Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[beniliusbob]

Definitely building a chessboard in MY fortress.

However, I agree: chess sucks! Ditch the board, play better games--like Go, or Settlers of Catan.

[Bandages]

Settlers of Catan.

This.
A thousand times this.

[Retro]

Sounds like your problem is that you're not familiar with all the rules. Look them up? As mentioned multiple times, pawns can only take diagonally.

[moocowmoo]

If you're serious about getting better then read this: http://www.chesscafe.com/text/heisman19.pdf

He also has many other free articles that are high quality: http://home.comcast.net/~danheisman/Articles/Novice_Nook_Links.htm

You have to put in a lot of effort if you want to play good. It's wrong when people think "if I know the rules I should be able to compete due to being intelligent". This totally discounts experience and practice, the factors which increase your skill at the game. At the very least you must know the elementary mates (K+Q vs K etc). Then, tactical motifs like pins, forks, and removal of the guard. This is basic stuff like learning what the ASCII represents in DF.

[Igawa]

  Chess is a bloody amazing....it's been played for hundreds of years, people have been developing strategy for hundreds of years, and it still one of the most balanced games ever to be made. And trust me it can be just as exciting as any modern vidja game. Find someone at your same skill level (in a 2hr tournament especially), and it can get intense as hell.

Just because you're 'good at strategy games', 'intelligent', or 'know the rules' has no bearing on whether you'll be good at chess....it's all about spatial thinking, logic, and simple experience. Chess has it's own area of strategic thinking which extends far beyond the basic rules. Only way to get better is to keep trying.

Learn the rules, and find PEOPLE (preferably real life) to play against. Playing chess vs the computer is one of the least satisfying ways possible to spend your time, cause unless you're damn good you'll never beat it with any consistency. Only thing it might be possibly useful for is going back and watching how it rapes you, to find the combos and other stuff.

PS. The reason your pawn couldn't take the queen was a classic case of a 'pinned' piece, where a rook, bishop, or queen is 'pinning' a unit in place because if it moves, the king will be in check. Pins and forks are some of the basic attacking strategies in chess.
Look for online chess servers to play vs people online. The only one I know well enough of personally is the (free) Yahoo games chess service. Go find some people with <1200~1100 rating and learn. Google can inform you of other chess services.

[Bishop36]

On top of all the other skills you need to play chess (that have been mentioned) you need to be able to bluff and read other people. That is taken out of a game with a computer, and even somewhat removed over internet play. Foresight is important also, you can know how all the pieces move, but if during a game you can't look a few turns into the future and see where they could be by then you will never be really good.

[Eagle_eye]

How long do you spend thinking about each move? I'd consider myself a good chess player, though certainly not at a master level, and I spend 2-5 minutes minimum planning each move. It's like doing math: to get it all right you have to check yourself over and over and over

[Grimlocke]

Chess is a good game, combining foresight, strategy and psychology. And without throwing in anything that can have you lose due to bum luck.

Playing against computer is realy only half the fun though. They dont care about the psychology part, and have an infinite amouth of foresight (only on the highest diffuculty only of course).

I suck at it though, hehehe. I allways overlook some horribly fatal flaw.

Best way to play it I think is amongts amatures. That way you have to think your tactics up on your own, and get to see them fail miserably. Fun.

[Foehamster]

Fundamentally, chess is the same as tic tac toe.  You make your move to bring you closer to the desired end state.  Everybody knows all information about the current state of the game.  The only reason all chess games don't end in a tie is there are more outcomes than a human could reasonably see.  It also means that its possible to have a computer play with perfect strategy.

That is why I don't like chess and would rather play something that has some hidden information. Like Poker, or the completely non-random Stragego.   There is no perfect strategy to Stratego, you set up your pieces based upon how you think your opponent will play, then divine better what's really going on through risk while doing your best to deceive your opponent into traps, or avoid where you are weak.

tl;dr Chess is emotionally dry and I have no need to do more math problems.

[o_O[WTFace]]

Chess does require strategy and spatial thinking and all that, but above anything else it just requires playing chess a whole lot.  They have done studies on this and basically novices see a bunch of pieces that can do different things and chessmasters see the entire board and the relationships and capabilities of each piece.  Since their brain is trained to understand all that they don't have to sit there and think about it, allowing good players to plan many moves ahead without difficulty. 

Personally I think chess is the most overrated thing ever.  Like seriously, you just pitch some conscripts at my castle and win because you attacked first? 

[BigD145]

Settlers of Catan.

No. Settlers is the flip side of Chess. Way too much luck involved.

[truckman1]

You know who else who really hates chess? the guys who attacked Gary Kasperov with flying dicks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7Bxn-V0rpc

[LeegleechN]

In my opinion chess is overrated. There are a lot of games invented in the last few decades that have the same style but play better. Shogi (japanese chess) is also much better. Also, it's lame that chess gets so many draws.

Go, however, is a beautiful game. It has the same tactical depth as Chess but far more strategy. It requires both chess style move/counter-move thinking (life and death problems) and deep intuitive pattern recognition (far beyond chess's positional evaluation). It can be played on many different board sizes depending on the skill of the players and the time they have available. It also has a brilliant and natural handicapping system. It has almost no draws. It has only 3 rules, yet they give rise to a game you could study for your lifetime. I think it's the perfect board game.

[Cardinal]

In my opinion chess is overrated.

Awesome.  So... what are your feelings on the sculptures of Rodin, quantum theory and the Iliad?

[Retro]

Awesome.  So... what are your feelings on the sculptures of Rodin, quantum theory and the Iliad?

That's a bit unnecessary, don't you think? Seems unfair to imply that someone who doesn't like chess doesn't like anything else widely deemed intellectual/impressive/masterful etc. Not everyone has to like chess.

I love it, I should say. I never bothered memorizing any strategies or tactics but for someone who plays casually I don't think I'm that bad.