And so it continues. Here's the full playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8pZbhjL-fQ&list=PL8N8j2e7Rp...
Here are some of his playlists: https://www.youtube.com/@DanielNaroditskyGM/playlists
A level up, studying openings.
Always go into a position with a plan (which generally means, which squares you want your pieces to occupy). A bad plan is better than no plan at all.
The plan must be continually checked with calculation (and here is where tactics is useful), and you must be ready to change plans if things don't go well.
You need also to study strategic concepts like weak squares, pawn structure, pawn majorities. This helps you to quickly identify what should be your plan even in a unfamiliar position.
If you have trouble winning a game that you should have won, study endgames. Specially, if you are ahead of material, try to simplify the position (trade pieces to give your opponent less chances to come back), and specially simplify into an endgame where you're sure you will win.
This is why I don't recommend bullet to anyone.
* Tactics - I did thousands of tactics puzzles using a program called CT-ART while under a time limit. I would have to complete 25 puzzles within 5 minutes while making 0 mistakes. If I made a mistake I would have to start from the beginning.
* Core positional concepts - Understanding pawn structure (double pawns, isolated pawns, passed pawns, pawn majorities, etc.), control of central squares, open files, king safety, and so on.
* Endgames - Many players neglect endgames. Master the basics: common rook-and-pawn and pawn-only endgames, how to checkmate with 2 bishops and bishop + knight, etc. Read Silman's Complete Endgame Course, Basic Chess Endings, and Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual (for advanced players) to improve your endgame play.
* Openings - Many people have mentioned learning openings, but it is generally a mistake for beginners and intermediate players to focus on this aspect of their game. It is not especially useful for a ~1000-rated OTB player to learn 15+ moves of theory in the King's Indian Defense only to end up in a position where there are slightly better according to theory but have no understanding of their position. It is better to center your opening repertoire around easy-to-learn openings and focus on improving other aspects of your game until you are strong enough to handle positions outside of opening theory.
* puzzles for tactics & mates
* learn 1 “easy to execute” opening for each color
It takes a ton of time and brainpower, and doesn't make you a better player once you're outside your memorized 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.
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
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.
The translation my book used instead of "chess-playing" was "draughts."
(unknown attribution but I got it from a scotsman)
— Hans Ree
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.
In chess, the pieces are intrinsically different. Their role in the game depends on the kind of piece they are, which doesn't change (unless a pawn promotes, I guess), instead of their position or relation with other pieces, which changes constantly. In go, all stones are identical, and their differences arise from their relationships with other stones around them.
In chess, you play to kill the opponent's pieces. In go, you play to claim territory. It's possible to win without ever taking an opposing stone. Although what's territory can be very fluid, because stones can be placed anywhere, and thereby kill a group that was thought to be alive, save a group that seemed dead, destroy or claim territory. But it all depends on the stone's relation to other stones. Chess depends much more on what a single piece is capable of. Even a poorly positioned queen is worth more than a very active bishop, because the queen can move to a better position, but the bishop can't turn into a queen.
I'm sure a missed a lot of nuance. I have no idea what they mean by nomos and polis, and parts of the second paragraph sound like I disagree with it. Maybe my translation is more my own opinion than a translation of theirs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterritorialization
Here’s a good 11-video series on their thought, for anyone curious:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCh5HOS_mbjLB4U_8IviyXTcO...
This is simply gone forever. Whenever i see today's celebrities becoming famous via 20 seconds tiktok, or pseudo intellectuals debating over twitter, and i think about this era that was only 50 years ago, i feel like crying.
The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract --Let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherche movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometimes indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.
Whist has long been noted for its influence upon what is termed the calculating power; and men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous. Beyond doubt there is nothing of a similar nature so greatly tasking the faculty of analysis. The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind. When I say proficiency, I mean that perfection in the game which includes a comprehension of all the sources whence legitimate advantage may be derived. These are not only manifold but multiform, and lie frequently among recesses of thought altogether inaccessible to the ordinary understanding. To observe attentively is to remember distinctly; and, so far, the concentrative chess-player will do very well at whist; while the rules of Hoyle (themselves based upon the mere mechanism of the game) are sufficiently and generally comprehensible. Thus to have a retentive memory, and to proceed by "the book," are points commonly regarded as the sum total of good playing. But it is in matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced. He makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the information obtained, lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe. Our player confines himself not at all; nor, because the game is the object, does he reject deductions from things external to the game. He examines the countenance of his partner, comparing it carefully with that of each of his opponents. He considers the mode of assorting the cards in each hand; often counting trump by trump, and honor by honor, through the glances bestowed by their holders upon each. He notes every variation of face as the play progresses, gathering a fund of thought from the differences in the expression of certainty, of surprise, of triumph, or of chagrin. From the manner of gathering up a trick he judges whether the person taking it can make another in the suit. He recognises what is played through feint, by the air with which it is thrown upon the table. A casual or inadvertent word; the accidental dropping or turning of a card, with the accompanying anxiety or carelessness in regard to its concealment; the counting of the tricks, with the order of their arrangement; embarrassment, hesitation, eagerness or trepidation --all afford, to his apparently intuitive perception, indications of the true state of affairs. The first two or three rounds having been played, he is in full possession of the contents of each hand, and thenceforward puts down his cards with as absolute a precision of purpose as if the rest of the party had turned outward the faces of their own.
People spend time lifting heavy weights, despite the existence of forklifts.
People spend time climbing mountains, despite the existence of helicopters.
That a machine can do something better than a human, is no reason to pretend that human to human competition is no longer worthwhile. A pleasant game of chess against a friend is as much a psychological battle as it is a tactical one.
I never played against computers, they could always beat me every single time. What would be the point? I play against humans, for the same reason I have conversations with humans and not with computers - even as they become capable of even that.
I do think that building an AI that does play like a human would be interesting, it's certainly never really been done. But it's interesting because it's an interesting problem to solve, not because playing against such a machine would be any fun.
Anyway, I can only speak for my past self and a few people I've known, but it's usually simple why people don't play.
It can be socially unappealing if there's no tradition of playing chess within their circle or that the people that do play might be snobs about it.
It can be difficult to feel encouraged to play since the game itself is complex enough to require more attention than expected and the jargon is confusing. The names of openings, tactics, etc. are not necessarily literal enough, and even when expressed in notation are still vague due to the nature of the game (many variations). For many people there's also a lack of motivation and it just seems unproductive, especially when it becomes clear that winning, even against the weakest AI, isn't common when starting out. Like any game, chess can help improve analytical thinking, but it's abstract enough to not be obvious how. If it's not made a pleasant enough experience, it's just easier to do something else.
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?
- 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!
That is exactly what's happening, players learn from engines and try to understand why they play this move and not that move, and as a result, there are a lot of competing players in top level chess, except that players started memorizing lines and the opening phase of the game became a bit dull and boring, however, this was only another obstacle for players, they simply needed to adapt and they did. Magnus Carlsen is well known for winning endgames that seem to be a dead draw, he keeps pushing and pressing until his opponents make a mistake and this is why he has been the world champion since 2013 (e.g. game 6 from the 2021 World Championship [0]).
>So I’m genuinely curious, does the chess community see a large number of discouraged average players?
No, the Queen's Gambit [1] made chess very popular, online chess is at its peak, it's pretty interesting to have world champions streaming and seeing them play variations that they wouldn't play in real life since they involve too much risk, or simply lead to losing positions, but they also make for exciting and amusing games.
Examples of time asymmetry:
-recorded media (TV, movies, books) are incredibly time-asymmetric, have 100x / 1000x time spent on creation vs consumption
-legal systems built on examples + exceptions, have mapped out and tested entire decision trees that defendents traverse once
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.
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
Chess is about the ebb and flow of ideas between you and the opponent. If you're not calculating when your opponent is, you'll lose. This is why this the advice is the right advice. You have to develop awareness and "responsiveness" to what your opponent is doing.
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?
This "feel right" ability goes by different names unconscious mastery, intuition, GM-RAM, drunken chess, Blink, pattern recognition and so on.
How to develop it is another question.
Sadly I fear it is almost impossible to develop it past teenage years.
There is something magical that happens around age 13-15(Fischer said he just got good when he made this "jump", of course he was around 2300 before that). Suddenly everything just clicks.
I was a lowly A level player when it just clicked around the age of 15 and I was a master. Sadly/luckily I did not progress past FM. The "click" is a required but not sufficient condition for GM at an OTB play.
Sure for some it happens at a bit later stage for some at a bit younger stage. You have to do some work before that and to become a super GM you have to do work afterwards. (as Anand famously said you read a bunch of Informators afterwards)
As Tal said to young Kasparov - Garry you have to sac first and calculate afterwards.
Of course I wasn't born that way, I've spent years playing chess and it's obvious that these years of playing resulted in a calibrated network of weights in my brain that allow me now to play by feel. My point is more that I didn't perform any structured routines when playing games like the article describes. I kept playing and doing tactics training and my brain did the rest through osmosis. Which leads me to my final point in that tactics and pattern recognition matter and I think, having discussed this with many folks including club players, that they are the best way to rapidly increase one's skill.
There is a saying that a difference between SuperGM, GM, IM, and a master is how many times a game they have to really spend time on a move that they are not sure of.
SuperGM might be unsure about 1-3 times a game, GM 3-5, IMs 5-7, and as a master I have about 7-10 moves.
Notice that depending on your time control, you will still want to take time to verify-calculate your "feel" moves.
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.
Of course conventional wisdom isn’t always right, but that is the conventional wisdom.
Correct play in longer TCs translate much better to blitz than vice versa.
It might be beneficial to spice things up, but this is in general not a good advice.
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
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
The more recent chess engines (LeelaChess, and the latest versions of Stockfish) use neural nets to allow for more shallow calculations without decreasing game quality. In this case the engine is better because it's just "more intelligent" (and nobody understands how).
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.
Lichess lets you pick several themes as well, if you want to focus on particular situations.
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.
So, can we get together a good list of websites/apps with links that are these 'not-chess' trainers?
I'll start:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Mul...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.FrameOfMin...
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.
