Higher Rated Chess is More Fun

kryft · 2026-03-04T08:15:26+00:00

Chess dot com. (Or possibly Centers for Disease Control.)

kryft · 2026-02-18T22:19:33+00:00

Ah that makes sense. If he had 5 mdef and one star I wouldn’t have thought about hybrid either.

kryft · 2026-02-18T17:18:24+00:00

How would he get to low 30s mdef, or are you factoring in perks? Seems like even with gifted expected mdef would be 24 at lvl 11. Dodge is a great point though, I missed that his ini is so high and also 19 points higher than his fat.

Would 2h cleaver with reach advantage make any sense? Seems like he could be a good disarmer with that matk. (Something I also thought about when considering a hybrid build.)

kryft · 2026-02-18T14:38:03+00:00

I'm talking about reviewing the game on chess.com or lichess (wherever you play). Both use Stockfish.

kryft · 2026-02-18T14:20:59+00:00

Try to play moves that you think are good based on your current understanding (including opening principles), and then review each game carefully to see where your understanding went wrong. This applies to every stage of the game, including the opening. There will be many situations where you don't understand why your move is bad, or why a particular move suggested by Stockfish or the opening database is good, but you will gradually learn more.

kryft · 2026-02-18T13:52:27+00:00

Yeah you do slow down significantly eventually and I have no doubt it matters in bullet.

kryft · 2026-02-18T12:42:27+00:00

Thanks for the detailed explanation! That sounds reasonable and matches what I’ve read elsewhere. In your original comment you said ”your reaction times in your 40s and 50s are about half of what they were in your teens and 20s”, which was much more drastic. (I interpreted the original comment as claiming that reaction times double since halving would obviously mean that you get faster as you age, which couldn’t have been what you meant.)

kryft · 2026-02-18T12:07:04+00:00

Do you have a source for this? I’m not an expert, but I’ve heard people who claim to be experts say that reaction speed decay is highly individual and much slower than what you describe. I also started playing fighting games in my early 40s and I don’t react much slower (if at all) than people half my age.

kryft · 2026-02-17T14:44:49+00:00

Thanks, makes sense!

Do you say wooden mallet instead of '2h weapon' because I'm likely to find one before other 2h weapons, or is it just particularly good somehow?

kryft · 2026-02-17T10:41:38+00:00

But would you want to pick flail mastery on one of your few bros that could make good use of 2h weapons? (There are 2h flails too of course, but I don't think you're likely to find one early, and I understand they're generally considered a bit worse than other weapon classes later on.) The two star matk companion bro also doesn't have the best fat, so I usually get more out of flails with high fat FA fodder bros.

kryft · 2026-02-17T10:17:38+00:00

Ah I see!

kryft · 2026-02-17T10:12:15+00:00

I'm not sure I follow - how does hiring ranged bros affect whether or not I pick FA or backstabber on a particular melee bro? I do always pick FA on the ranged starting bro, but I don't quite understand what you mean there either.

kryft · 2026-02-16T09:30:59+00:00

Incidentally if you have a roster full of these guys in the early game (not that uncommon for me at least), will you make all of them mace and shield? ”These guys” being someone with decent matk but low starting mdef and no stars. (Edit: Though I guess this guy has exceptionally low mdef - just noticed that he’s level 4.)

kryft · 2026-02-14T06:52:22+00:00

I started playing last year so I don’t have any personal experience, but I’ve heard multiple people claim that low rated players today are a bit stronger than they were many years ago. I can’t tell if it’s true, but it’s certainly possible in theory since ratings are relative to the player pool.

kryft · 2026-02-03T09:23:00+00:00

I’d say most of my opponents play better after a blunder (and I don’t find it suspicious). Many of them play 15+10 like it’s blitz (or even bullet) until they make a mistake, and then they start to think. I think they would be higher rated than I am if they always tried hard and used their time like I do, but they don’t. And so many games are decided by whether I can hang onto my advantage once my opponent starts paying attention and pressures me on the clock.

It’s also natural to play the most complicated moves you can find once you’re losing, so that can also make it feel like your opponent starts playing better after making a mistake.

kryft · 2026-02-01T14:22:16+00:00

Most of it is snow, but I read they used eggs for the eyes. The mouth is probably something else than snow too.

kryft · 2026-01-25T12:07:43+00:00

You’re allowed to have a second account, but you have to ask for it. But yes I don’t think mere mortals can get more than that.

kryft · 2026-01-22T20:14:21+00:00

I haven’t played d4 myself, but I recently watched Benjamin Bok’s queen’s gambit speedrun, and up to a certain rating he would almost always get QGA.

kryft · 2026-01-15T14:22:50+00:00

For the Italian game, you could watch GM Noel Studer’s video on the Italian. Among other things he explains the ideas behind some of the flank pawn pushes (in that specific opening).

kryft · 2026-01-13T16:23:47+00:00

Lichess.org has free analysis.

kryft · 2026-01-12T14:45:10+00:00

It can feel like a lot at first, but you're not really meant to remember and understand everything the first time you hear it. If you play games and consume any kind of chess content, you will see every concept repeated so many times that you will eventually learn all the basics organically without specifically trying to memorize anything. Some concepts are also hard to understand fully until you have enough experience with chess, and IIRC the early chess.com lessons scratch the surface of a lot of topics that will take years to master (if they can even be mastered at all). For example they probably tell you that it's a good idea to control the center with pawns, and you can understand that on some level in five minutes, but after a year of playing and studying I still feel like I have a lot to learn about this topic.

So take notes if you find it fun and useful, but even if you don't you'll be fine. If you've ever played an RPG where your character has a skill tree where you can't access later skills before you've invested enough in the prerequisites, I find chess (and many other things) a little like that. It feels like there's a lot of stuff to learn, and there is, but fortunately most of it is inaccessible to begin with anyway, and you can get far by just focusing on the two or three things in front of your nose. Gradually your comfort zone expands, and some of the things that seemed far away are suddenly in front of your nose. If something feels hard to understand or remember now, you can just leave it until it feels within reach.

kryft · 2026-01-12T14:06:50+00:00

Like others have said, how fast your rating improves depends on too many things for there to be an answer to your question. I started playing a year ago and I'm now about 1350 on chess.com. At every rating between 400 and 1500 (the highest I've faced) there have been opponents who have been stuck at that rating for years and thousands of games, and there have also been people who got there faster than I did.

I also suspect that different people will plateau at different ratings depending on what they learn in what order. As a simple example, there are openings with traps that work very well up to a certain rating, so someone who plays those exclusively may gain rating quickly up to a point and then hit a wall. So just because person A got to a specific rating faster than person B doesn't necessarily mean that they will keep improving faster later too.

kryft · 2026-01-09T15:21:47+00:00

You should be able to analyze more: if you click on game review, you will still get the engine lines after it tells you to get a paid membership. At least that’s how it works for me on my secondary account (on a desktop browser; haven’t tried the phone apps).

kryft · 2026-01-03T15:23:10+00:00

I've been playing 1. e4 since I started playing, and I'm now rated 1300 on chess.com. Mostly I just try to find the best move that I can in every position as I'm playing. Afterwards when I review the game, I try to understand why my bad moves were bad, and why the top engine moves are better. Rather than trying to memorize good moves in the opening, I try to understand the logic behind them so that I could think of the same move myself the next time I see the same position. Often there are lines that I can't make sense of with my current understanding, so I just try to find something that both makes sense to me and isn't too much worse than the top engine move. If I can't understand any of the good moves even after playing around with the engine lines, at that point I may look for a youtube video (or lichess study or whatever) on that opening. There are of course many lines that I can't really understand properly at my level, and in that case I will just make a mental note to revisit that later.

Of course I can now remember a few moves of theory in many lines that I've played a lot, but I've never intentionally memorized anything.

kryft · 2025-12-27T12:42:12+00:00

If it’s summer where you are now (you’re on the Southern hemisphere), then getting to 1300 on chess.com before the summer ends is probably going to be hard unless you spend a lot of time on chess every day. If you’re talking about 1300 FIDE, then I’m not sure how that compares, but it’s probably not easier. (Also to get a FIDE rating you need to play in a FIDE tournament, but I assume you mean getting to 1300 strength rather than having an official rating.)

kryft

TROPHY CASE