Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion
fide.com
fide.com
He seems to have this remarkable gift of making moves which aren't just strong, they get inside his opponent's head and cause them to either overthink/break down. I'm interested in the technical details behind this metric. Has anyone heard of it before?
Regardless, congrats Magnus. You are truly a generational talent, and I'm excited to see what your win will do for the game.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/net...
"...Carlsen is demonstrating one of his most feared qualities, namely his “nettlesomeness,” to use a term coined for this purpose by Ken Regan. Using computer analysis, you can measure which players do the most to cause their opponents to make mistakes."
I was surprised to see that this isn't just some subjective measure but can me measured using computer analysis. In chess this can be a great tool against one's opponents but in collaborative endeavors it can be a detriment to team productivity. I wonder whether the same analysis can be used to pin-point nettlesome members of team e.g members of an open source team whose contributions sidetrack collaborators and cause them to make more trackable errors...
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_annotation_symbols#Move_e...
1. Player A makes a move the computer considers suboptimal.
2. Disoriented player B responds with another move the computer considers an important mistake.
3. Player A capitalizes with moves the computer thinks improves his position, even relative to the original baseline.
4. The computer concludes that A is nettlesome.
So it's measuring the delta of what it considers optimal with what actually happens against real humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_effect
but recent advances in AI like in Deep Blue have introduced branch extension, where branches of the game tree with statistically similar rankings are searched further until one can be definitively regarded as the best one.
To summarize, chess engines can't give definitive answers on how good a move is because, like humans, they can't search the whole game tree.
http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1948809,00...
This is why the second part of Carlsen's quote is so important:
"Sometimes 15 to 20 moves ahead. But the trick is evaluating the position at the end of those calculations."
A human sees a late game position and has to actually calculate it all the way to its conclusion or at least a key position where they are confident of the evaluation [3]. A computer doesn't have to, and believe me, some of those 6 piece endgame positions are really weird. You move a piece just one innocuous looking square and it can alter the outcome from a win to a draw. There in fact were many endgame positions throughout chess history which were considered solved, only for the evaluation to change after a brute force calculation.
I'm not particularly good at chess [4], but in slow games I will routinely calculate 10 moves ahead in some sharp positions. Now, I'm not comparing my calculating ability to a GM, which is obviously better in every way, but the fact that a GM calculates 15-20 moves ahead is not why they are good. It is that at every step of that calculation they are evaluating the position incredibly accurately and are deciding the right moves to calculate.
In fact, due to the horizon effect, the reason computers got a lot better than humans wasn't due to raw calculation speed, it was due to massive improvements in their evaluation ability (like endgame tablebases) allowing them to put that massive calculation advantage to good use.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame_tablebase
2: All of which are already in the tablebase by definition, because you can't add to the number of pieces on the chess board
3: For example, if I can calculate a position to where I have a rook and a king and you only have a king, I don't have to think any further, I know this is a win for me.
4: ~1300 rating
{C24: Bishop's Opening: 2...Nf6}
1. e4 e5 2. Bc4 Nf6 3. d4 exd4 4. Nf3 Bb4+ 5.Bd2 Bxd2+ 6. Qxd2 O-O
7. e5 {White threatens to win material: e5xf6}
(7. O-O Nxe4 8. Qxd4 Nd6 9. Bd5 c6 10. Bb3 Nf5 11. Qf4 d5
12. Nbd2 Qd6 13. Qxd6 Nxd6 14. c4 dxc4 15. Nxc4 Nxc4 16. Bxc4 Bf5
17. Rfe1 Nd7 18. Nd4 Bg6 19. Re7 Rad8 20. Rd1 Rfe8 21. Nxc6 bxc6
{Jensen,B (1817)-Gade,J (1535) Helsingor 2009 1-0 (58)})
7... d5N {Black threatens to win material: d5xc4}
(7... Re8 8. O-O d5 9. exd6 Qxd6 10. Na3 c5 11. Nb5 Qb6
12. Qf4 Re7 13. Rae1 Be6 14. Bxe6 fxe6 15. Nd6 Qc7 16. Qg3 Nc6
17. Ng5 e5 18. Nf5 Ree8 19. Nf7 Qxf7 20. Nh6+
{1-0 (20) Le Dref,M (1770)-Bremond,E (1600) Angers 2006})
8. Qxd4?
(8. ⌓Bb3 {and White is still in the game} Ne4 9. Qxd4=)
8... Nc6∓ 9. Qd2 dxc4
(9... Bg4!? 10. Be2 Bxf3 11. Bxf3 Nxe5 −+)
10. Qxd8⩱ Rxd8 11. exf6 {White king safety dropped.} Re8+
12. Kd1
(12. Kf1 gxf6 13. h4 Be6∓)
12... Bg4 13. Nbd2 Rad8 {Black has a king attack}
(13... Re6!?∓)
14. Re1⩱ Ne5 15. c3??
(15. ⌓Re3⩱ {was necessary})
15... Bxf3+ −+ 16. gxf3
(16. Kc2 {doesn't do any good} Bg4 17. f3 Bf5+ 18. Ne4 Ng4 −+)
16... Rxd2+! {Deflection: e1} 17. Kxd2
(17. Kc1 Rxf2 18. Re4 Nd3+ 19. Kd1 Nxb2+ 20. Ke1 Nd3+ 21. Kd1 Rxe4 22.
fxe4 Rf1+ 23. Kd2 Rxa1 24. a3 Rxa3 25. Ke3 gxf6 26. h4 Ne5 27. Kd2 Ra2+
28. Ke1 b5 29. h5 b4 30. Kf1 b3 31. Ke1 b2 32. Kf2 b1=Q+ 33. Kg3 Qg1+
34. Kh4 Qh2#)
17... Nxf3+ 18. Kc2 Nxe1+ 19. Kd2
(19. Kd1 {the last chance for counterplay} Nf3 20. Rc1 Re1+ 21. Kc2 Re2+
22. Kb1 Nd2+ 23. Ka1 Rxf2 24. Rd1 Rxh2 25. Rg1 −+)
19... Nf3+ 20. Kc2 Re2+
(20... Re2+ 21. Kb1 Re1+ 22. Kc2 Rxa1 −+) 0-1
[2] Numeric Annotation Glyphs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeric_Annotation_Glyphs
I think it also measures how much people are trained to learn all the historical games versus learn deep principles and truths of chess. The great ones should be able to thrive in chaos.
This is true in other fields. Some traders get crushed in non-standard markets. Others thrive.
A program runs through your git/svn and tracks the user, date, commit, and reversion.
While analysing reversions vs commits and all the in between, I am confident it would be somewhat easy to tweak the analysis to be accurate.
Each reversion you encounter, you check the five next and five previous commits. If any users stand out as being in the previous tree for additional/reversional...
Actually, it may be a little complicated...
Definitely worth listening to the story: http://relprime.com/chinook/
In some cases two moves may be roughly objectively equal, one leading to more complex positions than the other. In these cases players do sometimes choose according to the situation on the clock, their style, or their mood. For instance, if I have more time left than my opponent, I may choose the more complicated continuation, and vice versa. This sort of practical savvy is important, but not nearly as important as many casual players assume.
Both Regan and Guid & Bratko have tried weighting the accuracy of moves by the complexity of positions faced. Carlsen is middle-of-the-pack in terms of reaching complex positions, so this doesn't seem to be the mysterious "nettlesomeness" either.
One thing I've tried is just staring at the player. I've also tried just barely glancing at the board and making the move on my turn while actually doing my studying on their turn.
The funniest thing that someone tried against me was playing a guitar while also playing chess. This was in a local tournament in college. Half way into the game, he stopped and exclaimed "What am I doing??" and tried to play serious from that point forward. Luckily for me, he waited too late.
Allow me to go on a tangent to let me tell my personal story with chess. I began playing at age 7 when my elder brother borrowed a chess board from a friend. It was a nice break from the physical altercations between us(read mat fights). My maternal grand ma called it "Satan's Game". And my mother toed the line. Why? I don't know the exact reason, but I guess it was an amazing time sink. Or maybe they both had watched this Hindi movie by Satyajit Ray: The Chess Players(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076696/). When the game s between my brother and me became violent(You moved it when I was off to the toilet...) it was banned from our home. But we didn't give up. Our summers were spent playing chess in a nearby mango orchard or the graveyard a mile away. The chess board made out of paper with plastic pieces was the only "toy" we never broke. Those were the best days of my life. And it's still safe 20 years later. With every piece intact. What a game.
Edit: Thank you for all the useful replies! In reply to some of you, I am a complete beginner at Go. Maybe the word 'boring' was not carefully chosen. As a programmer, I should have known better - that things may seem boring (tiresome?) until you become more fluent with them. I should certainly give Go another shot...
I'd give Go another try. If you're interested in watching anime, I found the series _Hikaru no Go_ pretty good motivation to keep learning.
Backgammon is also very rich also, although there is a random element there which, depending on your preferences, is either a good or bad thing.
The same could be said of poker, where the element of chance appears to be huge but which doesn't matter over many games.
Bridge is a game of short-term and long-term memory, strategy (in long matches), tactics, deduction, induction, risk assessment, hidden information, and finally a strong test of character, and your judgment of the characters of others. Unlike chess it does not seem to have a "limit" where you stop getting smarter and start merely learning more about chess. There's a reason it's the favorite game of some of the world's smartest and richest men.
Nope, what is it? Nothing shows up in my Google searches other than plain old "false cards", which are fairly obvious. I don't remember bothering to name such a thing.
Declarer leads the A, parter plays low, dummy plays low. Do you discard the Q or the T?
Since you have to discard a non-small card declarer will know you have either a singleton, or QT doubleton, because with any other holding you'd play something else. If you have T singleton, there is nothing declarer can do about it except lead small to dummy's J at trick 2. However, if you can convince declarer you have Q singleton, the right play is to hook the 9 in dummy. Thus, playing the Q at trick 1 is a mandatory false card - discarding the ten will never gain, discarding the Q puts declarer on a genuine guess.
At very high levels, this gets further randomized because declarer will pickup on the Q likely being a MFC, and thus work to otherwise resolve the guess and get it right (e.g. play other suits and using deductive reasoning from that. - so at very high levels the winning strategy is actually to make the MFC most - but NOT ALL - the time, at random.
On the other hand, for the declarer it is just business as usual: you try to navigate the tricks making as few guesses as possible. At some point realize that seeing the Queen doesn't always mean a singleton, so you put that in the "guess" category, but the actual process isn't effected.
I am ending my rant with a quote: "Rather than being the image of a single struggle as in chess, Go is much more like the panorama of an entire campaign, or complex theatre of war. And so it is more like modern warfare where strategic mass movements are the ultimate determinants of victory. … As in modern warfare, direct combat, without supporting tactics, rarely occurs. In fact, to engage too soon in direct combat frequently spells defeat." -- Oscar Korschelt
"Go: A Complete Introduction to the Game" by Chikun Cho generally gets very high recommendations [2].
When you finish your first book a good followup is "The Second Book of Go" by Bozulich [3].
Finally, the series "Graded Go Problems for Beginners" is excellent [4]. Volume I problems are suitable for beginners starting as soon as you learn the rules.
If you have an iOS device, take a look at smartgo books [5]. Chikun Cho's book listed above and the graded go problem series are available from them, as are many many other books. These books are in an interactive format that works with their free reader app.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Go-Beginners-Kaoru-Iwamoto/dp/03947333...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Go-Complete-Introduction-Beginner-Elem...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Second-Book-Beginner-Elementary-Books/...
I'd be of the opinion that boring-ness is fairly subjective, so being insulted probably isn't warranted.
You make good points about the gameplay differences, though.
Kind of irrelevant, but board games seem like a great application of 3D printing. I wonder if there will be another surge in popularity when (if?) 3D printers become household items.
Anyway, every one-on-one sport makes a reference to "human chess."
The truth is, any skill-based game can be extremely intense at the highest levels of play.
I'm a huge fan of both activities because of the combination of mental and physical demands.
Both are a bit hard to learn though because the pieces are oriental characters.
I agree there's a certain amount of hubris behind the endeavor. But I'm interested in the design of balanced games, and the ways in which some old games are not balanced or rigid.
>I agree there's a certain amount of hubris behind the endeavor. But I'm interested in the design of balanced games, and the ways in which some old games are not balanced or rigid.
The creator's blog post is quite entertaining, thought it was a joke but the game is quite real and looks interesting:
>Chess 1 was a big hit, no question there, but a few issues have cropped up over the years. First, the original game ends in a draw uncomfortably often. Second, memorization (rather than on-the-spot intuition) ended up being much more important than the original developers intended. Even top players such as Fischer and Capablanca complained about this. Third, because it has no hidden information, the ability to capitalize on reading your opponent is more limited than it could be. And finally, the first version offered only a single army and one matchup.
http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/30/announcing-chess-2.html
>So Anand encountered a "mild surprise" in the opening moves that left him "flying blind" (meaning the board was in a position with which he had not previously studied) and because of that he decided to not keep pursuing the game. He just engineered a draw.
>ntuitive understanding of the game and moments of brilliant improvisation are the most exciting aspects, and yet memorized lines of play are so deeply entrenched now that when a top player encounters anything outside of memorized, studied lines he heads directly for the draw. It's really the opposite of what you'd hope.
Shouldn't be a capitalizable entity in chess. I like chess (unfortunately I don't like it enough to practice it often) because of it's no make-a-poker-face-now requirement.
To me the trick is preserve some kind of backward compatibility with chess while finding a way to increase the strategic content. Ironically stuff like increasing the board size like in 3D chess variants, can actually reduce the strategic content by reducing the role of long-term factors like pawn structure.
EDIT: I can see some combination of the game's features -- particularly the king "touchdown" -- sort of working against the strategic content. IE people just playing gimmick openings to sneak their king across.
The reason why memorization is a problem in chess isn't because there aren't enough openings/endgames to remember, it's because most players need to memorize certain patterns to reach a certain level of effectiveness, because they would rarely be able to solve those problems over the board.
So the solution to the chess memorization problem isn't necessarily more openings and more complexity, which ironically could just INCREASE opening importance. Rather I think the idea is to increase the importance and depth of long term strategic factors like pawns, the sort of understanding of which grows over time and doesn't lend itself to rote memorization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoridor
A lot of the subtlety comes in because of the rule that you can never completely obstruct the opponent's path to the goal, but you can try to make it as convoluted as possible. Hence people try to multiply the opponent's options (so that they can be closed off at the last minute) and limit their own options (so that the opponent isn't allowed to block their unique path to the goal).
It has two big downsides, the main one for me is that it's extremely expensive (a brand new console + collection of titles is equivalent in price to owning a couple of top tier decks).
The other one is that it's seen as uncool or childish or nerdish. I'd rather not mention it in workplaces anymore.
That said, yeah, building decks playing the metagame is very rewarding intellectually :) and having games 24/7 on Magic Online is great.
Not like Go, don't you think? (I do, been playing go for 10 years already)
There are still formats where you see a wide variety of decks, but T2 play normally involves picking one of maybe 5 or 6 viable options.
With MTG, even if I went down to my local card shop for Friday Night Magic, there would be enough people there with netdecks to ensure that creative attempts at deck building don't succeed very often.
In a local chess tournament, the level of play isn't even close to being that standardized. Most of the local chess clubs I've been to don't even have more than one or two rated players.
The difference is pretty simple. In MTG, anyone with 200 bucks can buy a world class T2 deck and learn to play it reasonably well in just a few hours. On the other hand, highly standardized play in chess usually only occurs after years of intense study.
There is, however, an easy way to fix MTG's shortcomings. I just play casual/peasant/other unorthodox formats. It makes things more interesting and its cheaper.
So, I spend my weekends putting on a black uniform and working as a tournament judge at professional-level Magic events. And... maybe you're right that someone could do well at a local FNM this way. But at any sort of serious competitive level (even at the Pro Tour Qualifier level), your assertion just doesn't hold up.
You can see this in tournament results, by the way. Card availability is basically only an issue for casual/FNM play. At any sort of real competitive tournament, the field is made up of players who have access to the cards they want, and the winner is determined by a combination of preparation and skill.
Most importantly, you can see this in results from Limited formats (where players build decks using cards opened on-site from standard booster packs, which are unpredictable enough to constitute a random per-player card pool). Though there are certainly "Limited specialist" players, for the most part you will see similar lists of names among the top finishers in both Limited and Constructed formats, which drives home the point in a frankly undeniable way.
Limited is a great format that I'm glad you mentioned. Anything involving a draft is going to be pretty creative.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that MTG is inferior to chess. I like both games equally well.
Beyond the decks/openings analogy though, I'm not sure Magic and chess really compare well.
I think the most interesting distinction is in innovators vs. honers; Gerry Thompson is now out of the game at the professional level, but he was one of the greatest honers who ever played the game. Gerry was not known for coming up with new deck ideas, and in fact the few times he tried it he did horribly. But his ability to analyze the tournament landscape week to week, and make the perfect couple of tweaks to existing deck shells, was unmatched.
In some ways, the printing press ruined games like chess. I still like to play, but the widespread availability of opening books stifles creativity.
(I have a lot of experience with MtG, and a fair bit with chess, and this is my go-to analogy. I could also probably write a lot more on how the "netdeck" attitude signals someone is missing out on an unbelievable amount of strategic depth, but that's for another day)
(Get the Hive Carbon edition, it's much nicer looking)
Go and no limit poker are getting massively popular. They are both like chess, but much less tactical and a lot more strategical games. In other words, computers can't beat the best players in these games yet.
For whatever reasons, the status of games is somewhat related to whether they are "solved" by programs. Chess, like backgammon and checkers, is really on its way down.
I love chess, and play it all the time, and same with many other games. But the allure goes down once it is solved.
maybe all games will be figured out by software... but at the moment, no limit and go seem extremely exciting in terms of their possibilities/strategies.
The difference, of course, is between "this machine can beat the best existing human player" and "this machine can beat any conceivable player as long as it's logically possible to do so". And right now we're at the former stage for chess (at least in some abstract sense: I'm not sure that a specific machine exists in operable condition that reflects the state of the art), but nowhere near the latter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess#Predictions_on_w...
I love chess, but this type of thinking is flawed. Using this logic, the Twilight movies are misunderstood masterpieces, Justin Beiber is the millennials' Mozart, and WWE style wrestling should be in the Olympics alongside the decathlon.
Go is, poker is not. The key difference is that in go and chess, all the information about the game is known by both parties. That's not true in poker, where each player has data that's intentionally hidden from the other players.
There are a few gems there that you might be interested in.
I personally play heads-up poker. Unlike 9-handed poker, heads-up poker is constant action. It's more dependent on opponent profiling and maximizing expectation on the fly, using experience and statistics. A game of infinite variety.
Since April I've taken $200 and, playing online and live poker, have profited in the following ways:
+$6458 - online poker heads up matches
+$2900 - rakeback/bonuses from pokerstars
+$12500 - live tournaments and pot limit omaha cash
And that's merely playing recreationally, completely separate from my full time job. You can play a complex, fun game and make money doing it. Who wouldn't enjoy that?
It's very different from MTG, where me and my friends would play for the thrill of it, spending whatever little money we had to play.
The easy test here is: would you play a poker tournament just for fun, if there was nothing at stake? Few people actually do it. The thrill in both cases actually is (or becomes) the money made/lost.
I didn't advocate playing only for the sake of making money. I suggested it because of how complex a game it is. How much time it takes to master. And because the potential rewards once you do are quite significant, which is a nice added bonus.
And I'm not sure when you stopped playing (pre black friday?) but I don't think there's a single point at which I've ever stopped improving. I know many heads-up professionals as well and not a single one of them ever stops learning and improving their game. Stagnation in poker is death. As such, I don't know why you feel like it was a lot of fun at the start but lost that later on. There is always another level deeper you can go.
The point of any game is to win. The metric that determines the winner of a game is different in every case. In poker, it's how much money you're making. But that doesn't have anything to do with the game itself. It merely depicts how well you're playing.
Learning to maximize expectation with true mathematical finesse while factoring in accurate opponent profiling and gameflow is one of the most challenging things I've ever had to do gamewise. I've played chess since I was 5, Counter-Strike very seriously for five years, WoW for the first 3 years before it went to shit, and have been getting into Go. And in none of those games have I achieved the level of mental satisfaction as I have from poker.
Edit: Was your stars alias RRiccio as well? Were you a cash player? You only have ~750 tournaments recorded on sharkscope.
To put in another way: most MtG players I know are still in love with the game 10 years after they started playing competitively, while nearly none of my poker pro friends still play or enjoy poker 5 years after we started.
P.S. Played mostly on PP, pre-BF, diff alias.
On top of that I think most US players play on iPoker skins (black chip poker, cake poker, etc.) which allow US players.
But yeah, all of them (apart from the Nevada/New Jersey sites) are technically illegal down there. Most professionals who didn't quit poker altogether and didn't transition to live either moved to Canada or some third world country with no taxes and cheap living to grind.
I played professionally a few years back, so this was my understanding of the law then, and I haven't heard of any changes:
It's perfectly legal, as a player, to play. Laws have been created that prevent banks from transferring money to and from poker sites.
When Black Friday happened, it was primarily because poker sites were committing fraud to work with banks to process payments.
There are still sites operating, however they take very, very long to process payments, limit cashouts to a point where professional play is not possible, and can suffer the same fate as the big three sites did on Black Friday.
All of my professional-playing friends quit or moved out of country after Black Friday.
You can bypass location restrictions with VPN, but you also need a foreign bank account and can be caught and have your funds seized.
It's unlikely your $200 was a proper bankroll when you started, and it's even more unlikely that you or anyone else could consistently replicate these results (when starting out).
That said, I'm an ex-husng player, and played them professionally for three years, and I don't disagree with your overall message. Poker is a wonderful game, heads-up play is great and has almost no boring parts, and you can conceivably make a living at it if you put in your time and manage your money well.
How are the games these days? When I played it was primarily before superturbos, and I three-tabled $105s on FTP for just under a 60% winrate and 14% ROI.
I imagine the average player has really upped their game, though, and that the regulars these days would crush me on average--I'm rusty and the game has matured.
Those results are based on the following:
2,615 $3.50 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos
1,605 $7 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos
1,792 $15 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos
16,715 $30 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos
211 $60 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos
I've also played a handful of MTT tournaments which are a miniscule part of sample size but which result for about $7,500 of that $12,500. I played the $880 Fraser Downs Fall Poker Challenge in Vancouver and cashed 3rd for $7,384. I also won $5,000 that weekend in one session playing pot limit omaha cash. So that is, indeed, small sample size, but the rest is not. Read on.
This isn't run good. Once you're up to a sample of around 5000 heads up hyper turbo games, your results begin to accurately depict your actual skill level. I've played 22,938 heads-up hyper-turbo matches since April with a 1.08% ROI, 51.80% winrate, and $6,063.56 net profit before rakeback.
And yes, I practiced perfect bankroll management. If you're not living off your bankroll, using a 35/50 buy-in rule (move up when you have 50 buy-ins, move down when you're at 35 buy-ins) is a good, aggressive system to use. If you are, 100 or 200 buy-ins minimum is best, depending on how comfortable you are with variance. I started with $200 which was ~57 buy-ins for the $3.50s on PokerStars. I'm now playing the $30s and $60s with a bankroll over $6000.
And yes, people can replicate these results. Easily. My results are, honestly, more on the weaker side among regulars. As for a beginning player, they could easily replicate these results if they actually studied. It's really not that hard to crush the $3.50s-$15s on PokerStars. You just have to think. Most people are there to gamble.
The games are excellent these days. Of course the overall player pool took a hit on Black Friday, but there is still tons of action. Hyper-Turbos have only gotten more popular, especially because the best players are booking some of the highest profits among all high stakes players each year.
As for a 60% winrate and 14% ROI at super-turbos, THAT is too small of a sample size. It's highly like you're a winning player with a great ROI, but you were on an upswing. You're ROI was likely in the 2.5%-5% range. The highest ROI I've ever seen was around 6% over 20k games (also someone hit 7.5% over 3k games but thats too small a sample). And yes, the average player is slightly better, and the regs have definitely improved as well, but fish are fish. The games up to $15s are very, very soft. The $30s are as well but you'll start to run into a lot more regs at that stake.
Another alternative is Magic The Gathering :) or HearthStone.
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/How_to_Improve
If you listen to commentators discussing matches, they can explain why certain decisions are gutsy, what the history of each player is (so-and-so is amazing at Medivac drops, so you expect that going into a game with him; so-and-so prefers the late game, so you'll never see him build proxy pylons), and the long-term ramifications of certain events (it doesn't seem like a big deal to lose 5 workers, just like a pawn sacrifice doesn't seem huge, but at the pro level of play, you'd better get something of equal or greater worth out of that; it doesn't seem like a big deal to know when Zerg builds their first extractor, but scouting that timing can tell you a lot about build order).
> LoL does require some mechanical skill but once you get it down, it's 90% knowledge.
At a certain point, LoL is about having teammates who you've worked with enough to anticipate and account for. There's a world of difference between baiting the carry and hoping your jungler will respond to your ping, and baiting the carry because you know there's three seconds until your jungler's dash is off cooldown.
Personally, I get the shakes when I PvP in LoL so what decent mechanical skill I have kinda fractures. :( I miss watching LoL streams, actually; they stopped working for me.
;)
I've seen the Chess-Network on twitch.tv break 1k viewers which is tiny compared to the 300k League of Lengends and Dota 2 tournaments but still a substantial amount regardless.
Secondly, he is young, athletic and smart, getting a lot of media attention.
I'm not much a chess player myself but it still very satisfying seeing so much attention brought to a intellectual sport. I hope at least some of it will stick around.
He comes from a Nation consisting of 5 mill. people, compared to Anand's billion people.
This is probably the greatest sports achievement our country will ever make, as there are really no comparable sports achievements in the world, not now, anyway.
IMHO: They should knight him the second he gets of the plane when he returns home. Because no other Norwegian has ever accomplished anything close to this, with regards to bring honour to our nation.
Gratuler Magnus!
Were there such a title I'd be happy to see our government/King knight him, though.
Vishwanathan Anand was not the rule but an exception.
Probably without realizing it, your ego is merely interested in these false associations (Magnus > Anand => Norway > India, and parents-who-gave-birth-to-me-think-they belongs-to Norway => I belongs-to Norway) because it can grab a free ride to better self-esteem without any personal effort. I believe there are false notions of separateness and identity involved here.
Nationalism is also spiritually detrimental because it prevents you from realizing that you are not who you think you are. How can you even ask the question, "Who am I?" if you are so comfortable with who you think you are?
Sorry for the lecture. I hope there is something useful here for you despite raining on your parade!
PS: Before you all get on my case let me tell you I do get the fact that sports does have display of skills value (same as skills of artist) that is worth paying for. I also get that professional sports is hard and money hungry adventure and without fans it won't exist. What I don't get is why is it a matter of pride?
If someone wins "we won"
The discussion of "mind games" {"nettlesomeness" here) is something that SC2 has an obsession with, and certainly can play a massive part in pro tournaments, and I'd never considered it applying to chess... but now that I think about it, everything in SC2's meta really came from Chess to begin with, only applied in real-time with 300+ actions per minute and hundreds of pieces with few illegal moves. And yet I struggle more with grokking the advanced strategies of Chess than I do for StarCraft!
I find it funny that you'd assume that I don't know that. Of course I do. The balance in Chess is what makes it a far more strategic and "complex" (in terms of strategy and tactics) game. I said as much in my post. I like Chess, I just thought it was funny that despite playing chess all throughout school and competing in various tournaments, I'd never made the connection with StarCraft's various terms, ideas, and strategies.
That's what I was expressing. I have no idea what you thought I was trying to say!
Now I remember you had a build system that came with Pharen, any plans for that in the future? Mainly because I think using it as a build system with a nice functional syntax would be _amazing_ to use even with normal PHP!
What kinds of things make the repl crash for you? I know that most kinds of errors immediately cause it to exit. I should probably get around to adding an error handler to prevent that...
Phake (the build system) is pretty bare-bones right now and since I'm working on more optimization-related stuff I'm probably not working on it in the near future. However, I do want to work on making deployment in Pharen a lot easier and Phake'll help with that.
If you ever want to discuss this stuff more feel free to shoot an email on the mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pharen) or drop by #pharen on Freenode.
Phake, that's the one. I was curious about it, as I think a nice LISP styled build system that can be bootstrapped with only PHP and the Pharen runtime-lib would be really awesome as a build system for PHP in general. With Composer and a lot of other projects, tooling in PHP is moving forward at a rapid pace, but we're all hacking together shitty build systems from scratch (or using Phing, which is painful in my experience). Phake could be a nice alternative. For now, I'm using Make and calling into Pharen directly :)
It's "balanced" in some respects but both sides use the same features and most games end in a draw, and high level play is less and less interesting. And for that matter it's not even balanced really -- tournaments have players play both white and black because they are so inequal. This is like balancing starcraft by having everyone play mirror matchups or swap races.
>So Anand encountered a "mild surprise" in the opening moves that left him "flying blind" (meaning the board was in a position with which he had not previously studied) and because of that he decided to not keep pursuing the game. He just engineered a draw.
>Most real people are "flying blind" after the first couple moves of the game, and it's the challenge of trying to solve a puzzle against a live opponent (who is also flying blind) that makes the game so fun. At the highest levels, Grandmasters go very deep into the game in positions they have studied exhaustively, and then the moment they feel uncomfortable they search for the emergency brake, and consider themselves happy to escape with half a point.
>Intuitive understanding of the game and moments of brilliant improvisation are the most exciting aspects, and yet memorized lines of play are so deeply entrenched now that when a top player encounters anything outside of memorized, studied lines he heads directly for the draw. It's really the opposite of what you'd hope.
http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/11/11/high-level-chess.html
http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/30/announcing-chess-2.html
I still remember some important match almost 15 years ago between two world class Starcraft players, who also apparently were friends off the board, being settled in 3 minutes by one guy "4 pooling" (basically sucker punching) the other.
In other words, a sucker punch?
In SC2, 6pooling is certainly quite powerful (Zerg makes Tassadar cry...) but if it is scouted, the Zerg is now fucked.
The thing is, in the current meta, you never bother drone/probe/scv scouting that early, so you'd have to be able to read your opponent and know that he's a kind of player that loves those "Cheesy" build orders!
I'm quite sure you could put all you would ever need to know about Starcraft strategy into a single 300 page volume, whereas there are entire libraries full of chess books, databases of millions of games and 3300-rated computers slugging it out constantly, and the game still hasn't been completely exhausted yet.
The only issue I took with your original post was that you seemed to be claiming that 4 pool openings made the game less strategic when in fact the opposite is true. It's a common mistake made by people who do not understand the game.
I love Taeja so much.
Yeah. I played chess competitively as a kid, attending state tournaments, taking lessons outside of school, and so on. However, I found that the more I got into it and better I became, the less appealing it seemed.
Ironically, I felt that chess between relative amateurs was much more interesting than chess between more skilled players, because the improvisational component that I loved was much more relevant when people hadn't been going through the opening books.
Where do we go from here?
He took queen with queen, clearly, knowing it would be lost to king, and then again the pawn with knight. He had a knight, of all things!
When you assume that a world-class GM played "purposedly" for a draw that would lose him the championship title, you're probably wrong.
> He took queen with queen, clearly
He was in check. Taking W's queen was the only way to avoid losing his own for nothing.
Instead of trying to isolate white king into a corner for checkmate?
Never heard of a rule like that. Are you sure?
king versus king; king and bishop versus king; king and knight versus king; king and bishop versus king and bishop with the bishops on the same colour. - wikipedia
EDIT: There would be positions where you don't try position the king to try to hold the opposing king in a corner where the opposing king can't move towards the knight to escape a check, but in those positions it will be able to move away in other directions.
It's not in the written rules of the game, but is a consequence of the rules.
To place the opposing king in checkmate, you must have sufficient pieces to threaten the square the king is on, and all adjacent squares, simultaneously. This means anywhere from 4-8 squares depending on the position.
King and knight, alone, cannot threaten enough contiguous squares simultaneously to cause checkmate in any position, largely because the knight must place the opposing king in check (a king cannot get close enough), but due to the mechanics of the knight's move there will always be at least three adjacent squares not threatened by the knight at that moment, and at least one that cannot be threatened by the knight's king.
You should feel free to try this yourself: place a king of one color on the board, and a king and knight of the other color, and then use only those pieces to try to construct a checkmate. It simply cannot be done. The best you can do is isolate the lone king in a corner and cause a draw by depriving it of moves (but it will not be in check at that time, so it will be stalemate, not checkmate).
And as luiz-pv9 points out, king+knight is not the only "insufficient material" combination.
And you're pretty correct there, too, according to the last person I asked this question of.
That (along with watching the World Championship) has got me back into the game after not really having played it for about 30 years.
I'm impressed at how much she's learned in the program. She's still not capable of beating me, but I'm able to teach her things she's not learned yet in the program such as castling and en passant. Then I'm happy to see her come back after that week's lesson to tell me she used what I taught her and won her game.
I love chess in schools for a number of reasons. One of the most interesting things about watching chess in schools is seeing who rises to the top. The best players tend not to be the brightest academic students. The best players tend to be smart kids who fight some of the bs that schools make kids endure. These kids are smart enough to 'get' chess, and have enough fight in them to stick out the difficult moments in games and tournaments that separate the best from the really good. These are the kids who tend to get in trouble a lot, who get bad reputations among teachers. Watching those kids show everyone up by winning chess tournaments soundly against the brightest academic kids is pretty awesome, and can be life-changing for some students.
I love teaching chess because you can teach anyone some simple ideas such as opening strategies, piece values, and simple endgames, and they can then beat anyone who hasn't learned those concepts. Kids who never thought they could learn a "smart person" game like chess suddenly play well, and start to realize they can do intellectual things. Then you start to see natural talent come into students' games.
Playing chess with kids is fun! If you have the chance, introduce a kid to chess.
He's known to be focused strictly on the game and never do mind tricks to throw an opponent off. A lot of top players respect him for this.
and other such stuff.
Its 2013, I think by now we should all be smart enough to realize that the desire to drink alcohol doesn't really have anything to do with masculinity.