the Elephant being allowed to cross the water. Go (Baduk) is absolutely more popular than Chinese/Korean Chess in Korea and definitely more than western Chess
Why do people always put things in hierarchy or in better/worse?
Just give your opinion, apples are not better than oranges.
I don't even play chess or shoji.
He said the openings were all really routine/reactive, and the endgame was way too much chasing. To him, it was fairly obvious who was going to win after the midgame if it isn't evenly matched, but you're still spending most of the time repeating the same moves to advance pawns and pretty much waiting for mistakes in the endgame.
Xiangqi has a much more tactical opening, longer more varied midgame, and usually the game ends pretty quickly if someone has an advantage coming out of midgame, but otherwise at least the endgame doesn't get repetitive. But also because no matter how far behind you are in the endgame, you're still a threat because of the flying general rule so it doesn't feel as bad being on defensive.
Openings in normal chess are indeed pointless memorization. I would never have gotten into chess as well, if i had to memorize openings. However Chess960 nowadays exists, and it is thriving. Granted 15 years ago, no one played that variant.
Chess 960 expands the surface area of opening move possibilities by a factor of a thousand (960 to be more accurate). So if someone wants to memorize openings for 1 move, i.e. 2 plys, he has to memorize 2.000 possibilities. If someone wants to memorize 3 moves ahead, i.e. 6 plys, he has to memorize 6.000 possibilities.
In normal chess memorizing ten or fifteen moves ahead (i.e. 20 or 30 plys) is pretty much the norm.
>and the endgame was way too much chasing.
With all due respect to your dad, that's nonsense. Endgames almost always have the potential to outsmart and outmanoeuvre the opponent, like any other part of the game.
See a game [1] i played against goga-magoga ranked 200 in the site, in which for 70 moves i was always losing or equal, and i won the last 3 moves. Endgames are so unintuitive, almost like programming, that even the best players in the world get confused and fatigued by the complexity.
In an evenly matched endgame, sure. I think those endgames are fun, but rare when playing in person since there's usually a skill mismatch. He was complaining about the typical game where there's a mismatched endgame where one side has an obvious advantage but there's still a bunch of chase to close out the game.
There's no doubt that the endgame can get complex, but with chess a different kind of problem solving than the rest of the game and one that I understand why people don't find it fun.
I always thought there was a bit of irony with how much he disliked the chess endgame, because he was hopelessly addicted to playing go which is not that unlike to a pawns-only chess endgame in thinking.
That's why the endgame is called the technical part of the game. More like an electrician connecting electrodes together, or maybe programming, the end result might be beautiful, regardless of some boring moments.
googles
Oh, Fischer Random Chess. Except Bobby Fischer made some Nazi-level antisemitic comments, so new name. 960 because of 960 possible starting layouts. So, Chess960 it is, then.
Also most everyone plays time controls that completely avoid this.
Feels like people are reaching for reasons to dislike it here. It’s the most balanced and fun game I’ve found, and these issues ring totally hollow I think to anyone who plays it regularly.
There are some other issues you could point out, but they mostly exist entirely in classical time controls, or perhaps if you enjoy a less rigid and punishing game.
Obviously for a hobbyist player the experience is very different from people learning the ropes. Think the "kid playing against his dad at the cottage" experience. The kind of people who don't know any named openings other than the scholar's mate. The kind of players that don't know their own ELO.
This is the onboarding experience.
However, the opening can be very slow if both players play defensively.