I've recently started playing chess again a bit (after doing it a bit when I was a teen), and there's an interesting aspect of online chess that I began to realize:
When I was young you needed a local opponent to play chess, and that wasn't always easy. Why? Because most people around you were either significantly better (you always loose) or worse (you always win). It's not an interesting game if the outcome is almost always the same.
It's obviously a complete gamechanger when you have a plattform like chess.com which automatically figures out how good you are and matches you with a roughly equally skilled opponent.
The other fundamentally different thing is the learning tools. As a kid, I had one book on one opening and I had to sit by a board reading it to make the moves to try to dial in the learning. It was a slow and laborious process. I tried checking out another chess book from the library, but had to return it before I made significant headway. There was also one chess puzzle in the newspaper per week, which was fun, but not enough to really make a difference in my skill level.
Kids today can explore/memorize many openings and cover many more variations because of the online courses, some of which are even free. They can quiz themselves to ensure they dial in the move orders. And they can access hundreds of thousands of puzzles in rapid succession to improve their middle-game tactics and pattern recognition. And that’s not even going into having access to chess engines stronger than any human player to explore lines and learn why bad moves are bad.
All this makes studying the game so much easier, even before you test yourself against an actual opponent.
I've started using Chessable, and shot up about 500 elo in the past month. It's effectively chess books distilled into a rote memorization platforms. I picked one opening for white, two for black, and have drilled those variations to the point where I'm now dreaming chess moves. It's insane how easy it is to get very good, very quickly, with modern chess educational tools.
Chess apps having analysis baked in is a huge win for learning. I go through the analysis of every game I play now and make sure I find the moves I lost, it's improved my game greatly.
I find it odd that all my friends & coworkers in the tech industry have ended up on chess.com instead of lichess. Even beyond the fact it's totally free (and free of ads), the architecture itself is super interesting: https://lichess.org/@/thibault/blog/starting-from-scratch/NI...
It must be one of the best examples of a very large scale implementation of features that are simple and easy to understand
What are the differences? I'm not familiar with lichess, but chess.com has tons of bots at various levels that you can play against, and you can have one game per day analysed by stockfish for free (more costs money). I think that's a pretty good deal.
1. Lichess rating is ~200-300 points ahead of a Chess.com rating. Not in the sense that players are better, but an 800 player on Chess.com will probably be 1000-1100 on Lichess.
2. Fantastic analysis tool. Chess.com analysis tends to be a bit funky sometimes.
3. Zen Mode. Not really a pro / con, but it's nice to hide the UI and just have a board on the screen when playing.
4. Free, obviously. No ads.
5. Younger audiences may want to play where their favorite streamer plays, which tends to be Chess.com for nearly everyone unless you're Eric Rosen. Hikaru Nakamura, GothamChess, Magnus Carlsen, Botez Sisters, Anna Cramling, and Chessbrah are all on Chess.com.
6. Chess.com has better puzzles, although limited on the free tier.
I don't have exact numbers on population for both platforms, but if someone can correct me, I'm fairly sure Chess.com holds the majority of players.
You can analyze unlimited games for free on Lichess (both locally in browser and also serverside analysis that I think is donated server time). It lets you play against stockfish bits but they don't have "personalities" like the Chess.com ones do.
You also have unlimited free puzzles on lichess (paid on chesscom). Chess.com probably has a better library of learning content if you're into that (much of it paid though).
IMO if you're not paying I can't see why anyone would prefer chess.com over lichess: you get less and also get ass for the trouble. If you don't care about the monthly subscription cost, then maybe chess.com has fringe benefits over lichess.
>>IMO if you're not paying I can't see why anyone would prefer chess.com over lichess<<
For someone like me who has been playing for several decades now, it's the UI of chess.com/app.
IMO the Lichess app is superior. On desktop, the analysis features of Lichess and its database are superior. Ding Liren used the Lichess database to prepare.
I also like Lichess because I can play in arena tournaments against players with a much higher rating than me, which helps me learn - I'm not sure if this is so easy to do on Chess.com.
I paid for Chess.com for a while, but I stopped subscribing when I realized I never used it. Meanwhile I have multiple days of playtime on Lichess. Also, the owners of Chess.com don't seem like very nice people.
I'm pretty sure the pros and streamers prefer Lichess too, but they're sponsored by Chess.com so they have to pretend to like it.
It's free (freedom & beer), it has no ads, and it's feature-complete. It even has stuff that other websites make you pay for, like post-game computer annotation. It offers a web interface where you can play without even registering an account and free (again, freedom & beer) apps for iOS and Android.
The only downside when compared to chess.com is that fewer top-level professionals play there. Which is not an issue unless you're literally a super GM.
Lichess is amazing, I play there exclusively. However, I am plagued by a terrible bug: the Android app has half a second of lag when opening any screen for some reason.
It doesn't matter what connection I'm on, and the website is always instant, but the Android app always takes half a second to load any screen. It's infuriating when you want to view the analysis, or just navigate around the app.
I've taken to "installing" the webapp version on my phone. It's only a little bit different, but doesn't come with the frustrating issues the android app does.
I have a similar delay bug with the website itself. I've not reported it because I don't use my lichess account to play actual games, only puzzles. The lichess boards will only let you post a new thread if you have games on your history, and I refuse to comply as I've played thousands of puzzles and I should have clearance, and yes that's petty, anyway...
My bug is about Puzzle Storm. When you run out of time, the GUI shows you the post game screen and it takes a fraction of a second before it pops in a "daily record" banner. This fraction of a second is slow enough for me to drag my mouse cursor over the "Failed puzzles" filter, but fast enough for me to accidentally click "Play again" as it has been pushed down the page (by the daily record div) without me perceiving it yet. Once clicked, that button resets the page to start another puzzle storm and by then I've lost the failed puzzle history, so I can't go over it anymore.
It has happened already in the hundreds of times. I can't help it, hopefully the dev one day figures it out.
Have you tried disabling content blockers (including PiHole if you're in the app)? I'm not on Android, and haven't seen this but in Lichess, but when I see similar bugs on iOS, disabling content blockers often fixes them.
As someone who plays exclusively on Lichess I find the chess.com bashing, particularly here on HN, a bit short-sighted, in the sense that it's focussed on who provides the better (free) online service to play chess.
If your goal, however, is to popularise the game of chess, i.e. to get more people to play chess, a free online service is only a necessary condition. Chess.com seems to be able to sponsor and organise tournaments, pay content creators/chess players, offer live streams with professional commentators, etc. But also take legal responsibility and stand up to lawsuits.
Interested to hear your thoughts on this. I don't see Lichess being able to provide this type of value, and I'm not sure if they want to or should.
I think both chess.com and lichess are positive influences on the chess scene. We need a corporate presence to be able to organize tournaments, find sponsors, and support streamers.
That said, I prefer lichess and think most people should be using it. But I understand it’s not about the platform’s technical features; for most people, it’s about the network effect with their friends.
Yes, the rating system is fundamental to be able to enjoy the game, and also to lower the impact of cheating: if my rating is 1500 and I play against other players around 1500, I don't care if they are at that level thanks to cheating or not. I only care about being competitive with them and trying to do my best.
-- Shameless plug: I recently released a platform to improve tactically with puzzles and spaced repetitions, https://chess.braimax.com - feedback very welcome!
You're assuming a steady-state equilibrium. It takes several games for a player to settle into their Elo, and a cheater will have ruined the experience of their opponents in the meantime. You're also discounting the fact that griefers will deliberately create new accounts to continue playing against novice opponents.
How is this different from good (non-cheating) players joining a new website and having to get to their realistic rating? This happens, but as a percentage of games you play it has a very low impact; moreover, platforms usually tell you that a player has a not-yet-established rating with a question mark, eg 1620?
My suggestion is to just stop thinking about cheaters when playing online rated games. I started doing so years ago, and have increased my enjoyment of the game A LOT, without any visible downside.
Yeah seems like a trivial issue to fix - first 10 games are for evaluation, heck they can be had even against computer. Very few people are so pathetic/psychopathic to invest so much time into getting a rank and then cheating on real opponents and tank their account quickly. And for those few, just don't care about them, its just a game after all.
I think matching by level is quite psychologically destructive, and should be avoided.
People grind for hours and they see no sense of progress as they keep always being around 50% winrate because the stronger they get, the better the opponent get. And inversely they can play drunk chess and still win 50% and burn time pushing random pieces for a little short-term fun.
It probably depends on people but I think the average ratio for people to progress optimally their should be around four wins for one loss. And the loss should be correlated to the way you played. Anything below 80% winrate, means it becomes hard to distinguish the learning signal from the variance of the matching. The brain also need some balance between the carrot and the stick otherwise the ego take a hit.
Rating system also generate some strata artefacts meaning there are levels you can't get past without spending as much time as your opponent on tactics, or openings, and you never get to experience chess on a more strategic level, or deeper understanding level. This mean that most of the fun get extracted out of chess once you get addicted/interested enough.
I think it's much better to play unrated games anonymously against a random pool of anonymous players (eventually with a min level to exclude complete novices), and offer rematch when the games were interesting. You should play to win but your reward signal shouldn't be the win but rather the interestingness of the game for both opponent.
When playing you should try to understand your opponent, his current chess understanding and how it's revealed through his current moves, and construct with the board some situations that will be interesting enough for the both of you to have a good time. Don't play the board. Play the player through the board. A good game should look more like a dance than a fight. You have to infer from a few moves who your opponent is, and how to interact with him in a constructive way.
That's what popular streamer do when they play their viewers (usually friendly and constructive). And that's probably what teens expect when they join chess after viewing a few videos. But instead they get thrown into an adverse destructive pit of soulless addicted grinders.
That's a very elaborate way of saying that competitive players should delude themselves to cope with their weak mental game.
> Anything below 80% winrate, means it becomes hard to distinguish the learning signal from the variance of the matching.
Using winrate as a learning signal is your first mistake. You're making a million different decisions per game, and then decide to summarize it with a binary W/L?
If you want proper signal, you need to analyze your games on a more fine-grained level.
> And the loss should be correlated to the way you played.
No, it shouldn't and doesn't. Dealing with variance, and things beyond your control is an essential part of developing a strong mentality. Especially when playing in-person.
> The brain also need some balance between the carrot and the stick otherwise the ego take a hit.
If your ego takes a hit from this, you need to get back to the drawing board instead of praying that the world will change to accommodate your issues.
> you can't get past without spending as much time as your opponent on tactics, or openings, and you never get to experience chess on a more strategic level, or deeper understanding level. This mean that most of the fun get extracted out of chess once you get addicted/interested enough.
I can't speak to the "lack of stategy", but what makes a game fun to compete in is highly subjective.
> soulless addicted grinders
This is the exact kind of language and attitude I would see from players who plateau hard, and looking for external factors to blame.
You do realize that a lot of players play for their definition of fun and don't derive or base their personality around their strength as chess players, I hope?
I play different elo-rated games for the past 13 years and completely disagree with you. 50% is very healthy psychologically as it keeps you humble and challenged all the time.
If your play improves to ~55% win rate, you already feel highly rewarded and most of the reward feelings come from the fact that you now play on higher elo. You don't care about single losses/wins anymore.
In some video games you may randomly face an AI opponent without the game being explicit about it. That way the average human win rate can be above 50%. I don't know yet if this is good or bad.
You can set up some AI to let you win 80% of times, and let the game to the real players. That way, you will feel better.
I dabble in the realm of simracing. Man, what would I do for a 50% win rate. Every race is hard fought, and the possibility of a victory is far below 15%.
The times I have won, I trained the whole week, it was hard-earned, and really, nothing has felt better since. It's a high I can still ride with pride.
IMO, if you want to win more, you should train harder, or try something easier.
I had a similar experience in jiu jitsu, everyone is way better or way worse, so it’s very frustrating to play usually.
Unfortunately there isn’t an online jiu jitsu platform :)
I’ve also found there’s many many parallels between chess and jiu jitsu, which is really interesting, chess really is a super aggressive combat sport in terms of mental work.
Chess is having its soccer moment now. Here is why:
1- The entry cost has fallen dramatically. Before at a minimum you'd need to afford a chess set and a couple of books. Now, all you need is a parents phone. This is similar to soccer, where the entry cost is any ball you can find.
2- its egalitarian. Your size, sex, height, and even age do not matter. This has always been true but now its more pronounced with apps blurrying entry further. This is also similar to soccer in that even age differences dont really matter
3 - learning curve has flattened dramatically. This to me is key. In soccer, anyone can jump in an play even if you cant learn by watching. This was not true for chess until apps came along. It is particularly powerful that kids no longer need to follow notation or boring books to learn how to play well. Everything can now be taught by video, at your own pace.
4 - chess is now hyper social. This is another key element also enabled by apps. By being a 2 player game, its not a game that is social by nature. However, now you can be social anytime, anywhere. No board required.
That was all true ten years ago too so I don’t think that’s it. What changed is the Queen’s Gambit got popular, then covid caused online gaming to become even more popular, and then there were some things that made chess popular recently like chess boxing with streamers on YouTube.
Also Magnus Carlsen being relatable to young people, Hikaru Nakamura ,the world's best best speed chess player, having fun and dishing out sass on YouTube and Twitch, and lots of good commentators and players making great content on popular platforms.
Lots of factors built the base that was able to turn the interest from Queen's Gambit into a lasting and growing phenomenon.
These are good points, but there's a social aspect that this misses: there are quite a few twitch streamer personalities who are high level chess players AND can actually hold a conversation. So you've got a lot of kids and young adults who are being exposed to the game through entertainment and want to do it themselves. Hikaru, Magnus, the Botez sisters, etc... they're all highly popular and they all stream on twitch.
That's 21 different streamers averaging at least a thousand concurrent viewers. On average, it's 12,600 concurrent viewers.
Chess ranks #28 on Twitch when ranking by stream type. This includes games, just chatting, ASMR, and Special Events. It ranks higher than Elden Ring, Rocket League, Destiny 2, and Genshin Impact.
And ICC(Internet Chess Club) was around even in the 90s!
Chess video lectures have existed since the eaely 00s too, though they cost money and you'd buy them on a DVD filled with a mixture of video files and PGN files along with some metadata to be viewed through Chessbase.
It was basically the same thing as Chessable is today. Probably competitive in price too; Chessable is pretty fucking expensive if you actually want the video lectures.
3:
You really have to see the intro videos to strategy in youtube or chesskid. The production value and ability to engage has skyrocketed. Yes there was some content on YouTube then... But the material was NOT online 10 years ago. You can easily verify this looking at the ratio of views/years for the more recent videos vs old ones. Top comment was for Gothamchess channel. Check it out.
4:
The social element coupled with the ability to "play now" is very important. Until the last 5 or so years, a teen could not put together a similar rated game on demand. Even if you lived near a chessclub. Mobile apps with ELOs have brought the chessclub to the living room.
And originally meant to add
5:
As downposter said, parents will actively encourage chess, instead of restricting the amount of time on it. No parent will bat an eye if you play 3 hours straight. I wonder if thats because all parents have seen the queens gambit.(?)
In retrospect
6:
Algorithmic rating : the matching with a similar rated opponent is important since the satisfaction for winning (instead of continued losing) drives engagement.
> No parent will bat an eye if you play 3 hours straight. I wonder if thats because all parents have seen the queens gambit.(?)
I'd say it's more that chess is old, famous for being intellectual, and doesn't have the flashy childishness and addictive mechanics of many computer games.
So many of the usual parental worries around screen time - cyberbullying, causing body image issues, destroying attention span, rotting the brain, designed by experts to be addictive, promoting gambling - simply do not apply.
Have to disagree with your first two points for the US.
On 1, soccer became popular because there were organizations providing soccer for a fee. There may have been pockets of the US where kids would just go outside and play. That's not how it grew to be so big across the country though. These days it's not unusual to pay thousands of dollars a year to get on a club team - and that's where the fun is. I've never seen anything like that for chess.
On 2, player age and physical development matter a ton. One of the things I warn parents about when getting into soccer is to find a coach that focuses on player development rather than winning. Many teams make playing time and position decisions based only on which players are the biggest and fastest. (Those parents are getting ripped off, since the big and fast players don't develop skills, and the others don't learn the game.) This is quite different from chess, since as you note, size, sex, height, and age do not matter.
My question about online chess is: why aren't people feeling that their opponents are cheating?
I don't play chess. But in other online games, like FPS, the players always complain about cheaters. Then why isn't it a problem with chess.com? It's much easier to cheat with online chess than an FPS game, no?
1) A lot of "cheating complaints" in multiplayer games are simply people that suck. There was an article a while ago that examined several of these kinds of games and most people made the most absolutely basic blunders.
2) FPS games have a lot more degrees of freedom to cheat. There is network lag, hidden information, aimbots, etc. Chess, by contrast, has no hidden state and everything is contained on the server. The only way to cheat is simply to play better moves than your level.
3) Cheaters get bumped up in level quickly and wind up against people who can flag them for cheating. Almost all of the master level chess players can identify suspicious "computer" moves. Most systems have a way to flag a game or move for review. Finally, computers can deeply analyze the games and look for behaviors that don't match "humans".
4) The flip side of that is that amateurs blunder so much that they wouldn't be able to tell even if they got cheated against--by and large.
Jerk behavior tends to be far more problematic than cheating. For example, if you get a winning position, it's not uncommon for an opponent to stop playing but make you wait the rest of the time to count the win. You will bump into this, and it will annoy you way more often than cheaters.
>Jerk behavior tends to be far more problematic than cheating. For example, if you get a winning position, it's not uncommon for an opponent to stop playing but make you wait the rest of the time to count the win. You will bump into this, and it will annoy you way more often than cheaters.
When people do this on Lichess, I spamclick the button that adds 15 seconds to the opponent clock and write "move or resign". Sometimes people resign, sometimes they keep playing, sometimes they just close the app then you can claim the victory almost immediately.
This behaviour probably pisses me off so much because I grew up playing real tournaments, where politeness is highly valued. Getting up and walking away, or letting your time run out on purpose, is considered extremely rude to where it could get you disqualified.
They need a way of flagging this sort of behaviour as well. It should be relatively easy to spot if a person is repeatedly flagging while sitting there for a long time in completely losing positions.
I think Lichess already does this. When players do this, there's a warning in the chat that repeatedly doing this will result in a temporary ban. I don't know how long the ban is and whether it becomes permanent, since I never do this unless my connection actually dropped.
Cheaters get bumped up in level quickly and wind up against people who can flag them for cheating
Yes, and the other side of this coin is sandbagging. Cheaters losing on purpose to keep their rating down. Generally this is also pretty easy to detect because it’s difficult to lose on purpose in a convincing way. Just resigning the game in a non-losing position or blundering mate-in-1 is too obvious and easy to catch. Someone playing the top Stockfish line 20 moves in a row and then blundering their queen just sticks out like a sore thumb.
Chess AIs are so good that consistently cheating will put you at a very very high rating relative to most players. It’s also very noticeable as AI-suggested moves have very low centipawn loss (in other words, AI-assisted moves are usually recognizably the “best” move/ the same as what a cheat detection AI run by the chess service would suggest). A pattern of regularly making probabilistically unlimely centipawn loss move sequences can be detected. Other heuristics used are mouse moving offscreen IIRC.
A lot of top chess players only play bullet and blitz online where cheating is too hard, you’d have to completely automate it, at which point you are no longer playing a game but just watching an AI play pros until it gets banned.
If you cheat in FPS you still feel like you’re playing the game, just on an easier setting. But with Chess it’s basically just delegating the game to something else. When playing online there is little incentivize to do this.
The question is: Do I care? Particularly if I'm not super-competitive.
I play chess irregularly on a not very sophisticated level (ELO ~400). I get automatically assigned opponents. Sure, it's possible that some of them cheat. It's probably not super attractive, because I'm not sure what the fun is in "I beat random ELO 400 player on chess.com with a computer". So maybe one in a few dozend games I face a cheater.
If you get into much more competitive chess then people probably cheat more. But I guess for the vast majority of players it doesn't matter.
400 chess.com Elo (not ELO) is so low that bo cheater would never fall so lo in rating to play against you. 400 rating is still learning how the pieces move.
A huge amount of work is dedicated to busting cheaters. Getting into the minutia of exactly how this is done is outside the scope of this post, but the most obvious one is correlation. Run a correlation check between a suspected cheater's moves and various engines - and see how they matchup. Another would be time expenditure. A guy spending the same time for an only-move and a superhuman tactical sequence is probably not legit. And there's dozens of other metrics you can use to determine 'cheatiness', with the end result being near 100% certainty on whether somebody is or isn't legit.
I'm relatively high rated on chess.com and only run into a cheater every once in a blue moon. Invariably his account tends to be closed, and points refunded shortly thereafter. This wasn't always the case, 'back in the day' chess.com had a major problem with cheaters, but it's clear that at some point they made a serious effort to start flushing out the cheaters - and it's been a big success.
I've played over 500 games on chesscom in the last year at between 700-1050 rating. Its hard to point out a cheater but sometimes you just get a hunch, then on review of the game, they blundered twice in the first dozen moves then the game shifts dramatically. Early game rated 600, mid 1500+.
Whats more common is cheesy tactics. Kid will go on YT and watch a video about some cheeky opening and mimic that. Things like early queen pushes. Once you punish it, they crumble. So you get these players that have inflated ELO. If they can't do the one opening they know, they simply don't know the general tactics.
Then there are the smurfs. They don't last long at low rating but these people are the worst. They exist in any online game.
They use a ML Siamese head network that was donated to them back ~2012. Nothing has changed since then, and they don't prevent people from creating new accounts.
There were issues reported to them in 2016 about the siamese network failing to detect properly in cases where the client-side parameters being passed could be spoofed and held static, and they banned the people who reported it and deleted the posts from their github and the site.
From what I've seen, their team is petty, conceited, and vindictive people.
They make a show of valuing the community, but its just that; a show. When it comes down to actually reporting something responsibly in goodwill; they have no professionalism, and no credibility. They don't want to hear about it; and its easier to silence with the hammer of admin power than anything else.
Incidentally, there were also issues with the paperwork they filed for the charity in France too. You are required to have certain paperwork filed to provide when opening a bank account in France (so you don't comingle charity funds with personal funds). It didn't appear they filed that paperwork when I last went digging. Maybe OSINT will bring something up.
I honestly can't stand false hero worship, they've done nothing to earn respect and a lot to lose any credibility they may have had.
You seem to have some sort of grudge against Lichess, to the point that the only easily discoverable info about Liches's Siamese network is your own vague complaints about it. Perhaps you are the one who hasn't earned any respect.
Despite your claims that computers killed chess, chess is thriving more than ever, with more people making a living from chess than any time in history.
I don't see how chess has become more social. It's always been a very social game. You go to the chessclub, meet lots of interesting people, make friends. Tournaments are very social events too.
Playing online actually feels like the least social way of enjoying the game to me. I have no interest in chatting with random people, and most of the time someone tries to write something in chat it's an insult or accusation of cheating. Or just "gg", "nice tactic", etc.
I guess I can see that perspective yeah. Certainly there is no speaking during the game, since it's a game of concentration after all.
And top players might not do this, but most everyone else does: we discuss the games with the opponent after the game.
Club nights tend to be less formal; usually blitz will be played, banter and trashtalking during the game is common.
But yeah I guess it must look like we all hate eachother and never speak to eachother, from the outside. That's funny.
I come from a chess family. My dad has been an avid chess player for all his life, with a rating of around 1600. As kids we all went to the chess club, got our chess diploma's, played a few tournaments (my sister won a lot), I won a simultaneous chess game the author of the standard Dutch children's chess book in my youth gave in the shopping center near my home. But after that, I stopped. Played a few games in university who could really humiliate me on the board.
I taught my oldest son both chess and go, and when we played, I never held back, but when he was so far behind he didn't know what to do, he could turn the board around and continue play from my winning position, while I had to salvage his. That was a fun way to play. And then it stopped again.
Last year, my youngest son (now 8) suddenly wanted to join a chess club in our neighbourhood. My oldest (14) says lots of kids are playing chess at his school, though none at his level, so he started playing on chess.com. Instead of watching YouTube videos about video games, they're now watching GothamChess and other chess channels. So chess is hot again in our home. He now occasionally beats me. Making me work harder, to the point that the games between me and my dad are getting a lot closer (though I still lose most).
I can really recommend GothamChess, by the way. His videos are brilliant. Both meme-worthy, exaggerated emotions, deadpan disappointment at some moves, but also extremely educational. He analyses lots of novice games around 600 rating, which is super useful for the many new players, but also still interesting to me.
I visted my relatives recently, and i was shocked.
At first I though it was a new clash of clans type of trendy game, but its actually chess!
The teenagers have chess.com installed everyhere and are challenging each other nonstop, sometimes with real chess boards too!
There's social pyramid starting to form, with one of the younger ones conquering the game with no clear challenger, its football but for people who don't like football.
Its fascinating how an old and not very hip game became a crazy trend so fast.
I'd argue that it's always been football for people who don't like football. What's really changed is that now it's also football for people who do like football! During online events Magnus was often seen watching football (and other sports) [1] on TV while simultaneously playing big money online events. His rest days during live events were often turned into sports days.
This has really always been the case, for instance you even had players like Simen Agdestein [2] who was a professional football player and a chess grandmaster - at the same time, but chess has been hounded by dumb and inappropriate stereotypes. You don't need to smart to play, you don't need some amazing memory, or whatever else. It's just a really awesome, enjoyable, and deeply satisfying and rewarding game.
Yeah. The only thing you really need to be great at chess is to play a lot, on longer time controls, and to analyze your own games.
It’s such a common stereotype that chess is all about memorizing openings, like cramming for exams the rest of your life. It’s not. Cramming is all short term memory and people tend to forget everything a few weeks after the test. That doesn’t work in chess.
Great chess players have everything in their long term memory. They can rattle off openings and transpositions like nobody’s business. But they didn’t just study that stuff yesterday. They built it up over years of playing and calculating during games and analyzing the results. It’s much more akin to a great violinist who can play the Sibelius by heart than it is some high school kid cramming for the SAT.
> and i was shocked. At first I though (...), but its actually (...)!
> The (...) installed everywhere (...) each other nonstop, sometimes with real
> There's social pyramid starting to form, with one of the younger ones conquering the game with no clear challenger, its football but for people who don't like football.
The paragraph above specifically, it sounds coherent, but makes no sense. Pyramid? Pyramid of what? Younger ones? Football what?
> Its fascinating how an old and not very hip game became a crazy trend so fast.
In what school, today, are kids who don't play football constantly bullied? The only place I've seen that happen is in movies from the 80's early 90's.
I talked to a guy who manages a chess club, and he said it was a combination of Queen's Gambit and Covid lockdowns that boosted interest over the past three years.
My father has always been a chess aficionado, but I got turned off by the fact that he was the only available opponent, and he had 37 years of headstart (it didn't occur to me to go to a chess club). When I was in University, I discovered Go, which felt somehow deeper than chess (I do enjoy the occasional game of chess, but compared to Go it feels like a knife fight vs a military campaign). After school I stopped playing (and I had never gotten serious). However, my family needed a distraction when the war in Ukraine started (we live in Poland, so it's right around the corner), so I started playing Go with my son.
Since then we've gotten pretty serious - we play at a local club, went to a tournament, take lessons, etc. However, it's very much a niche hobby - more than A local club it's THE local club. Part of me wishes that I'd have chosen chess, which would've given us an order of magnitude more opponents and materials, both online and offline. On top of that, apparently it would've given my son an additional way to gain social status at school. However, the truth is that we do enjoy Go more than chess, and have already invested quite some energy (I am beginning to be an intermediate with an ELO of around 1150).
There are some perks of course. The Go community is super nice (the joke goes that, unlike with chess, you cannot just go to another club to play IRL if you piss off your club members). It's so small that even as a beginner I got the chance to befriend the reigning Polish champion (and one of the very few European Pros, which is a big deal - they play almost on par with the Asian pros). He turned out to be a fantastical human being, if a bit intimidating at first (he will casually play 5 games simultaneously, maintaining separate teaching conversations over each board, and a bonus conversation about AI; then he will be able to write down every game on paper).
While I feel a hint of jealousy for the popularity of chess, if Go were to disappear, I would just switch to chess and have probably have 85-90% of the fun I'm having with Go (not to mention access to my father's vast chess library). So, the fact that young people enjoy mind games makes me very happy - I feel that playing chess or Go is genuinely good for you.
As somene who prefers playing Go a lot more than chess, this is true. Games are far too long for most people, I do enjoy having a Go game in the background while I work but patiently sitting for 16 hours for a game to finish is not a great sell even if I love the game.
Well, the Koreans seem to be aware of this, and they are pushing for changes. They play shorter games, and they've recently moved from byo-yomi to Fischer timing (part of the reasoning was that players are trained to play at the very end of their byo-yomi period, so that introduced a minimum of 30 seconds per move - even if the players had decided in the first 4 seconds).
At your level, OGS and KGS are great Go servers. I've never been to a Go club or even played the game IRL, but I'm currently a solid 3k, which is ~1750.
A couple of years ago, my children’s primary school added a chess club. An hour after school once a week. $20 per ten week term.
Parents quickly worked out this equated to $2/hour childcare and signed up kids that had never before touched a chess board. It was a delightful chaos.
I am a high schooler in the US who's played chess for around 4 years now. Chess has been popular at my school since COVID (perhaps 1/20 people played it), but around February of this year it suddenly exploded in popularity to maybe 1/5 people. I have no idea why.
There's too much that's simply memorisation over skills, deep lines leading you down well traversed paths.
Creativity and ingenuity suffer.
The only real option* if you want interesting games is to make intentionally bad moves so that theory falls apart, and that's only an option against weaker players.
You can play with the more restricted time controls - but that only mixes things up by forcing mistakes, not by introducing well considered novel moves.
There's too much that's simply memorisation over skills, deep lines leading you down well traversed paths.
Creativity and ingenuity suffer.
The only real option if you want interesting games is to make intentionally bad moves so that theory falls apart, and that's only an option against weaker players.
Did you watch the world championship this year? It did not at all fit your narrative. The games were very exciting. The players were out of prep early and often. There were a lot of chances being taken, blunders, and mistakes. All this from 2800-level players.
I think people may soon realize that computers can be used for more than just preparing deep lines on well-trodden ground. They can also be used to find the shortest path off the beaten track and into a jungle of a midgame where you and your opponent can just play some chess. I love it!
Eh. I don’t care about the chess world champions. I’m not playing them. RTS games suffer a similar problem.
Until you become extremely proficient, you have basically no room to use novel strategies. You will lose to people with better execution on established strategies. And so you don’t do anything but grind execution and it’s pretty boring.
Chess isn’t quite this bad, but I find it pretty boring after a while.
The flip side to your comment, though, is that chess can be highly entertaining for people just getting started, who neither know any established openings or play lines, nor are playing against opponents who do... which describes the vast majority of newcomers to the game.
I would argue that you can get to approaching 1500 ELO without really knowing any theory at all, and just focusing on what "feels" like appropriate control of the board & game dynamics... and again, the vast majority of casual players will likely never move beyond that. But it's still fun, especially when they're able to challenge friends between classes to 3 or 5 minute matches.
I agree. Novice chess is great. Especially with local peers. I find it loses its appeal pretty quick when you start playing in a system like lichess however. Once you stop progressing quickly which is probably around a month or three of interested play.
That may not hold if it’s an established form of social competition where you can earn prestige by being good at it within your local peer group. It would be nice to see more intellectual challenges take that role among young people.
They made these blunders because they were in very unfamiliar, double-edged positions. Yes, sometimes nerves got involved but sometimes the positions were just very sharp and complex and they couldn’t find the engine line.
Also, a lot of those engine lines would’ve just made a draw, something a human player would never do when they’re playing with the white pieces in a need-to-win game.
Ofcourse making bad moves will hurt your chances of winning, but Hikaru was able to speedrun to 3000 points on chess.com with the bongcloud opening. So if that is achievable then I have no excuses losing because I chose a bad opening.
You can play dubious openings and do fine all the way up to middling grandmaster level.
Memorisation is not at all important for learning to play chess. It won't make you better at the game. Training your pattern recognition, your positional/endgame/opening understanding will.
Until you're around 1500 real life ELO(which takes years for most people), all you have to do is play the game and enjoy it, analyse it with the opponent or other friends from the club. No memorisation required.
I'd disagree. If you play a line like the Englund Gambit, you are going to get trounced.
A lot of times, Memorization isn't even needed. People develop mental shortcuts for calculation in positional, endgame, and middle game sections.
Things like forcing doubled pawns on the C/F files (depending on your color), calculating whether you can promote before the king can catch up (that triangle strategy). Lucena and a few others.
With a solid opening repertoire that's chosen to force certain openings/sublines you can limit the study needed significantly (and shoot to the moon rating wise).
Sure if you play a bad opening, you'll get problems. Especially if it's just a one trick pony. When I say dubious opening I mean the kind top grandmasters rarely play. I play the Modern Benoni with black. Sure it's dubious and white can get a pretty big advantage. But it's an opening with absolutely endless complexity in terms of the middle games that can arise. It's sharp, difficult to play for both sides, and I enjoy these positions and have played them for years now, with probably thousands of blitz games in the Benoni, and quite a few classical tournament games under my belt. I think all in all I've memorised maybe two or three lines back when I started playing it. The rest is all just my experience and intuition for the various set ups. And guess what, the lines I memorised? They hardly ever occur, because my white opponents never know them and they're the kond of thing you're not gonna find over the board, which is why I memorised them. And I win most of my games in the modern benoni at the 1800 FIDE level.
Point is memorisation is pointless. The way to study an opening is to understand the ideas, possible endgames, tactical and various structures that can arise.
There is a chess variant called Progressive Chess, where the number of moves per turn increases with each turn. In this variant, White starts with one move, then Black plays two moves, White plays three moves, and so on. The players alternate turns, and each time they play, they make one more move than their previous turn. This creates a unique strategic dynamic and requires players to think differently than in traditional chess.
I almost never play chess, but when I play chess I usually play this variant, because it's faster and people don't have any tactics memorised. I'm not even sure if it's possible to memorise in the same manner as regular chess.
I kind of feel if you think this then you've approached chess all wrong.
Your moves are all about controlling your opponents influence and responses while developing your pieces before situating for a breakthrough or attack.
Interesting games only really happen with decently skilled opponents who know the theory as well as you. The game often only starts getting interesting after move 16+.
Dubious moves and openings are a surefire way to lose.
I think the main reason, besides chess being fundamentally a great and timeless game, is streaming. Popular streamers picked it up and many top level players also started streaming online chess, which can be very entertaining. Often they are playing fast, exciting time controls like 1 or 2 minutes. Chess.com and others brought flavorful tournament coverage and hosted events with guests from outside the chess world. Chess.com and lichess have great apps and strong competitive communities.
Basically, it's all there. Chess is born anew for the 21st century.
This is the answer, my kids are all
Into it and they really
Love Gotham chess (I think that’s what it is called and Hikaru as well) I’m sure there are others but I’m already out of my element.
Those were simply people with not enough imagination. Eg. AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol brought a true renaissance in Go, with papers showing that now humans play objectively better than they did before AI. While we have comfortably superhuman AIs, they are still far from godlike. The doomers were confused about where the ceiling was (and in Go it is much further than we thought).
Because chess offers more variety in strategy than "rush A", "rush B", "they're going squeaky", "rotate". It's particularly fun in-person, and shockingly, the generation coming up likes to look at screens less and less, and apparently isn't keen on smartphones.
CS at a high level is like chess where you can't see your opponent's pieces most of the time. At low levels, it's basically what you described. Check out a pro game on Twitch some time. Every time I watch pros play, I learn a new lineup for util, angle to hold, runboost spot, etc.
A family member used to be a professional CSGO player and another family member played Quake at tourneys back in the day.
Your point is moot because only 1% of people play at a high-level, thus chess is at least more interesting than what 99% of CSGO players will experience in terms of strategy. Their ability to react and aim in real-time isn't a consideration either, nor is their access to a pretty decent computer and internet connection to be able to compete effectively.
In that case, your original point is also moot because chess at low levels doesn't have any strategy besides gimmicks (scholar's mate, fool's mate) and then moving randomly and hanging pieces. Around 800 ELO, people start looking for pins, skewers, forks, etc. Around 1200 ELO, you hit a wall and have to start grinding openings for a year, and then you'll hit the final wall at 1700 ELO where you can't advance unless you played from childhood.
You don't need to be Global Elite in CS to have a team that attempts site takes/retakes/rotations and tries to use util effectively. You'll never have GE reactions/aim, but you'll also never be an IM/FM in chess no matter how much you grind. CS is still fun even as a silver/low gold nova pleb because the midgame has effectively unlimited variety (just like chess), and 10 independent players as opposed to 2 leads to much more diverse gameplay. CS also has the advantage of there not being draws (aside from in Valve's matchmaking), something which plagues chess all the way to the super grandmaster level.
Modern sources of entertainment are dressed up in a lot of fluff. Blow all that fluff away and you're left with nothing that is any better than games and stories that have been with us since forever.
The kids these days are drowning in novelties of the sort that were scarce to me as a child. It stands to reason they wouldn't be as easily impressed or fooled by such things.
None of however does not lead to liking chess. The game is massively about memorization and drill, with some patina of superior aura on it. At least on lower levels.
Like you trying to make everything else sound inferior, plus fluff. It is not true, once you scratch reputation out of chess, you get mundane drills and memorization of situations.
Nah, not really. The beauty of chess is that you can almost equally enjoy it at any skill level. The challenge is almost always the same of calculating and evaluating the position to the best of your abilities. If you find yourself trying to memorize positions, you're either preparing to win the world championship or doing it completely wrong.
Watch blitz or bullet chess played online and you might understand. These are actual easier played online than in person because it automates pressing the clock and you can set (potentially conditional) pre moves. It’s basically a fast-paced videogame: https://youtu.be/PNQDJdjgkdU
Sometimes I play bullet games for hours straight because it’s very easy to just play one more 2 minute game.
I've never been interested in chess because it seemed to be way too much work to be good enough to have fun.
Things have gotten much easier now, you can get endless stream of free puzzles that are as fun as any puzzle game and adapt to your skill level... I'm still not that interested in actually playing but it's really the ultimate single player game for phones, always slightly challenging and takes as little or as much time as you want.
Chesstempo has the best content, at least at a middle or higher standard. Chess.com and lichess have more modern UI/UX but haven't perfected the automatic puzzle generation process that Chesstempo seems to have got right many years ago.
It’s kind of exactly why I like it. There’s a reason people have been playing it and it evolved over 1000-1500 years. The complexity and variety is extremely entertaining.
It’s really nice having that sort of depth vs a video game with a set path and story that you follow, or slicing random fruits with your finger.
And the accessibility has obviously gotten insanely good as has been pointed out before in the thread.
Faster variants are more accessible due to the UX quality given by chess.com and lichess. Blitz and bullet are like a competitive puzzle esport. Pair that with the competitive gaming industry and its more recent failures. A lot of people were hungry for something different, rather than a cheap reskin of the last thing that did the best numbers.
Over the last few months Rozman has dominated short form content for chess, and I think this article doesn't give him enough credit. Both long form and short form videos of his hit millions of views, consistently over the last few months. The analytics for his channel speak for themselves.
Here he responds to a reddit question from 3 months ago about the rise in Chess and he reponds "me" in an implied tongue in cheek way. [1] He is very active in the chess community and feels very accessible. Unlike the original elitist culture that chess was known for, he works hard to make it accessible and makes an effort to praise brilliant moves from low elo games/moves. His video answering chess questions on the wired youtube channel is a great introduction to him as well as chess, regardless of your skill level.
Rozman's videos that focus on beginner plays made me feel okay to be low elo, and that's impactful coming from someone at his skill level.
I am weak with opening theory and don't enjoy learning it. I enjoy playing intuitively, and have started playing much more chess960, a variant where starting piece positions are randomized. Lichess has recurrent chess960 torunaments. [2]
Some people discussing cheating and the more boring aspects of chess. Thing is,
- chess education is more accessible and is fun af now thanks to folks like Hikaru and Levy (aka GothamChess).
- default games are now rapid 10 minute games or 20 minute games at tops. This makes it as quick as a Fortnite round and the odds of cheating in such rapid games goes down drastically. Couple that with the excellent anti cheat work being done and the game really does stay short and enjoyable.
With the game being in popular culture via queens gambit it feels understandable that it is rising amongst younger folks (impossible to have predicted but very much easily explained looking backwards)
A lot of people seem surprised but honestly chess has always been one of the most popular games around. In most countries every sizeable town has chess clubs, leagues there's probably tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of players globally. As a chess player it's great to see that it has made inroads online with its popularity on Twitch among streamers and now kids in school, but it has always had a wide appeal.
Also encouraging that kids pick it over more distracting activities. One of the biggest benefits I've reaped from playing is just the ability to deeply focus and concentrate. Not a bad skill nowadays.
I'm old, and it's booming among my friends. For me, there are so many good explanations/videos on Youtube that make the game so much more accessible. All the stuff was in books, but seeing it explained live over a chessboard is WAY better.
My wife and I have played chess against each other off and on throughout the years. Once or twice I had started to get "serious" about levelling up my game but quickly dropped it due to other priorities.
Then I saw the Botez Sisters on Lex Friedman's podcast and started checking out their content. Holy crap is online chess ever entertaining as hell these days.
Not only are the various streamers on Twitch and YouTube great, but there are so many different variations of the game to come out, like Duck Chess. The bots that Chess.com creates every few months are more entertainment fodder. There is even Chess Boxing!
So I can completely understand why it's gaining traction with teens. Chess is "cool" now for the first time that I can remember.
This is also, of course, following The Queen's Gambit on Netflix and the Carlsen / Nieman cheating scandal. It is so entertaining.
Edit: it's also worth noting that a lot of non-Chess streamers have even started getting into Chess. That undoubtedly has an effect as well.
One thing I haven’t seen yet in these comments: the cheating scandal brought a lot of attention to the game. It was a great story to pique a young and curious imagination:
- chess is a board game in my closet next to parcheesi and backgammon but it turns out there are chess professionals who play high stakes games
- computers are so powerful that they can beat the best chess players, and you can use a computer to cheat
- the allegation is that a professional chess player managed to receive some kind of covert signal to tell him the right moves. It’s like a spy movie
- the drama continued to unfold with deep statistical analysis of prior games, $100 million lawsuits, and more
I learned chess as a kid. Recently, having read Annie Duke's "Thinking in Bets" I regret not having learned poker instead. I'll spare you the details here and let Duke walk your through it, but poker as a life still for decision-making is 100x better than the otherwise finite world of chess moves.
Note: I'm not knocking chess per se; just trying to provide context and contrasts with poker.
I have 3 kids (in their 20s) that started playing chess fanatically since last year. They never took interest earlier even while the house is filled with chess books and their dad is a pretty decent player (~fide 2000). I don't know why though, but I'm happy regardless.
My favorite recent bit about chess is that, in the wake of the success of QUEEN'S GAMBIT, there was a marketing push to make a new board game based on the show.
A new board game. Based on a show essentially ABOUT a board game. The mind boggles.
It may sound weird but playing a game of online chess works as a way for me to unwind.
I have been playing for several decades now. Never picked up a chess book/video/tutorial in my life (after the initial introduction by a relative). Always played with the flow. I would admit sometimes I do wish I should learn some openings but somehow deep down I couldn't see myself learning chess through a tut. May be some day someone would convince me otherwise, who knows...
and I am in no way a pro, hover around 1600 rapid on chess.com. It says I am ahead of 98.5% folks. Not sure how will this 1600 translate to ELO ratings.
YouTube recently has been recommending me chess videos. I think I clicked on one videomonths ago during the cheating controversy and now it's non-stop. I wonder how much of algos on YouTube, TikTok has to do with it...
I don't use any social media (apart from this one, and visiting some subreddits without logging in) and Tate was indeed widely talked about for the 2-3 months before his arrest, at least in Britain.
You don't have to be on social media - the UK newspapers and other sources will pick up what ever people are talking about on there.
Same—but it's because I'm not a teen boy. Friends who are teachers inform me that he was and is incredibly popular in that demographic. I dunno about "most internet famous person" but he was probably at least in the running.
It had exploded in popularity way before him, due to the other reasons mentioned; streamers, Queen's Gambit, etc. but the article is focused on a purported post January spike in schools - and considering the baleful influence he's claimed to have in them, it would also therefore seem necessary to factor him in to any analysis here.
I think it has a lot more to do with popular chess streamers like Hikaru, Botez sister, gothamchess etc. Andrew Tate promoted a lot of stuff and but I never came across his chess content and I follow chess content quite a bit. Also, I just googled what his chess rating was and his dad Emory Tate [1] came up, so it seems like he isn't even the most influential chess player in his family.
I recently screened a few intern resumes that listed chess rankings/scores/clubs—in a world of too many boring & plain resumes that fail to show aspects of your character, this was a welcome addition of variety—but sadly they were primarily only cultural fits on my team, not technical fits.
I’m almost certain most play it for the status. The average elo on chess.com is abysmal with most just playing for one turn copy paste tricks at a fast pace. At least that’s what I discovered when creating a smurf account. I just don’t see how that’s fun when the fun of chess comes from how nuanced and deep it is.
The game of chess has always been popular, but recently it has attracted a lot of interest because of the success of Netflix's "The Queen's Gambit" series. People of all ages, especially teens, have taken a newfound interest in the game as a result of the presentation.
Sure Netflix played a part but a larger portion of the growth was probably from popular twitch streamers/YouTubers who picked up the hobby and brought their young communities with them to chess tournaments vs other similar streamers etc in recent years.
It's become like a social status among people to have a decent elo, a horrible marker for intelligence but a growing popular one.
For me it was the YouTube algorithm. One day it recommended a video by agadmator chess about a classic Bobby Fischer game. I've been following it ever since and really had a lot of fun watching his breakdown of the classical world chess championship that just happened.
I used to love chess as a teenager. Chess club and playing Battle Chess on my early computer.
I started picking it up now and the resources to find games are great with Chess.com and Lichess but have found myself trying to relearn the skills and reading after losing 100 straight games.
It’s a good ole time tested game of strategy. I suspect the recent rise in players has largely been due to the pandemic, a group of dedicated streamers, and chess being an easy game people can pick up (mastering it is another beast).
I did poorly at chess because instead of thinking of my next move I'd be thinking about writing a program to figure out the next move for me. You could call it the "Programmer's Curse".
You and Alan Turing both. He was an appallingly bad chess player, but wrote an algorithm which was more or less minimax, the standard algorithm today. Unfortunately he didn't have hardware to run it on.
Not a teen, but I found that a game of chess whenever I'm idle (in a train, doctor waiting room) is a very nice time passing activity. Makes you think a bit .. unlike infinite scrolling news or tiks.
Prolly cuz most digital games have reduced in conplexity so much it's no more complex than a pachinko machine. Chess sure becomes an intellectually stimulating game again
It's obviously a complete gamechanger when you have a plattform like chess.com which automatically figures out how good you are and matches you with a roughly equally skilled opponent.