Do you play it? I love chess, but haven’t been able to find consistent partners in years. Does anyone know of good apps for playing against AI? Or reliable ways to find other players?
I love chess, but I only get amazing at it when I’m drunk. Also, I never know how to open. I fiddle around until me and my opponent have lost a few pieces and then I can start putting together a game.
I’ve never played with time limits on moves, either, so I’m probably not as great as I think.
I used to play a lot, but haven’t in a long time, so I’m pretty rusty.
I remember hearing a lot of people liked to play online with Yahoo! Chess. I don’t know if that’s the case anymore.
I was never good at it but I used to play a lot maybe a decade ago and am similarly super rusty. I was somewhere between ELO 1300 and 1400 at the time. Redhotpawn was where I’d mainly play, but the ELO from there roughly matches up with live play as my proudest chess moments are having taken live games off mid 1400 people a couple of times when they were having a bad day.
No I do not and I don’t want to learn. Thank you for asking though
I love watching chess and reading about chess, collecting chess sets and studying the history of chess - but I am terrible at it and would have a hard time beating a determined novice who picked it up a few months ago.
My favourite chess videos are Daniel King’s game reviews
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Yes, but only because I teach the children that I work with how to play it. Some of them are good little strategists. I’m very proud of them.
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I used to play fairly regularly in secondary school. I used to run a book club for the younger kids and part of working with them was playing quite a lot of chess outside of club hours, both so that they would get to know me and to cement why they should pay attention to me. I never played competitively (too far out from anywhere realistic) and online isn’t really my jam. I’d love to pick it up again, as I haven’t touched it at all for 2-3 years at this point.
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Nice, these look great. Thanks for linking!
I don’t really like online either, it loses a lot of the game when you can talk and see your opponent. But at this point I might miss the puzzle of the game enough to make online worth it.
Some more chess resources and odds and ends I’ve come across
Lichess is a good alternative to chess.com https://lichess.org/
https://www.chessable.com/ is a good site for learning moves and openings.
This is a cool visualization of over 2million chess games - probably the best graphical demonstration of what is meant by a ‘line’ in chess.
A Visual Look at 2 Million Chess Games
On the history of chess - here is a great video of Kasparov talking about Turing’s ‘Paper Machine’ - a prototype computer chess AI that Turing wrote out by hand.
How many games of chess are there? (a lot)
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I am always interested in playing chess, but it’s been a long time I’ve had someone else want to play. I did play online at chess.com for a while.
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Woah! That chess data viz is amazing. Thanks for passing it along!
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Yeah some really interesting tidbits in there - despite the massive number of possible moves, there are really only around 10 openings that are the most common that you should become familiar with. Also for square control - f6 is the most important square for black to put its knight on - while c3 and f3 are the most important squares for white’s knights - that’s the kind of basic board control to keep in mind when you’re playing.
My best friend’s brother taught me how to play chess and that was nice and sweet but the moment I learned of the body of advanced knowledge required to be anything more than pathetic at chess I just abandoned it completely. A requisite rich history of techniques spanning input from across nearly the entire globe? Oh, you can F-off right there, chess.
Zach Gage’s Really Bad Chess finally came out on Android, so I’ve been playing that a lot lately. I’m not very good at regular chess, so I’m not sure if playing this will make me better or way, way worse.
Holy crap - Kasparov is back and joining the rest of the Grand Chess Tour to take part in rapid & blitz in August!
Huge win for MVL, playing black, against Carlsen
I… may have started watching a ridiculous amount of chess videos and playing chess daily because of the youtuber Austin talked about in his essay, really for the first time ever (against the computer mainly). I played a few games against my grandfather when I was a tiny child but that is about it.
So… if anyone wants to play those daily games where you get 24 hours for a move I am historian_on at chess.com, we started one with @Robo_Rosa and its fun 
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