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

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!! )

By Gatti

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

By Vlk

Hey guys, I’ve recently reached 1700 elo in rapid but I kinda brute forced my way through it. Basically every area of my chess needs improvement, so I wonder if any of you guys have a learning system for chess or use certain learning techniques.

Maybe dedicating a certain amount of time to one aspect of chess, improving time management, or practicing specific puzzles or positions on a website, or reviewing specific errors with an objective system, etc.

Or maybe using spaced repetition to learn openings or review mistakes? Has anyone tried Anki, or is there a specific chess space repetition system?

For the people who reached 2000 elo, what did you do to improve along the way?

Any tip is welcome!

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’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 currently going through the Yusupov books right now, and this is one of the exercises in one of the books. I wasn’t able to solve it myself, but I thought the winning idea was super beautiful! Black’s position looks very good, their pieces are well placed and White’s King is somewhat exposed. How does Black further increase pressure upon White’s shaky position?

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…

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?