How to learn chess as an adult (2021)
alexcrompton.com
alexcrompton.com
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-chess-with-dr-wolf/id135...
It's got a beautiful UI, and it's a conversational chess tutor that goes over the basics, tactics, advanced strategy and with whom you can play and will point out mistakes and blunders for later review. Perhaps it is too basic for anybody that has a few hundred games of chess under their belt but if you know nothing about the game, it is a great way to get into it. As the author say, low level chess is about learning patterns and short-term strategy (what should I do the opening, how to checkmate with a rook, etc.) and this app teaches exactly that, in a gradual way.
Not affiliated, just a happy and now paying user.
We both really enjoy playing the game at our absolute best when I start the game less one rook, knight, bishop, and two pawns. I'm not a great chess player though.
Anyway, more to your question, finding a way to play Go in person is such a game-changer, literally.
1) Playing lots of games (https://online-go.com and https://gokgs.com are good for this). I usually have a few correspondence games going and then try to play a normal speed game daily. Don't worry about winning and losing, just play. Begin to internalize how standard tactics reappear regularly on the board.
2) Do tsumego (life and death) a lot. But don't just try things and see what happens. Try to read out the entire sequence before looking at the answer. (SmartGo One is a good app). Cho Chikun's beginner ones are good [1]. Try to work on a subset of problems (<100) until you can just look at the formation for a few seconds and see the answer. Play out all sequences to really understand why they don't work. Getting the answer isn't really the point, it's that you internalize the tactics involved in all tsumego.
3) As someone who spent WAY too much time reading books about Go strategy and tactics before I could barely play the game: don't do that. Books become much more useful once you are a SDK (single digit kyu) player. Until then, just play and study life and death. Reading books isn't bad, it just isn't that helpful when you can get beat in a game because you don't have the basic tactics down.
But what if I don’t know how to do anything else? I’ve learned the basic rules but struggle really hard even figuring out what’s a legal move.
I can't stress enough the need to just play games. Have fun. If you don't enjoy it you won't keep doing it, so don't stress out about "doing the right thing." Just try stuff and see if it works. If it doesn't, oh well. Don't do that next time. I know I said "don't just try things" above, but that was specifically in learning to read life-and-death problems. At your level you should just be having fun playing games right now. Life-and-death problems can be boring (but necessary) for a lot of players so the important thing right now is that you enjoy playing. The other stuff will come along naturally as you develop the desire to get better.
Oh, and don't play against AI (even weak ones). They don't play like normal humans and will just confuse you more than help. At much higher levels, AI has been very helpful in finding new tactics and strategies that more optimal, but at your level, playing other humans will get you better much faster.
You should totally do the tactics and puzzles that you can find (that same site has a bunch), but there's a lot more strategic recognition and pattern-matching in go than chess.
I'm also interested to hear if there are better tools though in the last .. Christ, twenty years? I'm old now -.-
If looking for a book. Cho Chikun's life & death corner problems progress in a systematic manner from beginner to dan level.
Also https://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPoss...
This seems like a wild claim. On chess.com I've gone from 500 to ~1050 in a handful of months without any real study, just some light YouTube watching. 500->800 felt like all it took was learning a few openings and not blundering pieces. 800-1050 felt like it came mostly from getting familiar with the common patterns from those openings that led to advantages/disadvantages. Most of my learning here came from reviewing my own games and trying to understand why my mistakes were mistakes.
I don't understand how people learn from slamming blitz/bullet games. The time constraints are too rushed to really think about what makes a move good or bad. I assumed it was a young person's thing, but the author said he plays these quick formats too.
Getting to 2000 rating is going to be quite a mountain to climb for you, unless you’re very young.
[1] https://github.com/jcw024/lichess_database_ETL/blob/main/REA...
This is since ratings only measure player's performance relative to other players in the same poll. A lot more people (and a lot more begineers) play online than in FIDE rated tournaments. So playing poll in tournaments is stronger than online playing poll, so even if we assume same rating system in all cases, players will have lower ratings in tournament play than online.
What complicates matters further is that playing polls aren't totally unified - in FIDE Elo ratings it's possible to see regional differences (indians for example are in general underrated), since playing poll is segmented by distance (due to travel costs not a lot of players play internationally). Additionally COVID19 made a total mess of ratings, since there was not enough events last few years, so majority of younglings are underrated due to not playing enough rated games, while improving as fast as the previous generation.
FIDE is currently deciding on rating reform, which will be implemented in january, trying to handle this situation.
What complicates matters even more is that FIDE Elo algorithm is not optimized for accuracy, but for calculations by hand (try calculating glicko2 rating change without computer!), so glicko2 more accurately predicts player performance.
And finally, time controls differ a lot between online and tournament play. Online even 5minutes feels slow, while in tournaments 90min+30sec/move is one of shorter time controls. Performance between slow and fast play is in general correlated, but this correlation is weaker at higher ratings (since both sides of the game have some non-transferable skills, so blitz specialists for example exists).
Of course, Hikaru has admitted that he deliberately works to inflate his online rating and has talked about the differences in the rules/mechanics online. For him, the lack of an increment in his online games (FIDE over the board blitz has an increment) and his well-practiced mouse skills help him a lot. Hikaru can flag a lot of people from a losing position, so he gets many more wins than he would have over the board. He also says he deliberately “farms” lower rated players to boost his rating by a small amount, and avoids games against dangerous opponents who are underrated (due to a lack of online play).
Higher rated players tend to be closer to their potential than lower rated ones, leaving less room for improvement, in any sport. They also will be more likely to get worse over time because, the nearer to the top, the more roads lead you downwards.
You’d have to pick a very peculiar metric to measure performance to compensate for that.
Yes, people have a skill ceiling. However, it’s not something you’re ever going to get to by just playing most games.
People naturally improve at games when they start playing. Some factors being more familiarity with the game, and making less mistakes. However, people will stall out at different ratings at that point.
However, if you do deliberate practice in the game you will absolutely continue to get better. If you’re practicing specific scenarios, have focused areas of improvement, coaching, analyze your own replays, record your practice, and watch it: You will improve.
Yes, abstractly a “skill ceiling” out there exists for you, but you’re extremely unlikely to ever reach it in a game of skill unless you’re trying to go pro in it.
If putting time in were all that were required to reach your skill ceiling, we would have way more League of Legends Grandmasters. Unless you assume the people that go pro are all just more talented, and that their practice doesn’t make a difference.
I play chess and the GM level is above the skill cap of some talented people who have put in dedicated practice since a child and are a full time professional dedicated player as an adult. The median talent at full time dedication for their whole life wouldn't reach that level, and no one who only started the game at age 20 has ever reached that level regardless of natural talent. Some of the most famous players never attain that level, including some full time professional players that are known figures today (like Eric Rosen) and historical chess theory leaders (like Jeremy Silman).
And in practice "just" GM level isn't even good enough to be a top tier player: the top 100 players can trounce the lowest GMs.
I would assume the same applies to any other game/sport that has the cache for people to train at it from childhood like Tennis, Basketball, etc.
I strongly disagree. I think that, for a given amount of effort (hours and study intensity) you’re willing to spend, everybody has a ceiling that they can reach. If what you say is true, why hasn’t Magnus Carlsen reached ELO 2900? Lack of deliberate practice? ELO deflation requiring players to get better to keep the same rating?
Ignoring that, the discussion isn’t whether you’ll continue getting better, but whether you’ll keep improving at the same rate.
> Unless you assume the people that go pro are all just more talented, and that their practice doesn’t make a difference.
I don’t see how that follows. I think the top is both extremely talented, extremely motivated, and physically strong enough to do the hours of concentrated practice.
I think it’s easier to see in physical sports. If you’re 2m tall and have enough motor skills to run and catch a ball, you’ll likely be ‘good’ at basketball in high school, even if you don’t practice much or well. To make it in the NBA, you have to be 2m tall _and_ have above average motor skills _and_ be above average robust, so that you can play x games a year without getting injured, _and_ be more willing to exercise than mossy to get stronger and more agile _and_ be above average good at reading the game.
I disagree with your disagreement, because simply controlling for total studying time and intensity is too reductionist. Different players have different sticking points when it comes to chess, e.g. weak strategic planning, weak tactics, poor positional understanding, bad endgames, etc. Your implicit assumption is that most players at some playing strength, are at that playing strength in all aspects of their game. In practice, that's simply not the case for many.
To give a concrete example, my classical rating on lichess hovers around 1800, but if you look at my tactics puzzle rating it's well above 2000, suggesting it's the positional and strategic aspects of the game that I'm weak at, which anecdotally feels true based on how I both win and lose most of my games. If I were to get a coach or deliberately work on those weaker aspects of my game myself (something I have not done), so that they're no longer the bottleneck of my performance, I could very well break this rating plateau I've been stuck in for the past half decade or so, and shoot up another 100 or even 200 points. I also have a friend of similar strength level, who has the opposite profile as me: strong positional and strategic understanding, weak tactics. And despite more or less an even record, whenever we play against each other, his wins are almost always grinds, while my wins are usually some tactical shot he missed or blundered into.
The bottom line is, at my strength level, and I'd hypothesize even up to the low to mid-2000s rating levels, these unbalanced types of players are probably more common than balanced players with similar ratings in all aspects of their game to their overall rating. The latter kind, you might be able to argue, have reached their natural ceiling; but even here I'd be surprised if they cannot improve more by deliberately strengthening aspects of their game. Conversely, based on my experience of 10+ years playing chess regularly, the vast majority of players simply don't have a good understanding of their own weaknesses. Many unbalanced players like myself, with the correct type of training and practice, even if total time isn't too much, can absolutely make significant improvements to their overall performance.
>If what you say is true, why hasn’t Magnus Carlsen reached ELO 2900? Lack of deliberate practice? ELO deflation requiring players to get better to keep the same rating?
In the case of top-level IMs, GMs, and certainly super GMs, who don't have glaring weaknesses in any aspects of their game, it's likely the case that they indeed did reach their ceiling. But these are the only people I'd be at all confident in making such claims.
You mean, "unless you have unlimited time."
You should learn endgame and tactics, the basics of opening and maybe a few openings. endgame will teach chess. openings teaches you openings. especially when you're a beginner people will make moves that don't make sense. Plus aren't there like over 4 or 5 quadrillion possible moves just within the first 10 moves?
The minute you stop blundering pieces you find yourself in a nearly even endgame.
For example, if you're an 1. e4 e5 player you'll want to learn how to counter the Fried Liver attack, as it's one of the most popular lines at the beginner to intermediate level.
You don't need to know many lines 7 moves deep either, just a couple of moves is already very helpful.
I do only play for fun / to kill time, though. So a few games a day on a metro or whatever. So with no aspirations to actually improve I think I'm at the peak of my natural ability.
Is rating on chess.com similar to rating in lichess? The article mentions 1%, but you start with 1500 in lichess??? If you lose often, you quickly go down. But if you keep an even record, you stay in 1500.
I don't understand how people learn from slamming blitz/bullet games.
As in the article, speed training helps recognizing patterns and dealing with them. At first it seems impossible to play significant moves with so little time, but you can try to just doing it. You'll adapt very soon.
I recommend starting with blitz 3+2 and later bullet 2+1. There are tournaments of 1+0... or even less time. 30 seconds is really crazy.
300 cc should be similiar to around 800 lichess. Around 2000-2200 ratings even out on both sites and on higher ratings lichess ratings tend to be lower than on cc.
For improving longer time controls are better. The old adage, that if you want to play blitz better you should play rapid and that if you want to improve rapid you should play classical is still valid today. Blitz is beneficial only at higher rating ranges (2000+) to allow practising openings, and even that only in moderation. Players who don't play classical time controls (90min+30sec/move at least) tend to plateau around 2000-2200 online.
This ofc doesn't mean that blitz isn't fun - vast majority of my games are in blitz time controls.
800 is very low in Lichess. If you can think just two moves ahead without losing pieces, you get 1000 easily.
For improving longer time controls are better.
Yes and no. There are different aspects to the game. Every variety is good for something.
After playing a lot of bullet, I win easily in blitz just because the time advantage. But the reverse is also true. After playing more slower games, my fast games get better.
And there are some parts of the game that you just need to sit down with a book and a couple of boards.
Is that actually true? You start at a 1500 in lichess, but that is a provisional rating and the outcome of your first few games are going to cause BIG swings in your rating. After your rating is no longer a provisional rating then that is going to slow down.
Losing a few games at the start might take a lot more wins to "even out" in rating. Just keeping an even record might not be enough to stay 1500.
The rating algorithm is suppossed to be predictive. It's only natural that the first data points cause big swings, but the amplitude will narrow after a few games.
Then, providing you win the same number of games that you lose, you stabilize. Will you keep around 1500? I think so, because the algorithm selects oponents with similar rating and with my own mediocre ratings over 1500, lichess tells me that I'm better than 60% of blitz players and 65% of bullet players.
There's a caveat though. Ratings in Lichess are not "lineal". There are annoying discontinuities. I get stuck at some level but, if I manage to go up 50 points, I get easier (but better rated) oponents and raise another 100 points. Conversely, if I get down a certain level, I can expect to sink even more.
But he studied, and studied, and last I knew he was 3 dan, which is about the point you can entertain the idea of becoming a pro (if I just worked harder).
Kids have a lot more free time to sink into a singular concern. Warnings about how something are out of the reach of adults aren’t actually hard rules, they’re just really good rules of thumb. But if you can make the time, it’s not impossible.
I don’t think chess is any different there. Small improvements may set reasonable expectations, but there are people who can blow right past them.
Being bad at Go and still playing anyway was an exercise in personal growth.
You can check that on https://europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/ and pick some players at random.
They have a nice date/rank graph and all those graphs start with an almost vertical growth which slows down and flattens. Some players play less often and get weaker but that's not the point.
I have no idea if it applies to chess too, possibly with different parameters, but why not? They are both games played with the brain by humans.
One question is what happens if you pair two of the top performers or two of the bottom ones? My prediction is that nothing changes.
The second one is related to the point of my comment. Can you build a graph date/performance? That could show curves similar to the ones of the go players and show how long it takes to flatten the curve.
As for pairing the two lowest producers, they'll sink even more as they are confused by what the other person is doing and it slows them down.
Changing someone's level of productivity is essentially untrainable in my experience. It's not a training issue. The people at the bottom know how to do the work, but any attempt to show them a more efficient way of doing it is overwhelming and confusing to them, and they shut down.
Ultimately, I think this is what's often downplayed in these conversations. Just because your friend was able to excel at Go in those 15 years, doesn't imply that any other specific person would be able to do the same, even with the same study. You'll find many people who attempted this but simply couldn't get past a lower plateau.
So, when you say "if you can make the time, it’s not impossible", I'm not sure that that's true. My suspicion would be that for a significant portion of the population, it would in fact be literally impossible. (edit: I was reading a different thread where somebody was asking about becoming a FIDE CM, that's what I was referencing here as being impossible for many, I don't know anything about Go ranks).
There are certainly people who need new genes. And there are people who need a new teacher. But boy oh boy are there a lot of people who would get better at difficult tasks if they got therapy.
There are of course players that know how to fully exploit mistakes in the bad openings, but when you're rated so low, openings rarely matter, especially if the opponent has to exploit a weird opening you have.
There's many more patterns related to pinning, tempo, that are worth much more for quick rating progress.
No way you get to 2000 by cheesing, maybe 1000 max. 2000 rating is not low, it’s top 0.3% on chess.com
Online chess has a lot of begineers, since its more approachable.
Edit: you’re not the same person from the comment above, my bad
In lichess Blitz database for 2200+ rated players there are 13883 games with this position. White won 50%, drew 7% and lost 43%.
Of course this position is nothing to write home about, but for online Blitz it's good enough.
I'm not saying I'm mating people in 3 moves. There are many unique mating opportunities in queen openings and many ways to create immense pressure on the king's side if the player does not defend well. Try it yourself and you'll quickly see that -2000 rated players (online) struggle with it. Similarly, you're not sacrificing development and you castle at the same moment (sometimes after black).
For example, many games I would get my queen attacked on F3 and then I would lose my rook. But this 3 move knight play on the opponents side gives you a lot of moves to create pressure, in one case you can have 3 pieces developed, while opponent has 0 (excluding the knight stuck in the corner). With the queen on king's side, you have a lot of options to equalize. If opponent is focused on saving the knight, the moves are just bad.
In 2+1 and 3 min blitz it's unlikely you'll get someone that won't make the position almost even after 10 moves.
The biggest hurdle to progress was my endgame and in blitz I found that being a piece down is rarely an indicator of loss at that level. + I did win a lot on time.
I was playing 200-250 blitz games a day and would analyze many, but I never bothered with openings. I quit because it was obviously too much.
I am not claiming it was the fastest way to progress, that it's a way to progress forever, that it doesn't have any flaws.
Chess has a very big space of patterns that you can learn that have nothing to do with openings and in my experience they count much more early on.
I shared my experience out of curiosity. Are there others who experienced something similar?
From my experience, to progress when learning anything it's enough to be consistent. The brain does its thing during sleep. When a roadblock is reached, you have to be able to identify it and make a plan to improve. Would it be more efficient to have a tested plan or a tutor? In most cases, yes.
This whole post is about how difficult it is to study chess and to improve, and you just stumble to 2000 playing for fun, with no study and no endgame knowledge. Also, consistency is most definitely not enough to improve: if you consistently practice the wrong things, you won't improve. And, if you didn't study chess at all and just played, like you mentioned, I also find it hard to believe that when you hit a roadblock you were able to identify what you needed to practice and implement a plan.
I'm 47 and started playing around 5 years ago. I only play Blitz and Bullet because I find it fun. In the first two years I went from around 1000 on lichess to around 1700. I've been "stuck" at 1700 plus or minus 100 since then.
I know I could improve with puzzles and classical time controls and study and analysis but I have no interest in that. I play games for fun. If I improve then great. If not no problem. It's the same as breaking out a game of Tetris or something for 5 minutes to me.
Blitz chess is already what a lot of people consider a variant. In Blitz format there are strategies and tricks that are outright blunders in longer time controls.
The biggest improvement by far for a casual player (at stage where you have some higher chess concepts understood) is to memorise.
Memorise and understand principles of openings lines (lines you want to play as white - few, more in depth, and most common lines you see being played - more, less in depth as black)
Memorise mating patters, there are certain setups that occur on board, knowing them can help playing them when they happen, or better angling to set them up yourself.
This was what made me drop chess as a teen. High level chess is a looot about memorisation. And that was when magic of chess disappeared for me :/
As a counterpoint to what you said, going back through your own game might not show you why and where you made a root cause mistake. If you dont have a background knowledge you will not know what to look for. And its rather a surface glance that you will 'get and forget' as soon as you start next game.
Better approach would be to study the positions you played after you are done playing for the day, or coming back to them on some other day.
Not all other games have this feature. If I play Catan with my friends, it's fun, but then the game is over. I'm not going to analyse my game and discover new tactics or strategies, like I will with chess.
Important to remember this is not a universal truth for all people.
> If I play Catan with my friends, it’s fun…
Interestingly, you and I seem to be opposites here. I only play chess for fun and never care if I improve, but spent thousands of hours in my college years analyzing and improving at Catan. I wonder if this is simply a matter of whether one prefers deterministic or stochastic games for optimization.
Older games become interesting to watch, mate in 6-8 puzzles become tenable, chess books about specific openings make more sense. Once a player knows how to finish basic endgames and accord himself properly in the middle game, they have the tools to grasp opening theory. From there on, there is a huge body of information about opening theory, playing styles, control and leverage of center, etc etc.
Much of the ink spilled about this game is a bit impenetrable without some acumen. But with enough appreciation to the past and present trends, one can fine tune one's playing style and really make the game your own.
Doing this and nothing else, I went up about 100 points a year for five years, from 1200 to 1700. (And then I stopped but I also could tell that I would have to start approaching it differently to go further.)
While the series did inspire me to study a little more, I'm pretty sure the result was due to an influx of weaker players who also watched the series, rather than my playing ability. But I still jokingly tell people it made my rating go up.
This is a great article on how to improve chess as a beginner, from the perspective of a former beginner. Basic recognition of patterns is the bedrock of tactical calculation. And focusing on problems that can be solved quickly is a good strategy for building it.
I do want to champion the cause of harder problems though, because there is more to calculation than pattern recognition. And this will become more and more important above the very impressive 1500 the author managed to reach.
Calculation is a conscious mental process that needs training in its own right. It involves the ability to visualise board states, remember where you are in the game tree, enumerate candidate/forcing moves and threats, heuristics like the method of elimination. None of these can be trained purely through these simpler problems, only through slowly taking your time applying all these techniques. This is why blitz rarely leads to an improvement in your base ability. The only way to build out your ability beyond what you can immediately recognise is to really struggle with positions you can't solve in 8 seconds, or even 8 minutes. This happens naturally if you play longer time controls(and actually spend your time). It's also tremendously helpful to join your local chess club and work through some problems with a stronger player to guide you. That's also a lot more fun to most people.
Learning chess doesn't have to be just a lot of rote exercise. You can also read books on positional chess, pawn structures, endgames, and openings. No, they don't decide games as much as tactical mistakes but they certainly influence games profoundly whether the players are aware of them or not. And a more "holistic" approach can be more motivating.
The idea is that calculation practise is great, but it also takes a lot of time. In the time it takes a beginner to solve one very deep calculation problem, they could have finished 40 pattern recognition problems and that would probably be more beneficial. So calculation and pattern recognition has to be balanced, and a few plies out of the comfort zone strikes that balance.
It's like studying the meta instead of actually playing.
(Scrabble champions just memorize the spelling not the meaning) (They probably also know a lot of the meanings but my point still stands)
Of course, plenty of people enjoy a much more memorization heavy game. But it feels like ruining the fun part of the game to me.
I don't memorize games several moves deep, just 3-4 maybe 5 depending on the opening, which especially in Crazyhouse as there are only probably 3-4 good openins.
That’s actually wrong. Short-term patterns will improve your chess short-term but you’ll hit the plateau pretty fast. They don’t teach you to play better at chess. It’s like copypasting some code from the Internet without fully understanding how it works.
In chess, it’s absolutely necessary to have a long-term plan: especially at lower levels, your ultimate goal should be attacking the king most of the time.
Use the engine smartly. Because it will tell you what move is objectively the best. It won’t tell you what move is best at your level. At different levels the best moves are different.
It’s important to train tactics but not with puzzles. Puzzles model situations that are out of context. It’s like training your swimming movements without hitting the water. It may be not harmful, but not particularly useful. Instead, you should get “puzzles” in your live games within the context, seeing the bigger picture.
Of course, you should play games. How can you expect to get better at playing chess without actually playing chess? Moreover, playing games and getting feedback on them should be the bulk of your training. Learning happens by trial and error.
Without dissecting this article any further, there is a battle-tested approach on how to get better at chess at any level and age:
- Be a kid. Don't overthink it. It's just a game after all. Feel it.
- Play as many games as possible. You can quickly get enough volume with bullet and blitz.
- Get feedback. You're able to give yourself decent feedback most of the time. Quickly analyze your games yourself or check them with someone, who can tell you what mistakes you have made at your level. Only afterward compare your thoughts to engine suggestions. Pay attention to the moves that drop the evaluation by more than (1, 2, 3, 4) points, depending on your level.
Of course, these are not hard and fast rules. But this is a solid foundation for the success.
P.S. My FIDE rating is 2423.
What you wrote, is exactly in-line with what the OT said: "Especially at lower levels, chess is a game of short term patterns, not long term strategy."
You are beginner, you need some opening, some little patterns to move out from the beginner level, and then you reach a new plateau, but you understand the basic, you have your "first stripe white belt" game and from there you should search for sure a way to move to the next plateau.
There is nothing wrong in just wanting to learn to play chess, have some tricks under your belt and having fun.. focusing on short-term patterns, as adult, maybe not having a lot of time to learn "the right bias-free way" is the easiest way to start having some fun.
> - Be a kid. Don't overthink it. It's just a game after all. Feel it.
> - Play as many games as possible. You can quickly get enough volume with bullet and blitz.
> - Get feedback. You're able to give yourself decent feedback most of the time. Quickly analyze your games yourself or check them with someone, who can tell you what mistakes you have made at your level. Only afterward compare your thoughts to engine suggestions. Pay attention to the moves that drop the evaluation by more than (1, 2, 3, 4) points, depending on your level.
I've been thinking recently that I should play anyway so that I could grow out of this condition. Any tips for that?
My suggestion based on my own emotions with chess is that you should start playing quick games like 3+2 or something. The time and emotional "investment" in those games is low enough that you might not care when you lose. Just start another game and try again. Losing classical game that you were playing for 2 weeks is a different beast.
If you lose a game, just stop playing for a bit, and don't give in to the feeling of wanting to play another to prove you can win. This will only result in frustration.
If you lose, make yourself think "That was a fun game. I learned X, and will try and do Y next time."
Oddly, the only sport where I'm chill about losing is tennis, where I think "nice, they played really well". Everywhere else, including chess, it's "how could you do this to me".
The only time I managed to be chill in chess was after I'd taken MDMA, and then when I'd lose I'd think "they played better, they deserve it". It went away after a few days, though, never to be repeated (presumably without more MDMA).
1. Instead of thinking, "sheesh, I suck" after losing, start thinking, "well played" (even if your opponent was in a losing position and beat you on time or with a sneaky pre-move; they still won). This simple reframing makes it less about the gaps in your abilities and more about having found an opponent who outplayed you that game. Finding better opponents is a good thing; you will learn more.
2. Actively make loss about growth: review games you lost. Find (a) the losing move and (b) the reason you made that move (harder, but important). Use that info to change your thought process to reduce future mistakes. This can be as simple as, "it's 2am and I've been playing blitz for 3 hours, I'm too tired to play my best, I'll stop playing after midnight". Or "I keep missing mate threats. I will say "checks, captures, threats" in my head after my opponent makes a move to train myself to systematically seek dangerous intent, until that process is so internalised that it's natural. I will also solve mate-in-one[1] or mate-in-two[2] puzzles on Lichess for 10 minutes a day until they feel obvious."
3. If you lose three games in a row, stop playing for a while (a few minutes/hours/days, whatever you need). If losses hugely affect your mood, a long string of them can make you feel really low. Pre-emptively break that cycle and do something else for a while.
From every loss I learned something (either that my tactics need work, that I need to improve my understanding of this or that structure, that I need to add a line to my repertoire), from victories not so much.
Also I find that going for a beer with opponent when they win is usually much better experience than when they lose - people tend to be more open and talkative after win than after loss.
In case of the loses you feel way more in control somehow (ooh, I definitely shouldn't have done that) or are just funny (I can't do anything, they are wiping the floor with me, it's comical) where you set up your own small goals to achieve because you have no hopes of actually competing (yes! I got him this one time so it's 12-1 not 12-0).
I've found that there are some games that losing isn't completely off-putting. But I think the real issue is that the fun I get from most games is in winning, not in playing. If I was playing for not reason (not to win, no goals, etc) I wouldn't play it, and would do something else instead. Winning makes it feel enough better than I want to play.
I've been trying to "overcome" this, too, and having the right mindset is start. "I'm here to enjoy the game, not the win.", etc.
Good luck. :)
Successful people fail often. Failures fail only once.
If you want success, make failure part of your DNA.
There is a reason why single player video games are still popular. It is fun to win!
I play ARPGs, where, I mow down hordes of enemies with a mere mouse click with fun graphics and sound.
Is this cotton candy compared to playing PvP games. Absolutely. I've done serious PvP before. But, after a day of work... sometimes, it is just fun to save the world, or make it burn.
Players are very lucky if they can irl find people that can beat them. The goal should always be to play someone who is better when possible, because it's the only way to improve via gameplay.
Most people don't play chess. Many fewer will ever play beyond the casual game with someone over a holdiay. Meaning that anyone who is remotely serious about improving will likely very quickly find themselves without anyone better to play.
I'm not a "good" chess player. But about half of the adults that I know, who play, won't play me for the same reason that you don't play. So I mostly teach children to play. Some of them can play now. They likely won't beat me for a long time to come. I don't improve over these games. The games are sometimes marginally fun for me. One kid won't learn for the same reason that you won't play. Those who do play are lucky to be able to improve their game against my play.
I've found that anything under 15 minute clocks just feels like brain poison to me, though. Your brain goes completely into pattern matching mode and lose out on the actual interesting tactical analysis you can do when you're taking a bit more time. I have been queueing up daily games instead and it's nice. Games take a month to resolve but if you just continuously add to the queue that's good.
EDIT:
> I learned a bunch of openings with White for 6 months or so, also via Chessable. Amazingly I won more games with Black, where I had learned nothing, than with White. I got frustrated with this, and switched my openings entirely. It had literally no impact on my rating, and I continued to improve.
I felt this so much recently. I got kind of obsessed with the Evans gambit, and would still lose to people who would play into the gambit and let me go down the lines I knew well. I'd just flummox later on. The game below a certain point is really just "don't blunder as much as the opponent"
I think that blitz reinforces my bad habits of approximate pattern matching and ultimately makes me play worse in my other games. If I want to "do it fast" I can just open my dailies and play them fast! But this is a me problem, I routinely play board games etc too quickly, and lose because of it. I do not need help with "do it fast".
I'd rather have a stable rating over time, at a level I can maintain comfortably, than have to expend ever increasing levels of energy to maintain a higher level; and probably end up having less fun. (maybe it's more like treading water. You can get more of your body out of the water, but each inch requires exponentially more effort to maintain)
That said, I started doing a lot of puzzles a while ago, as well as doing the basic mating pattern practice on Lichess. My rating jumped up a few hundred rating points. Turns out that I was missing a bunch of the basics.
Now I hover around average on the server for Blitz (~1500), and slightly above for Rapid (~1700) and that's awesome.
I only really have video games as an easily quantifiable example, but playing in top 1% of League of Legends doesn't really require anything more than a couple games a week to maintain that level. I have the knowledge, I know what to do, and I can execute on that. Perhaps this would be harder in a domain that leans more on physical or mental condition which tend to decrease over time, but probably not so much in Chess and the like.
Once I learned the basic opening principles, a basic opening for white (Italian) and black (Two Knights), and the phases of the game - the game opened up much more for me.
Just knowing to do E4/E5, take center, mobilizing pieces, trying to move pieces once in the opening, etc. improved my game so much.
I was making so many bad moves without knowing these and having a terrible time. Knowing all this didn't help me win at all, but it made my experience much better.
I unsubscribed immediately after getting the first. And I deleted some without marking them spam, so I got about double.
The comment I replied to made it sound as though they sold your data to a third party for marketing purposes or had a data breach.
1) eat. I would start playing in the morning, do okay, then lose a bunch. Finally, realized my blood sugar level was a major contributor to my elo 2) study tactics. Chess Tempo is great. Lots of good tactics books. Especially study spotting threats 3) Study basics of positions: best places to post rooks, bishops, control of center. But tactics more important. 4) don’t spend much time on openings. Learn the basics of a few common ones. Games will quickly diverge from openings. Because GM games so often depend on openings, amateurs (like me) tend to overpivot on this. 5) After playing, load your game into a chess engine and analyze what went wrong (if you played perfect, analyze what your opponent did wrong). Until about 2000, whomever makes the fewest mistakes usually wins.
> Where do you play that allows you to export games?
> And then are you loading into another site or using a local application on your laptop as the "chess engine?"
I assume that you are a beginner and the following is quite simplified but I believe will assist you in getting started.
Most sites allow you to save your games as PGN (Portable Game Notation). On lichess, for example, you can go into your profile page an click on the download button to Export Games. This will save your games in PGN format. You need to download install a chess engine onto your computer / device. On a laptop or desktop it is relatively simplest to first install chess software with a Graphical User Interface - google that term - I will mention just one - no affiliation - just that it's relatively simple. Arena is a free graphical user interface for chess that helps you analyze and play games, plus test chess engines. After you run Arena chess you can import the games you exported in PGN format.
There are very strong open source / free chess engines (eg Stockfish) and other chess software with or without commercial chess engines. Just remember these three things:
- The format that chess games are saved in is PGN with a .pgn extension
- There is chess software that replays these PGN with no chess engine and that's fine to review a game digitally
- There are umpteen chess-engines that will analyze your games / moves - some free, some commercial
I don't care much about my rating (I play chess to escape stress; not create more of it), but over the last couple years since I started playing, my lichess rating (fluctuating between 1200-1400) appears to have a very strong correlation with my mental health.
Of course it's obvious if you think about it, but it's very odd to have this accurate of an indicator with historical data.
Of course this only really works if you don't actively study to try and get better :)
From another angle, there is a huge amount of research on chess as a model of cognition. Because chess rating is quite objective, you can measure things like speed of learning, increase in skill with age, followed by decline of skill with age, the effects of alcohol and other drugs, diet, sleep. And, of course, it is a completely classic and ongoing topic of ai research and decision theory. If you are interested in those topics, having some insight into the game is also useful.
I kind of dislike not having a chance when playing against bots.
But any answer will be such only because no one tried hard enough to make a supreme AI.
On a sidenote, I think it’s interesting that we’re a point where it’s starting to get hard to come up with games that humans can beat AI at.
But in the extreme case of a random game (like rolling the highest number on a die) they are equal (obviously).
Maybe some randomness will help, but might not be enough.
My ideea is that bots can't win in the real world economy, no fund driven solely by algorithms can win more than funds driven by humans.
So if we can find a game modeled like the economy, where nothing is random but many things are uncertain, then it might be harder for the software to win.
But yes, I think you're right that you'd need a game where crunching a lot of numbers really fast doesn't give you an advantage. For instance, if the state space of the game is so big that number crunching is useless, and other approaches like AI style pattern matching (used IIRC by Alpha-Go?) don't work either.
Though ultimately, what is the uniquely human trait that would allow a human to beat an AI? Can you make a game that depends on that? Is there even such a thing?
I guess all the slot machine players tend to differ in opinion there :)
Sure, slot machine operators adjust winning chances so players keep on playing, but to a player, it's not influenced by anything they do, other than "just one more time and I'll win".
We can ask any successful CEO. Fortune 500 companies would use bots if that was possible.
Uncertainty doesn't equal randomness. Randomness is flipping a coin and asking you the result. Uncertainty is hiding the coin behind my back and asking you in which hand is it.
There is no reason why computers wouldn't eventually beat a human in the others, if someone writes a narrow AI for them. Consider for example, AlphaStar for StarCraft.
I would thought the same haven't I been reading articles on how bots won against humans at poker.
I am not sure about something like backgammon or monopoly.
Conjures an image of the astronaut with a gun meme...
- Wait, playing games to win is a waste of time now?
- It always was.It’s a machine, it won’t feel smug about knowing it could beat me if it wanted to.
I’ve never really understood people who are competitive about board games and similar inside-the-box scenarios. (There’s a certain “Dwight Schrute” aspect to that mentality that’s hard to watch.) I like losing in games because there’s no real-world cost to trying out some idiot strategy.
We are taught from a young age that winning is the objective of playing a game, but what if it wasn’t?
What if it was to learn some hidden truth, or to explore your own tendencies to over-react, to become too rash, to become overly-defensive or to be disappointed when things didn’t always go your way? What if you took each game as a learning opportunity?
If you take a different perspective, bots and AI can help you a great deal - they aren’t going to feel smug about beating you, or remind you of it over a family dinner, or brag about it on social media. They can help you improve your gameplay and yourself.
I’m reminded of this when I think of recent AI advances in Go. The moves and strategies that emerged have left that community in awe, because they were open to learning from what AI produced, not just obsessed with trying to win.
> We are taught from a young age that winning is the objective of playing a game, but what if it wasn’t?
No, we aren't. The are multiple players in a game. So you win some, they win some and sure, you are taught to try to win more than 50%. But if you win 90+% of the time, you are wasting both players' time.
For the current 1-2 years you can have a shot at physical/sports games, since robots are lagging behind AI capabilities, quite a lot.
I’d love to be wrong about that, but I’m probably not.
Check out Robocup for superhuman speed miniature soccer games. But the games are small and short. The humanoid games are much less well developed.
Personally I explicitly do not expect robots to actually have human-like shape but rather be optimized for the thing they do, which can change the energy requirements or otherwise things that might look "unfair" to humans. Usually this is one of the key reasons where different timelines come from in discussions, where people assume that a humanoid robot needs to be build that does the same movements like humans but somehow better/faster/... while I differ on that point.
We engage in sports because they are fun and explore the limits of our physical and mental abilities (or well, go above our limits, as all the kinesio-tapes and supplements in pro sports indicate). Involving robots can only continue to be fun if robots work with roughly the same restrictions.
If we want to measure AIs against our mental abilities, it's only fair to pit them with controlling as much "machinery" and suboptimal movements as humans do in a particular sport: that versatility is what makes our intelligence so amazing and, well, "general".
The general point I want to make is that it doesn't make sense trying to compare humans with AI (and somewhat soon) robots, because the will outperform everyone. Handycapping them is not a solution either. The "amazing versatility" of humans also will not persist for too long anymore I'd say, therefore the only way to have a real and fair comparison/pit is against other humans in the future.
While I am somewhat impressed by the conversational acumen of recent LLMs, the fact they can produce outright garbage tells me we are as far away from synthesising multiple types of intelligences as ever: humans simply need far smaller input data set to start recognizing patterns and rules (as witnessed by kids learning to speak).
I am not yet convinced we'll live to see something like actual self-driving cars with as much capability as an average human driver: I believe augmented environments are needed (communicating roads, signals and cars) to get to self-driving cars.
The one thing they've got going for them is consistent focus, whereas practical ability in humans significantly depends on the mood, tiredness, level of multitasking...
I'll try to make the same point land a bit harder:
Robots will not compete any time 'somewhat soon' in many/most physical tasks, because their energy storage capability, motor efficiency, strength to weight ratio, and many other mechanical and sensing properties are not good at all compared with humans and other animals, and can't be fixed by software. Everyday intuition underestimates how large this gap is.
Brains are only part of the requirement for competence in the real world.
It's pretty well known that bots resort to cheating to win at stuff like Civ. I'm sure there's a patch out there that removes the cheating, and you can stomp on computers there.
If somebody would bother to put in the time to make it, a well-crafted Civ bot could probably roflstomp every human out there just by virtue of perfectly micromanaging its production in every city on every turn without effort.
https://www.beyondallreason.info/
or if you're an AI maker come join us also and make a better bit for us to play against :)
It is important to distinguish two thing: "Computers can't solve this problem" vs "the currently existing bots suck". One is when the best programers trying their darndest can't make a bot good, while the other is when nobody even really tried.
(For example I can reliably run faster than Usain Bolt when he is not made aware that we are racing. :P )
This case sounds very much the second kind. There can be many reason for this, the simplest is that the makers of the game don't win more players by absolutely crushing them. It is a case where after a certain level of advancement you don't earn more money by making better bots. In fact you might start earning less if you take away the fun of the game. And of course anti-cheating measures will hamper 3rd party bots if they are not explicitly invited, and why would they be?
Simply saying estimating which way someone will evade / evading randomly doesn't sound like the kind of thing a computer would be bad nowadays. If someone tries that is.
Maybe I read the wrong forums but this particular hangup ("machines can do it better so what is even the point?") seems to be quite unique to chess as a hobby. I've never seen someone on an athletics tournament complaining that the sport is no longer fun because a cannon could throw the spear much farther than even the best athletes, or that they no longer enjoy going to the gym because a construction crane can lift much more than they will ever be able to. Chess is at its core a game of rigidly applying rules, pattern matching, and applying a depth-first search on as deep a search tree as you can manage. It should hardly be a surprise that computers can do that extremely well.
I find chess engines and any model that can play games themselves very fascinating though. I wonder why chess engines do not really play in a human-like way. That’s why I don’t even like to play against beginner bots because they will tend to make weird and obvious mistakes.
If the bot gets to have APM in the 400-500 range and has full map vision, even the top pros will get smoked no contest.
The games invented were Octi [1] and Arimaa [2].
[1]. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/450/octi
[2]. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4616/arimaa
A casual search shows some discussion of AI-resistant board games here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/eaept6/tell_me_...
Some previous discussions on similar articles fwiw:
Learning chess at 40 (2016)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31433914
(69 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20154285
(82 comments)
On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years (2020,338 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25108800
How to get good at chess fast (2013, 65 comments)
That's a... bold statement.
>But I'm a smart guy (hi white male privilege)
It's amusing to see someone go mask off and call non-whites low IQ like that.
You can’t have privilege unless you are in some way more powerful and able than other groups in the first place. I think one day people are going to wake up one day and realize that white people are just like everybody else. That they’re unremarkable - not some privileged elite.
His association with “smart” with “white male privilege” is a mask slip. Yet all saviours believe in some way, they are more powerful and capable than those they are saving. Even if all they’re better at is a board game.
You either believe there's white male privilege, and the author is correct, or you don't, and he... has a different opinion than you?
I'm not going to go more into it because I dislike framing this clear class problem as a race problem, but I wanted to point out the erroneous reasoning.
When humans communicate, we don't use Backus-Naur form. We generally accept that people will be able to derive the meaning from context. Does the author literally believe that over 50% of the planet watched it? The claim is preposterous - and obviously so. But it is a convenient shorthand for referring to the impact on the cultural zeitgeist made by that show.
Anyway, QG was astonishingly popular. See https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/the-queens-gambit-most-p... and https://adage.com/article/media/golden-globe-winner-queens-g...
So what I really need to study are the famous openings and the responses to various openings. Seems like a memory game.
Computer games were always more fun.
If I did something more manual I think I would perhaps crave that kind of outlet so I can kind of see the appeal. At least playing good chess does involve some improvisation and creativity.
Cubing on the other hand has not appealed to me at all since I learnt it was mostly just memorising some patterns and executing them. It just feels like a trick - it is impressive the speed some people can do it but I’ve never really been impressed by people being able to solve them.
Perhaps those are unpopular opinions though!
Preparing for a tourney or a big game is different obv. but usually you just play enough that openings and their values become a part of you
I think learning games of past masters in chess is akin to learning culture when studying language. Standing on the shoulders of the giants and all that jazz.
Especially since learning openings is not pure memorization of moves - its about learning ideas, stories, patterns. For example:
Najdorf variation of sicilian begins with 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 [0]. Idea behind 5. ... a6 is that black wants to play e5+d5 to gain full center, but 5. ... e5 right now losses due to 6. Bb5+. So black prevents it with 5. ... a6.
Now white has a lot of choices - 6. Bg5 is very concrete, you need some memorization, 6. Bc4 is sharp but a bit more rational, 6. Be3 is very popular today, ... All of them have some benefits and drawbacks.
I play 6. Be2, since it gives white some pressure, while having very classical idea-based play and black players often lack preparation for it. Black can now play 6. ... e6 (transposing to Scheveningen sicilian) or 6. ... e5, staying in the Najdorf waters. Lets look at 6. ... e5. White plays 7. Nb3, 7. Nf3?! is worse since white will soon want to play f4 or f3 and knight would block that pawn.
Now is the interesting part: the only good move in this position is 7. ... Be7 and it's hard to see why. A lot of my online games are already decided in next few moves.
Point is, that 7. ... Nbd7 (with idea of developing light squared bishop on b7) interferes with black control of d5, so white can gain bind on d5 via playing a4 (preventing b5) and then either Bc4 or Nd2-Nc4-Ne3 takes full control of d5. This is crucial, since if black is unable to achieve d5 pawn break he has nothing to play for in these structures, so game is totally in white hands.
Secondly 7. ... Be6 fails very concretely to 8. f4 Qc7 9. g4 exf4 10. g5!, which was pioneered by Julio Kaplan, a former junior chess world champion and software chess pioneer. We get to a very open position where black king is stuck in the center, so white gets a very pleasant attack for free.
I hope this gives you a bit of a counterpoint towards why learning theory is not only annoying.
[0] - in algebraic notation, for those interested in learning it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_notation_(chess)
The point of Qc7 is that black can answer f5 with Bc4 - offering trade of bishops instead, which is a bit disappointing for White. This is why this resource with g4 is important.
So if Black plays Qc7 White needs to know about this g4 temporary pawn sac. If Black plays exf4 then White recaptures with Bxf4, gaining a nice advantage in development. Finally if Black plays anything else (like Be7) White gains comfortable advantage with f5.
If I let it sit for a while, it vacillates between wanting to play g4, a3, Be3, h4, etc., and a quieter approach with Bg5xf6, Qd3, Nd2. At depth 46 it prefers the latter but only gives it +0.1 even though its PV shows W winning the d-pawn. Aaaand at depth 48 it's switched back to Operation Pawn Storm, though it wants to prepare with a3 and Bf3 before playing g4 and h4. And back to the piece manoeuvres and winning the d-pawn at depth 50. Still only +0.1, though.
(But computers are awfully good defenders, and maybe this is one of those positions that's much better for the attacking side when humans rather than computers are playing.)
Compare positions you get after:
- 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 6. Be2 e5 7. Nb3 Be7 8. Bg5 Be6 9. Bxf6 Bxf6 10. Qd3 Nc6
Black here has very natural development - his bishop is controlling d5, his knight is ready to jump to d4 (thus interfering with white heavy pieces control of d-file). Because of this he can liquidate into drawn (if difficult due to worse pawn structure) ending after 11. O-O-O Nd4 12. Nxd4 exd4 13. Nd5 Bxd5 14. exd5
This way of playing with Bg5 is not so popular anymore today (Be3 is way more topical, with either O-O or O-O-O), but it offers clearest comparison to analogous position.
- 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 6. Be2 e5 7. Nb3 Be6 8. f4 Be7 9. f5 Bd7 10. Bg5 Bc6 11. Bxf6 Bxf6 12. Qd3
Black needs to control d5 and e6 is off-limits, so he has to reroute his bishop to c6, where his knight wants to be. White has lasting pressure on d-file, it's not clear how black will develop his knight and he cannot easily force pieces off the board.
That's a bit like saying that mathematics or physics are "memory games", because if you take them seriously, you can't avoid learning tons of equations and formulas instead of being creative (and reinventing the wheel by going from scratch) :)
While memorization is certainly a part of chess:
* Opening theory doesn't matter all that much up until a very high level. Below the master level chess is about 90% tactics. You can pretty much rely on general principles in the opening, and your opponents won't know enough opening theory anyway (so what's the point of eg. memorizing the theory on Sveshnikov Sicilian up until move 15 if you won't ever use it, because your opponents will be out of the book and play something non-theoretical long before).
* Even when opening theory does matter, memorizing it blindly is not enough, and it would be very difficult when done that way. It has to be based on deeper understanding of themes, underlying structures, typical plans for both sides in resulting types of positions, crucial squares to control etc.
I remember this scene in "Suits" (courtesy of YT recommendation algorithm - never watched the entire series, so I don't know the broader context). A guy without a degree walks into a law office, and the boss says "sorry, we only hire from Harvard", but he demands that the boss opens some law book on a random page, and he can quote the book perfectly like a savant. Needless to say, he's hired on the spot : )
This is what people may imagine the work of a lawyer revolves around, but it's not really accurate.
Anyway opened a chesscom account, i got completly destroyed by online people, elo 100 according to chesscom, move to bots could beat 1200 up to 1500 elo eaisly... decided to give a try to online matches again destroyed but then started to find the pattern...
chesscom free account give me "three fair matches" that i could win to engage me in the platform, then it pairs me with either bots, 3-second chess engine cheaters or chess streamers playing with smurfs accounts, these pattern repeat almost every time sometimes is three, other times is four even five, if i play three games on 1 day the next day i would have another "three fair matches" and so on... so whats my point?
Unless you are paying good money for the subcription you are pretty much "meat canon" for others, the same applies to lichess... if you play 3 games a day for at least 2 years months you could get the 1200 elo, if you pay-to-win or pay the premium you would likely reach that 1000 elo more eaisly because is convenient for them to no match you against known cheaters on the platform...
Yes there are some bots, yes some people cheat, but what you're implying is just plainly false.
M not saying m on the level of masters but definitely not a newbie... either way i don't need proof just go to chesscom, open a new free account and start grinding... you are gonna see fast the pattern on how the platform gets you engaged but you need to look careful, it entices you with free wins before going hard on you, having three to five games a day was the eureka moment to get good ratings... either go slow or pay premium to get an edge on the game and preferred match making.
I'm anywhere between 1000 and 1800 depending on time constraints and I have friends pushing 2000. All free accounts. Don't know what to tell ya.
If you are think m wrong go start a free account and prove me wrong, you have less than 9 months to go up to 1500 elo.
I play probably 20 a day.
Look up chess speed runs on YouTube.
I never really understood WHY people are cheating in online chess games. There is no fame, no money in it. This is puzzling for me.
My frustration is that chess.com and lichess are extremely week at finding and banning cheaters. Sometimes is sooo obvious, when for example somebody blunders a piece in first few moves and from this moment starts playing just perfect moves.
Cheater detection sounds like very interesting problem
It makes it easy to achieve great accuracy in the long run, but hard to be accurate in the short run, because you don't want false alarms. So 99.9% of cheaters may get banned after a few games, but since they keep on coming up (it's not hard to simply register another account, after all), the frustration they're causing is always going to be there.
The thing was that matchmaking would match you up based on how many gems you spent. It inadvertently just set us all up with cheaters. The free game was pretty meh, but cheater's hell was a lot of fun. Everyone had every card, so the only way to win was being good at the game. I'm rather sad they killed the game eventually, it was a pretty well designed game.
I think bot hell for chess would be interesting too, the game becomes who can make better bots.
It seems that for some quite high proportion of the population someone else losing is necessary and sufficient for them to feel like they have won. Basically for those people winning just means "the other person lost".
This goes way beyond chess and explains a lot about society.
My point is: just go play for fun, you don't have to study or become a master at some opening.
You won't feel like you're getting better with this method but you will start to sense opportunities consistently (and then recognize them specifically).
Yes, you still need to then go learn a couple openings.
My personal opinion is that this is the most important. There's so many things you can focus on, sometimes we forget that we need to just spend more time actively focusing on chess to get better.
I think actively focusing makes a huge difference. Playing a 2+1 while watching netflix is completely different than 5+3, fully committing.
Lastly, I think if you find the part of chess you like most then lean into that! I love endgames, so I spend 75% of my time studying those. I might not be the best off for it (~1675 Lichess), but I like it, so there :)
My workplace has a chess league which is really cool and useful to keep wanting to practice.
> How To Learn Chess As An Adult (or, how I went from 300 to 1500 ELO in 9 months)
Because it showed that the person writing this “how to learn” was speaking from personal experience.
There are too many articles online that say how to learn something, but the author may never have actually tried it themselves and are instead writing based on other sources. Or worse yet, now in 2023 they may have asked ChatGPT how to learn something and just copy-pasted what it said.
Changing the title to just:
> How to learn chess as an adult
Is a mistake IMO, and makes it easier to skip past this article.
My philosophy is skill level and rating doesn't affect enjoyment.
Whether I'm rated 700 or 2700, once my rating stabilizes, I win as many games as I lose.
I have the capacity to improve a little with a lot of work, but, eventually my rating will stabilize and once again I'll have equal wins to loses.
It's only 10 mins, stuffed with good information and explained very beginner friendly:
I eventually realized that i enjoy chess puzzles much more than playing actual games of chess due to the lower time commitment and lower stress. I do puzzles every day but almost never play a full game.
As you get better, you make fewer mistakes and it is (usually) less of a struggle to perform well. You’re right in the sense that you’re never (as a human) going to master it like you can tic-tac-toe or rubik’s cube. But that sort of mastery isn’t fun either.
In the case of chess, you can learn the game very quickly. So I'm wondering at what stage a chess player consider they can play, and that they're now trying to improve rather than just learn.
Learning comes with analysis and deduction, both of which are pretty much impossible in a sub 10 minutes game for a beginner.
Play few long games where you think your moves carefully, then review your games. Understand the key moves that defined the outcome of the game.
Review your games when you win, review your games when you lose.
Watch professional games, do problems, etc.
https://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPoss...
watching https://www.youtube.com/@agadmator chanel.
Jokes aside, it's a fun channel. Makes me feel like I know what's going on in those games.
To put simply, I believe Chess is good as something of a brain exercise for when you're younger or if you are a parent and want to develop your child's logical thinking and that's it, no more and no less.
So what happens if you take Chess further?
People don't know when to stop and I've seen with my eyes this happen because there was this kid at Chess tournaments who was a much better player than I am, however the kid just lived Chess, there was nothing else to the kid, he was socially very unintelligent & awkward, didn't really do much anything else since his parents shoved him to Chess when he was 6 and made it a daily routine thing for him to focus on Chess and his school studies. Gradually, Chess took over his entire identity and he's now a titled player and from people who see him on an everyday basis, they all still don't say much about this now-adult other than that he's still just focused on Chess. The general sentiment of everyone who knows this kid is just pity because it's just a very one-dimensional life. He achieved success but it sacrificed a lot of his childhood, and for what?
Chess players, even titled ones don't really make a lot of money from tournaments and if you want to be good at it and play at tournaments, you have to dedicate basically all your time to it and have good discipline to keep at it, day after day. There's the coach hustle but that also requires you to be at least above average and also I haven't met a coach who's not just living Chess so it's about the same, you still get sucked into this lifestyle.
Chess at a higher level is pretty draw-ish and ultimately a memorization contest. Most strong players will not slip up if given a slight advantage and they will be able to convert this slight advantage into at least a draw. Strong players already have a good grasp on tactical motifs and can spot opportunities easily but that's where Chess theory comes into play. There's many openings and every opening has variations, which have optimal moves and then of course inaccurate moves and blunders. Just Sicilian theory is enough for someone to spend years of their life memorizing moves and building a repertoire.
Ultimately, Chess doesn't get more fun the stronger you get and that's counter-intuitive because people want to get better. I played Chess for a few years both casually and professionally, I won some tropheys and have some medals to show for it. I beat titled players (2300+ rated) but I quit all of it to focus on software engineering because Chess got boring. For me, Chess got to a point where further improvement depended on memorizing opening theory, middlegame theory and endgame theory. Just memorize and nothing more. I refused to do that so I often drawn/lost games in situations where I played less than ideal moves and my opponent knew the theory to punish my very slight inaccuracy. What I liked in Chess was the calculation, so something like Fischer Chess (Chess960) was fun but did you know people actually made theory even for that? So games got more and more boring, in casual games I would purposefully play bad moves to throw my opponent off their theory and to get into unknown territory in terms of tactics. I'd do that just to try to make the game fun again, but obviously I was burned out and there was no coming back from it.
In my country I am friends with a lot of Chess people. I saw a lot of things, like titled players throwing games for .. $10-$20. They spent about 20-30 years of their life to get good at Chess and now they have to throw games for money. Do I want to be that guy? How does it feel to study and play something for 30-40 years then just have to throw games for $20? Probably awful.
Also, general health-wise, most Chess players I know are sedentary, playing Chess isn't really healthy as you are sat in a chair for hours on end. It's very competitive, which can lead to stress and stress just leads to burnout often.
To end this post, I want to say that I luckily didn't keep on this path. In my opinion, life needs variety and so I have done much more and I am happier than the years I spent on Chess. Studied hard, got a job as a software engineer, went on many vacations, enjoyed food & drinks everywhere, had friends/love come and go, played many games, read books and watched movies and I just lived a more fulfilling life than my past Chess lifestyle because it's frankly, a stark contrast between the two.
TLDR: Trying to logically explain my distaste for Chess in modern times.
On the other hard I had ignored the game for all my adulthood because I felt, in my ignorance, that it was a game too hard to get into. I'm starting to like it as I learn, but I have no chance nor desire to break the 2000+ ELO threshold, to compete, to leave my mark.
I am learning Chess so that if one day I find an elderly gentleman at the park with a board, I can sit for a game and a chat.
Chess is a bit weird. I enjoy playing it. It's just a game but we place intellectual superiority on people who play it (well) but that's not true, a great Chess player wouldn't necessarily be a great engineer or an architect. There's some point of prestige to playing Chess, even in your wording, why is the elderly person playing Chess at a park a "gentleman"? It's because they play Chess and playing Chess is just classy in pop culture.
Anyways, my original comment was just an introspective on what Chess really is about on a higher level in my experiences, generally I see Chess as bit of a flawed game, since the better you get, the less interesting the game is and it just transitions in an overcomplicated memory game.
There's no glory to Chess. Good players were just kids that got shoved into this Chess lifestyle and kept at it. Adult players can get better but if you haven't played Chess as a kid, your talent is very limited and your progression speed is much worse, it's not impossible per say but it's also not likely.
"I am learning Chess so that if one day I find an elderly gentleman at the park with a board, I can sit for a game and a chat."
Since I quit actively playing, this is exactly my thought, it doesn't hurt to know how to play but any effort towards improving isn't really important, nor should it be any sort of priority. Take it slow, enjoy the ride but don't get too entangled.
A wise man once said, "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." and that just resonated with me, deeply, because it is really true on every and so many levels.
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." applies to a lot of things. How worth is it for me to spend my evenings honing my programming skills, instead of traveling, seeing the world, falling in love?
At the end of the day, there is no preordained path, nor St. Peter at the gate or other God deciding our worth by weighing our heart. Do what is fun for you, no one cares, not even God. The person that played chess all their life, and the person that did something better end up in the same place, forgotten, waiting to be swallowed by our red giant sun.
But if your parents wanted you to become a chess Grandmaster, and you just want to play ball, fuck them, go live your life.
Also, you can build interesting systems that actually improve peoples' lives whereas in chess you just sit on your ass calculating and memorizing stuff that affect nobody at all outside the game.
I appreciate this community since I can voice out things that people might be contemplative about and my negativity filled post was really just no false positivity comment about the reality of Chess in a random world country which I experienced time and time again.
The OP is "How to learn chess as an adult" and as I saw it, my first question in my mind was "Why should you learn chess as an adult?" and then I saw the lengths this person went to improve and while I don't want to be a toxic or negative bub about it, I also feel like I can contribute to this discussion by sharing my own opinion since I directly have a lot of experience with Chess. Now, I don't say that in an elitist way, I don't claim to be an expert but I feel like this blog post and similar posts are quite misleading and might trap uninformed people into thinking that Chess is something really worth learning as an adult or just increase the bias that Chess is some unique sport when it's just really a overrated game, kinda like Monopoly or any other game.
I spent a lot of time on Chess and I am glad to have provided some information on what it was like for me, because I think that it's really valuable for someone to read this and take away whatever they can from my experiences. I don't claim I have it all figured out, but generally, I suggest to keep Chess in moderation and no, you don't need to get better at it because it doesn't really get more fun.
Have a nice day! Thanks for reading.
If you want to become the best in the world at something then you have to give it 100%. It will be everything in your life.
Most people who try to be the best don’t make it. If you’re nearly the best then your life sucks. You’ve spent all of your energy trying for something that’s not going to give you any returns personally.
In terms of other sports, I think football (soccer) is a sport you don't really have to be 100% at, since that sport is somehow globally recognized and profitable so even subpar players can live well off it and it also seems much healthier than Chess and then there's the whole team aspect of it.
A subpar 3rd division football player is a better athlete than anyone you have ever met in your day-to-day life.
Chess supports maybe 30 full time competitors, whereas football supports a few thousand. However millions more people try to be footballers. Your odds of success are probably better with chess.
All three of those sports destroy your body. With chess it’s the hours sitting still and being stressed. With boxing and football it’s the concussions, tough training regimes and accumulated injuries that never fully heal.
Elite sport is bad for you.
I suppose it depends on where you are and how competitive it is.
You do have a point about elite sport though the argument extends to casual as well, where casual football, tennis or even basketball is just healthier than sitting over a chess board. Pardon me, I might be a bit biased here since I am maybe too conscious about sedentary chair-lifestyle since I work from an office and spend a lot of time in a chair and lately been trying to get more active.
I’m pretty sure the worst professional player in your local team could beat me and my whole five aside team by himself.
The skill gap between professional and good amateur is huge.
>Middlegame theory
What do you mean by this? There are strategical principles, but I don't think I've ever heard of middlegame theory.
>Endgame theory
Endgame theory isn't too difficult up to around 2000 FIDE if you know the basic principles (taking opposition, key squares, square rule, philidor position, other rook endgame basics, knowing which pieces you can mate with, etc) which can be learnt in an evening. You said you love calculation. Well, to me, even if you don't know endgame theory you can still be a good endgame player if you're a good calculator.
Anyway, I agree with your other points about there being no money in chess and chess leading to an unhealthy lifestyle.
By middlegame theory, I meant that there is a lot of resources on Chessable that go into middlegame theory of an opening if both sides played early opening by the book, so even middlegame is quite covered in terms of variants and the otherwise general strategy ideas are actually incorporated as part of the theory and studied as such.
As for endgames, I don't think the theory is too difficult but it's also been a situation where people are guided towards books like Dvoretsky's endgame manual and 100 endgames you must know and stuff like that which again is just thrown at you and told to go study it because a lot of the people read these books.
Now, generally, I agree, you can play Chess by intuition to a really good level but I've had games where my opponents just told me my moves were sound, made sense and in a way they were "good" but they fell to a part of their preparation theory that was like 8-9 moves deep and honestly, I really didn't like that and I absolutely didn't want to join this "rat race" because I think for me it would be a unhealthy life to aimlessly keep studying Chess just so I can be competitive against other people who do this same exact thing of studying.
Anyways, hope I clarified things and thanks for chipping in!
Computer generated? If so, I wouldn't be worried. Besides, imagine this scenario: you search for a 960 game on Lichess right now, you or your opponent have 25 seconds to move. In 25 seconds, you can't input a 960 position into another site and learn theory for that very specific position. If you take longer than 25 seconds to make a move, Lichess aborts the game automatically. It's not possible. 960 is a completely feasible variant if you want to avoid opening theory. Also, a big 960 tournament will be played next year^, so things are getting exciting in the 960 world.
>By middlegame theory, I meant that there is a lot of resources on Chessable that go into middlegame theory of an opening if both sides played early opening by the book, so even middlegame is quite covered in terms of variants and the otherwise general strategy ideas are actually incorporated as part of the theory and studied as such.
I have two things to say to this: 1. you should know the plans and ideas for the middlegames you get because these middlegames arise from your opening repertoire, which you should have already studied (pawn structures, best piece placement, common sacrifices, pawn breaks, etc). 2. as you say the theory is influenced by strategy (and tactics), so if you have a solid strategical foundation (and tactical), you will be fine as long as you're not playing an extremely sharp opening, in which you must know concrete theory. A book I found extremely helpful for strategy was: Mastering Chess Strategy by GM Hellsten.
>As for endgames, I don't think the theory is too difficult but it's also been a situation where people are guided towards books like Dvoretsky's endgame manual and 100 endgames you must know and stuff like that which again is just thrown at you and told to go study it because a lot of the people read these books.
Those books are not for beginners, especially Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual. I agree with you. If I were to recommend an endgame book to a beginner, I would recommend Silman's Endgame Course by IM Silman. You're a strong player, though, so I think you could get a lot out of Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual (at least the grey/blue sections, which Dvoretsky's notes as being the most essential parts).
>Now, generally, I agree, you can play Chess by intuition to a really good level but I've had games where my opponents just told me my moves were sound, made sense and in a way they were "good" but they fell to a part of their preparation theory that was like 8-9 moves deep
What was your opening repertoire?
^ = https://en.chessbase.com/post/freestyle-super-tournament-in-...*
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
My view is that chess without memorization is not a very interesting game. What remains is just calculation which is uninteresting to 99+% of people. Since you reached a high level in the game I believe you have excellent calculation skills and part of the reason for that is that you, as you say, find calculation interesting.
I find calculation pointless and thus I'm very bad at it; even after 30 years of playing I hang pieces on half my games and I rarely, if ever, calculate more than one move deep. I believe most people are like me in this regard and therefore most people will remain at a sub-1500 rating forever.
I'm sure there's been theory developed for Fisher Random (960) but memorizing that seems like a bigger PITA than for standard chess, because there's literally 960 starting positions to memorize the theory for, as opposed to one. Plus, if you play 960 online, you will not have a choice as to your starting position, it will be completely random. "Oh, I memorized a bunch of theory for starting position 521 and 859, but now I'm faced with position 157, so shit I'm out of luck" said nobody ever.
I do love 960, I play Crazyhouse960 the most as it's very fluid, requires little opening prep as it's randomized, and there's no endgame to solve for. It's just pure tactics and in-the-moment thinking.
But this isn't a good illustration anyway since it's a very constrained artificial example of a game based on pattern matching
I know there is a tendency to frame human intelligence in terms of the age’s breakthrough technology. But man if that isn’t reminiscent of token prediction.
My experience. I played chess when I was between 13 and 16, at that time I was a good player but not a child prodigy, let's say one of the best players in my school. I have no idea of my ELO then, there was no internet in the early '80s. I have not played for roughly 40 years. I few years ago I started playing on lichess and my ELO is now around 1700 (with a peak of 1900). I don't know if chess.com and lichess have different ratings.
1400 on lichess is more like 1200 on chess.com, but 1900 is probably 1900.
Based on your post though, you definitely seem like you are very smart or have a natural affinity for chess. 1900 is extremely high, especially in a few months or even years.
Normally people gain around 300 ELO points per year if they are learning and practicing actively.
Not in my experience. I'm rated 1900+ on lichess and 1600+ on chess.com. That's after playing a significant number of games (nearly 500 on chess.com, thousands on lichess).
The way I feel about it, a 1900 player on lichess is an intermediate beginner (like myself), whereas 1900 on chess.com already represents a decent club player level.
For reference, "in real life" (Elo rating / FIDE) I'm rated below 1300 in classical chess, and about 1400 in rapid - although I've played only one rapid tournament, and I don't have a blitz rating at all, which makes comparisons a bit tricky.
For what it's worth though, as far as I can tell, these proportions are about typical.