Chess

karpov on karpov described many things that would surprise you

Well if he had a room full of GMs analyzing a bunch of different lines, that might be better than what he could do on his own.

You insult the great Karpov.

Well, I did say “might”.

I liked this video of a planet full of GMs against one guy.

2 Likes

:vince3:

Hans with white vs Magnus on Monday in online Julius Baer Generation Cup

1 Like

hot take from the atlantic

Three hours. Zero replies. Not even the bots care.

https://twitter.com/matteo_wong/status/1571176061542481921?s=20&t=Afh8glePQsLTcAAwwPQE5w

I mean, idk maybe it’s a good piece. Paywalled though.

so, chess is like poker because of psychology snd … cheating. :woman_facepalming:

Yet if computers set the gold standard of play, and top players can only try to mimic them, then it’s not clear what, exactly, humans are creating. “Due to the predominance of engine use today,” the grandmaster So explained, “we are being encouraged to halt all creative thought and play like mechanical bots. It’s so boring. So beneath us.” And if elite players stand no chance against machines, instead settling for outsmarting their human opponents by playing subtle, unexpected, or suboptimal moves that weaponize “human frailty,” then modern-era chess looks more and more like a game of psychological warfare: not so much a spelling bee as a round of poker.

In that context, cheating scandals may be nothing less than a natural step in chess’s evolution. Poker, after all, has been rocked by allegations of foul play for years, including cases where players are accused of getting help from artificial intelligence. When the highest form of creativity is outfoxing your opponent—as has always been true of poker—breaking rules seems only natural.

Don’t know where to begin to criticize that. Somebody else do it

not enough gambling $ of their own on the line or my tastes

ie, magnus isn’t losing money when he lost the other day

there’s more crossover between poker and chess than poker and about anything else these days, comp is fine to me–both are getting increasingly more boring (hans is trying) thanks to computers which is a long term problem.

Piece seems fine to me. I think rapid and blitz are still interesting. Classical chess has been ruined by computers, this has been clear for some time. I would be perfectly happy to never see another classical game again.

I don’t disagree among the GMs. It’s a shame though if amateurs stop playing classical time formats, a lot of people are going to play blitz forever and plateau way below the level they could achieve by playing longer games and developing better chess thinking.

Well for starters they’re structurally different games. Chess is a total information game, poker is a partial information game. You don’t really bluff and call bluffs in chess.

2 Likes

Meh I don’t like the poker chess analogies much, I’m particularly “tilted” when chess commentators of late (like Svidler) throw around poker verbiage like equity and semi-bluffs; like I get it, it’s not a frivolous comparison but, just… why?

Not sure I have a problem with classical atm either, it still feels like the games are more decisive than they were 20 years ago when 12 move draws were the norm. Players still blunder a lot, the endings are interesting, it’s just rare to see a spectacular attack come out of nowhere.

I really liked the World Cup format with just two classical games, and if that’s not decisive you move to faster chess. I feel that’s fair, and adds an element where not everything is all prep.

No man will ever run as fast as my car.

1 Like

That’s not really the point of the piece. It doesn’t do a great job of spelling it out but what it’s saying is that top-level classical chess is frequently now about trying to find ways to exploit your opponent, much as in poker. A good example is Caruana’s brutal novelty in the Poisoned Pawn Najdorf against MVL in the 2020 Candidates. Caruana’s move 18. Bc4!? is not a top choice of the engine, but it was engine-prepared to be a move where Caruana knew the position and MVL didn’t:

In the post game conference Fabiano revealed that this was an idea found by his second Rustam Kasimdzhanov, "Most of these ideas, it’s a one time thing. Then you can’t play it again. Like this one, firstly black has many ways to play it.

In other words, the idea here is not to play accurate chess, nor to be creative over the board. The idea is to use computers to uncover positions which you can use to exploit your opponent. Decisive classical results are now fairly frequently the result of successfully landing one of these positions on the board.

2 Likes

I guess what I don’t get if these kinds of move are clearly not the best moves, they seem pretty risky. You’ve got to be sure that your super-GM opponent doesn’t just figure it out on the board. These guys might not be engine level, but they’re still damn good. And making suboptimal moves seems likely to backfire quite a bit.

Maybe there is something about these positions that makes them hard to calculate on the board. It seems theoretically possible, but a patzer like me can’t wrap my head around it.