Hacker News Reader

Chess players are switching to blitz/rapid chess. It dominates online on the main chess servers. For high level tournaments, they just need to ensure controlled environments so issues of cheating are minimized.

View on HN

It only dominates (and has dominated for basically the whole existence of internet chess) because games are short, fun, and non-committal. Playing a tournament game means spending hours on one game. That's exhausting and not something people "do for fun." On the other hand, you can get in a dozen 5 minute games in around an hour.

Computers still overpower humans on 5 0 chess. Even a crappy non-optimized bot I wrote can get 12 levels of the tree plus quiescence essentially instantly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com