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Comment by PartiallyTyped | Hacker News Reader

Magnus (Carlsen, chess) does this often, he pushes people into unknown territory that they are most certainly underprepared for through new or obscure openings that complicate a position very quickly. The game then turns tactical and they eventually find themselves in a bad endgame, one against Magnus of all people.

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Just in case someone thinks Magnus comes up with those openings on the spot.

No he has a team that uses computers to find out those plays based on what other player played as all past matches are available.

Source: I watched interview with a guy that was hired as a computer scientist consulting gig by Magnus team.

It does not take away how good he is as I don’t think many people could learn to remember weird openings and win from that against grand master level players anyway.

I remember reading that his memory is unrivaled - so this also isn't a strategy the other top players could simply copy.

In chess, there are basically three ways to evaluate moves

1) pure calculation

2) recognize the position (or a very similar one) from a previous game, and remember what the best move was

3) intuition - this one is harder to explain but, I think of it like instinct/muscle memory

All the top players are good at all of these things. But some are agreed upon as much better than others. Magnus is widely agreed to have the best memory. The contender for best calculator might be Fabiano.

In humans, all else being equal, memory seems to be superior to calculation, because calculation takes time.

Chess engines seem to reverse this, with calculation being better than memory, because memory is expensive.

This is the reason why I couldn't ever get into chess, despite my dad and brother enjoying it. My intuition was crap (having not developed it) and I lacked the ability or desire to fully visualize multiple steps of the game.

All that remained was rote memorization, which makes for a boring game indeed.

Despite all of that, I suspect chess will long outlive my preferred entertainment of Unreal Tournament.

The magic of chess is in matchmaking.

I enjoy using nearly pure intuition when playing so I just use that strategy and see the same ~50/50 win percentage as most players because my ELO is based on how I play past games and there’s millions of online players across a huge range of skill levels.

There’s nothing wrong with staying at 1000 or even 300 if that’s what it takes to enjoy the game. It’s only if you want to beat specific people or raise your ELO that forces you to try and optimize play.

I hate ladder systems. Winning is fun and losing is not. Why would I purposely choose to play a game/system where your win rate does not meaningfully improve as you skill up?

That sounds frustrating and tedious. If I get better I want to win more often.

But winning is only fun because you do not always win and almost proportionally so... If you get better you get to play better games against better opponents.

The win or loss is ancillary to the experience for me.

>The win or loss is ancillary to the experience for me.

Maybe because I primarily play sports and not chess but this attitude is completely foreign and mystifying to me.

Don't you feel bad when you lose? Why would you purposely engage in an ELO system that results in you feeling bad after 50% of games, and never gives you a sense of progress?

Isn't that profoundly discouraging?

Do you think Tiger Woods or Leo Messi wish they won fewer matches? Like I just can't get myself into a headspace where you're out for competition but are satisfied with a 50% win rate.

The ELO system does give you a sense of process. Continuing to beat up weak players does not give you progress. It makes you the one eyed king of the blind.

Do you think professional athletes like Woods and Messi are stupid because they could be playing in Farm League and winning every time against scrubs?

>The ELO system does give you a sense of process.

By definition it does not, unless your definition of progress is "number go up".

>Do you think professional athletes are stupid because they could be playing in Little League and winning every time against kids?

So let me get this straight: are you seriously suggesting that you don't understand the difference between e.g. the format of the NHL or the FIFA world cup, and playing against literal children to pad one's win rate?

Because I think you're probably not arguing in good faith with that last comment. Time for me to duck out of this conversation.

Progress is in the quality of the games not just an irrelevant number.

If you have a major skill gap, games become boring. Try playing Martin bot for 3 hours.

I honestly don't understand your point and do understand his, and definitely don't understand why you took it so aggressively.

All he's saying is it's boring to win all the time.

It feels bad to loose but you also need the wins to feel good. Beating a low ELO player is about as fun as beating small kids at basketball or something. For me it’s not the win/loss that drives me but making fewer mistakes. If I loose a game where my opponent punished a minor mistake, fair enough, that took skill and I’ll learn from it and I don’t feel bad. But if I loose because I made a blunder (obvious tactical error) that sucks and I hate that.

Because that's not a Nash equilibrium: for every extra bit of fun you have, someone else has notfun, and thus has an incentive to switch their strategy (play on another site)

You can always play in tournaments to figure out where you rank compared to a larger population!

Indeed I much prefer a tournament format.

You would probably prefer the game Shooting Fish in a Barrel over the game Chess.

Winning half the time is better because each of those wins means far far more than winning against bad players.

Playing down is only fun for insecure, unambitious people. If winning is the fun part, just cheat, don't seek out bad players to play against. Playing against bad players makes you bad at chess.

Edit: never mind you're the same guy constructing strawman arguments in the other thread

I haven't read this thread in that way: if you want to improve your skills that is great, it is your choice but you should know, realistically speaking, that at certain level you cannot improve anymore in your lifetime, except if you are part of the elite.

I stopped enjoying chess because a game in which you always lose is no fun; the only winning move is not to play.

His memory is definitely rivaled. During the recent speed chess championships broadcast they had Magnus, Hikaru, Alireza, and some other top players play some little games testing memory, response rate, and so on.

The memory game involved memorizing highlighted circles on a grid so even something ostesibly chess adjacent. Magnus did not do particularly well. Even when playing a blindfold sim against 'just' 5 people (the record is 48) he lost track of the positions (slightly) multiple times and would eventually lose 2 of the games on time.

But where Magnus is completely unrivaled is in intuition. His intuition just leads him in a better direction faster than other top players. This is both what makes him so unstoppable in faster time controls, and also so dangerous in obscure openings where he may have objectively 'meh' positions, but ones where the better player will still win, and that better player is just about always him.

Short term memory is extremely different from lifelong memory.

For sure, but 'memory' as people think of it plays a fairly small role in chess - mostly relegated to opening preparation which is quite short term - watch any player, including Magnus, stream and they all constantly forget or mix up opening theory in various lines. But of course if you expect to play a e.g. Marshall Gambit in your next game then you'll review those lines shortly before your game.

Instead people think players have this enormous cache of memorized positions in their minds where they know the optimal move, but it's more about lots of ideas and patterns, which then show themselves immediately when you look at a position.

Watch any world class player solve puzzles and you'll find they have often solved it before 'you' (you being any person under master level) have even been able to figure out where all the pieces are. And it's not like they've ever seen the exact position before (at least not usually), but they've developed such an extreme intuition that the position just instantly reveals itself.

So one could call this some sort of memory as I suspect you're doing here with 'lifelong memory', but I think intuition is a far more precise term.

It is commonly misunderstood what STM is capable of. It is nowadays known that STM is crap on many levels and can only hold around around 3 items, and unreliably at that. Certainly not 7 as was proposed earlier.

Anything beyond that goes into LTM. It takes around 5 seconds to put something into LTM. If the test talked about here has more than 3 things to remember, LTM must be in use and will be a limiting factor.

Any differences between people at that point likely refer to their chunking capabilities, i.e. if they can reduce complex patterns to a single entity to remember (each of which takes ~5 seconds).

Source: Human Problem Solving by Newell/Simon.

This is not a proper test for chess memory. The point is that chunking is learned. A strong player has a single entity in their mind that describes a complex pattern. Magnus may have many more of these available than his opponents, letting him memorize and recall chess patterns more easily.

The same is not true for other things to memorize. "Memorizing highlighted circles on a grid" is quite different from chess patterns. So I don't think this test can be used to say anything about his relative capabilities.

Chess memory is not so rigid or limited. For instance another little demo from the same event had the players name what game a position was from, but the pieces were replaced with checker pieces. Nonetheless the players were easily able to do so.

This is why I said the test was quite adjacent to chess.

While Magnus has a very strong memory (as do all players at that caliber) his intuition is regarded by others and himself as his strongest quality and he constantly talks about how an intuitive player he is compared with others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-gw6ChKKoo

> It does not take away how good he is

Honestly, your anecdote makes me respect him even more.

Few people go to those lengths to prepare.

I would presume almost every chess grandmaster does the same, no? And in that case there’s nothing particularly genius in this stroke.

Maybe doesn’t reduce my image of any individual player, but does reduce the image of the game itself.

I had a brief rabbit hole about chess at the beginning of this year and found out a few things pros do to prepare against their opponents. I was trying to remember one specific periodical, but I found it: Chess Informant. 320 page paperback (and/or CD! - I see they also have a downloadable version for less[2]) quarterly periodical full of games since the last one. Looks like they're up to volume 161.[1] I suppose pros also get specific games they want sooner than that, especially now with everything being streamed, but anyway. There's a lot more going on in chess that is just as important as the time spent actually playing in the tournament.

[1] https://sahovski.com/Chess-Informant-161-Olympic-Spirit-p695... [2] https://sahovski.com/Chess-Informant-161-DOWNLOAD-VERSION-p6...

That’s very interesting. However it’s like any of the organizations that support competitors at elite levels in all sports. From the doctors, nutritionists, coaches that support Olympic athletes to the “high command” of any NFL team coordinating over headset with one another and the coach, who can even radio the quarterback on the field (don’t think there is another sport with this).

Auto racing? Even has telemetry.

Road cycling as well maybe? Tour de France.

Do you think that this kind of inorganic requirement is part of the reason he abandoned World Chess?

No. He did not abandon "World Chess". He is still an active player.

He chooses not to participate in the FIDE World Championship primarily because he doesn't like the format. He prefers a tournament format instead of a long 1-on-1 match against the running champion.

Fwiw this is normal in chess nowadays. There was some brief era in chess where everybody was just going down the most critical lines and assuming they could outprepare their opponents, or outplay them if that didn't work out. Kasparov and Fischer are the typical examples of this style.

But computers have made this less practical in modern times simply because it's so easy to lose in these sort of positions to the endless number of comp-prepped novelties which may be both objectively mediocre, but also nary impossible to play against without preparation against a prepared opponent.

So a lot of preparation now a days is about getting positions that may not be the most critical test of an opening, but that lead to interesting positions and where the first player to spring a novelty isn't going to just steamroll the other guy.

So in this brave new world you see things like the Berlin Defense becoming hugely popular while the Najdorf has substantially declined in popularity.

It is true that Magnus usually prefers offbeat lines to get out of the opponent's preparation. However, they're rarely very sharp or otherwise tactically complicated; on the contrary, he excels at slow maneuvering in strategic positions (and, as you say, the endgame).

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