7 ms·

“Chess-Playing Excitement” in 1859

74 points by yarapavan 11y ago

fsk 11y ago
I lost interest in chess when I realized that, in order to be really good, you had to spend a lot of time studying and memorizing openings. That seemed like a boring waste of time.
davelnewton 11y ago
I was a low-level recreational player as a kid, got freaked out when I beat a state-ranked player, and have never been able to finish a game since then. That's not chess per se, it was a reaction to perceived stress. Plus I know that if I really got in to it it'd take over. Chess scares me.
- marktangotango 11y ago
  >> champions are afraid of losing, everyone else is afraid of winning [1] I found this to be true of myself. Chess afficianatos probably know better than me, but wasn't Bobby Fischer a big proponent of alternative rules for chess that removed the advantage of "merely" memorizing strong opening games and mid game strategies, something the soviets of his era trained specifically for? please correct me if I've got that wrong. [1] billy jean king Edit spelling
  - Nadya 11y ago
    Yes, Fischer wanted the back line to be drawn such that the order of the pieces was not set in stone but still imposed some limitations to retain castling and bishops being on alternate colors (instead of having two bishops on black) Typically called Chess960 or Shuffle Chess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - harperlee 11y ago
    Aficionados :)
  - schoen 11y ago
    The chess benefit from memorizing openings reminds me of two amazing articles reporting that many Scrabble champions are non-English speakers who've simply memorized the word list without having its contents in their vocabulary: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/features/2004/word_up/you_dont_have_to_know_english_to_play_scrabble.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/f... http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2005/dec/11/features.review47 http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2005/dec/11/features....
briane80 11y ago
I love chess but stopped playing around the age of 20. I played a lot in school and was captain of my school team. I played in league and cup matches for 2 years and every day I practised on fellow students in the sixth form prefects room. There was nothing quite as nerve wracking as sitting opposite your opponent in an important match and shaking hands and the first moves. On the other hand there was the excitment of knowing when you had beaten your opponent and just had to finish him off. I remember going to a tight end game with a top table opponent and had just Queened a pawn with another one 2 moves away. The referee gave me the Queen and said "Shall I leave another Queen here?" I replied "no thanks I just need the one" and grinned at my opponent. It's been said chess is more brutal than war. I had to give it up as I began obsessing about the game. It was driving me slowly mad. I was having nightmares about being chased around a large chess board by the pieces. I haven't played a game since.
- mholt 11y ago
  > "Shall I leave another Queen here?" I realize it was probably obvious in your case, but I would have been bothered by the ref making a comment or question like that during the game for fear of tipping off my opponent.
  - nathancahill 11y ago
    I'm sure his opponent knew.
- tbomb 11y ago
  >"There was nothing quite as nerve wracking as sitting opposite your opponent in an important match and shaking hands and the first moves." This has been true with most sports or competition based activities that I have done too. There's nothing quite like the nerves you get just before a match starts
  - briane80 11y ago
    Yes it's true. Though with Chess it felt different. I guess with sports you are pitting physical or athletic ability against an opponent but with Chess it's your mind and intellect which seems to draw the ego out more. Winning is euphoric but losing is a crushing psychological blow to the essence of what makes you... your mind.
dang 11y ago
Nabokov wrote a wonderful novel, "The Defense", about a chess player who goes mad.
twerkmonsta 11y ago
"Why Clickbait Article Titles Will Destroy Your Mind"
- deanstag 11y ago
  I was thinking the same.
- brayton 11y ago
  I hope they post the Medium stats on Views vs Reads
  - mromanuk 11y ago
    I entered the website for a sub-second, glimpsed the first line of text, and I was gone.
pattisapu 11y ago
My Starcraft coach tells me that if I want to get better I have to practice about 10 hours a day. So although, like chess, the game may hold some benefits for the brain [1], the opportunity cost is astronomical. Improving your brain while destroying your life . . . well, one could do worse. [1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0070350 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
- dimino 11y ago
  Are you already GM level? If not, then your coach is nutso.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - mafuyu 11y ago
    Agreed. StarCraft is not as hard as people make it out to be. The path to Masters is pretty straightforward and achievable in under 3 hours a day. You just need to be smart about how you practice.
- stcredzero 11y ago
  the game may hold some benefits for the brain [1], the opportunity cost is astronomical. How do you measure such "astronomical" opportunity cost? There's no meaningful, factual way of establishing the "what if" possibilities for any given individual. Instead, to make a scientific determination, we'd have to examine the lives of populations who engage in activity X versus those who do other things, controlling for other factors. Is there an "astronomical" difference between economic outcomes for those who play chess at the highest levels, versus those who play football, for example? Could the same thing be said for Starcraft?
  - dimino 11y ago
dimino 11y ago
> "I have wasted too much time on it already; I cannot afford to do this any longer; this is my last game." Who wants to take odds on whether or not this guy stopped playing after that game? I can't even remember how many times I've said this about various activities...
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  Would posting comments on HN happen to be one of those activities?
platz 11y ago
Nice piece about "chess sickness" and Duchamp (and he created less art and became more consumed with Chess) that echoes this post: http://thepointmag.com/2014/examined-life/exiles-game http://thepointmag.com/2014/examined-life/exiles-game “Much of an exile’s life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule,” wrote Edward Said. “It is not surprising that so many exiles seem to be novelists [and] chess players.”
tequila_shot 11y ago
some one please change the title. It looks very close to a link bait.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  The article feels rather click-baitey. It's basically a submarine for the book. While it does offer an interesting historical position, it completely fails to compare and/or contrast that to modern opinions, despite foreshadowing this in the opening paragraph.
agentgt 11y ago
Its sort of funny how the original SA article sounds like a beautifully crafted work of satire. I had to constantly remind myself that the original article is genuinely sober.
- Jtsummers 11y ago
  Just like articles on the evils of video games the past couple decades.
  - Roodgorf 11y ago
    This is exactly what I kept thinking of. You could basically do a search/replace of "chess" with "video games" and be pretty close to the sentiment towards gaming in most media until very recently. And with the advent of eSports, the comparison seems all the more apt.
tzs 11y ago
> Here’s the thing, though: We can chuckle at what seems like a nutty, off-base argument — except the author makes some extremely good points. Take, for example, the argument that chess is too sedentary a pasttime for people who were living increasingly industrialized and sedentary lives. This was true, and still is! Idea: make a chess clock where the two sides are independently powered by rechargeable batteries that start with low charge. Each clock side is hooked to a separate treadmill, which charges that side's battery. If your side of the clock runs out of power during the game while the other side still has power, you lose. It is up to you to decide when and how much to use the treadmill during the game, as long as you can keep your clock powered. Implementation Note: it would probably be better to not do this by actually having the treadmill control the power supply for each clock side. It would probably be better to just do this abstractly. The clock would keep track of an allowed run time parameter, a treadmill distance to run time conversion factor, and then would flag if "allowed run time" + "treadmill distance" x "conversion factor" - "actual run time" < 0.
- nvader 11y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing
dimino 11y ago
So I'll reach out to you guys because I've been racking my brain to no avail for the name of a particular blog, and have come up empty. The blog in question would have been perfect for this article, as it had both chess related questions, as well as articles of historical curiosity. Math articles, as well, would appear, and any sort of other kind of post that would interest folks who find these kinds of things interesting. I thought the name was related in some way to "meandering" or "useless" or something "trivia" related in the title, but I'm completely blanking. I would have sworn up and down that I heard about this blog from an XKCD comic (the same one that brought me here 3 or 4 years ago), but when I went back to look at the comic in question, I couldn't find the blog. I apologize if it's off-topic, but it's sort of inverse-relevant, I suppose?
- gjm11 11y ago
  Almost certainly Greg Ross's "Futility Closet". http://www.futilitycloset.com/ http://www.futilitycloset.com/ [EDITED to be less diffident -- I'm at least 95% confident this is what you're thinking of.]
  - dimino 11y ago
    This is absolutely correct, thank you!
billforsternz 11y ago
My main programming activity these days is working on my chess GUI. Working on problems like; How can I quickly search 10,000,000 games for a given position without creating a fully indexed multi-gigabyte database? Etc. Sometimes it bothers me. Am I wasting my life?
daveslash 11y ago
Arthur C. Clarke had a short story (so short, it fit on a postcard), in which chess defeats AI. http://wargamerscott.tripod.com/swordandshield/id14.html http://wargamerscott.tripod.com/swordandshield/id14.html
thesteamboat 11y ago
To play chess is the mark of a gentleman; to play chess well is the mark of a misspent youth.
EGreg 11y ago
I spent my late teenage years and early 20s often playing chess with old guys in the park. I regret I didn't engage in more productive pursuits, like chasing girls and taking them on dates. I am not kidding. If I had to go back I'd seriously cut down on the chess and up the dating.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

74 points by yarapavan 11y ago

fsk 11y ago

I lost interest in chess when I realized that, in order to be really good, you had to spend a lot of time studying and memorizing openings. That seemed like a boring waste of time.

davelnewton 11y ago

I was a low-level recreational player as a kid, got freaked out when I beat a state-ranked player, and have never been able to finish a game since then. That's not chess per se, it was a reaction to perceived stress. Plus I know that if I really got in to it it'd take over. Chess scares me.

marktangotango 11y ago
>> champions are afraid of losing, everyone else is afraid of winning [1] I found this to be true of myself. Chess afficianatos probably know better than me, but wasn't Bobby Fischer a big proponent of alternative rules for chess that removed the advantage of "merely" memorizing strong opening games and mid game strategies, something the soviets of his era trained specifically for? please correct me if I've got that wrong. [1] billy jean king Edit spelling
- Nadya 11y ago
  Yes, Fischer wanted the back line to be drawn such that the order of the pieces was not set in stone but still imposed some limitations to retain castling and bishops being on alternate colors (instead of having two bishops on black) Typically called Chess960 or Shuffle Chess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- harperlee 11y ago
  Aficionados :)
- schoen 11y ago
  The chess benefit from memorizing openings reminds me of two amazing articles reporting that many Scrabble champions are non-English speakers who've simply memorized the word list without having its contents in their vocabulary: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/features/2004/word_up/you_dont_have_to_know_english_to_play_scrabble.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/f... http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2005/dec/11/features.review47 http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2005/dec/11/features....

briane80 11y ago

I love chess but stopped playing around the age of 20. I played a lot in school and was captain of my school team. I played in league and cup matches for 2 years and every day I practised on fellow students in the sixth form prefects room. There was nothing quite as nerve wracking as sitting opposite your opponent in an important match and shaking hands and the first moves. On the other hand there was the excitment of knowing when you had beaten your opponent and just had to finish him off. I remember going to a tight end game with a top table opponent and had just Queened a pawn with another one 2 moves away. The referee gave me the Queen and said "Shall I leave another Queen here?" I replied "no thanks I just need the one" and grinned at my opponent. It's been said chess is more brutal than war. I had to give it up as I began obsessing about the game. It was driving me slowly mad. I was having nightmares about being chased around a large chess board by the pieces. I haven't played a game since.

mholt 11y ago
> "Shall I leave another Queen here?" I realize it was probably obvious in your case, but I would have been bothered by the ref making a comment or question like that during the game for fear of tipping off my opponent.
- nathancahill 11y ago
  I'm sure his opponent knew.
tbomb 11y ago
>"There was nothing quite as nerve wracking as sitting opposite your opponent in an important match and shaking hands and the first moves." This has been true with most sports or competition based activities that I have done too. There's nothing quite like the nerves you get just before a match starts
- briane80 11y ago
  Yes it's true. Though with Chess it felt different. I guess with sports you are pitting physical or athletic ability against an opponent but with Chess it's your mind and intellect which seems to draw the ego out more. Winning is euphoric but losing is a crushing psychological blow to the essence of what makes you... your mind.

dang 11y ago

Nabokov wrote a wonderful novel, "The Defense", about a chess player who goes mad.

twerkmonsta 11y ago

"Why Clickbait Article Titles Will Destroy Your Mind"

deanstag 11y ago
I was thinking the same.
brayton 11y ago
I hope they post the Medium stats on Views vs Reads
- mromanuk 11y ago
  I entered the website for a sub-second, glimpsed the first line of text, and I was gone.

pattisapu 11y ago

My Starcraft coach tells me that if I want to get better I have to practice about 10 hours a day. So although, like chess, the game may hold some benefits for the brain [1], the opportunity cost is astronomical. Improving your brain while destroying your life . . . well, one could do worse. [1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0070350 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

dimino 11y ago
Are you already GM level? If not, then your coach is nutso.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mafuyu 11y ago
  Agreed. StarCraft is not as hard as people make it out to be. The path to Masters is pretty straightforward and achievable in under 3 hours a day. You just need to be smart about how you practice.
stcredzero 11y ago
the game may hold some benefits for the brain [1], the opportunity cost is astronomical. How do you measure such "astronomical" opportunity cost? There's no meaningful, factual way of establishing the "what if" possibilities for any given individual. Instead, to make a scientific determination, we'd have to examine the lives of populations who engage in activity X versus those who do other things, controlling for other factors. Is there an "astronomical" difference between economic outcomes for those who play chess at the highest levels, versus those who play football, for example? Could the same thing be said for Starcraft?
- dimino 11y ago

dimino 11y ago

> "I have wasted too much time on it already; I cannot afford to do this any longer; this is my last game." Who wants to take odds on whether or not this guy stopped playing after that game? I can't even remember how many times I've said this about various activities...

unclebucknasty 11y ago
Would posting comments on HN happen to be one of those activities?

platz 11y ago

Nice piece about "chess sickness" and Duchamp (and he created less art and became more consumed with Chess) that echoes this post: http://thepointmag.com/2014/examined-life/exiles-game http://thepointmag.com/2014/examined-life/exiles-game “Much of an exile’s life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule,” wrote Edward Said. “It is not surprising that so many exiles seem to be novelists [and] chess players.”

tequila_shot 11y ago

some one please change the title. It looks very close to a link bait.

stephengillie 11y ago
The article feels rather click-baitey. It's basically a submarine for the book. While it does offer an interesting historical position, it completely fails to compare and/or contrast that to modern opinions, despite foreshadowing this in the opening paragraph.

agentgt 11y ago

Its sort of funny how the original SA article sounds like a beautifully crafted work of satire. I had to constantly remind myself that the original article is genuinely sober.

Jtsummers 11y ago
Just like articles on the evils of video games the past couple decades.
- Roodgorf 11y ago
  This is exactly what I kept thinking of. You could basically do a search/replace of "chess" with "video games" and be pretty close to the sentiment towards gaming in most media until very recently. And with the advent of eSports, the comparison seems all the more apt.

tzs 11y ago

> Here’s the thing, though: We can chuckle at what seems like a nutty, off-base argument — except the author makes some extremely good points. Take, for example, the argument that chess is too sedentary a pasttime for people who were living increasingly industrialized and sedentary lives. This was true, and still is! Idea: make a chess clock where the two sides are independently powered by rechargeable batteries that start with low charge. Each clock side is hooked to a separate treadmill, which charges that side's battery. If your side of the clock runs out of power during the game while the other side still has power, you lose. It is up to you to decide when and how much to use the treadmill during the game, as long as you can keep your clock powered. Implementation Note: it would probably be better to not do this by actually having the treadmill control the power supply for each clock side. It would probably be better to just do this abstractly. The clock would keep track of an allowed run time parameter, a treadmill distance to run time conversion factor, and then would flag if "allowed run time" + "treadmill distance" x "conversion factor" - "actual run time" < 0.

nvader 11y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing

dimino 11y ago

So I'll reach out to you guys because I've been racking my brain to no avail for the name of a particular blog, and have come up empty. The blog in question would have been perfect for this article, as it had both chess related questions, as well as articles of historical curiosity. Math articles, as well, would appear, and any sort of other kind of post that would interest folks who find these kinds of things interesting. I thought the name was related in some way to "meandering" or "useless" or something "trivia" related in the title, but I'm completely blanking. I would have sworn up and down that I heard about this blog from an XKCD comic (the same one that brought me here 3 or 4 years ago), but when I went back to look at the comic in question, I couldn't find the blog. I apologize if it's off-topic, but it's sort of inverse-relevant, I suppose?

gjm11 11y ago
Almost certainly Greg Ross's "Futility Closet". http://www.futilitycloset.com/ http://www.futilitycloset.com/ [EDITED to be less diffident -- I'm at least 95% confident this is what you're thinking of.]
- dimino 11y ago
  This is absolutely correct, thank you!

billforsternz 11y ago

My main programming activity these days is working on my chess GUI. Working on problems like; How can I quickly search 10,000,000 games for a given position without creating a fully indexed multi-gigabyte database? Etc. Sometimes it bothers me. Am I wasting my life?

daveslash 11y ago

Arthur C. Clarke had a short story (so short, it fit on a postcard), in which chess defeats AI. http://wargamerscott.tripod.com/swordandshield/id14.html http://wargamerscott.tripod.com/swordandshield/id14.html

thesteamboat 11y ago

To play chess is the mark of a gentleman; to play chess well is the mark of a misspent youth.

EGreg 11y ago

I spent my late teenage years and early 20s often playing chess with old guys in the park. I regret I didn't engage in more productive pursuits, like chasing girls and taking them on dates. I am not kidding. If I had to go back I'd seriously cut down on the chess and up the dating.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]