EPTThe Chess Thread - Page 71
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GreenHorizons
United States23250 Posts
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Oshuy
Netherlands529 Posts
On May 18 2015 13:48 GreenHorizons wrote: Is this Carissa Yip person anything special or all hype (I don't follow chess)? Both. Special, because she is a child prodigy and the best young female player the US have seen in the last ... 20 years or so (Irina Krush, born 1983, US female champ 1998 2007 2010 2012 2013 2014 2015). Carissa Yip is on track to win several US female championships. Overhype because looking for young talents and hyping them is part of chess culture. Her play and her performance is "top 10 world" for her age group which is exceptional, but does not make her a contender on the overall world stage ; If she goes on, she would probably get in the female top 50. Expecting more than that is speculation. Common signs of more to come in young players would be: - Playing in older categories and performing well (Judith Polgar and her sisters wining the chess olympiad over Russia in 1988 when she was 12, Hou Yifan China female champ when 13, Humpy Koneru female world junior champ when 14). - For female players, it can also be a switch to face male competition (Hou Yifan tied first in under 10 world championships in 2004, Judith Polgar entered overall top 100 when 13). - Reaching GM very young (14 for Hou Yifan, 15 for Judith Polgar and Humpy Koneru) If she continues to improve, check for those signs  | ||
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ThePhan2m
Norway2750 Posts
She is 6 years old and beat Simen Agdestein (3rd best Norwegian player) while he was doing simultain chess | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States23250 Posts
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don_kyuhote
3006 Posts
On May 21 2015 08:38 GreenHorizons wrote: I think I might of misunderstood chess my whole life. Anyone mind answering some embarrassingly simple questions either here or over PM? ask | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States23250 Posts
I guess I thought it was like tic tac toe but with a few thousand more possibilities. There are actually a lot of ways a game can be played, correct? I guess I thought chess was won and loss by who knew the most of the possibilities and could recall them on command. At low levels (like average middle schoolers) I figured most people just played by memorizing a couple moves (like the checkmate trick from a 5-6 moves i don't remember exactly) and then playing one two maybe three moves ahead in their minds. I haven't really revisited thinking about chess in a long time, but now that I am I'm pretty sure most if not all of that is wrong. Some of the other questions were based around that like, how many moves ahead are people thinking if any?, how important is the middle of the board as opposed to the corners?. What are the differences in the way different level of skilled people play? | ||
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
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GolemMadness
Canada11044 Posts
There's a lot of stuff that you can memorize (opening theory, tactical patterns, endgames, etc), but just memorising some stuff won't get you very far. It's very different from tic-tac-toe in that tic-tac-toe is a solved game. Every possibility has already been calculated, so if you memorise the possibilities, you'll never lose. Checkers is another solved game, but with 500 billion billion possible positions, it's a bit more difficult to memorise every possibility. How many moves people think ahead really depends on the player and the position. In general, the more pieces there are on the board the more possibilities there will be and the few moves you'll be able to see ahead. In endgames where there are very few pieces on the board, you can generally see much further ahead. A decent tournament player will always be able to see at least a few moves ahead. Controlling the centre is an important concept in chess. The difference between an experienced tournament player and someone who just plays casually every now and then is largely in how much they'll each see. The tournament player will have some sort of plan from the beginning. They'll see potential threats for both sides, be aware of concepts like pawn structure and positional play, etc. The casual player will mostly just play moves that he thinks looks good, but generally not without much of a plan. He probably won't be able to calculate more than one move ahead, and will often fail to even see that something is threatened on that very move. I'm a national master, which means that in smaller local tournaments I'm a pretty good player, but in bigger tournaments I'm pretty much a nobody who has an extremely small chance against good grandmasters. If I were to play against random casual players however, I could play a million games and not lose a single time. That's how chess works. | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States23250 Posts
On May 21 2015 13:34 GolemMadness wrote: A bit more than a few thousand possibilities. http://www.chess.com/chessopedia/view/mathematics-and-chess There's a lot of stuff that you can memorize (opening theory, tactical patterns, endgames, etc), but just memorising some stuff won't get you very far. It's very different from tic-tac-toe in that tic-tac-toe is a solved game. Every possibility has already been calculated, so if you memorise the possibilities, you'll never lose. Checkers is another solved game, but with 500 billion billion possible positions, it's a bit more difficult to memorise every possibility. How many moves people think ahead really depends on the player and the position. In general, the more pieces there are on the board the more possibilities there will be and the few moves you'll be able to see ahead. In endgames where there are very few pieces on the board, you can generally see much further ahead. A decent tournament player will always be able to see at least a few moves ahead. Controlling the centre is an important concept in chess. The difference between an experienced tournament player and someone who just plays casually every now and then is largely in how much they'll each see. The tournament player will have some sort of plan from the beginning. They'll see potential threats for both sides, be aware of concepts like pawn structure and positional play, etc. The casual player will mostly just play moves that he thinks looks good, but generally not without much of a plan. He probably won't be able to calculate more than one move ahead, and will often fail to even see that something is threatened on that very move. I'm a national master, which means that in smaller local tournaments I'm a pretty good player, but in bigger tournaments I'm pretty much a nobody who has an extremely small chance against good grandmasters. If I were to play against random casual players however, I could play a million games and not lose a single time. That's how chess works. Yeah I played a bit in elementary as it was something they made 'smart kids' do when they were done with their work. Then some random games since then but I don't think I've ever played against someone who knew much strategy. If they did, they didn't tell me anything about it. The same thing landed me in 'the chess club' in 6th grade but again they just put us in a room with some boards and let us play, so there was no strategy. I mean I came up with my own, based mostly on stuff that had a visual geometric appeal, but that was about it. That killed it for me and I lost any interest. I hadn't really thought about it in a game theory sense since, after statistics you would of thought that tic tac toe thing would of been straitened out but I just never made the connection. I feel like the number one reason I lost games or pieces was usually from thinking too many moves ahead and forgetting the move that was actually planned for that turn. I have no idea how good I am or how good my competition was (although many of them were quite confident lol) but I think I did alright. As such my pride and my ignorance dictates I must challenge you on your 1,000,000 games without a loss. I figure it's hyperbole but it definitely sparks my competitive nature. I've probably played around 100 games in my life if I was being generous so I'm probably not worth your time but maybe you'd indulge me and crush my chess pride sometime? Someone else is welcome to crush me if they wish, I've just never actually played someone who was actually 'good' and not just self-proclaimed. | ||
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puerk
Germany855 Posts
there are some concepts in play, and i guess the 3 most important ones are: control - how many fields are under your control (sum of your attacking pieces is bigger than the sum of the attacking pieces of your enemy) activity - how many spaces can your pieces move without getting captured king safety - this one is harder to evaluate, you want your king defence take more enemy pieces to break than he can mobilize through his activity usually following those concepts leads to "development", for instance: you move your minor pieces to squares adjacent to central squares, and use pawns to control the central squares aswell, while moving major pieces is discouraged early on as it usually gives up activity by giving your enemy moves that attack your major piece, forcing it back, and winning a tempo this way and the pawn structure is a tool to reduce enemy activity and control regarding some play: i like the android app "chess time" to play with friends/players of equal strength | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States23250 Posts
On May 21 2015 14:43 puerk wrote: to expand a bit on golemmadness: there are some concepts in play, and i guess the 3 most important ones are: control - how many fields are under your control (sum of your attacking pieces is bigger than the sum of the attacking pieces of your enemy) activity - how many spaces can your pieces move without getting captured king safety - this one is harder to evaluate, you want your king defence take more enemy pieces to break than he can mobilize through his activity usually following those concepts leads to "development", for instance: you move your minor pieces to squares adjacent to central squares, and use pawns to control the central squares aswell, while moving major pieces is discouraged early on as it usually gives up activity by giving your enemy moves that attack your major piece, forcing it back, and winning a tempo this way and the pawn structure is a tool to reduce enemy activity and control regarding some play: i like the android app "chess time" to play with friends/players of equal strength Thanks, I'll check it out. I never liked playing against 'the computer' because I always felt they were cheating lol. | ||
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puerk
Germany855 Posts
http://tcec.chessdom.com/archive.php or have a look at the notable games list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoresen_Chess_Engines_Competition | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States23250 Posts
On May 21 2015 15:04 puerk wrote: the best chess in the world is computer chess, i highly recommend watching TCEC http://tcec.chessdom.com/archive.php or have a look at the notable games list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoresen_Chess_Engines_Competition Holy crap that might as well be in Japanese. Almost nothing on there makes any sense to me. I figured out how to click through a game and I can recognize that there are what I presume are player names, everything else is foreign to me. That statistics are totally meaning less to me though lol. | ||
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puerk
Germany855 Posts
Stockfish (best open source chess engine) playing against Jonny, a decent (would beat every human) but second tier engine Under the central board is the game in standard algebraic notation. Clicking on the move (1. d4 for instance) jumps to that move in the game. All terms are clickable to reveal a pretty good tooltip. On the right side you have the engine output: what the engine thinks the constellation on the board is valued at (eval positive means advantage for white, eval negative advantage for black), move time is how long they thought (this tournament has ponder off which means every enginge is only allowed to think during its own turn), depth is the length of the tree of moves calculated by the engine for that move The graphs below show the game development: Eval 6.5 in this tournament is equivalent to giving up , thats how that game was decided. Now just go through it step by step and look at the principal variations on the right, where the engines show their most likely prediction for the next moves. | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States23250 Posts
On May 21 2015 15:47 puerk wrote: Well its not hard, take for instance: http://tcec.chessdom.com/archive.php?se=7&st=2&ga=29 Stockfish (best open source chess engine) playing against Jonny, a decent (would beat every human) but second tier engine Under the central board is the game in standard algebraic notation. Clicking on the move (1. d4 for instance) jumps to that move in the game. All terms are clickable to reveal a pretty good tooltip. On the right side you have the engine output: what the engine thinks the constellation on the board is valued at (eval positive means advantage for white, eval negative advantage for black), move time is how long they thought (this tournament has ponder off which means every enginge is only allowed to think during its own turn), depth is the length of the tree of moves calculated by the engine for that move The graphs below show the game development: Eval 6.5 in this tournament is equivalent to giving up , thats how that game was decided. Now just go through it step by step and look at the principal variations on the right, where the engines show their most likely prediction for the next moves. Hmm interesting. I think I got everything more or less but the ending of the game confuses me? | ||
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puerk
Germany855 Posts
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GreenHorizons
United States23250 Posts
On May 21 2015 16:33 puerk wrote: Both engines agree that white wins as one white pawn will get through unpreventable and the result is a free conversion to queen. Okay, that's basically what I thought. Thanks for the help. I'm going to have to try some games later. Another problem I have is I want unlimited time for myself and I have enough patience for about 30 secs for my opponent. I'll just have to work on that. | ||
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Nyxisto
Germany6287 Posts
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helpman175
17 Posts
He has climbed from rank 80 in December 2014 to rank 27 today. He is 15 years old and with 13 became youngest GM at that time. Maybe someone Carlsen has to be worried about. | ||
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Deleted User 97295
1137 Posts
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