Probably the most interesting example of someone pursuing chess later in life is that of Marcel Duchamp, the famous Cubist artist. He grew up playing chess for fun, but at age 36 he basically stopped making art and started pursuing chess full-time.
"I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."
"The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. ... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."
I just don't see the beauty in chess. It's got a lot of unjustifiable, inherent complexity. Different pieces with different rules under different conditions. You wouldn't expect multiple designers to converge, or discover, that game. It even has cultural elements embedded.
Whereas Go is nearly as simple as possible, yet much deeper. It's easy to imagine different designers coming to the same set of rules.
As someone who played a lot of competitive chess at a very high level in my youth (and poured hours and hours of my life into it), I can attest that it is a game that seems to attract eccentric minds. Whether they are eccentric before chess or whether chess introduces eccentricity, I don't know, but I met so many interesting people through chess, the likes of which I would never meet in my other usual social circles.
I can also agree that, at a high level, it can be an all-consuming game. It can be difficult to turn off. There are a lot of activities and pursuits that you can physically put away, but for a great chess player, the positions are always in your thoughts.
I always think it is interesting to observe which are movement is used to describe artists who did work in more than one (in this case Cubism and Dada).
Not at all a nit-pick or a correction; Duchamp's writing on Dada has influenced some of my own research/work and so I just find it interesting which labels we choose (of course one label is easier than some label fitting a monarch: Marcel Duchamp, Painter of Cubism, Assembler of Dada, Player of Chess).
It's fascinating that people say Duchamp stopped being a practicing artist when he turned his obsessions to chess. I would say he just changed his medium. He wasn't one for retinal works anyway.
I think the author's real problem is less his age but his tendency to stick to rules which are just meant as "rules of thumb". He says that this is how he is thinking but still primarily blames his age.
Following rules and schematics in chess is great/necessary for end games (which he says he wins) because there you really just work through the algorithms and it also allows for quickly played openings (assuming you memorized the few standards that are played 99% of the games).
But in mid-game you actually need creativity and concepts like forks become much more important and I'd trade a "knight on the rim" for a choice between two forks the next move any time. His daughter seems to be playing with creativity while he is so stuck in schematic play that his daughter can even predict his moves (“I knew you were going to do that.”).
What I think is really curious is his remark: "She played [...] as if I were just some lower-level chess engine making haplessly random moves. Indeed, when I made my moves, her eyes would often drift elsewhere—as if what I was doing was almost inconsequential to the larger game."
She is right to do so, nobody cares about what one did 3 moves ago. The board is in a state that does not care about its history, it only cares about future possibilities :)
When I play chess and look at the board when it is my opponent's turn, I don't care for my opponent but just take the time for a deeper analysis.
I'm a national master chess player and I think the opposite. In middle games heuristics are more important because even the final positions in your calculations will often still be very dynamic so you need some tools to be able to evaluate these positions you've never seen before. In endgames the same thing may happen, but the confidence around my evaluation will generally be much higher.
I'm learning the game of Go at near fourty. But I'm not having any of the problems he describes.
A great thing about learning and playing online is that you can find an opponent at your same skill level within minutes. Unlike learning in a local club, where every person you will ever play beats you every time, I win slightly more than half my games. I also get this nice increasing graph of my skill level. This is a lot more fun.
I wish physical sports were like this. Anything online is blessed with this mechanic where you can keep it challenging for everyone other than the people at the top or bottom (based on my experience in CoD where I'm pretty sure I'm bottom).
With sports like soccer it's quite noticeable that some people are way better than everyone else, or way worse. And there's no way to improve since you can't just rearrange thousands of teams.
I tried to learn Go, obviously beyond understanding the rules, and found it very difficult comparing to Chess. I wonder how you dealt with the huge exploration space of just putting one stone in the beginning of the game. In Chess, every movement is very constrained.
Crowdsourcing your opponents online is a perfect way to train a skill. (Assuming you've identified a clear skill you wish to train, and that you're willing to make that time commitment to train it.) Anonymous opponents can take the sting out of the learning curve.
A lot of local special interest clubs fail because they don't deal well with newcomers and beginners. This essay was perfect down to the last line, written through the lens of that special bond of parenthood.
I find answers such as "my brain is getting slower as I age" distasteful and unsatisfying.
One can not do anything with an answer like that. On the other hand, a somewhat careful review of the process can lead in useful insights.
Reading between the lines in this article I notice a few points that I think are important to the cause of the author's delayed progress at learning the game.
First the author describes how he set about reading all manner of strategies, variations of strategies, positions, tactics, etc. I think he shot himself in the foot with this. Humans tend to surrender when a task looks too daunting and his real goal was to keep up with a child who did not know anything about chess. None of the stuff he studied would be initially useful against a fellow novice with an innately short term focus.
Second, the author hired a coach, ostensibly to teach both him and his daughter, but later notes "I would sometimes wander into the room when coach Simon was there, watching him present her with some puzzle on the board".
So I have to wonder, what was he doing during the other occasions where his opponent was learning chess from an expert?
Third, the author's stated motive to learn was to teach his daughter; he removed that motive when he hired the coach. Without motive to drive engagement learning anything becomes extremely difficult.
Finally, after he discovered the complexity of the learning task the author then set about studying all of the reasons why he could not do well at his initial goal. This, again, is not useful in actually learning chess.
All in all, it seems like the author actually learned a lot more than his daughter did in the same amount of time. However, his lack of focus lead him to spend the time learning many things that did not help him play chess at a novice level.
I see the learning curve of chess to be similar to that of poker: Learning the basic moves is as easy as learning what hand beats what. You can memorize each in an afternoon. Then, you learn a few basic tactics and work on your ability to enumerate your opponents next possible moves. Similar to the basics in poker like betting strategies, calculating odds, etc. At this stage, you're still not going to go out and start winning. Finally, there's this huge learning cliff for both where, in order to even start winning even a little, you need to invest an enormous amount of time, read a lot of literature, and practice, practice, practice.
I'd like to get into chess, but the time commitment needed to get even moderately competent is daunting.
I wouldn't say that's the case. If you play online as a complete beginner your rating will drop like a stone at first and then you'll be matched against other people of your level. At that point, the system will take care of you, generally keeping you at a 50% win rate as you progress along.
There's only a huge cliff if you expect to be able to win against 1500 rated players as a complete beginner, a totally unreasonable expectation.
That's the thing with age, it's an eventuality. No matter how smug you are, the age you are smug about not being comes and much more quickly than you thought it would. I am not quite at 40, but still I know it will come soon enough.
I'm a parent in a similar situation. I'm ahead of my young child, but I think my days are numbered. I've improved since we both started getting interested, but my ramp is slower. (In part because he has classes, and I don't)
Perhaps with this in mind, I found the interesting context of the story more about the parent-child relationship, than learning beyond a certain age. It is very easy to mis-balance the roles of parent, coach and competitor. In the last line, the author captured this very clearly.
The first time I beat my step-dad at chess was the last time we played. I tried not to gloat, but I could tell he was disappointed. I half-heartedly suggested another game the next week, he declined, and that was the end of it.
I highly recommend speed chess (5 mins), as it allows for many more repetitions. You'll learn faster what works / doesn't. Intersperse every once in a while with a slow game to rethink your fundamentals and strategy.
Also, speed chess is much more forgiving. 1 mistake is not the end of the game, as time is the great equalizer. Whereas in slow chess, going down a pawn unintentionally is often a loss.
While great fun, I don't think playing blitz is beneficial in the long run.
It encourages plenty of bad habits: guessing (instead of calculating), "gambling" (making bold but refutable moves in hope that opponent misses the correct answer), over-relying on simple tricks like common opening traps which wouldn't work and would get you into an inferior position in a serious game, etc. etc.
Good blitz players are good chess players who happen to put their skills to a use by playing blitz, but they haven't developed these skills just by playing blitz
Children are definitely quicker, and in my experience with Chess... tactics are king. And tactics favor the quicker minds.
Strategic chess can be taught with words, and adults will naturally lean towards the strategic parts. We respect our predecessors, we seek knowledge that has already been discovered. Alas, heuristics and such aren't worth very much to a Chess beginner, who will regularly make "simple blunders" (like putting their own pieces in a knight fork) until Elo 1500+ (a moderately skilled beginner club player).
And even then, Elo 1800 to 2000 will regularly put themselves in a position where they can be forked in two or three moves.
If you can manage to play a blunder-free game (much harder to do than it looks), that's when strategic thinking comes in. Knight placement in the center vs edge, or backwards pawns here and there, or whatever.
In part, I think children do best at chess because they aren't distracted by any of the myriad of books and research on the subject (which are... hopelessly irrelevant to beginners)
In my experience this is very true. I was a better chess player aged 11 than I am now.
Think like a Grandmaster is a great book that illustrates how tactical chess analysis is -- all about iteration and composition of simple value judgements.
However, I have found books about chess strategy to be a very useful way to practise tactical thinking. For example, following the thematic sections in Think like a Grandmaster, or something like Bobby Fischer's analysis of his most memorable games (which both cover strategic concepts like two bishops or a strong centre) requires tactical analysis -- you're visualising moves and combinations in your head and making value judgements about positions just to follow along.
So strategy is a great way for an older player to keep tactical practice interesting!
I can sympathise with the author of the article. The cruel truth is that it is very difficult to improve as an adult. I think the analogy to learning language is a good one - to get really good learn as a child.
As far as I know there are no instances of a player learning to play as an adult and reaching grandmaster status. Akiba Rubinstein, an all time great who didn't learn until 16, was (nearly) an exception. Another famous (almost) counter-example is one of the pioneers of the Russian school of chess who learned chess from scratch twice - the second time as an adult after suffering total memory loss from a war injury. Unfortunately my Google Fu is failing me and I can't summon any confirmation or recall his name.
I learned Go several years ago at the age of 20, and tracked how much time I spent on it. Comparing my progress with that of a certain strong amateur who started at age 14 and estimated how many games he played throughout his progression, I think I reached my current strength of 1-kyuu after roughly the same amount of practice that he had when he was 1-kyuu. This anecdatum of mine agrees with children's extra synaptic density leveling out around age 12. I would guess that it doesn't matter whether the writer was 40, 20, or 14; hypothetically, it might matter if the writer were 4 (or 7).
Why shall I not judge Alexander at table, talking and drinking to excess, or when he is fingering the chess-men? What chord of his mind is not touched and kept employed by this silly and puerile game? I hate it and avoid it because it is not play enough, and because it is too serious as an amusement, being ashamed to give it the attention which would suffice for some good thing. He was never more busy in directing his glorious expedition to the Indies; nor is this other man in unravelling a passage on which depends the salvation of the human race. See how our mind swells and magnifies this ridiculous amusement; how it strains all its nerves over it! How fully does this game enable every one to know and form a right opinion of himself! In no other situation do I see and test myself more thoroughly than in this. What passion is not stirred up by this game: anger [the clock-banger!] spite [the spite check!], impatience [the hasty move!], and a vehement ambition to win in a thing in which an ambition to be beaten would be more excusable! For a rare pre-eminence, above the common, in a frivolous matter, is unbefitting a man of honour. What I say in this example may be said in all others. Every particle, every occupation of a man betrays him and shows him up as well as any other.
- Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Chapter 50, tr. Trechmann, p. 295
I think Chess could be learned and enjoyed by all ages. It just takes some dedication.
Hmm, I think it might be easier for young people to get better at chess because they are not burdened with the responsibilities of an adult.
Also Chess is prominently pattern recognition which may play a role in chess development in older people, since the recall maybe slower.
I enjoy playing chess since maybe middle school, but it wasn't until about 20 years later that I tried to program my own chess game, including logic and rules. It was extremely difficult for me at certain points, especially figuring out check mate. I really didn't think it was going to be so hard at first.
I played chess religiously as a kid. I attended chess clubs, went to private tutoring, and completed in U.S. Chess Federation tournaments. I even have a few trophies in my room that I'm still proud of.
Some time in high school, while studying openings and their variations, I was curious if computers would ever beat the great Grand Masters regularly and consistently. It seemed to me that the key to this success would be a full comprehension of knowing which opening to start with, how to respond to your oponent's opening, and how deeply that opening variation was memorized.
So, it wasn't surprising to me to learn that the Grand Masters are Grand Masters because of their memorization of opening sequences, the depth of that memorization, and when to use which variation.
Then while studying old games played by the masters, I saw a trend that disturbed me: more and more, Grand Master games were ending in draws. I recall reading an article recently that more than 50% of said games are draws.
This bothers me for two reasons: first, that the game is designed so poorly, that draws can occur as frequently as they do. But, more disturbing, is knowing that they are ending in draws because of a mastery on the opening game.
I am no longer a chess proponent, and won't play it when asked (although that might change if my daughter wants to learn). The only chess I will play is Chess960, by Robert Fischer, where the back row is randomized to 1 of 960 possible starting positions. This way, the game is less sensitive to opening sequence memorization, but on more on basic tactical strategy, such as control of the center board, when to pull out your queen, and how knights can compliment bishops.
Now, I'm a large advocate of Go. The game is much more strategy based and less memorization (although there are a good amount of tsumego and joseki that should be memorized, and you should know opening theory). But, due to the size of the board, the games are considerably different, and it is less sensitive to tactics. Thus, draws occur mostly based on evenly matched strategies, and less on cognitive capacity.
Another game I am enjoying is the currently developed Tak by James Ernest (http://tinyurl.com/takgameks (link to Kickstarter campaign (I'm not a paid schill, I just enjoy the game))). A simpler game than chess and go to explain, yet deep with strategy, and new enough, that patterns and sequences are still being studied.
Don't get me wrong. Chess is entertaining. I am glad there are people that enjoy it, teach it, and play it. It's just no longer for me. Again, unless the game is Chess960.
> So, it wasn't surprising to me to learn that the Grand Masters are Grand Masters because of their memorization of opening sequences, the depth of that memorization, and when to use which variation.
This is not true. Opening knowledge is a common deciding factor in games between GMs, but that's only because they're already so good at everything else. A low GM actually probably has a smaller skill margin over other players in terms of openings than in other areas of the game: as someone that's arguably a decent amateur (~2200 USCF) and has played against several GMs, I would prefer my chances in a game where we both have our opening knowledge versus one where neither of us has opening knowledge.
"She was lacking that larger, strategically metacognitive sense, that Bayesian ability to use probability to change one’s beliefs." - that says it all and puts the age difference into real perspective, there is alot to theory, games, AI which can't be understood until you have a child.
[+] [-] keiferski|10 years ago|reply
"I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."
"The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. ... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp#Transition_from...
[+] [-] vijayr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelGG|10 years ago|reply
Whereas Go is nearly as simple as possible, yet much deeper. It's easy to imagine different designers coming to the same set of rules.
[+] [-] kohanz|10 years ago|reply
I can also agree that, at a high level, it can be an all-consuming game. It can be difficult to turn off. There are a lot of activities and pursuits that you can physically put away, but for a great chess player, the positions are always in your thoughts.
[+] [-] thevibesman|10 years ago|reply
I always think it is interesting to observe which are movement is used to describe artists who did work in more than one (in this case Cubism and Dada).
Not at all a nit-pick or a correction; Duchamp's writing on Dada has influenced some of my own research/work and so I just find it interesting which labels we choose (of course one label is easier than some label fitting a monarch: Marcel Duchamp, Painter of Cubism, Assembler of Dada, Player of Chess).
[+] [-] yolesaber|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlg23|10 years ago|reply
Following rules and schematics in chess is great/necessary for end games (which he says he wins) because there you really just work through the algorithms and it also allows for quickly played openings (assuming you memorized the few standards that are played 99% of the games).
But in mid-game you actually need creativity and concepts like forks become much more important and I'd trade a "knight on the rim" for a choice between two forks the next move any time. His daughter seems to be playing with creativity while he is so stuck in schematic play that his daughter can even predict his moves (“I knew you were going to do that.”).
What I think is really curious is his remark: "She played [...] as if I were just some lower-level chess engine making haplessly random moves. Indeed, when I made my moves, her eyes would often drift elsewhere—as if what I was doing was almost inconsequential to the larger game."
She is right to do so, nobody cares about what one did 3 moves ago. The board is in a state that does not care about its history, it only cares about future possibilities :) When I play chess and look at the board when it is my opponent's turn, I don't care for my opponent but just take the time for a deeper analysis.
[+] [-] jegutman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielvf|10 years ago|reply
A great thing about learning and playing online is that you can find an opponent at your same skill level within minutes. Unlike learning in a local club, where every person you will ever play beats you every time, I win slightly more than half my games. I also get this nice increasing graph of my skill level. This is a lot more fun.
[+] [-] lordnacho|10 years ago|reply
With sports like soccer it's quite noticeable that some people are way better than everyone else, or way worse. And there's no way to improve since you can't just rearrange thousands of teams.
[+] [-] wslh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvanduzer|10 years ago|reply
A lot of local special interest clubs fail because they don't deal well with newcomers and beginners. This essay was perfect down to the last line, written through the lens of that special bond of parenthood.
[+] [-] reefoctopus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vithlani|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] trbvm2|10 years ago|reply
First the author describes how he set about reading all manner of strategies, variations of strategies, positions, tactics, etc. I think he shot himself in the foot with this. Humans tend to surrender when a task looks too daunting and his real goal was to keep up with a child who did not know anything about chess. None of the stuff he studied would be initially useful against a fellow novice with an innately short term focus.
Second, the author hired a coach, ostensibly to teach both him and his daughter, but later notes "I would sometimes wander into the room when coach Simon was there, watching him present her with some puzzle on the board". So I have to wonder, what was he doing during the other occasions where his opponent was learning chess from an expert?
Third, the author's stated motive to learn was to teach his daughter; he removed that motive when he hired the coach. Without motive to drive engagement learning anything becomes extremely difficult.
Finally, after he discovered the complexity of the learning task the author then set about studying all of the reasons why he could not do well at his initial goal. This, again, is not useful in actually learning chess.
All in all, it seems like the author actually learned a lot more than his daughter did in the same amount of time. However, his lack of focus lead him to spend the time learning many things that did not help him play chess at a novice level.
[+] [-] ryandrake|10 years ago|reply
I'd like to get into chess, but the time commitment needed to get even moderately competent is daunting.
[+] [-] chongli|10 years ago|reply
There's only a huge cliff if you expect to be able to win against 1500 rated players as a complete beginner, a totally unreasonable expectation.
[+] [-] BooneJS|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x5n1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|10 years ago|reply
Perhaps with this in mind, I found the interesting context of the story more about the parent-child relationship, than learning beyond a certain age. It is very easy to mis-balance the roles of parent, coach and competitor. In the last line, the author captured this very clearly.
[+] [-] vinceguidry|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcmaffey|10 years ago|reply
Also, speed chess is much more forgiving. 1 mistake is not the end of the game, as time is the great equalizer. Whereas in slow chess, going down a pawn unintentionally is often a loss.
[+] [-] V-2|10 years ago|reply
It encourages plenty of bad habits: guessing (instead of calculating), "gambling" (making bold but refutable moves in hope that opponent misses the correct answer), over-relying on simple tricks like common opening traps which wouldn't work and would get you into an inferior position in a serious game, etc. etc.
Good blitz players are good chess players who happen to put their skills to a use by playing blitz, but they haven't developed these skills just by playing blitz
[+] [-] rilut|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragontamer|10 years ago|reply
Strategic chess can be taught with words, and adults will naturally lean towards the strategic parts. We respect our predecessors, we seek knowledge that has already been discovered. Alas, heuristics and such aren't worth very much to a Chess beginner, who will regularly make "simple blunders" (like putting their own pieces in a knight fork) until Elo 1500+ (a moderately skilled beginner club player).
And even then, Elo 1800 to 2000 will regularly put themselves in a position where they can be forked in two or three moves.
If you can manage to play a blunder-free game (much harder to do than it looks), that's when strategic thinking comes in. Knight placement in the center vs edge, or backwards pawns here and there, or whatever.
In part, I think children do best at chess because they aren't distracted by any of the myriad of books and research on the subject (which are... hopelessly irrelevant to beginners)
[+] [-] thruflo22|10 years ago|reply
Think like a Grandmaster is a great book that illustrates how tactical chess analysis is -- all about iteration and composition of simple value judgements.
However, I have found books about chess strategy to be a very useful way to practise tactical thinking. For example, following the thematic sections in Think like a Grandmaster, or something like Bobby Fischer's analysis of his most memorable games (which both cover strategic concepts like two bishops or a strong centre) requires tactical analysis -- you're visualising moves and combinations in your head and making value judgements about positions just to follow along.
So strategy is a great way for an older player to keep tactical practice interesting!
[+] [-] billforsternz|10 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL5GE6S7LEk
I can sympathise with the author of the article. The cruel truth is that it is very difficult to improve as an adult. I think the analogy to learning language is a good one - to get really good learn as a child.
As far as I know there are no instances of a player learning to play as an adult and reaching grandmaster status. Akiba Rubinstein, an all time great who didn't learn until 16, was (nearly) an exception. Another famous (almost) counter-example is one of the pioneers of the Russian school of chess who learned chess from scratch twice - the second time as an adult after suffering total memory loss from a war injury. Unfortunately my Google Fu is failing me and I can't summon any confirmation or recall his name.
[+] [-] billforsternz|10 years ago|reply
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=20026
[+] [-] rpgmaker|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xom|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjklin|10 years ago|reply
Why shall I not judge Alexander at table, talking and drinking to excess, or when he is fingering the chess-men? What chord of his mind is not touched and kept employed by this silly and puerile game? I hate it and avoid it because it is not play enough, and because it is too serious as an amusement, being ashamed to give it the attention which would suffice for some good thing. He was never more busy in directing his glorious expedition to the Indies; nor is this other man in unravelling a passage on which depends the salvation of the human race. See how our mind swells and magnifies this ridiculous amusement; how it strains all its nerves over it! How fully does this game enable every one to know and form a right opinion of himself! In no other situation do I see and test myself more thoroughly than in this. What passion is not stirred up by this game: anger [the clock-banger!] spite [the spite check!], impatience [the hasty move!], and a vehement ambition to win in a thing in which an ambition to be beaten would be more excusable! For a rare pre-eminence, above the common, in a frivolous matter, is unbefitting a man of honour. What I say in this example may be said in all others. Every particle, every occupation of a man betrays him and shows him up as well as any other.
- Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Chapter 50, tr. Trechmann, p. 295
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Pingviini|10 years ago|reply
Hmm, I think it might be easier for young people to get better at chess because they are not burdened with the responsibilities of an adult. Also Chess is prominently pattern recognition which may play a role in chess development in older people, since the recall maybe slower.
[+] [-] viperscape|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giacomone|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atoponce|10 years ago|reply
Some time in high school, while studying openings and their variations, I was curious if computers would ever beat the great Grand Masters regularly and consistently. It seemed to me that the key to this success would be a full comprehension of knowing which opening to start with, how to respond to your oponent's opening, and how deeply that opening variation was memorized.
So, it wasn't surprising to me to learn that the Grand Masters are Grand Masters because of their memorization of opening sequences, the depth of that memorization, and when to use which variation.
Then while studying old games played by the masters, I saw a trend that disturbed me: more and more, Grand Master games were ending in draws. I recall reading an article recently that more than 50% of said games are draws.
This bothers me for two reasons: first, that the game is designed so poorly, that draws can occur as frequently as they do. But, more disturbing, is knowing that they are ending in draws because of a mastery on the opening game.
I am no longer a chess proponent, and won't play it when asked (although that might change if my daughter wants to learn). The only chess I will play is Chess960, by Robert Fischer, where the back row is randomized to 1 of 960 possible starting positions. This way, the game is less sensitive to opening sequence memorization, but on more on basic tactical strategy, such as control of the center board, when to pull out your queen, and how knights can compliment bishops.
Now, I'm a large advocate of Go. The game is much more strategy based and less memorization (although there are a good amount of tsumego and joseki that should be memorized, and you should know opening theory). But, due to the size of the board, the games are considerably different, and it is less sensitive to tactics. Thus, draws occur mostly based on evenly matched strategies, and less on cognitive capacity.
Another game I am enjoying is the currently developed Tak by James Ernest (http://tinyurl.com/takgameks (link to Kickstarter campaign (I'm not a paid schill, I just enjoy the game))). A simpler game than chess and go to explain, yet deep with strategy, and new enough, that patterns and sequences are still being studied.
Don't get me wrong. Chess is entertaining. I am glad there are people that enjoy it, teach it, and play it. It's just no longer for me. Again, unless the game is Chess960.
[+] [-] komaromy|10 years ago|reply
This is not true. Opening knowledge is a common deciding factor in games between GMs, but that's only because they're already so good at everything else. A low GM actually probably has a smaller skill margin over other players in terms of openings than in other areas of the game: as someone that's arguably a decent amateur (~2200 USCF) and has played against several GMs, I would prefer my chances in a game where we both have our opening knowledge versus one where neither of us has opening knowledge.
[+] [-] jonbaer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iKenshu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oli5679|10 years ago|reply