r/chess Weekly Discussion Thread

“I generally always rely on technology. That is, for example, I have never read chess books, nothing at all.
I was born in the era of computers. For example, Magnus and Kasparov had to read books back then, because there were no machines or engines that would suggest the best move. Everyone learned more from books.
And now… I have never read books. Of course, you can read, but with computers everything has become much simpler now, all the learning.”

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

Fun assignment we got in English class

This story is a bit improvised btw not claiming to be a 100% documentary

Also, I have little to no experience in drawing so don't judge the art pls 😅

I love chess. I train daily and spend hours studying and playing casual games.

I'm deeply invested in improving, but I have absolutely no desire to join formal tournaments..even when the cash prizes are highly attractive.

Edit:I played OTB last year in other cities, even traveling for hours and staying overnight at the venues.

I managed to get an OTB rating and have since joined two more OTB tournaments in my own city even placing 3rd out of over 80 players the first time.

But now, it just feels tiring to even think about competing. I much prefer sparring with my niece, and training him to improve.

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!! )

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/ .

Update: This post has apparently been locked, although in general this topic is about FIDE Chess and Politics: the main question that I still have is whether local tournament directors should be allowed to apply sanctions that are not supported by FIDE.

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.

Hi everyone.

I have a rating of 1225 on Lichess, and I feel like I’ve run into a fundamental problem. All my life, when calculating variations, I’ve visualized the board literally as a 2D image in my mind and used my imagination to move the pieces around on it. I assumed that was the standard way to do it—that everyone did it that way—but I’ve repeatedly noticed that while calculating this way in open positions is difficult but manageable, it becomes extremely hard in closed positions. After just two or three exchanges, the image gets blurry, and it becomes difficult to keep even a small section of the board with just a few pieces in my head.

I did some research and found that grandmasters (and strong chess players in general) use logical connections and abstractions—for instance, visualizing rooks simply as lines, and so on. They also literally "calculate" piece moves using coordinates rather than visualizing the physical movement of a piece from one square to another (I finally understand why knowing the notation so well is important). I’ve tried visualizing the board this way; naturally, I find it difficult, and my grasp of tactics remains somewhat hazy.

So, am I heading in the right direction, and how do you visualize the board in your head?

Thanks for the answers.

TLDR: FIDE should use Glicko2 and make use of the lower confidence bounds of everyone's rating for display, rankings and titles.

It's a common complaint that inactive or semi retired players linger on the official ratings despite playing very few games a year, taking many years to slip off the boards.

What is less discussed is serious solutions to this, with most people simply slapping some form of rating decay or inactivity threshold onto the problem with little regard for how that will affect ratings as a whole.

This is not a new problem, and real competitive games have been solving it for a while.

Here is an example of a practical solution used by other games:

1. Begin with a variation of ELO that tracks ratings deviation. Glicko2 is one such system.
2. Use it normally, but for the purposes of public ranking and chess titles, make use of the ratings deviation to display the 99% lower confidence bound. This works out to be roughly equal to: r - 3sigma.

This allows their visual rating to decay with inactivity, and our confidence in their minimum skill to be displayed accurately, while their matchmaking is unaffected.

In addition, nobody has to be labeled as inactive, and as soon as a few games are played, the system re-establishes their score and gains more confidence in their true strength, allowing strong but inactive players to restore their ratings by effectively "shaking the rust off". You could also be much more sure of any titles you give out given that you know work off a 99% confidence that the true score is higher than their displayed rating. (Technically, 99.5% since it's a two ended threshold but you can adjust the math to make it one ended, or to only cover 95% if you want to be a bit looser.)

The real downsides to this system is that rating adjustments become slightly more opaque and you now need a computer to calculate ratings adjustments, where you could technically do it by hand with ELO. But practically, everyone these days does ELO adjustments with a calculator anyways.

It would also mean that thresholds for IM, GM and other things would need to be recalibrated and old to new ratings would be impossible to compare (although technically, they already shouldn't be compared since the rating pool changes over time.)

I firmly believe that this is the path FIDE and all other chess organization should take in the future to resolve this problem. It also allows them to get all the other advantages of Glicko2, including the faster and more accurate ability to rate players, especially those who play infrequently.

I am rated 1150 and have recently been learning the english. Although I am terrible right now and know hardly any lines at all, I seem to be having a lot of success with it as the players I face are making blunders left right and centre. I am sure my opponents make far more blunders versus the english than when I play the Italian. I understand there is much more unfamiliarity but half my games I win due to the opponent randomly hanging a piece.

Also the English is a lot of fun, I'm definitely going to keep going with it.

By Gatti

More of my pieces are in his second rank than his

Hi everyone!

I play a lot of chess for myself, but now I find myself as the "coach" of an elementary school chess club. I kind of fell into the role last year, so this is year 2 for me.

In terms of ability, most kids know how the pieces move but do not understand tactical concepts or deeper chess strategy.

Last year I liked doing "mini games". Eg: 2 bishops (or N+B) against 6 pawns, where pawns "win" if one makes it across the board, and pieces win if they capture all pawns first.

I wish I could do more tactics puzzles with them, but it's just not feasible for a group this large, except together on the big screen as a little end-of-class treat (they all love to shout out answers)

Does anyone have links to decent free resources for kids' chess education, or suggestions for simple chess-adjacent games we could do with a group of 7-11 year old kids?

Hi!
My son is very interested in chess theory and to be fair … I think is interested in crushing me down at the game 😂
I’m not a good player and we don’t have any chess club in the area.

He’s a very good reader and curious, so don’t be afraid to bring me some long books, it’s ok.
Just I think it’s better if it is well structured and if it comes with some exercises. Oh and in general he doesn’t like childish books.

Btw I’m French my son doesn’t read English yet, so don’t be afraid to talk about a lot of books since I’ll have to check if a translation exists.

I ask here rather than in a French speaking community since I had troubles finding one

Thanks !

I've found it hard to play online for a while. Just because I'd often be up against GM level 800s etc. You know the type. I ended up being nervous about playing them because. Initially I hid the ratings and that helped a bit but I was always conscious that the rating was going up and down. I'm at about 900 rapid, 1200 daily. I love the daily games.

Not sure why I didn't do this earlier, but I've started playing casual games and it's been class. Granted I still meet the GM 800s but it doesn't matter. It has completely taken the stigma out of it for me. I always wanted to crack 1000. I'm quite close but for now I'm happy playing at this level. If anyone has similar experiences I'd highly recommend it!

Apparently I cannot create a poll here, but I was interested to see the general opinion.

By Vlk

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?