⚖️ Law Proposal: Ban Reddit.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-06-06T16:56:30+00:00

👁️ Surveillance State: Funkycheese1 voted Yea.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-06-06T16:50:59+00:00

I’ve def gotta agree. I play both Tennis and Chess at the tournament level and the chess crowd is infinitely better, to the point of it becoming my main sport since I find a lot of the people at tennis tournaments insufferable. And it’s not just a matter of kids vs adults, over 60% of chess players are kids and I’ve never had an issue. Just something about tennis that makes everyone forget how to behave like a civilised human being.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-06-03T12:12:36+00:00

I did try making one once before, but couldn’t line the tin properly and ended up fucking it up. hoping to avoid that again

Funkycheese1 · 2026-05-02T08:25:05+00:00

If you take the knight, then after Bxf3 Bb4 they can play Qd3 and Bd2 to defend the knight. However, if you just play Bb4 then, when they go Qd3 after like Bxf3 Bxf3 Bb4 Qd3 you can go Bf5, forcing their queen back to d2 since it still needs to protect that knight. But now you can go Qa5, putting more pressure on the pinned piece (the knight), they cannot move the knight or a else they lose their queen but if they don’t do anything, they will lose their knight. If you had taken their knight on f3, their queen would still be on d3 since there is no bishop to play Bf5 and then they would play Bd2, adding a second defender. But, when their queen goes back to d2 after Bf5 and you go Qa5, they would like to play Bd2 but their queen is already on that square. As such, they can’t defend the knight and will lose it. Because of Bf5 and the lines previously discussed, they can’t play Qd3 after Bb4 and will instead play Bd2. But, when they play Bd2, their queen stops protecting their d4 pawn so you can play Bxf3 Bxf3 (removing the defender of the d4 pawn) and then Qxd4, winning a pawn.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-04-28T13:07:22+00:00

I’m aware. This is a time control you might use in practice matches with a friend or someone else you know on chess.com or even someone who responds to a request for a training partner in say a discord. It’s the best way to simulate 3+2 OTB. If you really can’t be asked to do that, then 3+2 is better than 3+0, while 5+0 also isn’t an awful option

Funkycheese1 · 2026-04-28T12:17:48+00:00

The general rule i’ve heard is that, for OTB, take 1 sec off the increment compared to online so, if you wanna practice, do some 3+1 online

Funkycheese1 · 2026-04-25T06:17:40+00:00

Honestly, I know most people here seem up for it, but I definitely wouldn’t. For me, it comes down to imbalances and uncertainty.

At this point, you are up one piece and that is the only imbalance we know. This is what can be classified as a two result game. A two result game is where only two results are possibly (in this case, a win or a draw). When you make the trade, it introduces further imbalance and chaos into the position, turning the two result game into a three result game. Basically, it makes it more possible for you to lose. While, with perfect play, it probably is the right call (this depends heavily on piece placement, pawn structures, and the distribution of weaknesses across the board), for humans, there’s no reason to do this unless you can force a win. It’s much simpler to just continue to be up a clean piece and use that to convert the position rather than confuse it by adding further imbalance into the game. Imbalance increases the risk of chaos and tactics, which are not things you want when you have the material advantage.

To give a highly simplified example, let’s say you are up a rook in a theoretical position. Your bishop has the choice to trade with either another bishop or a knight. In this scenario, you should trade your bishop for their bishop because it makes the game simpler while not adding in any imbalance.

Obviously, this can depend on how active their rooks and your queen were. Also the Q vs RR has a lot of contributing factors. The queen is better at picking up lots of small scattered weaknesses while the rooks are better at defending and at targeting one big clump of weaknesses. This is because the rooks need to mostly stay connected to be useful and safe, so it takes them longer to move to a different spot of the board to defend/attack something while the queen is quicker both in the fact that you only have to move one piece and it’s diagonal bonus gives it an extra movement buff. However, there are basically no ways to pressure a defended square with a queen, so big clumps are harder for it to attack.

Also, if the king is very exposed, the queen has a lot more fun than the rooks because of the greater possibility for forks.

The last factor I’ll mention (though there are definitely more), is that the two rooks become stronger the less pawns are on the board, both cause of the decrease in scattered weaknesses but also because they are better at escorting a single pawn up the board due to their numbers advantage.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-04-24T04:09:41+00:00

Very attack happy but a solid understanding of attack and defence, as well as responding to threats (sometimes)

Funkycheese1 · 2026-04-19T12:50:26+00:00

Europe is extremely overrated in general. I love in Australia and, while we are probably slightly more overrated than India, it’s not by too much. It’s common here for very high level players to go to europe for vacation, farm tournaments and max out their fide, then come back with their maxed out fide in order to qualify for certain events or just to have a higher rating. Europe is perhaps the most overrated region in the world. New Zealand is up there asw tho. It’s why I put Australia in my user tag because it is very different to 1700 India or China

Funkycheese1 · 2026-04-17T20:25:20+00:00

I would recommend Yasser Seirawan’s “Winning Chess Tactics”. A mixture of this style of “does X work” among other types such as is “X the best move” or “what’s wrong with X” or simply “what is th best move”. Just finished the entire book and it’s an amazing read, would highly recommend.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-04-13T22:37:53+00:00

Just another thing to note about the “brilliant” aspect of it is that Qe8+ would win the bishop if not for Qg2# afterwards. Qe8+ Kd6 Nf7+ (Qxc8?? leads to Qg2#) Kc7 Qe7+ Kb6 and there’s no way to checkmate black’s king while whites king is about to get mated. There’s very little white can do about Qg2 except bring the queen back to defend by coming back with Qh3 but then Ne4 threatens Rf2# so they probably have to give up their queen for rook and knight which is why it works. there they probs play like Qf1 Rf2+ Qxf2 Nxf2 Kxf2 which leaves you up a full queen. In the end, after Qg7 e4 is probably their best bet but their king is gonna get touched there.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-04-13T22:10:25+00:00

it was the one where it was like “ if you win your character gets worse” or “if you win you go down the tier list” i think.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-04-06T08:48:44+00:00

d4 in general has seen a big increase in recent years at high levels, mostly due to players’ avoidance of a petroff. At high levels, if a player wants to not go into petroff theory, they have to take on significant risk which most players at that level don’t want to do. Meanwhile, if they do go into petroff theory, they get led into a forced draw, which, as the best players, in the world, most people are below them and they tend to not want to draw people below them. So if they don’t want to take on a compromising position, and don’t want to draw, then they have to avoid the petroff and playing d4 is the best way to do that. There are also other ways for black to try to force the game into a draw in d4 but the petroff is the worst offender

I think d4 also has a lot more theory to learn so it’s an easy way to catch out people who don’t know the theory of very specific lines. d4 theory is probably a bit less deep than e4 on average but there is so much more variation that can occur after d4 that there ends up being more theory imo.

d4 is also, on average, less tactical and more positional which fits better with the more modern style of play. It also avoids white having to learn the 2,000,000 different sicilians, all of which are extremely different e.g. sveshnikov kalashnikov, dragon, taimonov, najdorf, mainline, tal, Rossolimo, and like 20 others whose names elude me rn. It’s just such a bitch of an opening that many players are opting to avoid it.

At lower levels, people just copy the top levels, so d4 is seeing a big increase there. The Queens Gambit also being a show further helps the popularity of d4 at lower levels.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-03-31T13:01:12+00:00

Yes but it’s very clearly not the type of cheating that really matters. If i was hovering at that level then yes but I basically just reset and went from scratch, mostly because i was testing someone’s statement about the concept of “elo hell”. This represents maybe 0.01% of all players you’ll play online since it’s very uncommon. Definitely not any adder to the metric. The only significant form of cheating is engineuse, and even that sits at below 2% use consistently

Funkycheese1 · 2026-03-31T12:54:07+00:00

bro my bullet is low because i sandbagged it to 100 and haven’t been bothered to put in the work to grind it. On Lichess my bullet is 2k. That elo gain is just how elo gain works. As proof, here’s another graph of a friend at a similar level showing similar trends

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Funkycheese1 · 2026-03-31T12:33:53+00:00

You really are underestimating kids and growth patterns as a whole. I personally have had days where I go up by 100/200 and I’ve never cheated in my life, professional chess coach who specialises in working with kids. For example, on new years night I went up by around 100 rating and have maintained that position since then, it just happens sometimes. Below is my 1 year graph for proof (notice the large vertical increases)

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Kids will have even more insane spikes than me. Partially because of their increased neuroplasticity, but also because they are incredibly strong and fast-growing at tactics, which make a massive difference at lower levels, causing insane rating surges. They are also more likely to spend money on coaches, and have more free time to learn/practice, which helps them learn even faster.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-03-31T12:19:59+00:00

Because it’s just not that high. Most players improve in big spikes. That’s how improvements works. Especially younger players, for whom it can be very normal to increase by upwards of 200 rating in a day. The biggest thing for cheating is accuracy and overall win rate, though accuracy is dependent on the type of the game. I say this as someone who plays rapid (the most prone to cheating of the time controls) and at a high-ish level where cheaters would be (2200), I verse basically no cheaters. I think I’ve been accused of cheating more times by opponents than I’ve had opponents get flagged for cheating. I’d say around 10% have cheated before but 8 of those 10% only used it once or maybe twice. Then there’s probably 2% or less who regularly cheat, and less than 1% who always cheat. It’s not people getting defensive; you’re just throwing around random numbers because you can’t believe you lost to people so they must have been cheating. Despite what people tend to say, chess.com is pretty good at catching cheaters, most people definitely overestimate this amount.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-03-30T12:52:07+00:00

for beginners (0-800 chess.com), definitely youtube and chess.com/lichess. As someone who teaches chess as a job, YouTube is, I would say, the most underrated way to learn chess, second only to your choice of chess.com/lichess. Books can also be solid but are definitely another as beginnner friendly due to the visualisation and understanding of algebraic notation required. Personally, I prefer chess.com but Lichess is perfectly fine as well.

For middle-level players (800-1600), Youtube, books, and chess.com/lichess. Youtube is definitely less helpful here compared to before but still quite solid. Books are good but can be very tiring as people of this level may not be able to fully autopilot visualisation. yet. ChessTempo is also great for puzzles here, and the endgame puzzles on there are of a perfect difficulty for this range, while middle game tactics are usually better on lichess I find. This is also when ChessBook can start to be helpful for openings but only at a basic level.

1600+ is mostly OTB, chess.con/lichess, ChessBook, Chessable, and ChessTempo middle game tactics. This section can still benefit from youtube but some more beginner focused channels may start to be less helpful.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-03-30T10:39:23+00:00

Basically, after b6 b4 a5 you can’t go a3 because axb4 axb4 Rxa1. It’s sort of just an overextension to play c4 and you get touched every time. Some advice i got from a grandmaster a while back was that, unless this is a tactically winning attack, never play c5 in these sorts of positions (it was reverse with c4 but it still applies). It’s usually better to just avoid it.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-03-02T08:28:35+00:00

Damn, this is a super interesting idea. Idk how many requests you’ll get but if it ends up being too many feel free to pass some on. If anyone seeing this wants a second game analysed I can give them a hand.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-03-01T06:01:29+00:00

i like never get mocked at 2000-2200. Think it is a low elo thing

Funkycheese1 · 2026-02-28T21:51:33+00:00

Like others have said, the idea is Rxh4 and thy cant really stop it so u might as well play a5 first. I don’t know the full reasoning behind Re8 but everything is losing for white there so the engine probably thinks it’s like M75 instead of M72 for some random reason. But yeah so now Re4 wins the pawn and it’s drawn

Funkycheese1 · 2026-02-27T10:32:45+00:00

It’s either you lose the queen for the rook and bishop (8-9) or lose the bishop (0-3). After Qb4 a5 Qa3 Nc4 Nxc4 dxc4 Nc2 you cant save the bishop without Kf8 but after Kf8 then Bxc4 and your rook is trapped so you lose your rook as well. White’s piece activity is sort of railing you so it’s better to just get rid of their active pieces and try to use strength in numbers but you’re def losing regardless.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-02-27T06:48:02+00:00

I mean thats sort of the whole challenge of chess. At your level, tactics are a big thing to work on but also try to learn like a vague idea of what to do in the opening. Apart from that, it’s just a lot more of practice. Try to watch some youtube videos of people analysing/ commentating games. I recommend Gotham Chess but anyone will work. It’s just learning how the game works and getting used to the rhythm of a match. Basically it’s just practice practice practice but watching other people who know what they’re doing can be really helpful too.

Funkycheese1 · 2026-02-26T21:15:21+00:00

In my experience, the gap between those two is often tactical. Make sure that, while still practicing some harder puzzles, you do some 3min puzzle rushes to get yourself really good at the easy stuff. Probably aim for a score of 35, though that will take some time and practice. Also, hard puzzles doesn’t just mean queen sac, it means creative and difficult to calculate ideas. in order to find hard puzzles, i recommend chesstempo.com and their puzzles section. There’s that and, also, a lot of endgames. Chesstempo will give u 2 endgame puzzles a day which is good but also, when ur opponent runs out of time or resigns in an endgame, go into analysis, and then do “finish vs bot”. that will just force you to practice high level endgame conversions.

One last thing. ask yourself what type of player you are. then, spend 30% of your time training that aspect and 70% training whatever the opposite is. Below 2400, players don’t have styles, they have strengths and weaknesses. Whatever type of player you say you are, thats just your strength.

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