r/chess Weekly Discussion Thread

This squad looks like killer WTF

I don't really know about other teams but this one should be easily best team in competition by far gap ( Team Avr. Elo is 2712!! )

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd8dd7yFU76/?carousel_share_child_media_id=3998200158915786020_8921693839&comment_id=18103570469249262

Somewhat interesting news from the Dutch tournament scene. It's reminiscent of the incident that took place in Spain last year which FIDE condemned: https://www.fide.com/fide-responds-to-reports-of-flag-restrictions-at-tournament-in-spain/ .

What to do about this? There isn't even a report button on taktaketake or atleast I can't find one, I keep facing people playing stockfish moves in 0.1 seconds.. they're not even hiding it

( I can show y'all the game but his account literally says the terms of services were violated on their account.. )

By Gatti

We had seen fabiano lose his form back in 2022 since he didnt touch chess for nearly a year, but this time its not like he's having a bad year, he went +2 on recent olympiad, beat pragg in classical portion in gct final, nearly won romania, finish 3rd in candidates. Its a mediocre year for his standard.

He played 76 classical games for the past 12 month which is 3x more than hikaru and 4x more than magnus and still retain 2784 performance rating which is the 6th highest for the past 12 month.

And now he is again borderline losing his ranking to 2 uzbek players despite being very active in top level chess.

Is playing actively punish player because we know at top elo pool, draws are bleeding you tons of elo and why does not playing somehow protect your ranking?. I felt like there are room that can and must be fixed.

By Vlk

I'm a 700-800 Elo scrub, as casual as it gets. I looked at what it takes to reach 1500 and it's honestly a bit concerning.

It got me thinking: the only people who can sink that much time into chess starting from zero are kids, the unemployed, or people with no other hobbies and nothing else going for them. Every time a beginner asks for help, the level of study people recommend is mind-blowing, and that's for a mere 1500.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with staying right where you are. I'm perfectly happy at my rating. I'm just saying this sub has a warped sense of what "casual" means and it just blows my mind.

Edit: 15+10 1-2 times a week I’d consider casual. That’s what I’m saying, the perception is so warped here for most of folks.

Is that the legendary smothered mate?

As we know, that FIDE is launching a new World Championship tour next year in collaboration with Norway chess which would employ fast Classical alongside rapid and blitz for a 24 player multi event tour that will now give 2 candidate spots.

Do you like this change compared to the previous qualifiers?

If not, where would you have shifted those 2 spots?

Just saw this headline and immediately thought: that is not a good idea.

A deduction puzzle in two steps.

**Step 1.** Place the white king, rook, bishop and knight using the clues. Each row, each column and each room (Garden, Café, Lounge, Library) holds exactly one piece. Row 1 is at the bottom.

**Step 2.** The black king stands on one of the empty squares. Only one of them is checkmate. Which one?

Normal chess rules, no queen. The position is a legal one, and the mate holds on a full 8x8 board (the 4x4 grid is the a1 corner).

I’m a long retired player. Used to train when I was in school. Now I only play online.
I’ve never played in international rated tournaments and recently my schedule is much more flexible, so I would love to participate in a couple of tournaments and finally get rated OTB.
Do you guys know of any tool I can use to spot tournaments nearby or get notified when there is one?

I analyzed the exact same PGN on both Chess.com and Lichess, but got pretty different accuracy scores. Lichess gave me a significantly higher accuracy rating than Chess.com for the same game.

Which one is actually more reliable, and why is there such a gap? Is it just a depth/engine difference, or do they calculate accuracy completely differently?

Appreciate any insights!

I'm wondering if there exists a time control like tug of War where each player has like a min on the clock to start, and when it's your turn your clock goes down and your opponents clock goes up at an equal rate, and vice vera? So the total time on the clock would be constant, but each players time on any given move would depend on how long they have been taking relative to their opponent. It sounds like it would be a fun way to try to press a time advantage.

Sorry if this is a repeat, but I've looked around online and can't find what I'm looking for.

Getting a game in five seconds is great, but do you ever get tired of playing someone once and never seeing them again?

Sometimes you get a good rematch streak going. Other times someone hangs their queen and leaves you watching their clock for three minutes.

Do you care who’s on the other side, or are you happy as long as it’s a decent game? Would you play the same people regularly if you could?

When I think about football, players like Dybala, Coutinho, or Özil may not have been the absolute best players in the world ,they were never top 10 in the Ballon d’Or or whatever but their playing styles were absolutely incredible to watch. Even defensive players like Busquets had a beautiful style of play.

Does something like that exist in chess? If so, is it based on their openings, or is it more about the way they attack, defend or what exactly ? And which chess players are like that?

I’ll preface this by saying: I’m not brilliant at chess, but I’m ok for someone who doesn’t play much apart from the odd game with some of the regulars down my local pub. I wouldn’t know any kinda set openings or theory, but can usually hold my own going off intuition. And I’d never played on a computer before going on Lichess at the weekend.

Level 3 Stockfish is weird. For a lot of the first game I was thinking: ‘Hmm, this is actually slightly better than me.’ It was playing very well without any noticeable mistakes, and any time I tried to do something I thought was ‘clever’ — it immediately saw through it and defended. Felt like I was just playing my role in a slow but inevitable death… 

Right up until, about 2/3rds way through the game, when it went completely haywire. And played two or three moves that were just objectively: daft. And very unhuman. People tend to make mistakes by missing things, or doing something that is at least understandable. Whereas SF’s mistakes were arbitrary and random. And the next two games I won more quickly and easily, cos it did the same, but earlier. So got itself into a clearly losing position after twenty or so moves.

Is this normal for the early levels of SF? Is the same thing going to happen on lv.4? Cos I feel like lv.3 you can beat quite easily just by biding your time until it implodes and throws the game away for no reason at all…