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What is Chess? What to think and for how long
- sadhorse 4y ago"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." Paul Murphy.
- Bootvis 4y agoPaul Morphy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Morphy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Morphy
- ycombinete 4y agoSeneca was of a similar opinion: It would be a lengthy business to mention all the different people who have spent their lives engaged in chess-playing or exercise with ball or the practice of roasting their bodies in the sun. They are not unoccupied when their pleasure form such a busy occupation. No one will doubt that those men are energetic triflers who devote their hours to the study of useless literature - On the Shortness of Life
- TechBro8615 4y agoThat's weird, since chess didn't exist when Seneca was alive. Perhaps that's a mistranslation and he was referring to Ludus latrunculorum? [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludus_latrunculorum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludus_latrunculorum
- DC-3 4y agoMistranslation is unfair. It's a translation that best reflects the spirit of the original. It would be distracting to the modern reader to refer to a game which would be obscure and unfamiliar, when most likely the point of the original text is to invoke a board game which would be universally known among the audience. That said, you are right: https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/De_brevitate_vitae https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/De_brevitate_vitae > XIII 1. Persequi singulos longum est, quorum aut latrunculi aut pila aut excoquendi in sole corporis cura consumpsere vitam. Non sunt otiosi, quorum voluptates multum negotii habent. Nam de illis nemo dubitabit, quin operose nihil agant, qui litterarum inutilium studiis detinentur, quae iam apud Romanos quoque magna manus est. (emphasis mine)
- fasterik 4y ago>It would be distracting to the modern reader to refer to a game which would be obscure and unfamiliar I find it far more distracting to find a modern term in an ancient text that I know the author couldn't have known about. It's jarring and anachronistic. I would much rather see the original term. I can make a decision about whether to spend a minute to look it up (and learn something!) or skim over it if the meaning is clear enough.
- poulsbohemian 4y agoAgreed - a nice footnote would be appropriate.
- ycombinete 4y agoI have to agree. It was jarring to me to find this in my translation. I think either the original term with a footnote, or perhaps something more generic like “Boardgames”
- ormaybethizzy 4y agoOr maybe Senet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senet
- groffee 4y agoInterestingly this has just come up again recently with the 'dahl' controversy.[0] [0] https://classicalwisdom.substack.com/p/should-we-update-old-texts https://classicalwisdom.substack.com/p/should-we-update-old-...
- TechBro8615 4y agoCatullus 16 is certainly problematic! (It was also the only homework assignment that students begged to complete in my Latin course) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16
- martinjacobd 4y agoConsidering that we don't have any history of chess until more than 500 years after Seneca's death, in India no less, I think it's fair to say that this is yet another example of "ye olde translationes" editorializing and using too much dynamic equivalence. latrunculi, the word he uses in this sentence at the beginning of chapter XIII, must have referred to a different game. Plus, I doubt most people would really agree with de brevitate vitae. It's the equivalent of "grind culture" but from the first century. Amusing and interesting but probably not congruent with now most people want to spend their lives. (No shame from me if you do want to live your life that way, but it should just be known that this is far from a neutral perspective.) For a more balanced view of otium (pleasure, relaxation, opposite of negotium, business), I'd recommend the letters of Pliny the Younger.
- ezekiel68 4y agoI dunno. Who is to say it is "too much" dynamic equivalence? Seems to me the grand intent of the quote is preserved for the greater mass of English readers.
- chucksmash 4y agoHa, I just re-read this page in this book this morning. The translation my book used instead of "chess-playing" was "draughts."
- WJW 4y ago“Chess is beautiful enough to waste your life for.” — Hans Ree
- dfrankle 4y agoWell, if you ask me, the ability to play chess well is the sign of someone who knows how to make the most of their free time!
- BashiBazouk 4y agoHeh...good quote. I was in chess club in Jr high, playing lots. One day I was about two thirds through a book on chess openings and had a major moment of self reflection: what the hell am I doing, this is really boring. Luckily for me I was introduced to white box original DnD about the same time and that solved that problem...
- geodel 4y agoHa, great quote! There is good movie in Hindi about wasted life of Chess obsessed protagonists. [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chess_Players_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chess_Players_(film)
- teachrdan 4y agoOrthogonally, "Good at chess, bad at life."
- _a_a_a_ 4y agoThe definition of a gentleman - "a man who can play the bagpipes. But doesn't" (unknown attribution but I got it from a scotsman)
- cryptonector 4y agoA true Scotsman?
- patrickscoleman 4y agoThis makes me feel unreasonably better about my decision to stop trying to get better at chess. But I do miss those 3-day correspondence games with friends where you slowly get smoked by your better friends over weeks.
- rjbwork 4y agoMe and my friends play long term board games on boardgamearea.com now. Ticket to Ride, Roll for the Galaxy, It's a Wonderful World, and more. We've usually got at least 2, sometimes many more, going at a time. It's a good time.
- tiffanyh 4y agoYou could say this about anything ... like golf, etc.
- bsder 4y agoMorphy not Murphy.
- keiferski 4y agoI’ve always found Deleuze and Guattari’s comments on chess vs. go to be interesting. Some of the terminology might not make sense if you’re unfamiliar with their work, but I think you can get the general gist: Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the state apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of the State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, I contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. One the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing and deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere…) Another justice, another movement, another space-time.
- armitron 4y agoPrecise thought patterns, acronyms, X seconds per move... This seems like a terrible, robotic way to play chess, at least when it comes to having fun. I've played in excess of 100k games on lichess (mostly 3 minutes, some 5 minute and bullet too, no increments) with my ELO rating being ~2100 and I don't consciously do any of these (whether these or approximations of such still take place unconsciously is a different matter). In fact, I play purely by feel, looking at the board until a move "feels right". Similarly for time management, I try not to spend more time than my opponent at all times. If my opponent plays faster than me, I speed up. If my opponent is slower, I slow down but try to maintain a slight time advantage. This translates to the game never feeling like manual mental labor. Instead, it's moves and decisions seemingly streaming out of me without conscious control, almost like a superpower I never knew I had. It feels great and is a lot of fun.
- kzrdude 4y agoI would think that you have spent a long time previously, thinking about the best move, to learn these habits and feelings that come to you instinctively now, yes?
- vlovich123 4y ago> No masters are sitting there counting TSAW TISP on their claws! I think this is misguided. A rigorous thought pattern is not a cage, it is an x ray. It shows our lion's bones. Strong players don't notice their thought patterns - you only notice bones when they're broken. The goal is not to think TSAW TISP in t, the goal is for good thought patterns to become so internalised that they form the skeleton our muscles hang on. Bones force our chess lion's muscles to work harmoniously - bones make it impossible for muscles to work any other way. This is about helping new players figure this out. Or about helping players with poor time management figure out how to build that feeling and unlock the next level for themselves. “Play by feel” is unhelpful advice for those people and sometimes people are unable to get to the next level by themselves and need formal structures like this to figure out how to get better
- jrumbut 4y agoI think I just don't enjoy chess, so maybe all advice is wasted on me and I should give up on it for this lifetime but I appreciate your sentiment. Periodically I try to learn, and I know some openings out to a handful of moves and have done a bunch of end game puzzles and read about some concepts, but that middle area feels like a dark forest with no obvious path. I either make the blunder that sets me up to lose, watch my opponent make their blunder, or we survive. I think a more structured approach to the midgame would help me develop some of the sensibilities the grandparent poster is talking about. Does that even exist?
- ronyfadel 4y agoHijacking the comments to ask: what is the best way to get better at chess? (other than “just” playing matches, I’m already doing that)
- brrrrrm 4y agoPuzzles + learning openings. I highly recommend lichess for this
- genghisjahn 4y agoLearn end games before opening s. Learn k+q against a k. Learn k+pawn against k (how to advance a pawn to promote to q). K+r against K. There are others but get those 3 down.
- slm_HN 4y agoPuzzles are great for learning tactics, but eventually you need to learn some strategy and positional play. You'll need to read a book or two for this. And don't forget endings!
- shric 4y agoAnd don't forget to study end games too. I don't think you need a strong grasp of opening theory until you reach around 2000 (lichess).
- vikingerik 4y agoMake sure you do defensive puzzles as well. I'm fairly decent at spotting a tactic to win material a few moves ahead, but terrible at seeing one coming from my opponent early enough to avert it. I'm not sure what lichess has, but definitely look for puzzles where you have to avoid a knight fork or some pin or incoming checkmate.
- vishnugupta 4y agoStudy and practicing openings. By this I mean you should memorise all the lines of an opening; not just the main lines. A vast majority of matches are won/lost within 30-35 moves by a few botched up opening moves. I don't recommend puzzles that much. They give you mental satisfaction. However, it is one thing to think of a good move knowing before hand that there's such a move possible but entirely different to recognise that you are in such a situation in the middle of a game.
- kwikdraw 4y agoFor mediocre chess players like me I recommend trying online speed chess for a few months. Bullet chess where each player gets a minute total clock is a completely different game where you move every half second on average. Aggressive playing is rewarded - as long as you get your opponent to waste time thinking. The quick play allows you develop a better sense of positioning, game flow, and end game tactics. When you return to normal slow timed chess games after playing bullet for several months you will find that your clock management will be much improved.
- 10xDev 4y agoNo, in my experience it forms bad habits such as being severely prone to going for one turn attacks. One turn attacks may be the most common mistake among chess players. Anyone who has learnt to calculate deeper and look for nuances within a position will crush someone who only knows to go for time pressure.
- scyzoryk_xyz 4y agoThis is true. But the comment above is true as well. It depends on who you are and where you are at. I have certainly developed a habit for those one-turn attacks you describe. But going from short games back to slow chess and puzzles has been nice because I learned to manage how to think under that pressure. I’m now learning how to play tennis (another cliché gentleman’s game, I know). What I’m discovering is that it is very similar - there is the simple repetitive and purely textbook aspect of hitting the ball at just the right angle to make it go where you want. And then there is the energy management under time and pressure. So you sort of have to straddle this tension between these two and you gradually descend into just barely holding it together. My thought here is that ideal chess is very similar. There are the routine strategies, tactics and perfect moves. And then there is this raw impulsive fast paced aspect of just making the least awful move to just survive what is thrown at you with the bits of focus you still have left.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- have_faith 4y ago
- greenhearth 4y agoPretty sure all outcomes of chess games are predetermined.
- emptybits 4y agoAnd, yet, unknowable. So we play.
- greenhearth 4y agoYes, and somehow throughout my thousands of losses I've never grown into a lover of fate.
- cyrialize 4y agoDoing a few chess puzzles a day (and aiming to get them correct, rather than trying to get through as many as you can) has done wonders for my move speed. For example, I recognize forks much faster now. Lichess lets you pick several themes as well, if you want to focus on particular situations.
- blastro 4y agoobligatory lichess.org plug! best site on the net.
- j0hnyl 4y agoWhere in the app do I got to pick themes?
- Dr_Birdbrain 4y agoI think this functionality is not available on the app, only on the browser version. The browser version runs great on mobile, though.
- j0hnyl 4y agoGotcha thanks, I exclusively use the app, but for puzzle I think I can branch out. I prefer tap to move as opposed to mouse.
- 0bit 4y agoUnder https://lichess.org/training https://lichess.org/training on the left side pane there is a "Puzzle Themes" link (takes you to https://lichess.org/training/themes https://lichess.org/training/themes).
- Balgair 4y agoMeta Comment: A lot of the comments here that are about getting better at chess seem to boil down to: Do something other than bog-standard chess. Mess with time limits, do openings, play puzzles, etc. So, can we get together a good list of websites/apps with links that are these 'not-chess' trainers? I'll start: https://lichess.org/training https://lichess.org/training https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Multiverse_Time_Travel/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Mul... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.FrameOfMindGames.ChessCraft&hl=en&pli=1 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.FrameOfMin...
- andy_ppp 4y agoMy top tip is to only ever play in silence, with nobody and no distractions around, sitting or standing upright. These three things have added 200 points to my rating. I also find that noticing from intuition (a strange move by your opponent might be a trigger, or a tight position where you want to play strategically might be another) when to spend more time on a move sequence helps a lot. Taking a mental note that you spent a bunch of time on one move and need to play more quickly is another improvement. But this is also an art that comes with experience.
- LVB 4y agoI was just thinking about this. I've had spells (as recently as last night!) when I do want to play, but my mind is pretty tired or my mood is off and I end up dropping 50 rating points in a session because I'm sort of half-assing it. I should probably just play unrated games at these times (or just puzzles).
- jmmcd 4y agoThat is a great title. For many people, chess is not interesting, now that computers are so good at it. But for me, chess is even more interesting now that we have developed (narrow) AI programs that instantiate more and more parts of what humans do when playing. (I know, humans don't play like computers, but we do things like heuristic board evaluation and heuristic game tree pruning.) So in a game, the player is not only trying to find moves, but is trying to prioritise which trees to explore, based on heuristics and some sense of value of information, and on the relative state of the clock (do you want to go for complications? it depends how much time your opponent has left); is aiming for an overall "style" of game that suits them but not the opponent; and even managing risk (despite the game being deterministic), in the sense that different incomplete game trees might have different (heuristically-estimated) variances of outcomes.
- powersnail 4y ago> For many people, chess is not interesting, now that computers are so good at it. But why? I can understand that for a small number of people who has the ambition to become the best player, having an unbeatable figure looming over you is disheartening. Most players are never going to become even close to that, and they know it. The fact that AI has beaten the best of human players should be, theoretically, irrelevant to their interest in chess, other than having a novel teacher to learn from. They are playing against the same pool of players who are on the same level, with or without the the AI advancement. So I’m genuinely curious, does the chess community see a large number of discouraged average players?
- nwienert 4y agoChess is actually the most popular it’s ever been right now.
- jabl 4y ago- Chess was in times past seen as the ultimate game of pure intellect, where the player with the most of that uniquely human trait, intelligence, wins the game. Except that no, turns out a tiny piece of silicon the size of your fingernail can beat the best player on the planet. So why spend time and effort on chess instead of some other game where humans still reign supreme (office politics? Cheating on your spouse?)? - And a variant of the above argument, humans are a tool-making species. We make tools to do specific things better than we can with our bare hands. So that we can use the tools to do the things that tools are better at, and then use our own hands/heads on things that humans are better at. So now that we have developed tools that are better at playing chess than a human, lets move on to another more challenging task. - And since this is HN, a variant of the above is Larry Walls characterization of the virtues of a programmer: impatience, laziness, and hubris. We "solved" chess, time to move on. Of course, all of the above justifications are, in a way, justifications against chess as some kind of noble pursuit that improves the condition of humanity. If you enjoy playing it as a way to spend your free time, go ahead, don't listen to all the negative sniping from the sidelines!
- fferen 4y agoSomething I wonder: are computers better at chess because they can think faster? What if we give a team of top grandmasters 1 day per move, versus like 1 hour for Stockfish. Will they at least consistently draw? To my knowledge, top human vs computer matches these days only use piece odds, not time odds.
- 317070 4y agoNo, on long time controls, humans cannot see enough of the tree in some positions. They might be able to push the game sometimes into a position where they can hold if the engine is not set up to prefer complicated positions. But This is one of my favorites. On extreme short time controls, humans can handle some really good engines some of the time! Here you have Andrew Tang beating Leela in hyperbullet: https://youtu.be/Wf-wFXRpwgo https://youtu.be/Wf-wFXRpwgo Another approach that sometimes works is to be really booked up in dubious lines with an engine that does not have too much time, something Jonathan Schrantz manages from time to time https://youtu.be/FC2P6VUYu78 https://youtu.be/FC2P6VUYu78
- gjm11 4y agoIt's a little debatable whether Andrew Tang counts as "human" when playing hyperbullet chess.
- amalcon 4y agoAn easier way to do this would be to limit the hardware resources available to Stockfish. You can get the 24x time ratio just by giving Stockfish 1/24th of the compute cycles. That said, 24x is not even close to enough advantage there -- that probably removes less than one ply of depth. Stockfish can read far deeper than any human; you'd need a dramatically larger reduction to compensate for this. You could probably put Stockfish on a desktop computer from the mid 90's, and expect the team of GMs to win.
- gjm11 4y ago24x is more than 1 ply. Typical branching factor isn't so far from 24, and with alpha-beta the effective branching factor is more like sqrt(nominal branching factor), and I think modern engines are pretty good at pruning and extending the tree to make the scaling even better than that.
- swader999 4y agoA large part of sport, games and hobbies are the friendships and camaraderie that occurs.
- buzzy_hacker 4y agoI'm a decent chess player. 1600 elo over the board, 1800 online. I think the conclusions reached give too much time to non-critical moves and not enough time to critical moves. Let's take the 90 minute game, where it's suggested to use 88 seconds for opening moves, 165 seconds for non-critical moves, and 330 seconds for critical moves. 330 seconds (5 1/2 minutes) is too short for the critical position in a 90-minute game. I would be comfortable using about 15-20 minutes for the most critical move. I think my disagreement stems from the author's estimate of "7 or 8 critical moves per game." That's too many in my experience. In a 40 move game (the average), that's 18.75%. I'd say there are typically 3 or fewer critical moves per game. And there's no need to spend anywhere close to 88 seconds in the opening. When you're in theory, you can bust those out in a few seconds.
- anuraaga 4y ago[flagged]