Chess!

[igor_kavinski]

Any serious players here with an official rating of 2000 or above?

Clicked a Youtube video of Anna Cramling playing outdoor chess. Daughter of two Grandmasters. She's at 2100 or so. Learned that very few players get to 2300.

I tried playing chess when I was in my twenties, but with my computer. It was hard. I would win maybe once in ten games. Got tired after a while. Guess real chess players must know something that I don't for them to keep going at it again and again.

 

[lxskllr]

I used to play a lot, but lost interest after awhile. I got to a weird space where I was better than the average casual player, but couldn't hang at all with the big boys. That meant I either always won, or always lost, and the match could be determined before it started. I only like playing people. Playing computers is boring.

 

[Modeps]

I used to play a lot, but lost interest after awhile. I got to a weird space where I was better than the average casual player, but couldn't hang at all with the big boys. That meant I either always won, or always lost, and the match could be determined before it started. I only like playing people. Playing computers is boring.

Are you, me?
I haven't played against people regularly in 20 years

 

[igor_kavinski]

I have a dark secret that I haven't told many people.

Back when I was exploring chess, I got bored playing with my PC so hopped onto the first online chess website from search results. Met a woman from US who was a certified MS Office instructor. She beat me twice in less than 15 minutes. I was young at the time and my narrow view of the world didn't include the possibility that the average female could be smarter than me.

I had to do something to massage my hurt ego. Downloaded a chess program and invited the proud lady to a third game. I think she made the first move. I duplicated her moves in the software and the chess AI would take almost 10 to 15 seconds with full CPU utilization to calculate its counter move. Even moving the mouse cursor felt sluggish as hell during that. She became less chatty on chat as she became perplexed as to how I was suddenly outsmarting her. In less than 10 minutes, my PC made short work of her pride. She said she had something important to do and went offline. Never saw her again.

I wonder if she would have felt better knowing that she was beaten by a lowly Coppermine Celeron 700 MHz rather than some chess newbie

 

[bguile]

I have a dark secret that I haven't told many people.

Back when I was exploring chess, I got bored playing with my PC so hopped onto the first online chess website from search results. Met a woman from US who was a certified MS Office instructor. She beat me twice in less than 15 minutes. I was young at the time and my narrow view of the world didn't include the possibility that the average female could be smarter than me.

I had to do something to massage my hurt ego. Downloaded a chess program and invited the proud lady to a third game. I think she made the first move. I duplicated her moves in the software and the chess AI would take almost 10 to 15 seconds with full CPU utilization to calculate its counter move. Even moving the mouse cursor felt sluggish as hell during that. She became less chatty on chat as she became perplexed as to how I was suddenly outsmarting her. In less than 10 minutes, my PC made short work of her pride. She said she had something important to do and went offline. Never saw her again.

I wonder if she would have felt better knowing that she was beaten by a lowly Coppermine Celeron 700 MHz rather than some chess newbie

I used to play yahoo chess all the time back in the late 90's. It was pretty common to find people cheating even then doing either your method or have a chess program on a separate computer and copying the moves. I distinctly remember a player named "Evil Chess Scientist" who would easily beat most people in a regular match, but occasionally he would join a timed match and get whipped. Good ole evil chess scientist...

 

[Charmonium]

Personal bias - I will never spend the necessary time to become anywhere from OK to good. The range has to do with the complexity of the learning process - which may or may not reflect the game.

But that doesn't stop me from making up my own puzzles, even if in many cases it's unlikely I would get an answer.

And here is the first one I've run across in a while.

My perception of a grand master (by supposed amount of storage) - 70% many thousands of decided games. / 30% - ability to extrapolate patterns

Ready, aim, bye-bye

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Chess is for scrubs.
Behold:

5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel on Steam

It's the first ever chess variant with spatial, temporal, and parallel dimensions. It's 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel! Move pieces back in time to create branching timelines. Send a rook to a parallel dimension. Protect your kings in the present and in the past!

store.steampowered.com

 

[igor_kavinski]

I don't need a brain hemorrhage

 

[lxskllr]

Chess is for scrubs.
Behold:

5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel on Steam

It's the first ever chess variant with spatial, temporal, and parallel dimensions. It's 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel! Move pieces back in time to create branching timelines. Send a rook to a parallel dimension. Protect your kings in the present and in the past!

store.steampowered.com

Time travel. Since my first day on the job as a Starfleet captain I swore I'd never let myself get caught in one of these godforsaken paradoxes - the future is the past, the past is the future, it all gives me a headache.

 

[Muse]

True story:

Got into playing chess at lunch time in junior high school. My pals were the brainy guys. In high school, we did this too, Hamilton High in west Los Angeles. Besides playing at lunch, I occasionally played with one or the other of those guys, who were my best friends, at our residences.

One day those two best friends came up to me at school and said, "hey, the city high school chess championship tournament is this coming Saturday. We need a minimum of 4 people to participate and we need one more." I hadn't known there was such a thing as an annual Los Angeles wide high school chess tournament. I said OK. To reach the 4 participant minimum, they had another guy in mind, besides us 3, a guy I knew, I'd played poker with him a few times. He was actually the best chess player among the 4 of us but I don't think I'd played with him and don't remember seeing him play chess. A really cool guy.

So I say yeah, although I'd never played in a tournament before, had only played informally with a couple friends and our small circle of lunch-time chess people who would play in the outside lunch area at school just for something to do after eating our lunch, or possibly while eating.

It was probably my senior year. The tournament took place at another high school, which was famous for winning that chess tournament year after year -- Fairfax High, who were not far away and in our small league of high school sports competitors . There were a maximum of IIRC 10 "boards" allowed, i.e. each participating high school could enter up to 10 people and after the results were in only their top 4 scoring participants (boards) scores were used to determine the winner. Since we had only 4 boards, nobody's worst scoring boards could be tossed by our team. The perennial winning Fairfax High team had the maximum allowed boards participating, 10.

Everybody played 6 games. We used chess clocks, punching the button after we made our moves. We kept written records of each of the games, I guess everyone did. I heard people talking between games and a few rounds into the competition I over heard a couple of guys say "I think <my name> is overrated." I guess they were getting together between games and evaluating the competition based on the records of the games. I never told anybody about that. I felt secretly complemented that people were evaluating and rating me based on the records of the games I had played in the tournament!

You get 1 point for a win, 1/2 point for a draw. Average for the tournament participants was, of course, 3. I had the lowest score for my team, 4 1/2 out of a possible 6.

We won!

When it was over I called my mom and she drove over and picked us up and we brought home the big trophy in the car! It stayed in our house over the weekend.

 

[Muse]

One of my mother's brothers at one time won the New York State Chess Championship! I consider that probably the greatest accomplishment of anyone in my family, mother or father's side. There are MANY very accomplished people among them, but winning NY State chess championship is monumental! Can you imagine the level of talent?

 

[Muse]

I have a dark secret that I haven't told many people.

Back when I was exploring chess, I got bored playing with my PC so hopped onto the first online chess website from search results. Met a woman from US who was a certified MS Office instructor. She beat me twice in less than 15 minutes. I was young at the time and my narrow view of the world didn't include the possibility that the average female could be smarter than me.

I had to do something to massage my hurt ego. Downloaded a chess program and invited the proud lady to a third game. I think she made the first move. I duplicated her moves in the software and the chess AI would take almost 10 to 15 seconds with full CPU utilization to calculate its counter move. Even moving the mouse cursor felt sluggish as hell during that. She became less chatty on chat as she became perplexed as to how I was suddenly outsmarting her. In less than 10 minutes, my PC made short work of her pride. She said she had something important to do and went offline. Never saw her again.

I wonder if she would have felt better knowing that she was beaten by a lowly Coppermine Celeron 700 MHz rather than some chess newbie

I'm sure she suspected that you used a program to generate your moves. She had enough class to excuse herself without accusing you.

Many years after I stopped playing (I never found myself in a situation to play for about 25 years) I got my first PC (used desktop), installed a freebie chess program, which beat me every game. I'd bought that computer after taking several classes in computer software at the local city college and had great hopes it would lift me out of poverty! Of course, I revered the machine! But after being beat in chess consistently I began to have negative feelings toward the machine. Yes, it was irrational, but realized there was nothing to do but remove the program! I've never played chess with a computer since. I played a few games with roommates in my house, later on. They complemented me, but my game was weak from atrophy, of course.

Recently, I have watched a number of YT videos analyzing some famous games by great players, e.g. Bobby Fisher. The guy who made the videos did running commentary/analysis. Those, if you have some grasp of chess, are quite fascinating and instructive. However, I haven't played a game in over 20 years! Even so, I was able to understand a lot of what was going on and able to predict some moves.

 

[Muse]

You know, chess is a very old game but it's forever. As long as intelligent human civilization survives, chess will be a part of it. I don't know of anything else I can say that about except maybe math and the mathematical sciences. Well, there are other things that will survive like art, music, the humanities but those are different, they evolve more fluidly. Chess never changes, the rules are fixed. There are developments, openings, counter measures. There are great chess books, great games, great minds involved, but there aren't new genres of chess like there are of music and the arts in general. New math fields can open up, new areas in science.