Chess

[Mr. Tea]

Is it time we reassessed chess as a relatively non-hazardous game?

GM Ziaur Rahman (1974-2024) from Bangladesh dies during game

In the 12th round of the Bangladesh Championship, 50-year-old GM Ziaur Rahman suffered a heart attack after his 25th move in his game against GM Enamul Hossein. He died before he could be taken to hospital. Rahman was Bangladesh's second grandmaster after GM Niaz Murshed, and he was also a...

en.chessbase.com

 

[Murphy]

Fun thread, good game

Chess might be the only reason no-one at work has been killed yet. We have an ongoing game between shifts. It’s taken murderously seriously with a board in one of the kitchen spaces, so seriously no one would ever move a piece by cheating

Night shift is up, have an Iranian medic taking scalps but the point is we all get to think about something else, to the extent fag breaks are forsaken because “you’re up”

 

[version]

 

[IdleRich]

I just realised thar if you don't play you can't lose

 

[IdleRich]

Have you seen this video?




Do you see that arse going by on a skateboard in the background? That's Nathan. When he beat me at chess I knew it was time to give up forever.

 

[IdleRich]

In my defence it was one game each, for some reason I was a little overconfident in the first game... but he was about the same level as me, both games were close, each decided by stupid mistakes.

 

[Corpsey]

I went for a haircut the other day and my turkish barber was sat there next to a chessboard and because I was slightly tipsy I challenged him to a match even though I've not played it since I was 18 and I don't know the rules

So he taught me a few moves and now I've started trying to learn on chess.com

As I suspected, I am terrible at it. Maybe most are when they start? I don't really know how to attack. I don't know really know how to defend. I keep making moves thinking it's clever then realising I've not noticed an obvious reason why this move is dumb as fuck.

Anyway, I think I like the idea of sitting outside on a hot day sipping a beverage and playing chess more than the actual reality of playing it, which seems bloody hard and stressful and depressing.

 

[Murphy]

Figure the openings, basic defence and learn from errors (everyone makes mistakes)

 

[Corpsey]

Yeah it's just learn by repetion isn't it like everything else

I don't think I've got the kind of brain to be good at chess but if I'd been playing it since I was 5 I suppose I'd know enough tricks to beat the novice bot

 

[Murphy]

play people instead, chess.com has millions of games a day, think the lowest bot is 400 - you learn seeing how others fuck up too

 

[Murphy]

be aware with chess.com as there comes a point where Americans start sending friend requests who really really love Jesus

 

[Slothrop]

Yeah it's just learn by repetion isn't it like everything else

I think there's a bit more to it than just screwing up repeatedly until you screw up less. A lot of being good at chess seems to be pattern recognition, and having a lot of stuff internalized to the point that you don't even have to think about it. And you'll probably get stuff internalized faster if you start by making a conscious effort to think about it.

At a beginner level this basically just means checking after every move your opponent makes whether they've left a piece hanging (ie able to be captured for free), and before every move you make whether that'd leave a piece hanging. After a while you should get to a point where you don't generally need to check this stuff. Then thinking about whether either of you is hanging checkmate. Then thinking about either of you is hanging a one-move tactic (fork, discovered check etc) or a two move checkmate. At that point you're probably actually playing quite good chess, particularly if you've picked the basic habit of getting your pieces to active squares along the way.

 

[Corpsey]

In a way I'm not impressed by chess masters cos I figure they've just memorised all the moves

But maybe that's wrong. At the top level (if not at every level) there's got to be ppl playing each other who know as many moves as each other but somehow one of them is able to see something the other doesn't...

I'm a bit disappointed by Magnus being drunk streaming etc I want the chess master to be a stony faced inscrutable Russian who learned how to play in the Gulag where he was born

 

[Slothrop]

Try Sasha Grischuk:

 

[Corpsey]

Almost nothing looks more orderly than chess pieces before a match starts. The first move, however, begins a spiral into chaos. After both players move, 400 possible board setups exist. After the second pair of turns, there are 197,742 possible games, and after three moves, 121 million. At every turn, players chart a progressively more distinctive path, and each game evolves into one that has probably never been played before.

According to Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer scientist at the University of Alberta who demonstrates A.I. using games, "The possible number of chess games is so huge that no one will invest the effort to calculate the exact number." Some have estimated it at around 10100,000. Out of those, 10120 games are "typical": about 40 moves long with an average of 30 choices per move.

There are only 1015 total hairs on all the human heads in the world, 1023 grains of sand on Earth, and about 1081 atoms in the universe. The number of typical chess games is many times as great as all those numbers multiplied together—an impressive feat for 32 wooden pieces lined up on a board.

 

[Corpsey]

Concerning H G Wells - Chess Forums

In 1897 Lawrence & Bullen of London published a book of 39 essays by H. G. Wells entitled, "Certain Personal Matters." Essay number 30's topic was Chess. In 1963 I.A. Horowitz called this essay, ". . . a devastating treatise on the game by the omniscient H. G. Wells" H.G. Wells, as most probably...

www.chess.com

"The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations, the least satisfying of desires, an aimless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist, that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy, and unreliable--but teach him, inoculate him with chess! It is well, perhaps, that the right way of teaching chess is so little known, that consequently in most cases the plot fails in the performance, the dagger turns aside. Else we should all be chess-players--there would be none left to do the business of the world. Our statesmen would sit with pocket boards while the country went to the devil, our army would bury itself in chequered contemplation, our bread-winners would forget their wives in seeking after impossible mates. The whole world would be disorganised. I can fancy this abominable hypnotism so wrought into the constitution of men that the cabmen would go trying to drive their horses in Knights' moves up and down Charing Cross Road. And now and again a suicide would come to hand with the pathetic inscription pinned to his chest: "I checked with my Queen too soon. I cannot bear the thought of it." There is no remorse like the remorse of chess."

 

[Murphy]

every child knows play is nobler than work

- Judge Holden

 

[Murphy]

YT slightly ruins chess with hosts such as