How to learn chess as an adult (2021)

"Only about 10% of players ever gain more than 100 points, and only about 1% of players gain more than 200 rating points given years."

This seems like a wild claim. On chess.com I've gone from 500 to ~1050 in a handful of months without any real study, just some light YouTube watching. 500->800 felt like all it took was learning a few openings and not blundering pieces. 800-1050 felt like it came mostly from getting familiar with the common patterns from those openings that led to advantages/disadvantages. Most of my learning here came from reviewing my own games and trying to understand why my mistakes were mistakes.

I don't understand how people learn from slamming blitz/bullet games. The time constraints are too rushed to really think about what makes a move good or bad. I assumed it was a young person's thing, but the author said he plays these quick formats too.

If you follow the link to the data analysis [1] you’ll see that the argument is based on higher rated players. Low rated players have much higher variance in their rating and can improve by quite a lot, just by learning to stop blundering. That’s basically the situation you’re in.

Getting to 2000 rating is going to be quite a mountain to climb for you, unless you’re very young.

[1] https://github.com/jcw024/lichess_database_ETL/blob/main/REA...

And not to forget to avoid disappointment: An online 2000 is maybe an offline 1800 or so. Online ratings are in general higher than what people actually have offline.

I am not sure if that is generally true. It’s true for lichess and chess.com (compared to ELO) It really has only to do with the formula they use. They have different formulas. I think e.g. lichess has a formula so that the median is centered around 1500. This is different from how ELO is calculated. I would assume if they all had the same way to calculate the rating, it should be somewhat close.

Yes and no - they use different systems, but even if they used same system ratings would be different.

This is since ratings only measure player's performance relative to other players in the same poll. A lot more people (and a lot more begineers) play online than in FIDE rated tournaments. So playing poll in tournaments is stronger than online playing poll, so even if we assume same rating system in all cases, players will have lower ratings in tournament play than online.

What complicates matters further is that playing polls aren't totally unified - in FIDE Elo ratings it's possible to see regional differences (indians for example are in general underrated), since playing poll is segmented by distance (due to travel costs not a lot of players play internationally). Additionally COVID19 made a total mess of ratings, since there was not enough events last few years, so majority of younglings are underrated due to not playing enough rated games, while improving as fast as the previous generation.

FIDE is currently deciding on rating reform, which will be implemented in january, trying to handle this situation.

What complicates matters even more is that FIDE Elo algorithm is not optimized for accuracy, but for calculations by hand (try calculating glicko2 rating change without computer!), so glicko2 more accurately predicts player performance.

And finally, time controls differ a lot between online and tournament play. Online even 5minutes feels slow, while in tournaments 90min+30sec/move is one of shorter time controls. Performance between slow and fast play is in general correlated, but this correlation is weaker at higher ratings (since both sides of the game have some non-transferable skills, so blitz specialists for example exists).

That’s pretty much the opposite of how I feel. I can win against much stronger players over the board than online. It’s so hard to summon the same focus and energy in an online game.

It’s just a fact that online ratings are inflated. Hikaru Nakamura is rated 3231 (at the moment I write this) in blitz on chess.com but 2874 in blitz over the board, according to FIDE. That’s a difference of 357 rating points!

Of course, Hikaru has admitted that he deliberately works to inflate his online rating and has talked about the differences in the rules/mechanics online. For him, the lack of an increment in his online games (FIDE over the board blitz has an increment) and his well-practiced mouse skills help him a lot. Hikaru can flag a lot of people from a losing position, so he gets many more wins than he would have over the board. He also says he deliberately “farms” lower rated players to boost his rating by a small amount, and avoids games against dangerous opponents who are underrated (due to a lack of online play).

But that’s not surprising at all if you assume every player has a ‘ceiling’ performance they can attain, isn’t it?

Higher rated players tend to be closer to their potential than lower rated ones, leaving less room for improvement, in any sport. They also will be more likely to get worse over time because, the nearer to the top, the more roads lead you downwards.

You’d have to pick a very peculiar metric to measure performance to compensate for that.

I play competitive games in tournaments. I would disagree with your characterization.

Yes, people have a skill ceiling. However, it’s not something you’re ever going to get to by just playing most games.

People naturally improve at games when they start playing. Some factors being more familiarity with the game, and making less mistakes. However, people will stall out at different ratings at that point.

However, if you do deliberate practice in the game you will absolutely continue to get better. If you’re practicing specific scenarios, have focused areas of improvement, coaching, analyze your own replays, record your practice, and watch it: You will improve.

Yes, abstractly a “skill ceiling” out there exists for you, but you’re extremely unlikely to ever reach it in a game of skill unless you’re trying to go pro in it.

If putting time in were all that were required to reach your skill ceiling, we would have way more League of Legends Grandmasters. Unless you assume the people that go pro are all just more talented, and that their practice doesn’t make a difference.

However, if you do deliberate practice in the game you will absolutely continue to get better

I strongly disagree. I think that, for a given amount of effort (hours and study intensity) you’re willing to spend, everybody has a ceiling that they can reach. If what you say is true, why hasn’t Magnus Carlsen reached ELO 2900? Lack of deliberate practice? ELO deflation requiring players to get better to keep the same rating?

Ignoring that, the discussion isn’t whether you’ll continue getting better, but whether you’ll keep improving at the same rate.

Unless you assume the people that go pro are all just more talented, and that their practice doesn’t make a difference.

I don’t see how that follows. I think the top is both extremely talented, extremely motivated, and physically strong enough to do the hours of concentrated practice.

I think it’s easier to see in physical sports. If you’re 2m tall and have enough motor skills to run and catch a ball, you’ll likely be ‘good’ at basketball in high school, even if you don’t practice much or well. To make it in the NBA, you have to be 2m tall _and_ have above average motor skills _and_ be above average robust, so that you can play x games a year without getting injured, _and_ be more willing to exercise than mossy to get stronger and more agile _and_ be above average good at reading the game.

I think that, for a given amount of effort (hours and study intensity) you’re willing to spend, everybody has a ceiling that they can reach.

I disagree with your disagreement, because simply controlling for total studying time and intensity is too reductionist. Different players have different sticking points when it comes to chess, e.g. weak strategic planning, weak tactics, poor positional understanding, bad endgames, etc. Your implicit assumption is that most players at some playing strength, are at that playing strength in all aspects of their game. In practice, that's simply not the case for many.

To give a concrete example, my classical rating on lichess hovers around 1800, but if you look at my tactics puzzle rating it's well above 2000, suggesting it's the positional and strategic aspects of the game that I'm weak at, which anecdotally feels true based on how I both win and lose most of my games. If I were to get a coach or deliberately work on those weaker aspects of my game myself (something I have not done), so that they're no longer the bottleneck of my performance, I could very well break this rating plateau I've been stuck in for the past half decade or so, and shoot up another 100 or even 200 points. I also have a friend of similar strength level, who has the opposite profile as me: strong positional and strategic understanding, weak tactics. And despite more or less an even record, whenever we play against each other, his wins are almost always grinds, while my wins are usually some tactical shot he missed or blundered into.

The bottom line is, at my strength level, and I'd hypothesize even up to the low to mid-2000s rating levels, these unbalanced types of players are probably more common than balanced players with similar ratings in all aspects of their game to their overall rating. The latter kind, you might be able to argue, have reached their natural ceiling; but even here I'd be surprised if they cannot improve more by deliberately strengthening aspects of their game. Conversely, based on my experience of 10+ years playing chess regularly, the vast majority of players simply don't have a good understanding of their own weaknesses. Many unbalanced players like myself, with the correct type of training and practice, even if total time isn't too much, can absolutely make significant improvements to their overall performance.

If what you say is true, why hasn’t Magnus Carlsen reached ELO 2900? Lack of deliberate practice? ELO deflation requiring players to get better to keep the same rating?

In the case of top-level IMs, GMs, and certainly super GMs, who don't have glaring weaknesses in any aspects of their game, it's likely the case that they indeed did reach their ceiling. But these are the only people I'd be at all confident in making such claims.

I'm not sure about Leagues rating system but I would definitely believe that the top echelon in most serious sports/games is reserved for people who are both more talented and also hardcore practice.

I play chess and the GM level is above the skill cap of some talented people who have put in dedicated practice since a child and are a full time professional dedicated player as an adult. The median talent at full time dedication for their whole life wouldn't reach that level, and no one who only started the game at age 20 has ever reached that level regardless of natural talent. Some of the most famous players never attain that level, including some full time professional players that are known figures today (like Eric Rosen) and historical chess theory leaders (like Jeremy Silman).

And in practice "just" GM level isn't even good enough to be a top tier player: the top 100 players can trounce the lowest GMs.

I would assume the same applies to any other game/sport that has the cache for people to train at it from childhood like Tennis, Basketball, etc.

I've been playing chess since I was 6, and I'm 7 now.

You should learn endgame and tactics, the basics of opening and maybe a few openings. endgame will teach chess. openings teaches you openings. especially when you're a beginner people will make moves that don't make sense. Plus aren't there like over 4 or 5 quadrillion possible moves just within the first 10 moves?

Are you able to confirm there isn’t a typo here? You’re 7?

with comments back past 2018 i think it's safe to say its a typo xD

Maybe they started to procrastinate in HN when they were 2.

Exactly, the ageism here at HN is outrageous.

It wasn't a typo. I was making a joke.

Is this advice not going in the exact opposite direction to what looks like a well-researched TFA with an n=1 experiment to back it up? Why do you think your opinion differs?

TFA mentions that their openings preparation didn't help much, and mentions next steps as learning "Basic Endgames".

The minute you stop blundering pieces you find yourself in a nearly even endgame.

It doesn't necessarily matter that there are quadrillions of possible openings. Studying traps that occur often in the openings you play is definitely helpful.

For example, if you're an 1. e4 e5 player you'll want to learn how to counter the Fried Liver attack, as it's one of the most popular lines at the beginner to intermediate level.

You don't need to know many lines 7 moves deep either, just a couple of moves is already very helpful.

I’ve known this guy off and on for years. When we first met 15+ years he was slightly better at Go than me, which was middling amateur. All the Go books say if you want to be a pro you have to start as a child.

But he studied, and studied, and last I knew he was 3 dan, which is about the point you can entertain the idea of becoming a pro (if I just worked harder).

Kids have a lot more free time to sink into a singular concern. Warnings about how something are out of the reach of adults aren’t actually hard rules, they’re just really good rules of thumb. But if you can make the time, it’s not impossible.

I don’t think chess is any different there. Small improvements may set reasonable expectations, but there are people who can blow right past them.

A friend of mine devised an empirical rule to predict the highest Go ranking that a player will reach: the ranking after the first 4 years of play plus 4.

You can check that on https://europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/ and pick some players at random.

They have a nice date/rank graph and all those graphs start with an almost vertical growth which slows down and flattens. Some players play less often and get weaker but that's not the point.

I have no idea if it applies to chess too, possibly with different parameters, but why not? They are both games played with the brain by humans.

I think this might be related to the pareto distribution of productivity in my line of work (steel fabrication). Our most productive employees are literally 10 times more productive than the least productive. And it's always the same people at the top of the list, and always the same people at the bottom. If you pair them together, the productive employee loses 10-20% of productivity while they're together, and the less productive employee improves by 5-10%, but as soon as you separate them, they go back to where they were before.

but there are people who can blow right past them

Ultimately, I think this is what's often downplayed in these conversations. Just because your friend was able to excel at Go in those 15 years, doesn't imply that any other specific person would be able to do the same, even with the same study. You'll find many people who attempted this but simply couldn't get past a lower plateau.

So, when you say "if you can make the time, it’s not impossible", I'm not sure that that's true. My suspicion would be that for a significant portion of the population, it would in fact be literally impossible. (edit: I was reading a different thread where somebody was asking about becoming a FIDE CM, that's what I was referencing here as being impossible for many, I don't know anything about Go ranks).

I’ve known too many people who get into their own heads about certain topics. They lock up and become impervious to new information.

There are certainly people who need new genes. And there are people who need a new teacher. But boy oh boy are there a lot of people who would get better at difficult tasks if they got therapy.

You're right I think. Most adults really don't improve at chess very often. They do when it's a new hobby, but then they plateau. And it's not that they couldn't improve further, it's just that they're not able or willing to do the things necessary, which is usually a lot of exercise and study. It's just a hobby for most people at the end of the day, and they'd rather spend an hour at the club discussing and blitzing some silly openings with friends than spend an hour solving puzzles or studying endgames. We still all carry the illusion of some prospect of improvement, that's the human condition. But most people don't take it very seriously and are more in it for social reasons.

It clearly aggravated some of the people at the Go club that I was not improving past hobbyist. But the thing I didn’t share with them is that all through my childhood, I would try new things and if I wasn’t instantly mediocre or better at it I would decide this was no fun and drop it. If you are good at enough things you can fill your weeks with activities and ignore the things you aren’t good at.

Being bad at Go and still playing anyway was an exercise in personal growth.

I mostly played blitz with openings where queen is moved in the first 3 moves and got to ~2000 (no proof, sorry). I didn't study chess at all outside of playing it intensely for 1-2 years. Of course, my end game was also very bad. It was such a frustrating fun I had to stop.

There are of course players that know how to fully exploit mistakes in the bad openings, but when you're rated so low, openings rarely matter, especially if the opponent has to exploit a weird opening you have.

There's many more patterns related to pinning, tempo, that are worth much more for quick rating progress.

but when you're rated so low, openings rarely matte

No way you get to 2000 by cheesing, maybe 1000 max. 2000 rating is not low, it’s top 0.3% on chess.com

It's possible, if unlikely - wayward queen is not as bad as it looks (black has maybe a tiny bit more than equality), most players don't face it often (so probably don't have a lot of prep memorized) and in blitz time controls it's hard to find optimal punishment for subpar opening play. And 2000 is not that high again - top 0.3% on chess com is maybe top 50% of tournament players.

Online chess has a lot of begineers, since its more approachable.

Everyone who’s higher rated than 500 can see that you’re lying, I don’t know why you insist. Yes, you’re not immediately losing the game if you play the right moves, but it stops being a “trick” waaaay before you’re 2000, even in blitz. You don’t need any “prep”.

Edit: you’re not the same person from the comment above, my bad

edit: what the other responder says

I'm not saying I'm mating people in 3 moves. There are many unique mating opportunities in queen openings and many ways to create immense pressure on the king's side if the player does not defend well. Try it yourself and you'll quickly see that -2000 rated players (online) struggle with it. Similarly, you're not sacrificing development and you castle at the same moment (sometimes after black).

For example, many games I would get my queen attacked on F3 and then I would lose my rook. But this 3 move knight play on the opponents side gives you a lot of moves to create pressure, in one case you can have 3 pieces developed, while opponent has 0 (excluding the knight stuck in the corner). With the queen on king's side, you have a lot of options to equalize. If opponent is focused on saving the knight, the moves are just bad.

In 2+1 and 3 min blitz it's unlikely you'll get someone that won't make the position almost even after 10 moves.

The biggest hurdle to progress was my endgame and in blitz I found that being a piece down is rarely an indicator of loss at that level. + I did win a lot on time.

I was playing 200-250 blitz games a day and would analyze many, but I never bothered with openings. I quit because it was obviously too much.

2000 rated players of course won't get mated in 3 moves, but position after 1. e4 e5 2. Qh5 Nc6 3. Bc4 g6 4. Qf3 is not unplayable for White - Black is equal or maybe just a little bit better.

In lichess Blitz database for 2200+ rated players there are 13883 games with this position. White won 50%, drew 7% and lost 43%.

Of course this position is nothing to write home about, but for online Blitz it's good enough.

This seems like a wild claim. On chess.com I've gone from 500 to ~1050 in a handful of months without any real study,

Is rating on chess.com similar to rating in lichess? The article mentions 1%, but you start with 1500 in lichess??? If you lose often, you quickly go down. But if you keep an even record, you stay in 1500.

I don't understand how people learn from slamming blitz/bullet games.

As in the article, speed training helps recognizing patterns and dealing with them. At first it seems impossible to play significant moves with so little time, but you can try to just doing it. You'll adapt very soon.

I recommend starting with blitz 3+2 and later bullet 2+1. There are tournaments of 1+0... or even less time. 30 seconds is really crazy.

Rating on chesscom is wildly different than on lichess in lower rating ranges.

300 cc should be similiar to around 800 lichess. Around 2000-2200 ratings even out on both sites and on higher ratings lichess ratings tend to be lower than on cc.

For improving longer time controls are better. The old adage, that if you want to play blitz better you should play rapid and that if you want to improve rapid you should play classical is still valid today. Blitz is beneficial only at higher rating ranges (2000+) to allow practising openings, and even that only in moderation. Players who don't play classical time controls (90min+30sec/move at least) tend to plateau around 2000-2200 online.

This ofc doesn't mean that blitz isn't fun - vast majority of my games are in blitz time controls.

If you lose often, you quickly go down. But if you keep an even record, you stay in 1500.

Is that actually true? You start at a 1500 in lichess, but that is a provisional rating and the outcome of your first few games are going to cause BIG swings in your rating. After your rating is no longer a provisional rating then that is going to slow down.

Losing a few games at the start might take a lot more wins to "even out" in rating. Just keeping an even record might not be enough to stay 1500.

Some people just want to have fun and that's what blitz is for. Why are people so preoccupied with improving when it comes to chess? If any other game is mentioned the discussion will not be so centered on improvement as it is with chess. Maybe it is because chess has this air of a "thinking man's game" which does not really deserve. It's just a game like any other.

Because learning and improving is part of the pleasure of chess. It's a game you can enjoy to play, but also enjoy to study. As you improve, there's a tangible sense of progression which is rewarding. And the scope for progression goes very very deep.

Not all other games have this feature. If I play Catan with my friends, it's fun, but then the game is over. I'm not going to analyse my game and discover new tactics or strategies, like I will with chess.

Because learning and improving is part of the pleasure of chess.

Important to remember this is not a universal truth for all people.

If I play Catan with my friends, it’s fun…

Interestingly, you and I seem to be opposites here. I only play chess for fun and never care if I improve, but spent thousands of hours in my college years analyzing and improving at Catan. I wonder if this is simply a matter of whether one prefers deterministic or stochastic games for optimization.

I don't understand how people learn from slamming blitz/bullet games. The time constraints are too rushed to really think about what makes a move good or bad. I assumed it was a young person's thing, but the author said he plays these quick formats too.

I'm 47 and started playing around 5 years ago. I only play Blitz and Bullet because I find it fun. In the first two years I went from around 1000 on lichess to around 1700. I've been "stuck" at 1700 plus or minus 100 since then.

I know I could improve with puzzles and classical time controls and study and analysis but I have no interest in that. I play games for fun. If I improve then great. If not no problem. It's the same as breaking out a game of Tetris or something for 5 minutes to me.

If you analyse the blitz games after playing them, that can bridge some of the gap.

As someone who is at 1000 and also one of those people who only slam blitzes, I can confirm that one benefits from it only to a point, mostly developing skill in quickly reading the board and identifying the low-hanging-fruit moves.

Yup, starting to play 2+1 increased my 5+3 rating by 200 up to 1800 (lichess). But continuing to play 2+1 with no analysis or thought hasn't increased my rating further.

I do only play for fun / to kill time, though. So a few games a day on a metro or whatever. So with no aspirations to actually improve I think I'm at the peak of my natural ability.

I love quick games, 3min blitz being my favorite and I suck at chess. It makes it almost a different game to me. I stopped playing for years because my memory of chess was slow boring waiting. Blitz is just full on, all the time.

The author says specifically blitz/bullet is suboptimal for learning, for precisely the reasons you mention. The author plays these types of games to kill boredom.

You may learn up to a stage, when a complete beginner, by quickly and repeatedly being exposed to basic mistakes without having to think much. Afterwards it is probably detrimental indeed.

I can only speak from my experience but blitz worked for me. I would make occasional, furtive attempts to learn but nothing ever worked. Then one day I started playing a single five minute lichess game with coffee in the morning at work. And when I would make a mistake, I would do a takeback to see what I did wrong and how I should have played it. Sometimes I would play the puzzles.

Doing this and nothing else, I went up about 100 points a year for five years, from 1200 to 1700. (And then I stopped but I also could tell that I would have to start approaching it differently to go further.)

Is there a well known strategy game where AI doesn't have better chances to win than a human? Is there possibly, math wise, that such games exist?

I kind of dislike not having a chance when playing against bots.

I would say any game that includes a lot of uncertainty, subjectivity and random chance would mean that an AI would not usually have an edge over a human. Maybe games like diplomacy, magic the gathering, pandemic, Gloomhaven, maybe poker (?), backgammon (?) etc.

On a sidenote, I think it’s interesting that we’re a point where it’s starting to get hard to come up with games that humans can beat AI at.

I would like to hear your reasoning as to why you think that a human is especially good at dealing with uncertainty. My experience is the opposite.

True randomness doesn't drive better results for humans, due to some intrinsic humane qualities, but rather eliminates the advantage of large volume data access and processing of AI. Basically true randomness levels the playing field. Backgammon is a perfect example.

You want a game where searching large amounts of data, computing moves and calculating probabilities fast doesn't help.

Maybe some randomness will help, but might not be enough.

My ideea is that bots can't win in the real world economy, no fund driven solely by algorithms can win more than funds driven by humans.

So if we can find a game modeled like the economy, where nothing is random but many things are uncertain, then it might be harder for the software to win.

I would imagine in many games randomness (e.g. through throwing dice, or pulling cards from a randomized pack) add noise, but the underlying strategy (including processing data, calculating probabilities etc.) still help. In such a game even though an AI might be superior, the randomness might mean that occasionally the human wins. Or for an extreme example, if nothing you do in the game really matters, it's all just down to random chance, then the AI:human win rate should approach 50%. But such a game would probably not be particularly enjoying to play.

But yes, I think you're right that you'd need a game where crunching a lot of numbers really fast doesn't give you an advantage. For instance, if the state space of the game is so big that number crunching is useless, and other approaches like AI style pattern matching (used IIRC by Alpha-Go?) don't work either.

Though ultimately, what is the uniquely human trait that would allow a human to beat an AI? Can you make a game that depends on that? Is there even such a thing?

if nothing you do in the game really matters, it's all just down to random chance... But such a game would probably not be particularly enjoying to play.

I guess all the slot machine players tend to differ in opinion there :)

Sure, slot machine operators adjust winning chances so players keep on playing, but to a player, it's not influenced by anything they do, other than "just one more time and I'll win".

TBH, "real world economy" does allow humans to rewrite the rules, and they've done so: issuing more bonds, deflating the currency, printing more money, bailing out broke banks, hiding facts and selling before downturn goes public, pure and simple fraud...

I’m not saying a human would be better than an AI. Just saying it would be a more equal playing field, since neither would have a significant advantage.

I think this depends on whether the human has a chance in a particular run (yes) or on average of many runs (probably no because the AI will calculate the probabilities better).

But in the extreme case of a random game (like rolling the highest number on a die) they are equal (obviously).

I would like to hear your reasoning as to why you think that a human is especially good at dealing with uncertainty.

We can ask any successful CEO. Fortune 500 companies would use bots if that was possible.

Uncertainty doesn't equal randomness. Randomness is flipping a coin and asking you the result. Uncertainty is hiding the coin behind my back and asking you in which hand is it.

That's disanalogous to board games. We're comparing board games with uncertainty to board games without uncertainty. In either of these categories, the thing that makes AI competent is unlimited training data due to self-play.

Computers are better than humans at poker (DeepStack) and backgammon (eXtreme Gammon). XG for example is commonly used by expert backgammon players to analyse play, much like how engines are used in chess.

There is no reason why computers wouldn't eventually beat a human in the others, if someone writes a narrow AI for them. Consider for example, AlphaStar for StarCraft.

Scaringly enough, Diplomacy seems to work well for AI too. https://ai.meta.com/blog/cicero-ai-negotiates-persuades-and-...

I would say any game that includes a lot of uncertainty, subjectivity and random chance

I would thought the same haven't I been reading articles on how bots won against humans at poker.

I am not sure about something like backgammon or monopoly.

There will never be anymore. AI simply outperforms humans at increasing rates. When in doubt, for a specific game a narrow AI can be trained up.

For the current 1-2 years you can have a shot at physical/sports games, since robots are lagging behind AI capabilities, quite a lot.

Robots can’t even carry enough energy to play a physical/sports game, even if their AI was perfect and cost zero energy itself. There’s no imminent tech that will change this. We have many years.

I’d love to be wrong about that, but I’m probably not.

Check out Robocup for superhuman speed miniature soccer games. But the games are small and short. The humanoid games are much less well developed.

Probably we differ here on the timespans, thats okay :-)

Personally I explicitly do not expect robots to actually have human-like shape but rather be optimized for the thing they do, which can change the energy requirements or otherwise things that might look "unfair" to humans. Usually this is one of the key reasons where different timelines come from in discussions, where people assume that a humanoid robot needs to be build that does the same movements like humans but somehow better/faster/... while I differ on that point.

That's moving the goalposts (pun intended :)): having a wheeled robot with an enclosed (ball protection!) basketball holder slide around the basketball court and extend the basketball holder up to the rim would certainly allow it to beat humans, but it wouldn't really be "playing basketball".

We engage in sports because they are fun and explore the limits of our physical and mental abilities (or well, go above our limits, as all the kinesio-tapes and supplements in pro sports indicate). Involving robots can only continue to be fun if robots work with roughly the same restrictions.

If we want to measure AIs against our mental abilities, it's only fair to pit them with controlling as much "machinery" and suboptimal movements as humans do in a particular sport: that versatility is what makes our intelligence so amazing and, well, "general".

but thats the same as in Chess, Go or even StarCraft: the AI is absolutly impossible to beat for human players unless it has explicit flaws built-in.

The general point I want to make is that it doesn't make sense trying to compare humans with AI (and somewhat soon) robots, because the will outperform everyone. Handycapping them is not a solution either. The "amazing versatility" of humans also will not persist for too long anymore I'd say, therefore the only way to have a real and fair comparison/pit is against other humans in the future.

I feel like it is possible, but just not anything we will pursue. Nuclear reactors? Inductive charging in the floor? some kind of overhead electric like we use to power trains? I'm sure it's "possible", but probably not safe for humans to be around.

Civilization V? Warcraft 3?

But any answer will be such only because no one tried hard enough to make a supreme AI.

OpenAI's dota2 bots were pretty impressive, they even had an open public lobby for people to play against.

They didn't dominate against human pros, neither did alphastar. So Humans still have a chance there.

I've found playing against weaker bots you lose on the sort of human nature of weaker players. In particular humans tend to have a bit of an internal narrative, but weaker chess bots tend to just throw in shitty moves.

It's pretty well known that bots resort to cheating to win at stuff like Civ. I'm sure there's a patch out there that removes the cheating, and you can stomp on computers there.

Civ evo [0] applies the same rules to AI and human players. It is supposed to have a very strong AI. Also, AI does not have a personality (friendly, aggressive, etc.); it just wants to win. Unfortunately, I could never bring myself to learn this new variant.

[0] http://c-evo.org/

The problem with video game bots in games like Civ is that "playing well" is not actually the core goal of the devs. Rather, it has to be enjoyable to play against and easy enough to build and debug in the limited time available until release. Given those constraints, most game devs just give the bot free resources and call it a day.

If somebody would bother to put in the time to make it, a well-crafted Civ bot could probably roflstomp every human out there just by virtue of perfectly micromanaging its production in every city on every turn without effort.

> "I kind of dislike not having a chance when playing against bots."

Conjures an image of the astronaut with a gun meme...

  - Wait, playing games to win is a waste of time now?

  - It always was.

There's a difference between playing to win and being frustrated because your opponent can consistently steamroll you effortlessly without even giving you a chance to set your game up.

Is there some shame in asking the AI to play worse?

It’s a machine, it won’t feel smug about knowing it could beat me if it wanted to.

I’ve never really understood people who are competitive about board games and similar inside-the-box scenarios. (There’s a certain “Dwight Schrute” aspect to that mentality that’s hard to watch.) I like losing in games because there’s no real-world cost to trying out some idiot strategy.

World of Warships has lots of strategy to it (and the bots suck at it). Good players don't shoot where the ship would be if it kept going straight but take into account the map, other ships positions and psychology to guess evasive maneuvers.

and the bots suck at it

It is important to distinguish two thing: "Computers can't solve this problem" vs "the currently existing bots suck". One is when the best programers trying their darndest can't make a bot good, while the other is when nobody even really tried.

(For example I can reliably run faster than Usain Bolt when he is not made aware that we are racing. :P )

This case sounds very much the second kind. There can be many reason for this, the simplest is that the makers of the game don't win more players by absolutely crushing them. It is a case where after a certain level of advancement you don't earn more money by making better bots. In fact you might start earning less if you take away the fun of the game. And of course anti-cheating measures will hamper 3rd party bots if they are not explicitly invited, and why would they be?

Simply saying estimating which way someone will evade / evading randomly doesn't sound like the kind of thing a computer would be bad nowadays. If someone tries that is.

Can I suggest you consider why you’re playing?

We are taught from a young age that winning is the objective of playing a game, but what if it wasn’t?

What if it was to learn some hidden truth, or to explore your own tendencies to over-react, to become too rash, to become overly-defensive or to be disappointed when things didn’t always go your way? What if you took each game as a learning opportunity?

If you take a different perspective, bots and AI can help you a great deal - they aren’t going to feel smug about beating you, or remind you of it over a family dinner, or brag about it on social media. They can help you improve your gameplay and yourself.

I’m reminded of this when I think of recent AI advances in Go. The moves and strategies that emerged have left that community in awe, because they were open to learning from what AI produced, not just obsessed with trying to win.

That does not quite seem to be the point. There is a huge difference between "better" and "crushing".

We are taught from a young age that winning is the objective of playing a game, but what if it wasn’t?

No, we aren't. The are multiple players in a game. So you win some, they win some and sure, you are taught to try to win more than 50%. But if you win 90+% of the time, you are wasting both players' time.

come join us at Beyond All Reason :)

https://www.beyondallreason.info/

or if you're an AI maker come join us also and make a better bit for us to play against :)

cough https://zero-k.info/ cough

You can adjust bot difficulty. If that doesn't work for you nothing will because with humans you also can never ever beat the best player in the world.

Yes. Risk. There's a large online community around it now and lots of YouTube videos of people playing it to a high strategic level. There's all sorts of signalling going on between players and bots are easy to counter even at the highest settings.

Play a high variance game of chance like cards or Magic the Gathering. Then when you win it's because of your skill and when you lose its because of chance. :)

Most board games don't have any superhuman AI. You could play race for the galaxy for example. There are bots, but you can achieve very high win rates against them.

Don't play against bots then. There's plenty of people online to play against at any moment of the day.

Maybe I read the wrong forums but this particular hangup ("machines can do it better so what is even the point?") seems to be quite unique to chess as a hobby. I've never seen someone on an athletics tournament complaining that the sport is no longer fun because a cannon could throw the spear much farther than even the best athletes, or that they no longer enjoy going to the gym because a construction crane can lift much more than they will ever be able to. Chess is at its core a game of rigidly applying rules, pattern matching, and applying a depth-first search on as deep a search tree as you can manage. It should hardly be a surprise that computers can do that extremely well.

starcraft broodwar is one such game, although the AI bot has to be handicapped to have the same visual and APM constraints as a human player.

If the bot gets to have APM in the 400-500 range and has full map vision, even the top pros will get smoked no contest.

A handful of games have been invented with the purpose of giving humans an edge over AI. They may have had a chance when the best AI was alpha-beta search, but against modern reinforcement methods, I don't believe they have a chance.

The games invented were Octi [1] and Arimaa [2].

[1]. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/450/octi

[2]. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4616/arimaa

A casual search shows some discussion of AI-resistant board games here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/eaept6/tell_me_...

A bit of an unhinged, unpopular opinion take: Chess is a very overrated game that's overglorified to the limit and it's an unhealthy addiction for a lot of people and I think modern media needs to stop flaunting Chess as something of a high-horse type of thing.

To put simply, I believe Chess is good as something of a brain exercise for when you're younger or if you are a parent and want to develop your child's logical thinking and that's it, no more and no less.

So what happens if you take Chess further?

People don't know when to stop and I've seen with my eyes this happen because there was this kid at Chess tournaments who was a much better player than I am, however the kid just lived Chess, there was nothing else to the kid, he was socially very unintelligent & awkward, didn't really do much anything else since his parents shoved him to Chess when he was 6 and made it a daily routine thing for him to focus on Chess and his school studies. Gradually, Chess took over his entire identity and he's now a titled player and from people who see him on an everyday basis, they all still don't say much about this now-adult other than that he's still just focused on Chess. The general sentiment of everyone who knows this kid is just pity because it's just a very one-dimensional life. He achieved success but it sacrificed a lot of his childhood, and for what?

Chess players, even titled ones don't really make a lot of money from tournaments and if you want to be good at it and play at tournaments, you have to dedicate basically all your time to it and have good discipline to keep at it, day after day. There's the coach hustle but that also requires you to be at least above average and also I haven't met a coach who's not just living Chess so it's about the same, you still get sucked into this lifestyle.

Chess at a higher level is pretty draw-ish and ultimately a memorization contest. Most strong players will not slip up if given a slight advantage and they will be able to convert this slight advantage into at least a draw. Strong players already have a good grasp on tactical motifs and can spot opportunities easily but that's where Chess theory comes into play. There's many openings and every opening has variations, which have optimal moves and then of course inaccurate moves and blunders. Just Sicilian theory is enough for someone to spend years of their life memorizing moves and building a repertoire.

Ultimately, Chess doesn't get more fun the stronger you get and that's counter-intuitive because people want to get better. I played Chess for a few years both casually and professionally, I won some tropheys and have some medals to show for it. I beat titled players (2300+ rated) but I quit all of it to focus on software engineering because Chess got boring. For me, Chess got to a point where further improvement depended on memorizing opening theory, middlegame theory and endgame theory. Just memorize and nothing more. I refused to do that so I often drawn/lost games in situations where I played less than ideal moves and my opponent knew the theory to punish my very slight inaccuracy. What I liked in Chess was the calculation, so something like Fischer Chess (Chess960) was fun but did you know people actually made theory even for that? So games got more and more boring, in casual games I would purposefully play bad moves to throw my opponent off their theory and to get into unknown territory in terms of tactics. I'd do that just to try to make the game fun again, but obviously I was burned out and there was no coming back from it.

In my country I am friends with a lot of Chess people. I saw a lot of things, like titled players throwing games for .. $10-$20. They spent about 20-30 years of their life to get good at Chess and now they have to throw games for money. Do I want to be that guy? How does it feel to study and play something for 30-40 years then just have to throw games for $20? Probably awful.

Also, general health-wise, most Chess players I know are sedentary, playing Chess isn't really healthy as you are sat in a chair for hours on end. It's very competitive, which can lead to stress and stress just leads to burnout often.

To end this post, I want to say that I luckily didn't keep on this path. In my opinion, life needs variety and so I have done much more and I am happier than the years I spent on Chess. Studied hard, got a job as a software engineer, went on many vacations, enjoyed food & drinks everywhere, had friends/love come and go, played many games, read books and watched movies and I just lived a more fulfilling life than my past Chess lifestyle because it's frankly, a stark contrast between the two.

TLDR: Trying to logically explain my distaste for Chess in modern times.

This argument generalises to all sport.

If you want to become the best in the world at something then you have to give it 100%. It will be everything in your life.

Most people who try to be the best don’t make it. If you’re nearly the best then your life sucks. You’ve spent all of your energy trying for something that’s not going to give you any returns personally.

I suppose it does to a certain extent but most of my experiences were with Chess, Football and Boxing. People say Chess is a sport but it's not really physically-exerting like some other sports or even healthy at all.

In terms of other sports, I think football (soccer) is a sport you don't really have to be 100% at, since that sport is somehow globally recognized and profitable so even subpar players can live well off it and it also seems much healthier than Chess and then there's the whole team aspect of it.

I think you have to be very good at football/boxing to make a living off it.

A subpar 3rd division football player is a better athlete than anyone you have ever met in your day-to-day life.

Chess supports maybe 30 full time competitors, whereas football supports a few thousand. However millions more people try to be footballers. Your odds of success are probably better with chess.

All three of those sports destroy your body. With chess it’s the hours sitting still and being stressed. With boxing and football it’s the concussions, tough training regimes and accumulated injuries that never fully heal.

Elite sport is bad for you.

Football is very different because you don't have to spend as much time. Professional players train for 1-3 hours per day and that's it. The remaining time of the day they do nothing at all because there's no point to physically exert yourself more, you'll just get injured for no benefit. Also, you have to be 100% rested when game time comes which means that 2-3 days prior to the game you take it very easy during training, or even don't train at all.

This is true. With physical sports you have a limit on the time you can spend training. That’s different to chess and other e sports.

Local football team has people who are mostly mediocre and they make decent money, since I know one of the players. I don't mean to belittle their efforts or the time invested but generally, it is a competitive sport but it's also at same time providing more opportunities overall.

I suppose it depends on where you are and how competitive it is.

You do have a point about elite sport though the argument extends to casual as well, where casual football, tennis or even basketball is just healthier than sitting over a chess board. Pardon me, I might be a bit biased here since I am maybe too conscious about sedentary chair-lifestyle since I work from an office and spend a lot of time in a chair and lately been trying to get more active.

American football is literally a chess match. It's an orchestarted sport where scheme's are major components of the game. bill belichick (coach for New England) invented a type of coverage (pattern-match) that took professional football coordinators 20 years to understand but once they did it altered how the game is played and took away sections of the field. Once you understand what they're doing Football is an incredibly complex sport compared to Basketball, Hockey and Soccer (pure sports).

Sounds like you have terrible experience with being forced to explore one's talent for the game, but I dont think that deep of an history with it can provide an objective assessment of the game: any hobby taken to the extreme, maniacal and methodical level stops becoming a hobby, and turns into work. There is this widespread notion that the deeper you go, the more enjoyable it is and it is utter nonsense. Even in gaming, the concept of minmaxing, which is antithetical to enjoying a game, is encouraged, but all it does is turn a fun pastime into spreadsheets and hard effort for asymptotic gain.

On the other hard I had ignored the game for all my adulthood because I felt, in my ignorance, that it was a game too hard to get into. I'm starting to like it as I learn, but I have no chance nor desire to break the 2000+ ELO threshold, to compete, to leave my mark.

I am learning Chess so that if one day I find an elderly gentleman at the park with a board, I can sit for a game and a chat.

While I absolutely understand your point, I also feel like it's sometimes beyond someone's control to get sucked into something. I started playing with friends on school breaks and soon I was joining a Chess club with them and soon I was googling ways to get better and soon I was skimping out on social interaction because I felt it was better to stay home and play online chess because starting up a game was far easier than having to go somewhere physically and wonder if it's gonna be a good time and all.

Chess is a bit weird. I enjoy playing it. It's just a game but we place intellectual superiority on people who play it (well) but that's not true, a great Chess player wouldn't necessarily be a great engineer or an architect. There's some point of prestige to playing Chess, even in your wording, why is the elderly person playing Chess at a park a "gentleman"? It's because they play Chess and playing Chess is just classy in pop culture.

Anyways, my original comment was just an introspective on what Chess really is about on a higher level in my experiences, generally I see Chess as bit of a flawed game, since the better you get, the less interesting the game is and it just transitions in an overcomplicated memory game.

There's no glory to Chess. Good players were just kids that got shoved into this Chess lifestyle and kept at it. Adult players can get better but if you haven't played Chess as a kid, your talent is very limited and your progression speed is much worse, it's not impossible per say but it's also not likely.

"I am learning Chess so that if one day I find an elderly gentleman at the park with a board, I can sit for a game and a chat."

Since I quit actively playing, this is exactly my thought, it doesn't hurt to know how to play but any effort towards improving isn't really important, nor should it be any sort of priority. Take it slow, enjoy the ride but don't get too entangled.

A wise man once said, "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." and that just resonated with me, deeply, because it is really true on every and so many levels.

Even if I dont completely agree with your negative take, I appreciate the point your making.

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." applies to a lot of things. How worth is it for me to spend my evenings honing my programming skills, instead of traveling, seeing the world, falling in love?

At the end of the day, there is no preordained path, nor St. Peter at the gate or other God deciding our worth by weighing our heart. Do what is fun for you, no one cares, not even God. The person that played chess all their life, and the person that did something better end up in the same place, forgotten, waiting to be swallowed by our red giant sun.

But if your parents wanted you to become a chess Grandmaster, and you just want to play ball, fuck them, go live your life.

If you spend the same time studying programming that you need to spend to become a good chess player then you will likely become a professional programmer which means you will make a decent living in most countries of the world.

Also, you can build interesting systems that actually improve peoples' lives whereas in chess you just sit on your ass calculating and memorizing stuff that affect nobody at all outside the game.

If you say it that way, nothing is worth talking about in life and nothing is worth doing because we all just die and end up wherever as is per the usual nihilism doctrine. The quote I cited, indeed, potentially applies to a lot of things but hey, we are talking Chess.

I appreciate this community since I can voice out things that people might be contemplative about and my negativity filled post was really just no false positivity comment about the reality of Chess in a random world country which I experienced time and time again.

The OP is "How to learn chess as an adult" and as I saw it, my first question in my mind was "Why should you learn chess as an adult?" and then I saw the lengths this person went to improve and while I don't want to be a toxic or negative bub about it, I also feel like I can contribute to this discussion by sharing my own opinion since I directly have a lot of experience with Chess. Now, I don't say that in an elitist way, I don't claim to be an expert but I feel like this blog post and similar posts are quite misleading and might trap uninformed people into thinking that Chess is something really worth learning as an adult or just increase the bias that Chess is some unique sport when it's just really a overrated game, kinda like Monopoly or any other game.

I spent a lot of time on Chess and I am glad to have provided some information on what it was like for me, because I think that it's really valuable for someone to read this and take away whatever they can from my experiences. I don't claim I have it all figured out, but generally, I suggest to keep Chess in moderation and no, you don't need to get better at it because it doesn't really get more fun.

Have a nice day! Thanks for reading.

I think what you're describing is the crux of the issue for chess players who don't want to commit full-time to chess but also have problems just playing a game here and there casually because it draws them in. In other words, they’re too good to be casual but not good or dedicated enough to be full-time professionals. These people are usually chess experts with 2000+ ratings but below international master (IM) level. I, for one, played chess when I was a kid, but decided not to devote too much time to it (1800 elo), although it was a lot of fun, because I wanted to spend time with friends and I didn't want to spend too much time on chess. Over the years, I adopted the approach of trying to be in the top 10% in many different things, just for fun and interest, instead of being just in the top 0.1% in one thing.

Chess at the highest levels is drawish, but we're talking 2500+ FIDE. The vast majority of players aren't near 2500. Memorisation isn't even a problem for most people because most people won't ever be playing at the professional level and even then the amount of memorisation required isn't as much as you're making it out to be. For example: a close friend of mine is an FM and I saw his opening files. He has around 500 lines on the Benko, around 600 lines on the English (1. c4) and 700 lines on the Sicilian Najdorf (including anti-Sicilians). That's his entire repertoire, which he has been building up for 10 years. That isn't a crazy amount. As for 960 theory, please show me. I've heard of 960 principles, like developing bishops before knights because bishops, but not actual opening theory.

Middlegame theory

What do you mean by this? There are strategical principles, but I don't think I've ever heard of middlegame theory.

Endgame theory

Endgame theory isn't too difficult up to around 2000 FIDE if you know the basic principles (taking opposition, key squares, square rule, philidor position, other rook endgame basics, knowing which pieces you can mate with, etc) which can be learnt in an evening. You said you love calculation. Well, to me, even if you don't know endgame theory you can still be a good endgame player if you're a good calculator.

Anyway, I agree with your other points about there being no money in chess and chess leading to an unhealthy lifestyle.

I remember I saw some website which allowed you to select some 960 position and it would show like some commentary on how to proceed as either side and what should be prioritized and showcase past games with the same position, this was like a year or two ago.

By middlegame theory, I meant that there is a lot of resources on Chessable that go into middlegame theory of an opening if both sides played early opening by the book, so even middlegame is quite covered in terms of variants and the otherwise general strategy ideas are actually incorporated as part of the theory and studied as such.

As for endgames, I don't think the theory is too difficult but it's also been a situation where people are guided towards books like Dvoretsky's endgame manual and 100 endgames you must know and stuff like that which again is just thrown at you and told to go study it because a lot of the people read these books.

Now, generally, I agree, you can play Chess by intuition to a really good level but I've had games where my opponents just told me my moves were sound, made sense and in a way they were "good" but they fell to a part of their preparation theory that was like 8-9 moves deep and honestly, I really didn't like that and I absolutely didn't want to join this "rat race" because I think for me it would be a unhealthy life to aimlessly keep studying Chess just so I can be competitive against other people who do this same exact thing of studying.

Anyways, hope I clarified things and thanks for chipping in!

I remember I saw some website which allowed you to select some 960 position and it would show like some commentary on how to proceed as either side and what should be prioritized and showcase past games with the same position, this was like a year or two ago.

Computer generated? If so, I wouldn't be worried. Besides, imagine this scenario: you search for a 960 game on Lichess right now, you or your opponent have 25 seconds to move. In 25 seconds, you can't input a 960 position into another site and learn theory for that very specific position. If you take longer than 25 seconds to make a move, Lichess aborts the game automatically. It's not possible. 960 is a completely feasible variant if you want to avoid opening theory. Also, a big 960 tournament will be played next year^, so things are getting exciting in the 960 world.

By middlegame theory, I meant that there is a lot of resources on Chessable that go into middlegame theory of an opening if both sides played early opening by the book, so even middlegame is quite covered in terms of variants and the otherwise general strategy ideas are actually incorporated as part of the theory and studied as such.

I have two things to say to this: 1. you should know the plans and ideas for the middlegames you get because these middlegames arise from your opening repertoire, which you should have already studied (pawn structures, best piece placement, common sacrifices, pawn breaks, etc). 2. as you say the theory is influenced by strategy (and tactics), so if you have a solid strategical foundation (and tactical), you will be fine as long as you're not playing an extremely sharp opening, in which you must know concrete theory. A book I found extremely helpful for strategy was: Mastering Chess Strategy by GM Hellsten.

As for endgames, I don't think the theory is too difficult but it's also been a situation where people are guided towards books like Dvoretsky's endgame manual and 100 endgames you must know and stuff like that which again is just thrown at you and told to go study it because a lot of the people read these books.

Those books are not for beginners, especially Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual. I agree with you. If I were to recommend an endgame book to a beginner, I would recommend Silman's Endgame Course by IM Silman. You're a strong player, though, so I think you could get a lot out of Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual (at least the grey/blue sections, which Dvoretsky's notes as being the most essential parts).

Now, generally, I agree, you can play Chess by intuition to a really good level but I've had games where my opponents just told me my moves were sound, made sense and in a way they were "good" but they fell to a part of their preparation theory that was like 8-9 moves deep

What was your opening repertoire?

^ = https://en.chessbase.com/post/freestyle-super-tournament-in-...*

Most of what you say about the highest level is true for most other pursuits.

My view is that chess without memorization is not a very interesting game. What remains is just calculation which is uninteresting to 99+% of people. Since you reached a high level in the game I believe you have excellent calculation skills and part of the reason for that is that you, as you say, find calculation interesting.

I find calculation pointless and thus I'm very bad at it; even after 30 years of playing I hang pieces on half my games and I rarely, if ever, calculate more than one move deep. I believe most people are like me in this regard and therefore most people will remain at a sub-1500 rating forever.

As the classic quote goes:

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

* What I liked in Chess was the calculation, so something like Fischer Chess (Chess960) was fun but did you know people actually made theory even for that?*

I'm sure there's been theory developed for Fisher Random (960) but memorizing that seems like a bigger PITA than for standard chess, because there's literally 960 starting positions to memorize the theory for, as opposed to one. Plus, if you play 960 online, you will not have a choice as to your starting position, it will be completely random. "Oh, I memorized a bunch of theory for starting position 521 and 859, but now I'm faced with position 157, so shit I'm out of luck" said nobody ever.

I do love 960, I play Crazyhouse960 the most as it's very fluid, requires little opening prep as it's randomized, and there's no endgame to solve for. It's just pure tactics and in-the-moment thinking.

Good article. A lot of the comments here give bad advice though, which isn’t surprising because they show a lot of common misperceptions about chess. Jeremy Silman has written a couple of books about what is actually important. Quickly, what worked for me when I started playing on chess.com at age 40 after not playing for over twenty years. My rating at age 17 was 1450. Restarted at 1200, and barely progressed at first. If your rating is different you may need different things. Again, Silman is good on this. What worked:

1) eat. I would start playing in the morning, do okay, then lose a bunch. Finally, realized my blood sugar level was a major contributor to my elo 2) study tactics. Chess Tempo is great. Lots of good tactics books. Especially study spotting threats 3) Study basics of positions: best places to post rooks, bishops, control of center. But tactics more important. 4) don’t spend much time on openings. Learn the basics of a few common ones. Games will quickly diverge from openings. Because GM games so often depend on openings, amateurs (like me) tend to overpivot on this. 5) After playing, load your game into a chess engine and analyze what went wrong (if you played perfect, analyze what your opponent did wrong). Until about 2000, whomever makes the fewest mistakes usually wins.

The question is, is it worth it getting into chess as an adult? What is the appeal? And what additional value does it bring compared to other "productive"/mentally stimulating hobbies?

Sounds like you don’t like chess very much. Sounds like you think everybody should have the same brain as you and are frustrated why this isn’t the case.

Sounds like they're asking questions and you're making assumptions.

No. Unless you enjoy it.

For me, chess requires a level of focus and time management unlike anything else (Go is the same, but I learned chess). There are no motor skills required, unlike most video games or a musical instrument. As an adult learning the first time, it is frustrating because it is so much harder than for a kid. But then so is music and foreign language.

From another angle, there is a huge amount of research on chess as a model of cognition. Because chess rating is quite objective, you can measure things like speed of learning, increase in skill with age, followed by decline of skill with age, the effects of alcohol and other drugs, diet, sleep. And, of course, it is a completely classic and ongoing topic of ai research and decision theory. If you are interested in those topics, having some insight into the game is also useful.

One person's take. I use chess to relax after hours of taxing mental work, think programming, meetings or even any stress. While I learned as a child, I didn't really play, as there wasn't anyone to do so, now with chess.com, or any other online service it's super accessible.

I think it is better to approach chess as a game (not as a mental exercise). If you enjoy it, play it. Otherwise, don't.

One fairly unique thing is that you can play against other humans of equal strength with zero friction over the web.

Interesting you put "eat" here as your first item.

I don't care much about my rating (I play chess to escape stress; not create more of it), but over the last couple years since I started playing, my lichess rating (fluctuating between 1200-1400) appears to have a very strong correlation with my mental health.

Of course it's obvious if you think about it, but it's very odd to have this accurate of an indicator with historical data.

Of course this only really works if you don't actively study to try and get better :)

As you say, you can’t usually “measure” your mental performance. After having this experience, it also explained why I was a more productive programmer in the afternoon (after lunch) and I started eating a light breakfast. My mom wasn’t so dumb after all!

I have learned the same, my mental health strongly correlates with my chess performance. I'm not really good, think 1400 the most, but sometimes I just cruise to my high score and then sometimes I cannot win a game to save me.

How do you load your games into a chess engine? Where do you play that allows you to export games? And then are you loading into another site or using a local application on your laptop as the "chess engine?"

They all have ways of saving a PGN file. I have Fritz and now I usually use playchess.com which automatically stores your games and has an easy way to launch analysis.

I don't like losing, I want to always win. That's why I don't play.

I've been thinking recently that I should play anyway so that I could grow out of this condition. Any tips for that?

I prefer losing actually - I always find myself a bit dissapointed after achieving victory.

From every loss I learned something (either that my tactics need work, that I need to improve my understanding of this or that structure, that I need to add a line to my repertoire), from victories not so much.

Also I find that going for a beer with opponent when they win is usually much better experience than when they lose - people tend to be more open and talkative after win than after loss.

Wins feel unearned (the opponent just played so bad) or accidental (he played good but made this one mistake, it could have gone either way).

In case of the loses you feel way more in control somehow (ooh, I definitely shouldn't have done that) or are just funny (I can't do anything, they are wiping the floor with me, it's comical) where you set up your own small goals to achieve because you have no hopes of actually competing (yes! I got him this one time so it's 12-1 not 12-0).

I've been the same way for as long as I can remember. It applies to single player games, too.

I've found that there are some games that losing isn't completely off-putting. But I think the real issue is that the fun I get from most games is in winning, not in playing. If I was playing for not reason (not to win, no goals, etc) I wouldn't play it, and would do something else instead. Winning makes it feel enough better than I want to play.

I've been trying to "overcome" this, too, and having the right mindset is start. "I'm here to enjoy the game, not the win.", etc.

Good luck. :)

I am the same, I'm so terrible at chess that it's just not enjoyable for me, and I don't have time to learn it properly, so I just don't play even though I find the game interesting and a bit addictive.

I'm the same, but I haven't managed to grow out of it. I just get frustrated and keep playing in anger until I win, which sucks for my social life.

Oddly, the only sport where I'm chill about losing is tennis, where I think "nice, they played really well". Everywhere else, including chess, it's "how could you do this to me".

The only time I managed to be chill in chess was after I'd taken MDMA, and then when I'd lose I'd think "they played better, they deserve it". It went away after a few days, though, never to be repeated (presumably without more MDMA).

Take up any online multiplayer game and then lose a lot. Lose till it wears you down, so you'll stop caring, about loses ... and wins. It will feel terrible at the beginning and you'll want to come back to single player games that are built in a way that lets you win, but after some time (years) you'll no longer care and will enjoy the game itself not the result.

Make the win the rating, not the individual game?

Losing hurts, but:

1. Instead of thinking, "sheesh, I suck" after losing, start thinking, "well played" (even if your opponent was in a losing position and beat you on time or with a sneaky pre-move; they still won). This simple reframing makes it less about the gaps in your abilities and more about having found an opponent who outplayed you that game. Finding better opponents is a good thing; you will learn more.

2. Actively make loss about growth: review games you lost. Find (a) the losing move and (b) the reason you made that move (harder, but important). Use that info to change your thought process to reduce future mistakes. This can be as simple as, "it's 2am and I've been playing blitz for 3 hours, I'm too tired to play my best, I'll stop playing after midnight". Or "I keep missing mate threats. I will say "checks, captures, threats" in my head after my opponent makes a move to train myself to systematically seek dangerous intent, until that process is so internalised that it's natural. I will also solve mate-in-one[1] or mate-in-two[2] puzzles on Lichess for 10 minutes a day until they feel obvious."

3. If you lose three games in a row, stop playing for a while (a few minutes/hours/days, whatever you need). If losses hugely affect your mood, a long string of them can make you feel really low. Pre-emptively break that cycle and do something else for a while.

[1] https://lichess.org/training/mateIn1

[2] https://lichess.org/training/mateIn2

Honestly: Play a game where you are supposed to win.

There is a reason why single player video games are still popular. It is fun to win!

I play ARPGs, where, I mow down hordes of enemies with a mere mouse click with fun graphics and sound.

Is this cotton candy compared to playing PvP games. Absolutely. I've done serious PvP before. But, after a day of work... sometimes, it is just fun to save the world, or make it burn.

Yeah. You have to realize that in chess there are two players and one of them is going to lose. Sometimes it's you, sometimes it's your opponent. To progress in chess you need to win more games than you lose. 50.5% win rate is enough in the long term.

My suggestion based on my own emotions with chess is that you should start playing quick games like 3+2 or something. The time and emotional "investment" in those games is low enough that you might not care when you lose. Just start another game and try again. Losing classical game that you were playing for 2 weeks is a different beast.

I was the same. I can't easily describe what changed, but now I don't play to win or lose, I just decided to play for the sake of playing.

If you lose a game, just stop playing for a bit, and don't give in to the feeling of wanting to play another to prove you can win. This will only result in frustration.

If you lose, make yourself think "That was a fun game. I learned X, and will try and do Y next time."

I don't like losing, I want to always win. That's why I don't play.

Successful people fail often. Failures fail only once.

If you want success, make failure part of your DNA.

My dad was a master chess player in my country when I was growing up so I know all the moves but I never had the interest to go further than that.

So what I really need to study are the famous openings and the responses to various openings. Seems like a memory game.

Computer games were always more fun.

To be fair it only gets memory intensive at higher levels (lets say 1800 fide, 2100 online) - before you can get by playing any not directly lossing line you want, since your opponents won't know how to punish it optimally.

It's still a systematic "issue"... If it is virtually impossible to find a great or optimal move (even given enough time) without having to memorize tons of specific situations first that's kinda annoying. It's a similar thing with competitive programming. At first the problems are solvable by thinking, but at some point you just need to memorize (or even copy paste) a solution that someone else figured out first... Boring.

You can say this about any human endeavour - to learn language, you need to learn idioms. To write, you need tropes, to program you need patterns, etc. Every sport has its plays.

I think learning games of past masters in chess is akin to learning culture when studying language. Standing on the shoulders of the giants and all that jazz.

Especially since learning openings is not pure memorization of moves - its about learning ideas, stories, patterns. For example:

Najdorf variation of sicilian begins with 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 [0]. Idea behind 5. ... a6 is that black wants to play e5+d5 to gain full center, but 5. ... e5 right now losses due to 6. Bb5+. So black prevents it with 5. ... a6.

Now white has a lot of choices - 6. Bg5 is very concrete, you need some memorization, 6. Bc4 is sharp but a bit more rational, 6. Be3 is very popular today, ... All of them have some benefits and drawbacks.

I play 6. Be2, since it gives white some pressure, while having very classical idea-based play and black players often lack preparation for it. Black can now play 6. ... e6 (transposing to Scheveningen sicilian) or 6. ... e5, staying in the Najdorf waters. Lets look at 6. ... e5. White plays 7. Nb3, 7. Nf3?! is worse since white will soon want to play f4 or f3 and knight would block that pawn.

Now is the interesting part: the only good move in this position is 7. ... Be7 and it's hard to see why. A lot of my online games are already decided in next few moves.

Point is, that 7. ... Nbd7 (with idea of developing light squared bishop on b7) interferes with black control of d5, so white can gain bind on d5 via playing a4 (preventing b5) and then either Bc4 or Nd2-Nc4-Ne3 takes full control of d5. This is crucial, since if black is unable to achieve d5 pawn break he has nothing to play for in these structures, so game is totally in white hands.

Secondly 7. ... Be6 fails very concretely to 8. f4 Qc7 9. g4 exf4 10. g5!, which was pioneered by Julio Kaplan, a former junior chess world champion and software chess pioneer. We get to a very open position where black king is stuck in the center, so white gets a very pleasant attack for free.

I hope this gives you a bit of a counterpoint towards why learning theory is not only annoying.

[0] - in algebraic notation, for those interested in learning it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_notation_(chess)

In that last "very concrete" line, the 'fish seems to think 8 ... Qc7 is a mistake, and after e.g. 8 ... Be7 instead it puts W at just +0.2, which is perfectly respectable but not obviously better for W than after 7 ... Be7. If you try the same g4; fg g5 idea, then it thinks B is actually slightly better after either ... Nfd7, or even better ... f3; Bxf3 Nfd7. I'm a patzer so don't claim to know what the key differences are, but one is that in the variation Stockfish prefers the white pawn on g5 is hanging so he has to either spend a move playing something like h4 or else sacrifice it.

There is another finesse: the point of f4 is that White is threatening f5, attacking the bishop. Black then has a choice between retreating (which losses time) or Bxb3 (which gives White bishop pair).

The point of Qc7 is that black can answer f5 with Bc4 - offering trade of bishops instead, which is a bit disappointing for White. This is why this resource with g4 is important.

So if Black plays Qc7 White needs to know about this g4 temporary pawn sac. If Black plays exf4 then White recaptures with Bxf4, gaining a nice advantage in development. Finally if Black plays anything else (like Be7) White gains comfortable advantage with f5.

This is why I've been avoiding chess. Anything that feels too memory intensive just doesn't seem fun to me. It's not creative strategy it's just rote memorization. Same goes for Rubik's cubes.

I’ve always felt the same way - perhaps it’s because I get to work on interesting and hard problems at work so when I get home I’d rather veg out. I’d much rather swim for an hour than do something mentally taxing and memory intensive.

If I did something more manual I think I would perhaps crave that kind of outlet so I can kind of see the appeal. At least playing good chess does involve some improvisation and creativity.

Cubing on the other hand has not appealed to me at all since I learnt it was mostly just memorising some patterns and executing them. It just feels like a trick - it is impressive the speed some people can do it but I’ve never really been impressed by people being able to solve them.

Perhaps those are unpopular opinions though!

Just play chess960. It is a better game.

Yeah I'll play the shit out of a Civilization game. That's like "3D chess" in a way because every unit has their own moves, you're restricted by the hexagonal board, you have to know which unit to use in which context.

I don't find chess memory intensive, I almost never directly commit opening variations to memory. I play around with them, often against myself, until I get a feel for what works, what's speculative and what's bad.

Preparing for a tourney or a big game is different obv. but usually you just play enough that openings and their values become a part of you

So what I really need to study are the famous openings and the responses to various openings. Seems like a memory game.

That's a bit like saying that mathematics or physics are "memory games", because if you take them seriously, you can't avoid learning tons of equations and formulas instead of being creative (and reinventing the wheel by going from scratch) :)

While memorization is certainly a part of chess:

* Opening theory doesn't matter all that much up until a very high level. Below the master level chess is about 90% tactics. You can pretty much rely on general principles in the opening, and your opponents won't know enough opening theory anyway (so what's the point of eg. memorizing the theory on Sveshnikov Sicilian up until move 15 if you won't ever use it, because your opponents will be out of the book and play something non-theoretical long before).

* Even when opening theory does matter, memorizing it blindly is not enough, and it would be very difficult when done that way. It has to be based on deeper understanding of themes, underlying structures, typical plans for both sides in resulting types of positions, crucial squares to control etc.

I remember this scene in "Suits" (courtesy of YT recommendation algorithm - never watched the entire series, so I don't know the broader context). A guy without a degree walks into a law office, and the boss says "sorry, we only hire from Harvard", but he demands that the boss opens some law book on a random page, and he can quote the book perfectly like a savant. Needless to say, he's hired on the spot : )

This is what people may imagine the work of a lawyer revolves around, but it's not really accurate.

Rather than studying specific moves and move orders, you can get away with studying plans and ideas if you're under 2000 FIDE. I got to around 2200 online with minimal opening memorisation, but with a lot of time dedicated to solving tactical puzzles (2-3 hours every day for around 3 years).

Great article. I got into chess recently, and I can only recommend the "Learn chess with Dr. Wolf" app.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-chess-with-dr-wolf/id135...

It's got a beautiful UI, and it's a conversational chess tutor that goes over the basics, tactics, advanced strategy and with whom you can play and will point out mistakes and blunders for later review. Perhaps it is too basic for anybody that has a few hundred games of chess under their belt but if you know nothing about the game, it is a great way to get into it. As the author say, low level chess is about learning patterns and short-term strategy (what should I do the opening, how to checkmate with a rook, etc.) and this app teaches exactly that, in a gradual way.

Not affiliated, just a happy and now paying user.

Can anyone recommend a similar app/site for learning go? That one feels so hard to learn, but it is so fun. the games really feel like a conversation

I gained the most from gobase.org, just clicking through professional games. The tool you can review/replay games with lets you try to guess the next move - just let them play the first 10-15 moves and then start guessing. Don't spend a ton of time thinking, just _guess_. Guess over and over, and if you don't guess the move after 5-10 tries, have it tell you, try for a few seconds to understand why that might be a good move, and continue.

You should totally do the tactics and puzzles that you can find (that same site has a bunch), but there's a lot more strategic recognition and pattern-matching in go than chess.

I'm also interested to hear if there are better tools though in the last .. Christ, twenty years? I'm old now -.-

1. Play and have fun. You won't stick around if you don't. 2. Tsumegos, most important are the tesuji and life & death when beginning, opening/ending don't matter when a blunder kills half the board. See https://goproblems.com/

If looking for a book. Cho Chikun's life & death corner problems progress in a systematic manner from beginner to dan level.

Also https://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPoss...

As low-DDK player, what has helped me most is

1) Playing lots of games (https://online-go.com and https://gokgs.com are good for this). I usually have a few correspondence games going and then try to play a normal speed game daily. Don't worry about winning and losing, just play. Begin to internalize how standard tactics reappear regularly on the board.

2) Do tsumego (life and death) a lot. But don't just try things and see what happens. Try to read out the entire sequence before looking at the answer. (SmartGo One is a good app). Cho Chikun's beginner ones are good [1]. Try to work on a subset of problems (<100) until you can just look at the formation for a few seconds and see the answer. Play out all sequences to really understand why they don't work. Getting the answer isn't really the point, it's that you internalize the tactics involved in all tsumego.

3) As someone who spent WAY too much time reading books about Go strategy and tactics before I could barely play the game: don't do that. Books become much more useful once you are a SDK (single digit kyu) player. Until then, just play and study life and death. Reading books isn't bad, it just isn't that helpful when you can get beat in a game because you don't have the basic tactics down.

[1] https://tsumego.tasuki.org/

There are good suggestions on the sidebar of the go subreddit.

Go is so wonderful as a social game. I took its philosophy on "teaching-games" (ie, every game is approached as an opportunity to learn/teach more than as a competition, and handicap structures are built-in to skill difference), and have applied them to chess as I start playing with my 7 yo son.

We both really enjoy playing the game at our absolute best when I start the game less one rook, knight, bishop, and two pawns. I'm not a great chess player though.

Anyway, more to your question, finding a way to play Go in person is such a game-changer, literally.

Try Baduk Pop.

Ah this is great, just spent 30 mins playing this on the London underground as it works offline too

Yeah it's great when you have a few minutes to spare. I do a little lesson and a quick game to practice it in my lunch break.

It is a nice app but it had too many bugs for me to consider renewing my subscription with it. It would sometimes make suggested moves that were just completely wrong. I did provide feedback on some, which they agreed were bugs.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chess.ches...

I like casual chess; as soon as it gets into blitz and studying openings and patterns I tend to lose interest, that sounds like work, not fun.

It's like studying the meta instead of actually playing.

I love playing Scrabble (with people I know), still competitive, but try to play words you know and share the meanings after the game so it's fun and you learn.

(Scrabble champions just memorize the spelling not the meaning) (They probably also know a lot of the meanings but my point still stands)

Qat

This is how I feel as well. I did a little studying, but it not only felt like a treadmill, I actually felt like I was using less of my critical thinking skills the more I studied. Stuff like memorizing openings, memorizing the best move a chess engine would give you for certain situations, stuff like grandmasters memorizing entire games - this all seemed to be pretty common. I didn't see the point in putting in work only to enjoy the game less.

Of course, plenty of people enjoy a much more memorization heavy game. But it feels like ruining the fun part of the game to me.

I'm 1700-1800ish lichess (Crazyhouse and King of the Hill). I agree with this, but with one caveat. I memorize a few openings just because games can get crazy sharp pretty quickly, and there are a few patterns or move orders in the opening to memorize just so you aren't mated quickly.

I don't memorize games several moves deep, just 3-4 maybe 5 depending on the opening, which especially in Crazyhouse as there are only probably 3-4 good openins.

I feel the same way, and it's what drove me to backgammon instead. Lots of fun, far less things to memorize to be competitive, and the dice make it exciting (and infuriating!).

Speaking of, if you are looking for a FOSS option for playing backgammon online, check out https://bgammon.org (my project, launched a few weeks ago)

I have the exact same opinion, and this is what drove me to play go. I can't really explain it, but go feels more suitable to casual games.

Bobby Fischer thought the same thing as well

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess

Like most people, late last year I watched the Queen's Gambit.

That's a... bold statement.

Not the only bold statement in the article.

But I'm a smart guy (hi white male privilege)

It's amusing to see someone go mask off and call non-whites low IQ like that.

I don't think that's what they meant.

What did they mean? Can't figure it out.

Educated. Access to good schools.

What has that got to do with being good at chess?

The concept of privilege is that you have time/energy/resources to do things like play chess instead of looking for work. I'm not sure if you're questioning the concept of privilege (which is fine) or saying that it specifically doesn't have anything to do with chess.

Oof, when you try to be self-deprecating and acknowledge your privilege and it's still racist.

You either believe there's white male privilege, and the author is correct, or you don't, and he... has a different opinion than you?

I'm not going to go more into it because I dislike framing this clear class problem as a race problem, but I wanted to point out the erroneous reasoning.

Do you understand the purpose of hyperbole in prose?

When humans communicate, we don't use Backus-Naur form. We generally accept that people will be able to derive the meaning from context. Does the author literally believe that over 50% of the planet watched it? The claim is preposterous - and obviously so. But it is a convenient shorthand for referring to the impact on the cultural zeitgeist made by that show.

Anyway, QG was astonishingly popular. See https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/the-queens-gambit-most-p... and https://adage.com/article/media/golden-globe-winner-queens-g...

and here I was happy to get up to 1000 in Chess.com after 2 years (only to then just hover around forever). Knowledge is power etc etc but at one point nothing replaces studying.

I've found that anything under 15 minute clocks just feels like brain poison to me, though. Your brain goes completely into pattern matching mode and lose out on the actual interesting tactical analysis you can do when you're taking a bit more time. I have been queueing up daily games instead and it's nice. Games take a month to resolve but if you just continuously add to the queue that's good.

EDIT:

I learned a bunch of openings with White for 6 months or so, also via Chessable. Amazingly I won more games with Black, where I had learned nothing, than with White. I got frustrated with this, and switched my openings entirely. It had literally no impact on my rating, and I continued to improve.

I felt this so much recently. I got kind of obsessed with the Evans gambit, and would still lose to people who would play into the gambit and let me go down the lines I knew well. I'd just flummox later on. The game below a certain point is really just "don't blunder as much as the opponent"

Sounds good to me! Ratings are a treadmill. As you get better so do your opponents. You'll always have a ~50% winrate.

I'd rather have a stable rating over time, at a level I can maintain comfortably, than have to expend ever increasing levels of energy to maintain a higher level; and probably end up having less fun. (maybe it's more like treading water. You can get more of your body out of the water, but each inch requires exponentially more effort to maintain)

That said, I started doing a lot of puzzles a while ago, as well as doing the basic mating pattern practice on Lichess. My rating jumped up a few hundred rating points. Turns out that I was missing a bunch of the basics.

Now I hover around average on the server for Blitz (~1500), and slightly above for Rapid (~1700) and that's awesome.

Your analogue is probably true to a certain extent, but in reality maintaining your current form in any domain of expertise is easier than achieving that form in the first place.

I only really have video games as an easily quantifiable example, but playing in top 1% of League of Legends doesn't really require anything more than a couple games a week to maintain that level. I have the knowledge, I know what to do, and I can execute on that. Perhaps this would be harder in a domain that leans more on physical or mental condition which tend to decrease over time, but probably not so much in Chess and the like.

I've accepted that I'm worse at chess than other people in some innate sense, but puzzles have been nice. I really enjoy the chess.com lessons as well, and listening to someone explain stuff is always pleasant. I might not absorb much, but it's better than nothing.

Have you tried mixing up games with daily moves with rapid and blitz? Mixing “do it right” with “do it fast” training is more effective than doing only one of both.

One thing a friend of mine mentioned about studying, is that you can get in a weird cycle where you end up reinforcing answering incorrectly to a thing over and over.

I think that blitz reinforces my bad habits of approximate pattern matching and ultimately makes me play worse in my other games. If I want to "do it fast" I can just open my dailies and play them fast! But this is a me problem, I routinely play board games etc too quickly, and lose because of it. I do not need help with "do it fast".

It's not brain poison, if you're at the level you're at. Pattern matching is incredibly important, and dishing out many games to learn those and avoiding blunders would probably help you a lot.

On a side note, it's a good demonstration that knowledge beats intelligence. Being smart just gives you a higher ceiling, but most people can get pretty good at almost anything if they work hard enough. The question is of course why would you do it, and do you have the motivation.

Most people are intelligent, that's why they can get good, but being smart not only has a big effect on the ceiling, but also on the speed to get to the same level, which in turn affects motivation, so you can't judge it to be an inferior factor

But this isn't a good illustration anyway since it's a very constrained artificial example of a game based on pattern matching

I see examples of that pretty much everywhere. People that regularly do and practice something get to be better than the vast majority of people, so talent and intelligence end up playing a lesser role. This is true for physical skills and also mental. The author said he ended up in the 95th percentile -- I doubt this is achievable for all people, but "high" yes (whatever the interpretation of high is).

For most cases, I agree. I think almost anyone with the time and determination can get to 95th percentile or up in a non-physical pursuit. Intelligence becomes a key determinant if you want to break the top 0.1%. Most people of average intelligence could become a top 5% programmer if they wanted to, but getting 2 minute solutions on Advent of Code? Almost certainly not. (I pick AOC because I've been looking into the folks who hit the leaderboards and they all seem to give off high IQ vibes so far.)

When I was a kid I heard proffessional player opinion that people who play more games get better results, he stated chess is game of numbers. I'm probably not on that level as no matter how many games I played there is rating level I cannot beat, it's glass ceiling for me.

This conclusion does not follow from the article.

Interesting to see a shoutout to Gwern for his writeup on spaced repetition.

I'm curious: which part of that is interesting? Aside from Piotr Wozniak's writing, Gwern is the common coordination point for these techniques.

Oh, just interesting to see a reference to Gwern, whom I'm only familiar with through postings on HN, in a blog post that's on HN.

This is also on HN. Same bubble, not much of a coincidence?

I wouldn't have been surprised to see him referenced in a comment. I was surprised to see it in a blog post that ended up here, where the blogger didn't reference HN in any way — it was all about chess (which is not one of the more common things discussed on HN).

Especially at lower levels, chess is a game of short term patterns, not long term strategy.

That’s actually wrong. Short-term patterns will improve your chess short-term but you’ll hit the plateau pretty fast. They don’t teach you to play better at chess. It’s like copypasting some code from the Internet without fully understanding how it works.

In chess, it’s absolutely necessary to have a long-term plan: especially at lower levels, your ultimate goal should be attacking the king most of the time.

Use the engine smartly. Because it will tell you what move is objectively the best. It won’t tell you what move is best at your level. At different levels the best moves are different.

It’s important to train tactics but not with puzzles. Puzzles model situations that are out of context. It’s like training your swimming movements without hitting the water. It may be not harmful, but not particularly useful. Instead, you should get “puzzles” in your live games within the context, seeing the bigger picture.

Of course, you should play games. How can you expect to get better at playing chess without actually playing chess? Moreover, playing games and getting feedback on them should be the bulk of your training. Learning happens by trial and error.

Without dissecting this article any further, there is a battle-tested approach on how to get better at chess at any level and age:

- Be a kid. Don't overthink it. It's just a game after all. Feel it.

- Play as many games as possible. You can quickly get enough volume with bullet and blitz.

- Get feedback. You're able to give yourself decent feedback most of the time. Quickly analyze your games yourself or check them with someone, who can tell you what mistakes you have made at your level. Only afterward compare your thoughts to engine suggestions. Pay attention to the moves that drop the evaluation by more than (1, 2, 3, 4) points, depending on your level.

Of course, these are not hard and fast rules. But this is a solid foundation for the success.

P.S. My FIDE rating is 2423.

That’s actually wrong. Short-term patterns will improve your chess short-term but you’ll hit the plateau pretty fast

What you wrote, is exactly in-line with what the OT said: "Especially at lower levels, chess is a game of short term patterns, not long term strategy."

You are beginner, you need some opening, some little patterns to move out from the beginner level, and then you reach a new plateau, but you understand the basic, you have your "first stripe white belt" game and from there you should search for sure a way to move to the next plateau.

Not having a long-term plan and focusing on short-term patterns is fundamentally wrong. You won't only hit the plateau but will be stuck there unless you relearn chess the right bias-free way.

Fixed formatting of the last part:

- Be a kid. Don't overthink it. It's just a game after all. Feel it.

- Play as many games as possible. You can quickly get enough volume with bullet and blitz.

- Get feedback. You're able to give yourself decent feedback most of the time. Quickly analyze your games yourself or check them with someone, who can tell you what mistakes you have made at your level. Only afterward compare your thoughts to engine suggestions. Pay attention to the moves that drop the evaluation by more than (1, 2, 3, 4) points, depending on your level.

Thanks, fixed!

My biggest frustration with chess online is the huge number of cheaters on platforms like chess.com and lichess. It really takes the whole fun away.

I never really understood WHY people are cheating in online chess games. There is no fame, no money in it. This is puzzling for me.

My frustration is that chess.com and lichess are extremely week at finding and banning cheaters. Sometimes is sooo obvious, when for example somebody blunders a piece in first few moves and from this moment starts playing just perfect moves.

chess.com puts some effort in detecting cheaters. When I was active user I was receiving messages stating that such and such game was lost to cheater and my rating is updated to reflect that.

Cheater detection sounds like very interesting problem

Cheating detection can only be achieved statistically (it's kind of like proving a random number generator isn't random).

It makes it easy to achieve great accuracy in the long run, but hard to be accurate in the short run, because you don't want false alarms. So 99.9% of cheaters may get banned after a few games, but since they keep on coming up (it's not hard to simply register another account, after all), the frustration they're causing is always going to be there.

I never really understood WHY people are cheating in online chess games.

It seems that for some quite high proportion of the population someone else losing is necessary and sufficient for them to feel like they have won. Basically for those people winning just means "the other person lost".

This goes way beyond chess and explains a lot about society.

I briefly scanned the article. I am not that impressed by the result. I thought that an average smart person and particularly someone with a scientific background could reach that resalt in one or two months.

My experience. I played chess when I was between 13 and 16, at that time I was a good player but not a child prodigy, let's say one of the best players in my school. I have no idea of my ELO then, there was no internet in the early '80s. I have not played for roughly 40 years. I few years ago I started playing on lichess and my ELO is now around 1700 (with a peak of 1900). I don't know if chess.com and lichess have different ratings.

Lichess ratings are higher generally, although they even out with chess.com the higher you get.

1400 on lichess is more like 1200 on chess.com, but 1900 is probably 1900.

Based on your post though, you definitely seem like you are very smart or have a natural affinity for chess. 1900 is extremely high, especially in a few months or even years.

Normally people gain around 300 ELO points per year if they are learning and practicing actively.

1400 on lichess is more like 1200 on chess.com, but 1900 is probably 1900.

Not in my experience. I'm rated 1900+ on lichess and 1600+ on chess.com. That's after playing a significant number of games (nearly 500 on chess.com, thousands on lichess).

The way I feel about it, a 1900 player on lichess is an intermediate beginner (like myself), whereas 1900 on chess.com already represents a decent club player level.

For reference, "in real life" (Elo rating / FIDE) I'm rated below 1300 in classical chess, and about 1400 in rapid - although I've played only one rapid tournament, and I don't have a blitz rating at all, which makes comparisons a bit tricky.

For what it's worth though, as far as I can tell, these proportions are about typical.

yes, they use different rating systems (Glicko 1 and 2), see https://lichess.org/page/rating-systems

Never watched the Queen's Gambit )

I stopped watching movies and series altogether a few years ago feeling I'm wasting time. Now I still waste time, but on other things :)

I'm basically the same way these days, but Queen's Gambit is a miniseries and really really good. Good value for the time.

The way I got into chess was by doing a couple of lessons using the Chess.com app.

Once I learned the basic opening principles, a basic opening for white (Italian) and black (Two Knights), and the phases of the game - the game opened up much more for me.

Just knowing to do E4/E5, take center, mobilizing pieces, trying to move pieces once in the opening, etc. improved my game so much.

I was making so many bad moves without knowing these and having a terrible time. Knowing all this didn't help me win at all, but it made my experience much better.

What got me was how much chess.com spammed me after signing up. I used a throwaway email address specific to them, so I know it's them. I unsubscribed but they continue to spam me.

What exactly are they spamming? I haven't noticed anything.

What does it even mean to learn chess? I suppose any adult can learn the rule in a few hours and start to have fun from there. Then is there a specific rating after which you can claim that you have learned chess? or will you get more fun once you reach a given level? it seems to be a very elusive target.

What does it mean to learn piano? A foreign language? Programming? Tennis?

As you get better, you make fewer mistakes and it is (usually) less of a struggle to perform well. You’re right in the sense that you’re never (as a human) going to master it like you can tic-tac-toe or rubik’s cube. But that sort of mastery isn’t fun either.

My practice:

watching https://www.youtube.com/@agadmator chanel.

Yeah, I, too, practice my bball skills watching Curry's highlights ;)

Jokes aside, it's a fun channel. Makes me feel like I know what's going on in those games.

Fun to see GM Axel Smith mentioned, I used to be his student as a teenager, when he was still an IM. Great teacher and just a wonderful person overall. I can vouch for his methods, even if I was a teenager when I practiced them.

This is a great article on how to improve chess as a beginner, from the perspective of a former beginner. Basic recognition of patterns is the bedrock of tactical calculation. And focusing on problems that can be solved quickly is a good strategy for building it.

I do want to champion the cause of harder problems though, because there is more to calculation than pattern recognition. And this will become more and more important above the very impressive 1500 the author managed to reach.

Calculation is a conscious mental process that needs training in its own right. It involves the ability to visualise board states, remember where you are in the game tree, enumerate candidate/forcing moves and threats, heuristics like the method of elimination. None of these can be trained purely through these simpler problems, only through slowly taking your time applying all these techniques. This is why blitz rarely leads to an improvement in your base ability. The only way to build out your ability beyond what you can immediately recognise is to really struggle with positions you can't solve in 8 seconds, or even 8 minutes. This happens naturally if you play longer time controls(and actually spend your time). It's also tremendously helpful to join your local chess club and work through some problems with a stronger player to guide you. That's also a lot more fun to most people.

Learning chess doesn't have to be just a lot of rote exercise. You can also read books on positional chess, pawn structures, endgames, and openings. No, they don't decide games as much as tactical mistakes but they certainly influence games profoundly whether the players are aware of them or not. And a more "holistic" approach can be more motivating.

The way I've heard it described for go is that beginners improve fastest by focusing on problems that require them to calculate 1–3 plies out of their comfort zone. These build strongly on pattern recognition (those are the comfortable bits) but also include some game tree walking (at least in go, 1–3 plies make up a pretty heavy game tree for a beginner.)

The idea is that calculation practise is great, but it also takes a lot of time. In the time it takes a beginner to solve one very deep calculation problem, they could have finished 40 pattern recognition problems and that would probably be more beneficial. So calculation and pattern recognition has to be balanced, and a few plies out of the comfort zone strikes that balance.

I was introduced to chess in adulthood by a friend who taught chess in schools. His advice: play 2000 games without worrying about game play or outcome. Worked great for me.

We have the same advice in go. But it's lose your first 50 games as fast as possible.

https://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPoss...

Why to learn chess as an adult?

Despite absolutely loving chess as a child, I never studied it professionally, and I did not even play a single game after primary school. A couple of years ago I stumbled upon a chess video recommendation here on Hacker News. It was the 27th entry of ChessNetwork's Beginner to Chess Master series and it rekindled my love for the game. I have been playing chess casually ever since. I cannot recommend ChessNetwork's videos enough: I found them to be insightful, well-made, and very respectful of both the game and the audience.

I learned about the Woodpecker Method from HN, bought it through the Forward Chess app so I could plough (plow?) through it on my phone.

You won't feel like you're getting better with this method but you will start to sense opportunities consistently (and then recognize them specifically).

Yes, you still need to then go learn a couple openings.

When I first encountered chess as a kid I thought it was a game about thinking because that's how we played it. I was good at it. Then in high school I've met a kid that wiped the floor with me because he actually was taught how to play chess. I played with him few times until I won once just because he was lulled by a streak of wins. That was enough for me so I stopped bothering him with myself. Later in some other context I played checkers with him which I used played (and loose terribly) with my grandma as a few years old child. It turned out that I'm wiping the floor with him in checkers. He didn't even won once. Then I formed a overgeneralized opinion that games are not using any universal matter of thinking. Any thinking you do for the purposes of games is narrowly tailored to the game itself. Being good at one means you are still terrible at others. I generalized this opinion even more, into all domains of human activity. So now when highly educated geologist claims something about climate or zoologist claims something about vaccines I know that they are beginner level wrong.

One of the best "beginner chess" videos I have ever seen was made by one of the persons, I would have least expected making a good tutorial video, because she is hardly ever too serious in her other videos: Andrea Botez

It's only 10 mins, stuffed with good information and explained very beginner friendly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aavP_NnrXS8

(2021)

Some previous discussions on similar articles fwiw:

Learning chess at 40 (2016)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31433914

(69 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20154285

(82 comments)

On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years (2020,338 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25108800

How to get good at chess fast (2013, 65 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10695748

This is a less interactive site than those mentioned in the article, but i found www.chesstactics.org incredibly helpful when i was starting out.

I eventually realized that i enjoy chess puzzles much more than playing actual games of chess due to the lower time commitment and lower stress. I do puzzles every day but almost never play a full game.

oh, nice!

I think the most important thing about learning chess is to not play blitz or bullet games until you are already at a high-enough level (1500+).

Learning comes with analysis and deduction, both of which are pretty much impossible in a sub 10 minutes game for a beginner.

I had been playing regularly for the past 30 years or so. After I watched "The Queen's Gambit", my rating went up about 100-200 points on Lichess. I was hovering in the 1800-1900 range, and shortly after watching it, I broke 2000 for the first time.

While the series did inspire me to study a little more, I'm pretty sure the result was due to an influx of weaker players who also watched the series, rather than my playing ability. But I still jokingly tell people it made my rating go up.

Chessable Pro is $12 per month, or $75 per year: https://www.chessable.com/pro/

(2021)

I've been playing on lichess for about 10-15 years, started playing when I was over 30. I probably average one 5+0 game a day. I don't play in tournaments. Usually one game for a break and then get back to work.

My philosophy is skill level and rating doesn't affect enjoyment.

Whether I'm rated 700 or 2700, once my rating stabilizes, I win as many games as I lose.

I have the capacity to improve a little with a lot of work, but, eventually my rating will stabilize and once again I'll have equal wins to loses.

I preferred the original title:

How To Learn Chess As An Adult (or, how I went from 300 to 1500 ELO in 9 months)

Because it showed that the person writing this “how to learn” was speaking from personal experience.

There are too many articles online that say how to learn something, but the author may never have actually tried it themselves and are instead writing based on other sources. Or worse yet, now in 2023 they may have asked ChatGPT how to learn something and just copy-pasted what it said.

Changing the title to just:

How to learn chess as an adult

Is a mistake IMO, and makes it easier to skip past this article.

get started and keep going.

My personal opinion is that this is the most important. There's so many things you can focus on, sometimes we forget that we need to just spend more time actively focusing on chess to get better.

I think actively focusing makes a huge difference. Playing a 2+1 while watching netflix is completely different than 5+3, fully committing.

Lastly, I think if you find the part of chess you like most then lean into that! I love endgames, so I spend 75% of my time studying those. I might not be the best off for it (~1675 Lichess), but I like it, so there :)

My workplace has a chess league which is really cool and useful to keep wanting to practice.

For anyone less then 1,000 it is trivial to gain 100 points. Most could do it by playing games but anyone wanting to learn just needs to read some advice, study an opening and practice. 1400 > 1500 is much more impressive then 300>1200.

Capablanca's famous adage "I see only one move ahead, but always the best move" turns out to be true

I know there is a tendency to frame human intelligence in terms of the age’s breakthrough technology. But man if that isn’t reminiscent of token prediction.

What works with most mind sports:

Play few long games where you think your moves carefully, then review your games. Understand the key moves that defined the outcome of the game.

Review your games when you win, review your games when you lose.

Watch professional games, do problems, etc.