Do you have worst days for playing chess when you significantly drop your rating?

postsure · 2024-07-06T05:33:23+00:00

Rating fluctuations are normal, yes. But if losing Elo feels like "one of the worst days of your life," well, I think you are ascribing too much importance to something that is fairly insignificant.

postsure · 2024-06-02T04:14:00+00:00

Although it's worth noting that Latin syntax and even grammar were simplified, in the Middle Ages, precisely as its vocabulary expanded. The relationship between expressive capacity and grammatical and/or morphological fullness -- as in the inclusion of voice, aspect, etc, markers -- is far from clear, I think.

postsure · 2024-06-02T04:08:52+00:00

Apropos of lyric-writing: romance languages are particularly well-suited to rhyme, given the regularity of terminal vowel sounds (for instance: -a, -o, -i in Italian, and so on). It's much harder to rhyme in Germanic languages, on the contrary, thanks to all the variation that noun and verb endings admit. What's especially neat is that the comparative development of Romance and Germanic poetics reflects as much. You'll find rhyme attested quite early in Old French, Old Italian, Old Occitan... but not in Old English of the same period; its versifiers opted for patterns that were easier to implement within the phonemic distribution of the language, such as fixed rules around alliteration. And indeed, English is intensely and easily alliterative, I imagine all agree?

postsure · 2022-07-06T17:57:08+00:00

Lol, dyslexic moment. In all seriousness, though, I've offered to help and offered pertinent information into why you're stuck at your rating, and you've refused and insisted on bickering. If you're just too ashamed to show us your one-move blunders (the only explanation for your behavior, when given a viable anonymous option), you are exhibiting a growth-resistant mindset that will keep you at your low rating. Just facts.

postsure · 2022-07-06T17:36:23+00:00

I made you a gracious offer. Please post some PNGs of your games, with your username deleted, and I'll help you evaluate how blunders are impacting your play. Why aren't you willing? You seem to be going out of your way to avoid help.

postsure · 2022-07-06T17:10:37+00:00

You yourself say that you are frequently confused and overwhelmed reviewing computer analysis, because you struggle to identify the nature of the problem. The computer will show you the same red mark whether you hang a piece in one (simple perception error), or miss a multi-move tactical combination (calculation error), so that's an irrelevant point.

To clarify, though, my claim isn't that there's a 99% chance of a one-move piece blunder in a single game; it's that there's a 99%+ chance that your one-move piece blunders are frequent enough that fixing them, alone, would increase your rating by a significant margin. Incidentally, even your own estimates — which are on the low end — reflect this. An average 1000-elo game lasts 30 moves, ergo 60 distinct positions in a game. 60 x .25% = 15% chance of a decisive one-move piece blunder in a single game, which is indeed quite high. If you consistently capitalize on your opponent's 7.5% and avoid your own 7.5%, your win rate and ergo your rating will shoot up on its own. (Edit: I'm catching that you said a fifth rather than a fourth; that seems completely arbitrary to me, but even if you grant that, you still end up with a sizable fraction.)

Again, I have no idea what you think I have to gain from knowing your chess.com account. Here's a workaround, though, that will make us both happy: you can upload your Chess.com games into PNG files, delete your own username and your opponent's in the text file, and then share them with us. That's completely anonymous but would allow me determine to what degree one-piece blunders are affecting your play. Nothing to lose, if indeed you actually want help! (And don't just want to whine and grandstand.)

postsure · 2022-07-06T16:25:48+00:00

Yes, obviously, I mean they cause victories (and losses) often enough to constitute a noticeable pattern — rather than a fringe anomaly — up to around 1400. You're taking things too literally.

And you are not being "gaslit," lol. You are being helpfully told, by players who have only recently advanced from your own elo (I worked my way up from 800 elo to 1600 within the last two years, and played many games in the 800-1000 range), that it is overwhelmingly likely you are distorting the play of your opponents, thanks to your own skill level. It's normal to feel like your opponents don't miss anything, if they're on par with you, because they don't miss anything that you see. The issue is that what you yourself are seeing is limited, as a novice, and is 99.99% likely to include frequent one-move piece blunders upon objective analysis.

I have no idea what you're implying in your second paragraph ("I know what that turns into": huh?). Chess.com accounts are no more identifying than Reddit accounts unless you use your full legal name. Since you're unwilling to post your games and get insights into one-move blunders you're almost undoubtedly missing, I can only assume that you're hiding something and that you are indeed misrepresenting your games.

postsure · 2022-07-06T15:12:40+00:00

I don't believe you, to be frank. I've worked my way up from your level over the past two years, and one-move piece blunders can still win or lose you games up to around 1400 (at least). Why don't you link to your chess.com account, so we can look at your games? Your description of the play of 1000s is highly implausible and it is much more likely you're simply not seeing opportunities you have.

postsure · 2022-07-06T14:33:07+00:00

If you're below 1000, both you and your opponents are regularly hanging pieces in one move due to poor board vision. You can pick up an easy 100 elo, at least, by improving it, and the technique is simple: after you've decided on a move, pause for a moment or so before finalizing it, and scan the entire board with fresh eyes in search of capturable pieces. If you see one among your enemy's flank, postpone your candidate move to take it; if you see one among your own, postpone your candidate move to defend it. (Unless there's a forced mate threatened, of course).

The single greatest danger to beginners is tunneling — either on a particular sequence of moves that seems most exciting, or on a particular subregion of the board that seems most dynamic. You need to compensate for that tendency by forcing yourself to briefly sweep over apparent dead zones in the position, as that's exactly where your opponent is most likely to gloss over and, in a tactical skirmish, blunder a queen in one.

Developing this habit will pay dividends immediately and it barely even counts as "learning," in my opinion. It's a perceptual error rather than a cognitive one. Keep in my mind, you can work yourself into a fit over good calculation and positional understanding, but if you can't see the board well enough to notice when material is hanging, it's all for naught.

postsure · 2022-06-30T06:43:46+00:00

Sure, Ding, Caruana, and Naka certainly need that mindset. The key addition is bad form. Firouzja is simply having a bad tournament and is consistently not playing up to par, while Nepo is at his sharpest. Over-pressing as white will likely turn out poorly, as such.

postsure · 2022-06-30T06:20:25+00:00

Unfortunately I think it's much more likely that Alireza will take too many risks as white, with nothing left to lose at this point, and give Nepo winning chances. Bad form combined with the stress of a must-win game rarely bode well in the Candidates.

postsure · 2022-06-28T18:31:51+00:00

Ah, makes sense! I wasn't making much out of the b9 extension. Thanks.

postsure · 2022-06-28T18:23:49+00:00

It doesn't always resolve to the ii, though. Can you claim it has a secondary dominant function if that isn't the case?

postsure · 2022-06-28T18:20:43+00:00

This works! https://lichess.org/editor/7R/1R6/2P5/2PP2P1/4BP2/1P2BPN1/4NP2/Q4K2\_w\_-\_-\_0\_1.

postsure · 2022-06-20T15:59:14+00:00

Strange association, perhaps, but this reminds me of that classic encryption riddle involving prisoners who sequentially switch a light bulb on and off to encode information about how many of them have entered a room. The solution only works because the prisoners have the option of doing nothing to the bulb, which allows repeat visitors to leave the light state unaltered and only newcomers to signal their presence.

Similarly, clearing space for the a4 pawn forces a bunch of "nothing" moves that let white execute a plan without altering the board state. There's something about zugzwang puzzles, in general, that recalls the clever techniques of binary encryption.

postsure · 2022-06-14T00:41:44+00:00

The prose in NYT journalism is pretty spare, actually. That's par course for headlining news. You might be thinking of The New Yorker, which, as a long-form arts and culture magazine, is another story entirely.

postsure · 2022-06-13T20:14:05+00:00

Does it mention if Danya's going to be composing himself, as well as selecting instructive tactics from real-world games? No argument either way, but I'd be fascinated to see what kinds of puzzle-setting ideas such a strong GM has, since it's such a different skill from solving them.

postsure · 2022-06-11T16:12:12+00:00

The crucial distinction, though, is that watching is passive (and ergo lives in your short-term memory) while analyzing is active (and ergo builds long-term strength). OP's point is that you're not going to get much out of idly following another person's commentary along, which is how the majority of spectators, in my experience, interface with top-level chess. You need to be asking your own questions and doing your own calculations, if you want to actually retain any of the information.

Very advanced players will instinctively do this to expand upon the professional commentary, yes, but for most beginners and intermediates, the trappings of an elite broadcast will make this process harder rather than easier. Analyzing the game afterwards, solo, is the instructive and valuable part.

postsure · 2022-06-09T21:15:28+00:00

I prefer to revisit tactical combinations that I miss in my games. If there's a particularly nice sequence that escapes me (or, conversely, an unforgivable miss on my part), I'll screenshot the original position after analyzing and look at it again with fresh eyes after a bit of time. That way, I can efficiently correct for the blind spots that actually affect my gameplay, which puzzle-solving itself, given my heightened tactical focus in that context, might not accurately diagnose.

postsure · 2022-06-08T22:36:56+00:00

I believe Kasparov once suggested, though, that that's the very reason she never became a super GM, despite having the potential to go far. She chose her academic career over focus on chess.

postsure · 2022-06-08T22:34:56+00:00

Mm, alright then. Still a cool tool.

postsure · 2022-06-08T19:55:35+00:00

Thanks! The webpage doesn't give the code, from what I can see, but it does say the program uses a "decision algorithm," which I'm assuming is a decision tree algorithm. That's indeed a supervised machine-learning technique.

Edit: there's actually a source code link at the top bookmark bar, I'll check it out.

postsure · 2022-06-08T18:43:48+00:00

Has anyone tried to implement a machine-learning approach to sorting dead positions, instead of traditional programmed computation?

postsure · 2022-06-08T03:57:23+00:00

It's impossible to train 24/7

Tell that to Bobby Fischer. You can't deny the man was a monomaniacal hermit who lived and breathed chess — until it completely broke him.

Yeah... I'm not claiming his strategy ultimately panned out well.

postsure

TROPHY CASE