Are you serious? I didn’t want to call you out on your stupidity too much in my original post, but this is ridiculous. There have been thousands of books written about only combinations/tactics in chess. Little kids who have just learned the moves a few weeks ago know elementary chess combinations like the “fork” or “pin”.
Why don’t you enlighten yourself?
??? Whoa man, chill out. My original post was meant to be a FG-related joke, and my response to you wasn’t meant to discredit your vast knowledge of the game. I don’t play competitive chess so I admit to not knowing about tactical chess terms. That’s why I asked for enlightenment. The concept of chess combos is a bit different from FG combos: A series of moves that set up a situation where it’s nearly impossible for the opposing player to get out of without taking a hit. I’d be more incline to call them “unblockable setups” when using FG terminology. Only thing I can think of that comes close to FG concept of combos is checkers when you use one piece to jump multiple pieces and remove them from the board on one turn (or hit-confirm, in FG terms).
Thanks for the links though. I’ll read up on those elementary chess combos.
Fair enough, heh. However, there is a glut of material on chess combos, and the stuff contained online, with multiple board diagrams, does a much better job illustrating combos than I can with mere words.
I think it’s quite similar, though. In each case, the “combo” forces the opponent’s reply, and leads to a huge, winning advantage in each variation.
Yeah, you can think of it as an unblockable set-up with certain chess combos, but in others, there is only one legal move the victim of the combo can play, which can be thought of as similar to the hit-stun animation for fighting games.
Yeah, you can think of it that way. However, I think even here the analogy isn’t perfect; in checkers, many instances of multiple captures lead to an easily winning position, while in FGs, there’s always the perpetual comeback factor.
Does this thread include discussion of David Sirlin’s Chess 2?
No. Briefly looking at it, it’s one of worst chess variants I’ve ever seen. In fact, even calling it “chess” is inaccurate.
Among the different variants, “Seirawan Chess” is probably the most interesting I’ve seen.
wtf is a chess 2? i cannot find the rules online. do you have to pay for it?
Depends on the time controls. I believe that the en passant is a nerf for the people who complained about losing. You know en passant and castling have only been implemented recently when compared to how old chess is.
There are comebacks in chess. Also, there are “poisonous pawns” and so forth. I came up with Chess 2 in mid nineties for a high school logic class. I still have the original game board somewhere…
Yea, I could see poisonous pawns being one example, though you’d have to set it up first, and it’d be hard if you’re down a ton of pieces.
My attempt at making a FG related joke failed miserably in the context of Chess. Go ahead and disregard it if you haven’t already.
I used to be pretty good at what you might call reactive chess. Basically I just make sure everything is covered by everything else and wait for the opponent to make a mistake. I guess it would be kind of like turtling or perhaps more like playing a zoning game by threatening their pieces from a distance and waiting for them to make the wrong move. I know very little about popular chess strategies, I had a couple of my own opening setups to get things going but that was it. After the first 5 moves or so it was just bait and punish
It’s a pretty shitty way to play chess but it was good enough to get me the #1 spot on my junior high chess team and I managed to win 75% of my league matches.
I also own this game and its broken as shit http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d2/Chess_4.jpg
^Closed games?
You’re fucked if you lose a knight or try that shit when you pawn structure gets messed up early on…
HAHA. Clever.
By the way, for anyone interested in world-class chess, the Wiijk An Zee has just finished round 3. They have the best interface for tournament games that I’ve seen, (including high-level analysis by chess program Houdini, rated 3160+) and the chess has been exciting, since it doesn’t use either a faster time control or the fucking retarded Sofia scoring. Anyways, check it out;
I still can’t find the rule set for sirlin chess 2. i am dying of curiosity. all i am finding off google are hints about what it is. it sounds like he turned it into warhammer.
best chess variant i ever played is siamese chess. its a 2v2 multiplayer game, fast paced and fun. great for all levels of chess players, its more about intuition, reaction, teamwork (your buddy says he badly needs a knight so you sac a rook for it and he wins in a few turns), and fierce attacks. its not so much about intense calculation and knowledge of theory, which is why its suitable for any skill level. cause lets face it, to be really good at chess, you need to have spent years studying that shit.
other random musings. our best chess player in high school was a girl. usually girls are terrible at chess, or if they’re good they’re ugly, but she happened to be kinda cute and was legitimately good at the game. obviously all the guys would hit on her. and i didn’t go to some scrub high school either. we took our shit so serious we had a varsity AND a junior varsity chess club. yasser seirawan, who went to high school here, took the team to get a second place finish in nationals (he blamed himself for not getting first). he was so boss, he demanded the team get letterman jackets, AND HE GOT THEM.
of course, i was class of 01, and our team wasn’t anywhere near as good as when the future grandmaster was at the helm. but we would get second at state competitions. we’d only lose to fucking lakeside, a shitty private school whose kids were rich enough to afford ridiculously good coaches and teachers. i went to garfield, a public school in the ghetto. fuck those rich fuckers.
i was pretty terrible at chess, wasn’t even good enough to be on the varsity team, only the junior varsity lol. I tried to study, I really did, but I would go HUH whenever i’d read chess life or a chess book, and it’d talk about things that to the author were completely obvious, but to me were not. they’d mark certain moves with “?” and others with “!”, and it’d be because of subtle positional things that went completely over my head.
one book that i’d recommend to noobs is Jeremy Silman how to reassess your chess. he talks about the high level strategies and game plans, which i never had whenever i played chess. specifically, he talks about “imbalances”, which are things like a knight vs a bishop or a pawn majority on your kingside vs a pawn majority on their queenside. so he teaches this simple system where you identify the imbalances in a position, and seek to make yours better. example. if you have a knight vs a bishop. generally speaking, knights are better in a closed position, and bishops are better when their pawns aren’t on the same color. so you make moves to make your knight better. you can trade your knight off, but you do so to exchange it for a different advantage. IE, you trade your knight off for their bishop to cripple their pawn structure and end up in a won end-game position. i had never really played chess with a game plan or any real strategy prior to that book, and it helped my understanding. unfortunately, its not enough. you still really need to know opening theory, and you need to know endgame theory. when entire BOOKS are written on just the sicilian dragon, let alone rook/pawn endgames, you are pretty much fucked if you don’t know that shit.
so obviously i am still terrible. i had a scholastic rating of 1100 i think. the one time i played at a real chess tournament, i lost all three of my games. but at least i got an annual subscription to chess life for joining the US chess federation.
the biggest similarity between chess and fighting games is that you can only get better through lots of practice, dedication and study playing against vastly superior opponents. chess is a little too stressful for me, because the games are hours long, whereas in a fighting you aren’t as emotionally invested in a match. you lose in thirty seconds, who cares, play again. in chess, seeing your opponent pile up positional advantages is mentally devastating. i really like RTS because its a happy medium. games are half an hour long, and you get kind of emotionally invested, but its not so devastating.
PS the only comeback mechanic in chess is the clock. i could occasionally beat the better chess players on my team in blitz, because blitz is more intuition than knowledge/strategy. kind of like siamese chess. if your opponent has a better position than you, but sacrificed too much time to get there, well you MIGHT have a chance to win if you try to run their clock down. obviously in a tournament where games are hours long, that’s not gonna happen.
you can hope they fuck up and make a blunder. at the high levels, its only going to be a small subtle blunder and youve got to be godlike enough to spot it.
“The winner of the game is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake. - Tartakover”
I’m trying to look for any kind of commentary, but not finding any.
without commentary, i can only vaguely understand what’s going on. i see black is balls to the wall attacking white, and just sacced his rook, but i’m totally missing the combo?
EDIT:
referring to this game - Radjabov, Teimour vs GM Gelfand, Boris
1.d4 Nf6
2.c4 g6
3.Nc3 Bg7
4.e4 d6
5.Nf3 O-O
6.Be2 e5
7.Be3 Ng4
8.Bg5 f6
9.Bh4 g5
10.Bg3 Nh6
11.h3 exd4
12.Nxd4 Nc6
13.O-O Nxd4
14.Qxd4 f5
15.Qd5+ Kh8
16.exf5 Nxf5
17.Bh2 Bd7
18.Bg4 Nd4
19.Bxd7Qxd7
20.Rad1 Rae8
21.Nb5 Nxb5
22.cxb5 g4
23.h4 b6
24.b3 Qf7
25.Qb7 Re2
26.Bg3 Be5
27.Rc1 Qf5
28.Qxc7 Bxg3
29.fxg3 Rxg2+
30.Kxg2 Qe4+
EDIT2:
oh wait nm i see it, he forced a draw
Yeah, Radjabov was in a worse position, so he sacrificed a rook to get perpetual check and the draw. Oddly enough, after 29…Rxg2+, the computer engine suggests the insane-looking 30. Kh1! to preserve a small edge. Also, there is analysis right after every move from the chess engine, although it’s not always easy to understand everything that it recommends! You can also click on the other games on the right sidebar. Really good interface.
He goes through the rules on his forum.
Honestly, for all I know, it could be a terrific game…it just has nothing to do with Chess, and calling it “Chess” is just false advertising. Like, it uses a chess board (then again, so do checkers and many other games) and some of the original pieces, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the game of chess. I wouldn’t even call it a chess variant, really.
That’s pretty awesome. I first became a player of respectable strength thanks to GM Yasser Sierawan’s “Winning Chess” series, especially “Play Winning Chess”, “Winning Chess Tactics”, and “Winning Chess Strategies”.
Yeah, I’ll second this. IM Silman is a terrific writer and I got a lot out of his books, especially the ones about the endgame. (There was one called “Essential Endgame Knowledge” just on king and pawn endings, which helped me out a bunch when I was younger)
I’ve heard a bunch of great things about “Re-Assess Your Chess”, but never picked it up when I was younger, although being written by Silman, I’m sure it’s of very high quality.
Who all wants to play chess
I know it’s cool to talk down to checkers and all, but doesn’t that too have an absurd amount of possible positions?
It’s not an easy game, and checkers strategy is surprisingly complex(not chess complex though)…
Fred Reinfield even wrote a book on checkers strategy lol…
No, I definitely agree with you; checkers has quite a bit of strategy in it.
One of my cousins, who lives in Moscow, used to play checkers on a pretty high level. Had a coach and studied tactics books and everything.
We used to play both checkers and chess. In checkers, he would beat me like 7 out of 10 times. However, the remaining 3 out of 10 times, just from being able to calculate variations like I would in chess, I would get a draw.
In chess, I would beat him 10 out of 10 times. Hell, I would play him with rooks odds (he starts with an extra rook), and still beat him 10 out of 10 times.
Checkers is a fun game and has good strategy, but unfortunately, it’s been completely solved by computers since the early 80s. (Back when chess computers sucked and would lose against a decent master)
I like chess but can never win, this is the only chess game I like [media=youtube]M3ur5pEPI_A[/media] i saw this chess set back in the 90s
http://newyorkchessandgameshop.com/images/products/detail/chess4chessset.jpg
The difference between chess and checkers is that checkers has been solved/conquered by a computer already similar to how tic-tac-toe has already been solved. Computers have not found a final solution for chess. So chess has not been conquered yet.
I used to play chess pretty heavily in HS. I preferred speed chess when I was younger. i don’t play anymore though. I’m kinda glad I didn’t take chess to serious though it’s crazy. How much work you gotta put into it.
