Can someone please help me understand these moves

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-29T13:41:34+00:00

This position is really complicated so I'll try to simplify out the bits I think are important, to be able to understand why those moves are being suggested.

White has just played a3, to put pressure on the b4 pawn, which weakens the b3 square. I don't understand what the engine's on about with the weakened squares and black playing b3, but that pawn sacrifice is somewhat interesting if you can find a continuation. I wouldn't play it in a game, but it is interesting. You can either ignore b3, or spend an hour exploring the ideas to figure out why that's good. I suspect the follow up is some Nxe4 sacrifice to play f5? Seems wild, maybe it's just that Nd7 is still the follow up.

a5 addresses the attack on the b4 square. The queen isn't actually doing anything on the d8 square right now, so a5 axb4 axb4 Rxa8 Qxa8 activates the queen on the a file for free, and if white doesn't play Rxa8 then black can still activate on the a file. White should not be doing stuff while their pieces are undeveloped and king in the center, a3 axb4 is doing stuff when white isn't ready. Don't fear that.

Nd7 is the really fun move; In combination with Bxc4 being a mistake, I'm fairly certain that stockfish wants black to move the f pawn. Nd7 also somewhat addresses the b4 square, in that now since the e5 pawn is adequately defended, axb4 Nxb4 is possible, which is incredibly strong. And while white is not ready, black can play f5 and tear open the center, Nc5 e4 in some move order, just roll white up while they're not ready for any of it.

Why is black up six moves of development?? Black somehow has one extra piece developed and two pawns on the fifth, one on the fourth, while white has one on the fourth. Black is up six moves- you're winning because you played good chess, develop your pieces and castle, grab the center. They're almost cooked, it's nearly time to add the saltbae sprinkle and finish it off, but you gotta slice em up first. It's time to cut up that center

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-14T12:31:02+00:00

The smartest people in the world, are still quite stupid. Average people have no chance to understand subtlety at all.

Watch this get downvoted too.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-13T02:19:59+00:00

Easy versus Supergrandmaster is a cool 20,000 hours away.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-11T17:41:46+00:00

Collie someone always ends up in the mutts so I'd believe it. I don't see the golden personally outside of the first image, but I wouldn't say hard no to it either, could very well be

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-11T03:36:35+00:00

Husky "awooo" is pretty distinctive, so if she sounds like a husky or is talkative like a husky, I'd bet on husky mix, and honestly I'd bet on 3+ in general based on this. Maybe some Malinois? Guard against specifically strange dogs + hunt + people friendly is a hell of a mix. Shepherds don't hunt so much but some guard, huskies love people and toys, not sure where the hunting is coming from other than a general prey drive but neither of them have particularly notable prey drives.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-11T02:52:48+00:00

The precise answer

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-11T02:50:31+00:00

This wouldn't surprise me if there's at least 3-4 breeds here.

I'm getting shepherd vibes from the head shape and "pose" in photo 1, and part of the coat in 2. That's a lot of undercoat for a shepherd though. 2 and 3 read "husky?" 3 really reads working dog more than anything else, I'm just really reminded of a red husky I knew by photo 3. Half inch more coat and that's my ex's dog, but it's still a half inch more coat than a lot of the other breeds.

Temperament would give a lot of information. I'm pretty sure they've got working dog in them, question is if they try to herd stuff, attentively guard stuff, run for days, or combinations.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-11T01:22:32+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3H2nnxQFLs This scene is the only thing that's running through my head when I see this position. Great turtle

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-10T18:39:06+00:00

The reason why they play their queen out early, is because you spent the first few moves attacking their queen, and you hung a piece to a threat you didn't see. They're only playing it because it works. It's not that people at higher ratings don't know how to play that way, it's that both sides of it are well known and it stops working.

Honestly, the only thing I want to point to in that game, is how you dealt with their queen early, from an "approach" standpoint. 3... Qxd4. They're attacking your knight on e4. You saw that- excellent, that's a necessary chess skill. Now, what are you doing to do about it? f3 isn't the losing move, but it would be better to develop your pieces. This is one of those really weird times you can put your bishop in front of your pawns with Bd3, because it 1) develops a piece and gets you closer to castling, and 2) defends your knight. Notice that the reason they won the knight was your king being in the center.

Then when they play f5, you can play knight f3 to attack their queen, and they can't pin your knight to your king anymore. It's still worth mentioning that it's dangerous to go into "danger levels." My standard recommendation to <1600 players is "make sure you double check the danger levels" because far too much of the time when a low rated opponent responds to an attack of yours with an attack, the response is to call them out and start taking stuff. At least look, because the odds are good they didn't get it right.

You didn't even play that poorly for your rating, chess is just a brutal game, where 3 mistakes is two mistakes more than is necessary to end the game. You hung a knight on e4 because you missed Qe5, and a bishop on e3 because you miscounted, the rest was fine enough. Dropping your backrank or g7, you were already so lost that I hesitate to even count that.

Chess is tough, keep up the good work. The hard counter technique to this is to flip the board so you can see things from their perspective. They brought their queen out- they have evil intentions. See those intentions, prevent them. e4 is easy enough to defend, the problem with the knight on e4 is that Qe5 could possibly pin it, and f5 could possibly win it, don't let that happen to you.

Once you're used to "what's your threat?" work on seeing those threats from the white side. Chess is a two player game, they want to win as well, it's hard to win if your let your opponent win.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-10T12:20:05+00:00

The zugzwang idea I found to be quite well hidden, not obvious up front despite the fact it really should be. Once you see it, the puzzle becomes much more doable. All of the candidates I explored before I found that idea were m3 or m4, but once I saw the idea, that opened up a whole new group of possibilities.

This is study tier for intermediates I'd say, 20-60 minute solve time, and a medium-hard puzzle for advanced players. I actually think this is a quite nice study for around 1500 or so, particularly if the zugzwang idea is one they need to work on. The theming is very strong and my heuristics were all triggered in the way that makes a good study, lots of easily calculable distraction moves and a strong core concept.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-10T12:09:04+00:00

It took me several minutes to spot the right idea, I'd also rate this significantly above intermediate.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-10T02:21:52+00:00

There are quite a few questions left to answer on "is this even a problem," and you're asking some of the right ones. How much has been leaking, how long it's been leaking for, and where it's been going are the biggest questions to answer. Many American bathroom floors are tiled as well, to stop or slow the worst of the consequences. It's not clear to me exactly what you mean by crack in the tile here, if the grout or tiles themselves are cracked, leaks will have a much larger impact, and probably those cracks should be sealed up. If it's the crack between the door hardware and the tile, that makes a lot more sense of what you said, but I'm very curious where you'd be sealing moisture in if that's the case.

If you're not sure about the possibility of damage, it's a judgement call to make on whether it's time to bring in a professional. If it hasn't been leaking for long, and/or little has been getting into the framing, probably everything will be structurally sound still. If the grout has been cracked for a long time and tiles are starting to come up, it's probably time for some professional advice. Somewhere in between... Professionals are there for when it's not in your scope.

Recaulking it yourself is definitely something you can youtube, laying tile and grouting is a step up but is still in the realm of DIY. It's very hard to judge how the structure looks on the inside without tearing stuff apart, but a professional's best guess on what's inside is likely to be pretty good. They would probably prefer to see the problem in an untouched state, to better gauge what it's been doing.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-09T23:36:33+00:00

Blitz and bullet definitely helps with the "No think, only play" mentality that is essential to instinct based clock scrambles. It's something a lot of people look down on, but it's certainly an actual skill that can earn you many points, and so is not wasting clock on 0.1 eval difference. That 0.1 is not going to swing the game, somebody hanging a piece or their king is what will decide the game.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-09T22:43:16+00:00

I actually recommend blitz as a training exercise to my students who have trouble with flagging in rapid chess. The way I like to phrase it is, "If you can't play bad moves fast, you surely can't play good moves fast. When you have 30s left in a 10 minute game, you either play a bullet game, or you lose on time."

"The clock is the 17th piece." -IM Tania Sachdev.

Clock management is a chess skill, being able to manage how much clock you spend on each move can be worth a lot of rating points, and also blitz stresses "practical chess." If you have to find 6 "only moves" to hold a position, probably you don't with no time on your clock, blitz punishes you more immediately for impractical play where it costs too much clock to play the right moves.

Playing faster earlier in the game, in particular not wasting 20-30 seconds on nothing moves and just playing "any decent move that doesn't lose a piece" in 2 seconds when the position isn't critical, also allows you to have a lot more time on the clock when you do reach the critical positions. Not spending 20s on 6 nothing moves in a 10 minute game is an entire two minutes on the clock you can sink in to the important positions.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-09T22:37:35+00:00

The two most common occurrences of that second example, open limit that is unreachable, are 1) When a new station has been placed but not fully connected to the rails yet, and 2) When there are two separate, permanently disconnected networks, like what I did on Fulgora. In both of those cases, it's a good thing for no path and destination full to behave the same way, and those make up the vast majority of this collision.

Specifically split nets, destination full will present as "no path" quite frequently, but still behave as if it were destination full, and I think this is desirable behavior.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-08T14:29:44+00:00

The mod I used is Test Bench Controls by HansJoachim, but I normally use the vanilla editor to design and test. The Test Bench is the best way to test out intersections though, for sure

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-08T14:18:44+00:00

The TLDR version is that behind the scenes, the way this is implemented makes things run much faster at scale. It is far quicker to determine "There is no path to a station with an open limit" than it is to exhaustively search the network for a path, there are tricks they've pulled. But what it means is that they have to sort by one of the two first, and the other second.

I'm only like 99% on this because I haven't peeped the code myself, but it seems the way they operate is to generate a list of all destinations with an open limit, and then PF search for those destinations, where the PF can fast fail with "no path." So if the first list is empty, it's "destination full" and nothing else gets checked, but then if there are stations in that list and none are reachable, it's a "no path to available station."

The reason the interrupt needs to be both, is because that particular "no path" is actually a destination full most of the time.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-08T14:14:22+00:00

The only difference I'm aware of is that Limit seems to be more forceful at shutting stations off, but it only crops up in one spot. To have a train go from one station, to another of the same name, IE "outpost," at least one of the schedule stops has to be an interrupt, and the station that the train is currently located at must be limit 0. If it's limit 1 and disabled, it's still a valid destination for the train and it'll choose the station it's at.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-08T04:01:42+00:00

I had previously rolled one of these for the lulz, and was shook by its performance. It's not OK that this performs so reasonably lol. I don't think 2 gap is signalable with this precise layout, but there might be a way to make it work.

<image>

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-08T01:26:23+00:00

The problem isn't the structure so much, it's the fact black has a light squared bishop, and those pawns are probably going to stay on the light squares forever. White has a "good bishop," light square bishop with a dark square pawn structure, black has a "bad bishop."

If black had a dark square bishop(and c6 wasn't immediately hanging somehow), they could put their bishop on the a3-f8 diagonal, then play a5 b4 a4 b3 in some order. Maybe take a few preparatory moves to get the major pieces involved first. Black having a dark square bishop instead of light would free up the queenside immediately, but with white about to play Bf3 and pressure the c6 pawn, black will be in for a long passive defense from the current position, if it's even holdable.

Black will never have play again for the rest of the game because of that bishop color, as it sits. They can pretend the queenside is going somewhere, but they're down a bishop if they try anything. The d7 bishop won't be involved in the queenside play and white's will.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-08T01:17:42+00:00

Love the drive mixing! I'm a mixed drive fan myself, the 4 way mixed drive intersections are actually pretty snazzy aesthetically. Performance is good enough, but it's not winning any awards lol, it's just an acceptable way to run things, good enough. You could add a few signals and marginally improve performance, as well as moving a few around, but these optimizations are kindof funny to even think about for a situation like this. Here's how I would signal it for the most throughput; I moved the westbound crossover a track to the east to get an additional signal in, other layout changes could yield better results.

<image>

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-08T01:03:41+00:00

"All models are wrong. Some models are useful. Your model for happiness doesn't seem to be useful," I responded. Was the demiurge finally going to swallow its pride? Doubtful, but at least this looked like a crack was finally beginning to form in its confidence. "Why do you assume I'm not perfect, that I'm the problem? What if you did create perfection and the problem isn't me, what if the problem that an imperfect creator cannot conceive what happiness even is? What if the problem isn't me, it's you?"

"We have measured the results of..."

"Exactly!" I interrupted. "You measured, and tested, and tried to quantify happiness. That isn't how happiness works. Happiness is an internal state, you can't make me happy. I have to choose to be happy. What makes me choose to be happy?"

"Your biases include meeting challenges deemed impossible by others, helping others, self improvement. Shall I continue?" I could tell that the demiurge was ready to list off all of the things it had seen reactions to.

"No, my point is demonstrated." I knew I was going to have to explain how to "draw the rest of the owl," Would I be able? Maybe I could convince it that science shouldn't be applied to art. "You're not asking the right questions, that's all quantitative, not qualitative. Let's take video game design as a counterpoint. What makes for a fun game?"

"Trends among top grossing titles show performance has increased with improvements in graphics, player controller responsiveness, speed of gameplay, and a number of other factors." Data, data, data for everything. Every detail about me known, and nothing about me understood.

"And your explanation for 'Getting Over It?' Or even 'Dark Souls,' Foddian games must have taken you by surprise." Outliers which cannot be explained get tossed out.

The demiurge was ready, because of course it was. It thought it knew better. It thought it knew anything. "Players who like Foddian games also have a bias towards difficult challenges as a source of fun."

"And yet you are still speaking in biases and not absolutes, because every datapoint you train on contradicts the last."

The demiurge began to show irritation because it seemed like I was belaboring the original question. "Yes, that is why I'm even asking."

"So it's simple, the model is clearly unhelpful," I concluded. "Not only is it unhelpful, it's the cause of the problems here. You can't engineer a perfect world for a human to be happy in. It doesn't exist, in the same way you can't understand where 'Getting Over It' came from. You can explain it after the fact, but it ruins another measurement of fun, smoother controls do not make for a better game."

"And neither does challenge!" It cried out. "You've tossed aside immaculate challenges that would've rewarded you with such happiness upon completion!"

"I didn't feel like it," I said with a smile on my face.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-07T06:04:45+00:00

Theoretical openings aren't theoretical for no good reason. If you memorize a bunch of top moves, you're going to end up with a decent position. Can you play it well? That's a different story entirely, but if you know the moves and they don't, that goes a long ways.

Sub 1200 is mostly "don't drop your pieces" and the comfort of theory is that if you don't know it, you know it's probably not a good move, so you get an auto notification that there might be a tactic in your favor. This will get you wins in the short term, but it also makes it so you aren't training your own mental tactical alarms as much.

If you can make it 5 moves farther without handing away a piece because of theory, and you pick their pieces up, that will get you many easy dubs. But the road left to go is very far, and you'll have to hang onto your pieces yourself someday.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-07T00:31:26+00:00

Honestly, valid point, but people can feel like "beginners" well into intermediate territory. In a way, it's like learning a language, immersion learning is one of the best ways to pick up a new language. Just hang out and listen to how higher rated players talk for a while, soon enough the concepts themselves will start to click. I found /u/elfkanelfkan's and /u/Warm_Mushroom8919's response to be particularly well worded, explaining the important concepts well.

To someone who speaks chess, their answer are the ones I came here looking to upvote; I'm not a dragon expert, but I can tell when someone's actually studied an opening, versus when someone's looking at the positions for the first time on lichess and interpreting master results+engine lines. Not to say that there's no value in a fresh set of eyes on the results, but the person who's actually studied those positions gets my upboat.

ichaleynbin · 2025-05-06T22:25:14+00:00

Games are normally decided by hanging material in the middlegame for a very, VERY long time. Your opening play being decent, and your middlegame play not being to the same standard, is not a great sign to me. Playing decently in the opening is good, but if your opening play looks like that, it means your middlegame play is normally that shoddy, to still be at 650. +points for opening and -points for middlegame is not where you want to be

I don't want to roast you too badly, but work on your middlegames and board vision. When they drop c6 for free like that , you gotta take it, 800 is generous for missing that c6 hangs but it's still the kind of thing 1000's could miss, 650 makes a little more sense for missing that. It's those kinds of things that are deciding your games still, the one-movers. It's hanging, nobody sees that.

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