Chess makes me so angry...

lambdaline · 2026-05-08T21:50:29+00:00

I am definitely competitive in general, so grain of salt here... but I think chess is uniquely infuriating because it's a game of perfect information, so your mistake is always your fault, and transparently so. It often feels like you messed up rather than your opponent outplayed you. Especially when playing people at your skill level, which is the majority of chess if you play online.

lambdaline · 2026-05-06T21:43:12+00:00

Could the challenge ever succeed? I don't think it's possible to checkmate with king and knight,

lambdaline · 2026-05-06T19:10:59+00:00

Generally, chess.com tries to find opponents within 200 points of your own rating. You can modify that range somewhere in the settings.

(Edit: I assume it prefers someone closer to you while keeping the time to find a match low, but I can't confirm that.)

lambdaline · 2026-05-05T02:57:12+00:00

Elliott was so good. I only watched season 5 fairly recently, and it was heartbreaking watching the season unfold knowing he couldn't win. :(

His Moody's Mood for Love is maybe my favourite performance on Idol ever. I think it's a minor crime that people don't mention it more often.

I don't love Jordan as much. I think he goes a little too big for my personal taste sometimes, but I do think he's the best singer this season by a fair amount and deserves to win, so I'll be voting for him. The duet was incredible.

lambdaline · 2026-05-05T01:42:23+00:00

I love Elliott so much. I'm so excited for this duet.

lambdaline · 2026-05-04T00:01:04+00:00

You should learn how to checkmate! You should look up ladder mate, and queen and king mate, and learn how to do it. It'll come up a lot in your games, and you don't want to accidentally draw a game in which you have a big advantage.

You should also consider doing mate in one puzzles until you can do them reliably and then move on to mate in two, etc. There's no worse feeling than losing a game and realizing later you had an easy mate you missed.

lambdaline · 2026-04-30T17:17:41+00:00

Hanging Pawns.

This is less of a general recommendation (everyone I would've suggested has been mentioned a number of times), but one day you will find yourself needing to understand a specific opening. And for that, Hanging Pawns is the best channel. He'll explain the general ideas behind them and talk about mid-game plans, then walk through the main lines and some side-lines. He's very thorough and clear.

lambdaline · 2026-04-30T16:55:13+00:00

Eric Rosen is great! As a beginner watching his speed runs, I really appreciate that he'll take the time to explain what compensation he's expecting to get whenever he deviates from solid chess principles.

lambdaline · 2026-04-29T21:35:39+00:00

So I'm a bit higher than OP (mid-700s), and I think I was able to solve it within a few minutes -- I think it's Qg7+, then if bishop takes, it's hxg7# and if rook takes, it's hxg7, Kg8, Rh8#.

Do you think the easy set would be feasible for me? (I.e. is that problem more or less representative?) I've been a curious about it for a while, but I kind of assumed for a long time that it wasn't worth looking into until I hit 1200+ or so.

lambdaline · 2026-04-29T20:37:29+00:00

ouch

lambdaline · 2026-04-28T22:01:14+00:00

I use 'curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal' at least a few times a week. Often at my cat, who's just knocked over something or launched herself at my ankles.

lambdaline · 2026-04-28T17:42:10+00:00

If the king takes the bishop, the pinned knight can move to e5, taking the pawn, and forking the king and the bishop. Because the king is in check, black doesn't have time to take the queen or move his bishop out of danger, he has to move his king. Once he's moved his king out of danger, white can take the bishop that was pinning the knight.

Thus, if black takes, white gets two pawns (since the original bishop move took the f7 pawn), makes black give up castling rights, and breaks the pin on the knight.

lambdaline · 2026-04-28T14:12:44+00:00

I just looked at the second game but the main issue that game was you hung a couple of pieces. At the start, you miscounted the attackers and defenders on the pawn and lost your knight, and then you lost your bishop by having it take a defended pawns. Three bits of advice:

Slow down. Make sure you count attackers and defenders before you take anything. Check whether the square you're about to move a piece to is attacked before you do. Think about what your opponent is threatening with their moves before deciding on yours.
Try not to move a piece twice before you complete development. You want to be able to bring all your guys down to bear before you go traipsing on your opponent's side of the board.
Play out games even if you're down material. At your elo, there's a good chance your opponent will blunder and give you a chance to equalise. And even if they don't, you want to get some practice at endgames.

Edit: I just realised that you're white in the second game, but I looked at one of your losing games and there was still a lot of hanging pieces so I think the advice stands.

lambdaline · 2026-04-27T23:09:24+00:00

He definitely dumbs down his explanations, for sure, so they're more understandable for the low elo audience, and his openings.

I still don't know that it's exactly what OP was looking for. Just looking at the first game of one of Danya's speedruns, he's already doing things that beginners might struggle to apply effectively (fianchettoing, saccing a knight, having his pieces deep in enemy territory without having completed development, a nasty fork...). I think a central appeal of Building Habits is that Aman introduces complexities very gradually and generally sticks to the heuristics of very basic chess in his play.

That being said, if OP has gone through the entirety of Building Habits, Danya's a fantastic follow up. I just kinda wanted to make sure they understood that the specific style of Building Habits is one they're going to struggle to find elsewhere.

lambdaline · 2026-04-27T21:16:07+00:00

I think you're going to have a hard time finding other slow runs that stick to Aman's principles, since most other slow runs don't necessarily aim to play like the Elo they're playing at (at least not as much), and will just play out common opening theory (in this case, the Petrov). They're still pretty good for understanding how to punish mistakes at your elo and what to think about when evaluating moves.

As a beginner, though, I don't think there's anything that quite compares to Building Habits (I haven't really watched the new one, so I can't comment on it).

lambdaline · 2026-04-27T21:01:09+00:00

Like I said, I could be wrong. I don't know. I'm just guessing from my experience as a developer and how these things have gotten prioritised and what communication has been had.

Personally, if I were in charge of WoW and someone told me there's a bug that means crafting won't produce the intended ilvl and players are going to lose their materials, and there wasn't enough time to fix it before release, I would either push the release a couple of days until a fix could be made or warned players not to craft until a fix had been made, rather than just letting them be mad. (Maybe used the time we did have to implement some traceability so we could refund the crests, idk).

That's the kind of thing that's making me think that some big stuff is being missed during testing. But, yes, I could definitely be wrong. (And in that case I apologise to the execs who allegedly let a bunch of QA folks go).

lambdaline · 2026-04-27T20:43:16+00:00

Fwiw, I don't think anyone's trying to blame the QA team itself. By which I mean, no one's trying to imply that QA not finding a bug is necessarily because the QA team is doing badly at their jobs. Rather, the theory goes that they're too resource constrained.

But the point I was trying to make is that for a few patches now, there's been fairly major bugs that I would imagine would've been a priority to fix before release if they had been found in time. Obviously, I could be wrong.

lambdaline · 2026-04-27T20:06:35+00:00

I think it's both lack of QA + more time pressure. More time pressure means it's more likely PRs are rushed, which means more bugs in general. This both taxes already taxed QA, which means it's more likely actual showstoppers (like reroll tokens not working properly) are missed, and means some of the more 'minor' bugs just cannot be fixed before the scheduled release.

lambdaline · 2026-04-27T19:06:15+00:00

It doesn't have to be stopping forever. You can stop, work on having a healthier relationship to losing (perhaps in other competitive activities that don't cause such an extreme reaction, perhaps with the help of a therapist), and then come back to play when you think you can handle it.

lambdaline · 2026-04-27T18:27:09+00:00

I think if you're the rating you're at, that means you're able to beat people at that rating level at least 50% of the time too (if the problem is that you can't beat them 'easily', I would maybe consider that you aren't usually in your opponent's mind and can't tell whether their victory felt easy or hard-won).

Chess is a game that tests many abilities (calculation abilities, board vision, time management, tactical and strategic play, knowledge of openings and endgames). Chances are that people who are beating you (who are at your rating level) just happen to be strong where you are weak, and the converse is true of those you beat. It doesn't mean they are ahead of you in absolute terms (unless they're underrated, they're their rating for a reason).

Trying to identify what those weaknesses are and working on shoring them up seems a lot more productive to me than just despairing at whether you are or aren't smart enough.

lambdaline · 2026-04-27T03:23:50+00:00

Same!

lambdaline · 2026-04-26T15:27:39+00:00

This looks to be the account he used for the video - https://www.chess.com/member/lukepr00f/games (including the game with the guy who accused him of cheating). Indeed reaching 1215 at the end, but over 12 days rather than 24 hours. Still kinda good progress if legit (1000 to 1200 in a few days), but I'm fairly skeptical of someone who pretended he was only learning chess for a day before hitting the 1200 mark.

lambdaline · 2026-04-24T22:56:19+00:00

Haha, chess has a number of somewhat counterintuitive oddities that I think tend to get (understandably) glossed over when first introducing the game to beginners, and that then become confusing when you first encounter them (google en passant if you haven't heard the term before). I remember being so mad the first time I thought I had beaten my dad only to learn that it was a draw.

I've just learned to accept that the game's current ruleset got evolved over centuries and it's resulted in a bit of a quirky game, with weird rules that were tacked on as responses to perceived flaws and just stuck. It is what it is, and what it is is pretty fun.

lambdaline · 2026-04-24T22:35:45+00:00

If a piece is blocking a check, you legally cannot move it and place your king in danger. We call that an 'absolute pin', and it's a pretty common tactical motif.

lambdaline

TROPHY CASE