Chess

No, you got bamboozled there, Rick. No paranoia.

 

Yeah, that sounds like some bullshit.

 

Any free tactics websites someone can point me, too? Is the chess tactics server Rick pointed to best?

 

chess.emrald.net is the one I love. 15 minutes a day to build pattern recognition. They expect you to solve the problems very quickly in order to get points (although if you don't care about points, you can take as long as you want).

Some people prefer to work on calculation (sitting there and figuring it out slowly) rather than pattern recognition, and in that case you might want something slower. I'm not sure of any pure free sites out there that do that, but I know chesstempo and chess.com are supposed to be popular and have at least partially free services (i.e. there's a limit to how many problems they'll give you in a day, but you can buy unlimited access).

 

Thanks!

 

I like chess. I'm not able to see 2 and 3 moves ahead, much less the 5 or 6 the really good players can, but I can appreciate the game and try to play whenever I can.

 

(sorry in advance, but chess is a subject on which I can bloviate pretty hard).

That's kind of an interesting subject. It seems like people outside of chess focus a lot on how many moves ahead a player can see. I'm no more than a strong amateur, but I have a lot of master-level players that I work with and talk to as well.

It's not really a matter of seeing X number of moves ahead. There are openings that I know exactly what both sides will play and why 15 moves deep into the game. There are endgames where I can tell you exactly what must be played 20 moves ahead. For complicated middle-game forced variations, I can usually do about eight before it starts to get fuzzy, depending on how many pieces there are involved.

But there are also a lot of positions where even the world's best players don't really think that many moves ahead. Their opponent has a lot of options, noting is forced, and they are all about equal. There's no point in thinking much further until you see what they do.

A lot of the time, "seeing ahead" is really just understanding the position. A strong player usually has a pretty good idea of what the position means for both sides at any given time. Pawn structure dictates a lot.

Here's a common pawn structure known as the French Advanced



If I'm white, I know that black is going to want to focus his pressure on the d4 square, the weakest central point in white's structure. Because I know that, I know where pretty much all of his pieces want to go.

To attack d4, he needs to get his knights to c6 and f5, his queen may very well end up on b6, and he's going to want to play a pawn to c5. His dark bishop is either going to go to e7 or b4, just because those are the only squares for it. He's going to castle kingside because the c-pawn advance would leave his queenside too weak to protect his king. He's going to play his rook on the a8 to c8 to take advantage of the c-file likely opening up after he plays his pawn to c5. His light-squared bishop will almost certainly have to settle for the d7 square, just to get out of the way of his rooks and off the back rank.

So I'm not sitting there thinking "If I do this, then he does that..." a bunch of times, but I have a very good idea of what moves are coming and in what order.

So anyway, this was all leading up to one of my favorite chess quotes of all time. It's usually attributed to Capablanca, a 1920s world champion, though it's never been conclusively proven he actually said it.

"I only see one move ahead. But it is always the right one."

 

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8362701/the-evolution-cheating-chess

Rick, This article reminded me of the story you told earlier in the thread.

 

Yep. That is sadly common, and I worry that it's going to eventually destroy over-the-board chess. Or else tournament directors will just have to sack up and ban all electronic devices.

""He's just a little boy who made a mistake," says Catherine Smiley, his mother."

Fuck you and your cheating kid, lady. And bullshit this was the first time he'd cheated.

 

I really struggle with stuff like this. What in the hell is the point of winning (something like this) if you have to cheat to do so? I suck at chess and can't seem to get any better, but I'll be damned if I'll cheat so I can win. Hell, I'd be thrilled just to hang around long enough in a match to make a serious player work at it.

And I agree ... this little fucker's been cheating for awhile. I daresay dear little Mommy knew about it, too.

 

I know of so many kids in our high school league who were so obsessed that they would have gone this route in a minute.

I once beat a kid in a match at Mercersburg Academy and he flew into a sobbing tantrum, right at the table.

 

It looks to me like it's a simple cycle:

1) Player begins to take pride in being a "good chess player" and it becomes part of his identity.
2) Player discovers that it's a lot harder to keep getting better than he realized.
3) Because he feels like he is a good chess player, cheating isn't really getting him anything except what he "should" be having.

It's like they feel like they would be getting these results anyway if they put in the work and really concentrated (which isn't true), so it doesn't feel like they are doing anything wrong by short-cutting.

I did have a string of crazy awesome results a few years ago. After I knocked off a master rated 800 points higher than me, I noticed I was getting a lot of attention from the tournament director. Fortunately, I never left the room, I don't carry a smart phone, and my matches were riddled with mistakes (just fortunately not as many mistakes as my opponents seemed intent on making that day).