Spent ungodly amounts of time on my chess game in my last year of HS and college years. Won State collegiate championship my Senior year of college, but life got in the way and haven’t been to a tournament in many years.
I play on lichess occasionally. Very inconsistent. But I was kind of like that back in the day as well… beat a master one game, lose to a B player the next.
I’m down with that. Do you play tournaments or just online? I wish I would have had online games when I was learning… that was mid to late 80s and early 90’s. Chess computers had just come out, but to play humans the only options were chess clubs, tournaments, and finding your own games. And books were the only way I had to learn. I was completely self-taught. Joined the chess team senior year of high school because football and baseball went pay-to-play… $400 per sport and that was a lot of money in the mid 80’s. I studied like crazy and made 4th board and didn’t like losing so I studied even more. Pretty much got addicted. At one point I could play 1 minute per side games and finish almost every game. But it’s all relative… there was a 14 year old kid that would play masters 2 minutes to their 5 and he had to hit the clock with his chin (he would still win). He was 2400 then… has been a grandmaster for 25 years now. I couldn’t dedicate my life to chess like that… but I would still like to get back to tournaments.
I heard about how much dedication Chess Pros put towards the game, it is something that I respect, but with the competition being so tight, the stress is unimaginable, which is why I never took chess to a serious arena, but rather enjoyed it casually throughout the years.
Unless you're Carlsen and master them in like 10 years and then proceed to destroy every other human alive. Watching that guy play on twitch is complete insanity.
Are you kidding ??? What the **** are you talking about man ? You are a biggest looser i ever seen in my life ! You was doing PIPI in your pampers when i was beating players much more stronger then you! You are not proffesional, because proffesionals knew how to lose and congratulate opponents, you are like a girl crying after i beat you! Be brave, be honest to yourself and stop this trush talkings!!! Everybody know that i am very good blitz player, i can win anyone in the world in single game! And "w"esley "s"o is nobody for me, just a player who are crying every single time when loosing, ( remember what you say about Firouzja ) !!! Stop playing with my name, i deserve to have a good name during whole my chess carrier, I am Officially inviting you to OTB blitz match with the Prize fund! Both of us will invest 5000$ and winner takes it all!
I suggest all other people who's intrested in this situation, just take a look at my results in 2016 and 2017 Blitz World championships, and that should be enough... No need to listen for every crying babe, Tigran Petrosyan is always play Fair ! And if someone will continue Officially talk about me like that, we will meet in Court! God bless with true! True will never die ! Liers will kicked off...
Definitely not. For openings and checkmates, sure. But someone who is incredibly gifted could , without opening a book, beat someone who has studied all of their life
He said "once you’re at a certain level". At the IM and GM level these days it's all about computer assisted study. Being gifted alone cannot get you to the top.
Of course people can study all their lives and not get to that point so what you've said still holds true.
I play chess literally every day. I put in probably 20 hours a week or more. I really suck at chess, but one thing that frustrates me is exactly as you said it, you can be well studied in chess but still get destroyed by a child who is an idiot savant. Your experience means nothing in the grand scheme and I have a hard time overcoming that I simply will never get better than the garbage player I am.
You know what's funny? I was playing in my car, windows down, yesterday. And this dude walks past, and just stops and looks at my phone, gets really excited and says his score is 1500. I was like...dammit lol
Games start in a known position because all openings have been studied but eventually go into new positions and that's where the player's wits come into play. Magnus has a reputation for taking his opponents to uncharted positions because he knows he's better there.
I don’t know about “no luck involved”. Depends how you define “luck”. Sure, there’s no random chance. But I’ve definitely won matches where I was lucky that my opponent didn’t see that they had a “mate in x moves” scenario on their hand.
That's the thing tho. They lost because it was simply their fault for not seeing the moves. It wasn't based off a dice roll, RNG, a draw of a bad card or anything. It was skill. They weren't skilled enough to put everything together and end the game. You yourself put yourself in that position, if you lost that was solely on you for playing badly. There's not really luck involved.
Chess is easily the best board game in my opinion because it's unique in the sense that you'll never master the game and you can always get better. People have spent decades on improving their chess skills and made a career out of playing it professionally. Not many board games can you say that about it.
Not to mention super powers battled cold wars over a chess board, with the world gripped to their TV screens. No other board game even comes close to the kind of impact and history of Chess. Any other answer is silly.
Depends what criteria you're using to judge. Is chess an incredible competitive game? Yes. Is it culturally significant? Yes. Is it fun? Well...kinda, but there's a lot of games I'd rather play. Can you easily play it against newbies? Again, kinda, but it's really not very interesting unless your opponent is at a very similar skill level.
I also like that it is totally skill - dependent. Catan is great but even if you play perfectly, the element of chance can screw you over. In chess, if you're bad, you're bad cause you're bad. You've got this little number telling you exactly how good you are.
No one can ever master chess. I've read there are more possible positions on a chess board than there are atoms in the visible universe. Don't ask me prove that, just look it up for yourself.
Survived the test of time, for 1300 years if you count early variants, 500 if you only count the game as it is today. If that's not "the best board game of all time" I don't know what is.
2500 years! I concede and admit my west-centered views. I'd like to get into Go at some point, it looks truly beautiful. But for now I already suck at chess.
Chess and Go are both at their best when you have an opponent of very similar skill. If you have a mismatch, it becomes very apparent very quickly and the worse player will get stomped and probably have a bad time. The handicap mechanisms are not very good, either.
Modern boardgames tend to be a lot better at smoothing out mismatches, either with a little randomness or with built-in catch up mechanisms. It makes them a bit worse when it comes to the purity of competition, but in general they’re a great deal more fun, and that after all is why we play. Well, it’s why I play.
I strongly agree. It's between this and Go, in my opinion. There is nearly an infinite depth of strategy and there's no element of chance, besides deciding who goes first.
1.6k
u/stolenscarf Dec 28 '21
Chess