My gosh this is me every game I’ve ever played. I get so focused on my own plans that I wind up overlooking something stupid. I’m getting better, having been playing a decent amount since this thread came up, but it still happens far too often.
I was getting rather hot under the collar when I saw the Ne4 notification come across my dash as I was on my way to visit a client. I could hardly believe it. I lost my last game to @Juan_Raigada in a similar way.
Pressure was on, though.
I love working with a nice wooden set as well. I’m so tempted to break down and grab these:
https://www.noj.si/?mod=catalog&action=productDetails&ID=182
and:
I know I would never use it enough to justify the cost though.
Edit: I’ve wanted a version of that set on the front of the Tal bok ever since I first saw in many years ago.
The truly sad, oblivious moment. Up until I lost, I was very happy with my board position and how the pieces developed.
This is what I have so far for round 2. Let me know if is missed a finished game or got the result wrong.
A neural net chess engine that’s been specifically trained to play like a human of a given level would, by using online games of that level as the corpus:
I’d been hoping for something exactly like this, since playing Stockfish on low difficulty levels is so incredibly unnatural.
This would be cool. That’s what I’ve always been looking for in a computer opponent, one that plays somewhere near my level. Typically what I’ve encountered in the past is either unbeatable or as you said unnatural where it plays strong and then occasionally just makes a brain dead move.
Have you fired up a game against the computer? Gonna have to check this out.
Probably the holy grail of computer chess. If someone can actually solve it well it would be great. No one likes getting their ass handed to them by a 3500 chess engine, or a chess engine that plays like a GM for 20 moves and plays like a 500 player for 1.
OK - this is VERY cool. It plays very human, but also has cool tools after a game in a post game analysis mode. For example, you can click on the “book” and it will show what opening is being played, odds of white vs. black of each move, but also show past master games with the current moves and you can click on the listed game and it will switch to that game and let you play through it.
This is the kind of thing you’d expect to have to pay hundreds of dollars for.
I think Chessbase has their online tool available for free as well:
https://database.chessbase.com/
https://openings.chessbase.com/
I’m not sure what functionality is gated by payment in there. I know it does limit the amount of games returned in live database to like the top 1000 vs their actual program which gives you everything. Chess.com should have an opening explorer as well, but I don’t know if it lets non-paying members look at master games.
Other interesting tools that have come online recently, but could cost money:
https://decodechess.com/ - tries to give analysis in words instead of just lines
https://www.chessable.com/ - spaced repetition learning. I was really hoping Chessbase would incorporate something closer to this in Chessbase 16, but apparently they did not. It sounds like they did add some interesting tools for opening study based on your preferred playstyle though. Chessbase does offer spaced repetition learning for openings. Free Chessable courses is where I started to work on the Nimzo and Ragozin that @newbrof and I started in.
Congrats to @SamS for a well deserved win. That was a fun game, and you kept me on my heels the entire time.
Two games still in progress in round two.
That was a really tough game - you kept playing good moves I did not even think of and it kept screwing up my plans!
The post game tools are what is available on lichess, which is one of the very popular chess sites. Lichess is great, it’s a non profit chess site and all their code is open source. The same things you’d have to pay for on chess.com you get on lichess for free. (That being said chess.com does have some pretty cool features like the video lesson content and I love puzzle rush)
I tried a few times, I can get 3 or 4 moves, but not only 3. Will give it another pass tonight.
The answer
Q-h7.
1… K-b8, 2 RxP! (not R-d1? defeated by K-c8!); K-c8 3 R-a8 mate.
1… P-a2, 2 Q-b1! (not R-d1? defeated by P = Q pinning the R); K-a7 3 RxP mate.
There is definitely something to be said for the physicality of using a board and pieces, while I’ve got a wood Staunton that is the easiest to look at from a play stand point, I’ve still got a soft spot in my heart for this Alice in Wonderland I pulled out my wife and kid have been playing every day since watching Queens’s Gambit.
Got this one many moons ago in 1966.
you also can do the Charlton Heston thing as in Omega Man or was it Soylent Green (?) when he comes home and play chess using voice. “Alexa, pawn to e4” There are some chess apps in the Amazon app store that let you do this …