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>I tend to win because I'm just a better tactician due to studying chess Can you give an example situation where your chess experience gave you an edge over yo

>I tend to win because I'm just a better tactician due to studying chess Can you give an example situation where your chess experience gave you an edge over your opponent? I'm failing to see how chess tactics would translate to a more complex sim like Civ.

bitexploder 4y ago
It is an interesting assertion. What we know about learning and chunking in our brains implies that chess knowledge is too specific to be used elsewhere directly. The years of playing chess probably just mean parent is good at analysis and learning things like chess, and is why they were interested in chess to begin with. Maybe some chess concepts work and apply, but chess memory and skill is rather specific.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  A lot of it is specific, but it's not like chess and civ are completely disjunct either. There is some significant overlap between some of the thought processes involved. They both have minimax game trees, though civ obviously has a much bigger branching factor so you have to be a lot fuzzier about it. But I'd argue that just having played a lot of chess with a more managable branching factor makes it easier to make the meta decision of how to think about these games.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
It's not very tangible like "oh that's just like a skewer tactic in chess!", it's more a general ability to think ahead and enumerate various likely scenarios, and ways of deciding what to do. Chess is not just pure pattern recognition. It's also a game of decisions, understanding what your opponent is trying to do, swallowing your own pride, etc. You can play chess in an almost poker type way, playing risky lines betting that your opponent won't find a tricky refutation. It seems like the board state(and clock) is all there is, but that is far from the truth. One of the biggest challenges for learning chess players is to learn to consider your opponent's plans and factoring it into your own. This sounds obvious, but from my experience tutoring kids it's very much not the natural state of things. The natural thing is to only consider what you want to do. Which doesn't work if the opponent's plan is quicker. Then you need to find a new idea. Even if you're just a few moves away from completing yours. There's a mental discipline to avoiding the sunk cost fallacy there that can easily be worth a few hundred rating points. Now, most of the research on transfer of chess skills has focused on things like IQ and working memory, and found no meaningful transfer. But there's a lot more to chess(or any other skill) than that. I'm not convinced this is adequately expored by the field of psychology at all. I regularly beat people at simpler strategy games even though they're the ones teaching me the rules of the game. You could argue I'm just naturally good at strategy games, and that's why I play chess. And that must be at least partially the reason. But it's my intuition that some of these more abstract game decision making, opponent modelling, etc skills do transfer(I am biased though, obviously). But that's a lot harder to research than doing an IQ test and a short term recall test.
- GameOfFrowns 4y ago
  Thank you very much for the insight and also for providing the example (in the other post). What is your opinion on the Age of Empires series?
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    Only happy to provide! I haven't played AoE since the very early days. AoE is an RTS game, right? I used to play a fair bit of Starcraft 2 back before the expansions. I'm hilariously bad at it and it's too stressful for me, but I love watching pro players play it, in fact it's become one of my favourite sports to watch. AoE4 multiplayer was a bit of a clusterfuck balance wise, last I heard. I hope they get that sorted so a real pro scene could develop, and I can enjoy watching it :D I feel like there's very little meaningful transfer between RTS and chess. Much more dependent on fine motor skill, fast thinking, and multitasking, all of which are things I'm not stellar at.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
I forgot the example. The one I remember best is this 6FFA where all but me and another much more experienced player(who introduced me to civ in the first place) were irrelevant by the endgame. I was slightly ahead in science and snowballing, and he was playing for culture victory, and succeeding. I could tell that my only option was war. But he has more production. So it had to be nukes, and he had to not know about it, otherwise he could declare war and stop me in time. So I had to make him believe this was not a threat. I did several things like feigning playing for diplo victory(actually to avoid him banning nukes) I got him distracted right there trying to keep me from taking all the cs. By the time I completed the Manhattan Project, his invasion was too late and I was able to nuke his cap and his nr. 2 city. I laid this plan a lot of turns in advance. Afterwards he said he thought the culture win was a sure thing.

bitexploder 4y ago

It is an interesting assertion. What we know about learning and chunking in our brains implies that chess knowledge is too specific to be used elsewhere directly. The years of playing chess probably just mean parent is good at analysis and learning things like chess, and is why they were interested in chess to begin with. Maybe some chess concepts work and apply, but chess memory and skill is rather specific.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
A lot of it is specific, but it's not like chess and civ are completely disjunct either. There is some significant overlap between some of the thought processes involved. They both have minimax game trees, though civ obviously has a much bigger branching factor so you have to be a lot fuzzier about it. But I'd argue that just having played a lot of chess with a more managable branching factor makes it easier to make the meta decision of how to think about these games.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

It's not very tangible like "oh that's just like a skewer tactic in chess!", it's more a general ability to think ahead and enumerate various likely scenarios, and ways of deciding what to do. Chess is not just pure pattern recognition. It's also a game of decisions, understanding what your opponent is trying to do, swallowing your own pride, etc. You can play chess in an almost poker type way, playing risky lines betting that your opponent won't find a tricky refutation. It seems like the board state(and clock) is all there is, but that is far from the truth. One of the biggest challenges for learning chess players is to learn to consider your opponent's plans and factoring it into your own. This sounds obvious, but from my experience tutoring kids it's very much not the natural state of things. The natural thing is to only consider what you want to do. Which doesn't work if the opponent's plan is quicker. Then you need to find a new idea. Even if you're just a few moves away from completing yours. There's a mental discipline to avoiding the sunk cost fallacy there that can easily be worth a few hundred rating points. Now, most of the research on transfer of chess skills has focused on things like IQ and working memory, and found no meaningful transfer. But there's a lot more to chess(or any other skill) than that. I'm not convinced this is adequately expored by the field of psychology at all. I regularly beat people at simpler strategy games even though they're the ones teaching me the rules of the game. You could argue I'm just naturally good at strategy games, and that's why I play chess. And that must be at least partially the reason. But it's my intuition that some of these more abstract game decision making, opponent modelling, etc skills do transfer(I am biased though, obviously). But that's a lot harder to research than doing an IQ test and a short term recall test.

GameOfFrowns 4y ago
Thank you very much for the insight and also for providing the example (in the other post). What is your opinion on the Age of Empires series?
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Only happy to provide! I haven't played AoE since the very early days. AoE is an RTS game, right? I used to play a fair bit of Starcraft 2 back before the expansions. I'm hilariously bad at it and it's too stressful for me, but I love watching pro players play it, in fact it's become one of my favourite sports to watch. AoE4 multiplayer was a bit of a clusterfuck balance wise, last I heard. I hope they get that sorted so a real pro scene could develop, and I can enjoy watching it :D I feel like there's very little meaningful transfer between RTS and chess. Much more dependent on fine motor skill, fast thinking, and multitasking, all of which are things I'm not stellar at.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

I forgot the example. The one I remember best is this 6FFA where all but me and another much more experienced player(who introduced me to civ in the first place) were irrelevant by the endgame. I was slightly ahead in science and snowballing, and he was playing for culture victory, and succeeding. I could tell that my only option was war. But he has more production. So it had to be nukes, and he had to not know about it, otherwise he could declare war and stop me in time. So I had to make him believe this was not a threat. I did several things like feigning playing for diplo victory(actually to avoid him banning nukes) I got him distracted right there trying to keep me from taking all the cs. By the time I completed the Manhattan Project, his invasion was too late and I was able to nuke his cap and his nr. 2 city. I laid this plan a lot of turns in advance. Afterwards he said he thought the culture win was a sure thing.