I can haz checkmate?

I was never good at chess. I think there's a conspiracy of chess players who force it as a bar for measuring intelligence. I'm smart and I sick at chess. Fuck chess.

Sounds like someone got beat at chess.

Didn't mean to reply. I suck at chess too.

Define "suck". Define "at chess".

I don't think of myself as a good chess player, although I'm certainly better than your average man on the street (enough to hustle chess players at cafes and parks near the homeless shelter). The thing with chess is, there's a huge gap between "competent" chess players - people who know a little bit about the game and have casually studied theory - and people who are "great" at it - people who've studied whole libraries worth of theory and have these great big nerd brains capable of processing all the necessary information. Back in prep school, one of my dormmates was a Junior champion with a rating of about 2200. The kid was insane; he was capable of checkmating any one of us, using just a couple pawns and his queen, in twenty moves or less. I watched him do it, many times! All of us were smart kids, and again, we were all perfectly capable of holding our own against non-chessclub n00bs, but we stood absolutely no chance against Mr 2200. And here's the kicker: Mr 2200 would have gotten his ass stomped in by anyone in the 2500+ range, just as badly, if not worse than, we were being destroyed by him. His parents were really pressuring him to train and study hard so he could be an official Junior Grandmaster, and I think he may have actually gotten to that point a few years later, but it took a ton of hard work and most of it was just books and memorization and staying at home on Friday nights because mom and dad thought his chess performance could guarantee him a spot at Princeton.

>> I think there's a conspiracy of chess players who force it as a bar for measuring intelligence.

There definitely is! I don't usually agree with you, Cena, but this observation is spot-on.

My biggest problem was that I had no patience for studying openings, which is a pretty massive problem. I was pretty good tactically, and enjoyed fast-and-flowing mid games, but you can't get to that point if the other guy knows all the best lines and strings you along into a well-rehearsed trap, seven moves ahead. Also, I hated speed chess, and got stressed from being in social situations, particularly ones that were as competitive and testosterone-fueled as the neighbourhood chess battles.

You guys know what a mess Bobby Fischer is, right? Well it's no wonder he's like that; chess is evil. Fuck chess.

You guys should try 'go'
It beats the pants off chess. Its a far far purer game.Creativity and more fuzzy logic are much more important than any rote learning.
Good place to play online for free is kgs.

Oh god. I went to a "gifted kids"-y thing at Duke for a few summers, and one year I somehow, by dint of crippling social anxiety, ended up stuck talking to a kid who was a) a magical chess wizard of some rank, and b) one of the biggest fucking creeps I've ever talked to. I wasn't really aware of the concept at the time, but in retrospect, he was obviously on the far side of Asperger's, and every talk with him would keep circling back to either Robert Heinlein or Mussolini.

Not even politics, or history, or military spergin', or the lowest kind of aesthetic engagement with fascism or whatever. Just a constant test of my ability to gently convey the idea that there is an upper bound on the number of times you can loudly say the name "Mussolini" in public before people start to stare.

I played on KGS for a few years. I never had the discipline to make it past 6-7k but I enjoy watching games from time to time.

@Baleen Yeah same here, though I do not play games in order to exert discipline. I'm happy to keep playing at that level.

I had tons of books on Go (many lost in one of my moves). There's a point where you have to learn to memorize games and compare blocks of points in vastly complicated tesuji before you place a stone. I do enjoy playing, just saying there's this line where you have to kick it up a notch to break into the amateur dan levels. Some people have a knack for it. I met an autistic computer programmer who casually said he was a 7d. Some brains are built for pattern memory, super-enumeration. Guys like me have to work a lot harder at it.

it just rolls off the tongue. do you mind if i use this as a lyric?

classic

Most modern chess engines use a hybrid approach of both having a *gigantic* book memory and highly optimizing their search through the game space.

I've heard a similar theory that mastering chess or similar games actually re-wires the brain. I will stick to my dumb guy hobbies.

Source?

I think certain varieties of engineering can have a similar effect.