Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion

http://www.fide.com/component/content/article/1-fide-news/7539-fide-world-championship-2013.html

by jordanmessina • 13 years ago

430 253 13 years ago

sethbannon• 13 years ago

I'm super excited to see the impact this will have on our noble game. I think it could see a real surge in popularity in the years ahead. And at the age of 22, Magnus is only just getting started.

aet2• 13 years ago

What do you think about freestyle chess?

edias• 13 years ago

It will be interesting to see if Chess, or other boardgames for the matter, will benefit from streaming services as much as video games have.

I've seen the Chess-Network on twitch.tv break 1k viewers which is tiny compared to the 300k League of Lengends and Dota 2 tournaments but still a substantial amount regardless.

ramidarigaz• 13 years ago

Chess Network broke 4.5k within the first two minutes of last night's game. I imagine it went higher but I accidentally fell asleep :(

primitivesuave2• 13 years ago

I get really annoyed with the commentators on Chess Network, they have a tendency to overanalyze and talk way too much. The best commentator I've found is an Australian named Mato: youtube.com/matojelic

booop• 13 years ago

Chess champions come and go, but why would Magnus becoming the champion affect the game any differently than his predecessors?

maaaats• 13 years ago

The first obvious one is that he is from the western world. No matter what may be politically correct, that will be positive in the western world compared to a Russian or Indian having the title.

Secondly, he is young, athletic and smart, getting a lot of media attention.

jordanmessina• 13 years ago

Press conference is live right now for anyone interested: http://chennai2013.fide.com/fide-world-chess-championship-20...

deletes2• 13 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFJNESXsRkY

simias• 13 years ago

My god those comments. Even chess streams are not safe it seems.

rikacomet4• 13 years ago

Now what the heck happened in the end? Anand gave up a knight advantage, purposedly for a clear cut draw. I have no clue why he did that this time.

He took queen with queen, clearly, knowing it would be lost to king, and then again the pawn with knight. He had a knight, of all things!

cjbprime2• 13 years ago

Anand gave up a knight advantage, purposedly for a clear cut draw.

When you assume that a world-class GM played "purposedly" for a draw that would lose him the championship title, you're probably wrong.

He took queen with queen, clearly

He was in check. Taking W's queen was the only way to avoid losing his own for nothing.

rikacomet4• 13 years ago

are you sure about that? the king could have moved back up, but in front.. moved from right side to left side between those two lines, without moving in front of the queen line.

lobe• 13 years ago

It was the best option in both cases. He was in check when he took the queen, so the queens had to swap or black would lose his queen. At the end Anand traded his knight for the pawn as a king and knight (black's material) can't win, but a king and pawn (white's material) can, so it is in blacks best interest to swap.

rikacomet4• 13 years ago

what rule is that? are you implying even if only white king, black king, and black knight would be left on board, it would be a draw/win for white by default?

Instead of trying to isolate white king into a corner for checkmate?

Never heard of a rule like that. Are you sure?

bmslieght2• 13 years ago

Clearly you should be in the next final of the world championship of chess.

xfax• 13 years ago

A well-deserved win. Can't wait to see what else Magnus goes on to accomplish.

3327• 13 years ago

Chess is amazing it blows my mind why simple tools and games like this are not incorporated in some 'fun' way into the education system. By 'fun' I mean that if children were told to play chess they would not. A system would be need to be designed so that they look forward to chess class as they do for PE and art.

Aqueous• 13 years ago

Chess is very addictive and I think even if they were told to like chess they would. I know that we played chess sometimes in public grade school and having been encouraged to do so didn't prevent me from enjoying it. it eventually became quite difficult to pull me away :-)

iends• 13 years ago

Armenia requires chess in schools for at least two hours a week (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/07/chess-d...) and they consistently are one of the top countries in the Chess Olympiad.

prof_hobart• 13 years ago

My daughter hates PE, but she's just been peer pressured into wanting to learn chess - at her first wet break time in her new class, half the girls sat down and started playing, and she felt left out.

That (along with watching the World Championship) has got me back into the game after not really having played it for about 30 years.

scrabble• 13 years ago

My daughter's grade school has chess lessons once a week (we are in Canada). They start as young as junior kindergarten. To reinforce the lessons and gauge her learning, I try to play at least one game with her a month.

I'm impressed at how much she's learned in the program. She's still not capable of beating me, but I'm able to teach her things she's not learned yet in the program such as castling and en passant. Then I'm happy to see her come back after that week's lesson to tell me she used what I taught her and won her game.

harvestmoon• 13 years ago

Chess is great, but I prefer "Go." (An oddly named game.) Had I learned it when I was young, I feel I would have benefited greatly.

japhyr• 13 years ago

I've been teaching, middle school and high school, for the past 15 years. I have always had a stash of chess sets and clocks in my room. They see pretty consistent use.

I love chess in schools for a number of reasons. One of the most interesting things about watching chess in schools is seeing who rises to the top. The best players tend not to be the brightest academic students. The best players tend to be smart kids who fight some of the bs that schools make kids endure. These kids are smart enough to 'get' chess, and have enough fight in them to stick out the difficult moments in games and tournaments that separate the best from the really good. These are the kids who tend to get in trouble a lot, who get bad reputations among teachers. Watching those kids show everyone up by winning chess tournaments soundly against the brightest academic kids is pretty awesome, and can be life-changing for some students.

I love teaching chess because you can teach anyone some simple ideas such as opening strategies, piece values, and simple endgames, and they can then beat anyone who hasn't learned those concepts. Kids who never thought they could learn a "smart person" game like chess suddenly play well, and start to realize they can do intellectual things. Then you start to see natural talent come into students' games.

Playing chess with kids is fun! If you have the chance, introduce a kid to chess.

macspoofing2• 13 years ago

There's only so much time in a day, and there's a lot that one wants to throw at a kid to learn (everybody has a pet topic he or she thinks kids should study, whether it's chess, or music, or programming or personal finance or whatever..)

kadabra9• 13 years ago

Reading more about this match and Magnus in general, I learned of a measure termed "Nettlesomeness" which has been used to measure which players do the most to make their opponents to make mistakes. Magnus, with his highly creative style of play and unexpected moves, not surprisingly ranks the highest in this measure.

He seems to have this remarkable gift of making moves which aren't just strong, they get inside his opponent's head and cause them to either overthink/break down. I'm interested in the technical details behind this metric. Has anyone heard of it before?

Regardless, congrats Magnus. You are truly a generational talent, and I'm excited to see what your win will do for the game.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/net...

erikig• 13 years ago

Thanks for the comment, the concept of nettlesomeness intrigues me.

"...Carlsen is demonstrating one of his most feared qualities, namely his “nettlesomeness,” to use a term coined for this purpose by Ken Regan. Using computer analysis, you can measure which players do the most to cause their opponents to make mistakes."

I was surprised to see that this isn't just some subjective measure but can me measured using computer analysis. In chess this can be a great tool against one's opponents but in collaborative endeavors it can be a detriment to team productivity. I wonder whether the same analysis can be used to pin-point nettlesome members of team e.g members of an open source team whose contributions sidetrack collaborators and cause them to make more trackable errors...

biot• 13 years ago

I think this is actually based on subjective measures. An annotated game[0] will have ?!, ?, and ?? added by human commentators to indicate varying levels of mistakes. A computer analysis can make use of these subjective move evaluations within an annotated game to easily measure which players cause their opponents to make mistakes at a significantly greater frequency than their normal rate of mistakes.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_annotation_symbols#Move_e...

mathattack• 13 years ago

Impressive that it's scientific.

I think it also measures how much people are trained to learn all the historical games versus learn deep principles and truths of chess. The great ones should be able to thrive in chaos.

This is true in other fields. Some traders get crushed in non-standard markets. Others thrive.

dfan3• 13 years ago

I believe Regan just measures how badly a given player's opponents tend to err (as determined by computer evaluation of moves). So it's just a post hoc statistical measure, not an actual evaluation of how tricky that player's moves are.

coob• 13 years ago

This reminds me of the sorry of Deep Blue's buggy randomness causing Kasperov to freak out: http://www.wired.com/playbook/2012/09/deep-blue-computer-bug...

cjo• 13 years ago

There was a checker playing computer called Chinook that had something similar happen at one point (iirc one of its databases was corrupted).

Definitely worth listening to the story: http://relprime.com/chinook/

sohailk• 13 years ago

Not a bug, it was a feature.

brandall10• 13 years ago

If Magnus is making strong yet unexepected moves relative to his opponents - doesn't that mean he simply has a higher degree of mastery at the game?

lifeformed2• 13 years ago

Well, "unexpectedness" isn't just a failure to anticipate by weaker players. A non-optimal move could be intentionally made with the intention to be unexpected, in order to play mind games with the opponent. Unexpectedness could be a factor in what makes a move strong, not just an after-the-fact observation.

beefman2• 13 years ago

I follow Regan's chess work pretty closely and I don't know where Cowen got this term. The link provided shows intrinsic ratings, not "nettlesomeness". As shown by Regan and others, Carlsen simply plays more accurately than anyone else. Chess is probably drawn, so one only wins when his opponent makes mistakes.

Both Regan and Guid & Bratko have tried weighting the accuracy of moves by the complexity of positions faced. Carlsen is middle-of-the-pack in terms of reaching complex positions, so this doesn't seem to be the mysterious "nettlesomeness" either.

pawn• 13 years ago

I've tried a few techniques to try getting in a person's head while playing, but I wouldn't have any idea how to measure it. Some techniques are on the board, but some aren't.

One thing I've tried is just staring at the player. I've also tried just barely glancing at the board and making the move on my turn while actually doing my studying on their turn.

The funniest thing that someone tried against me was playing a guitar while also playing chess. This was in a local tournament in college. Half way into the game, he stopped and exclaimed "What am I doing??" and tried to play serious from that point forward. Luckily for me, he waited too late.

Tycho• 13 years ago

I believe there was a Russian grandmaster in the 60s who is credited with introducing psychology into chess because he would deliberately play moves which would stir up uncomfortable memories of defeat for his opponents (based on study of their past tournaments) and this distract them from the game at hand. Can't remember his name though.

anuragramdasan• 13 years ago

60 minutes from last year. pretty cool stuff right here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc_v9mTfhC8

aaronetz• 13 years ago

<blasphemy alert> Does anyone know some good alternatives to chess, as a game that mixes deep thought and aesthetic variety? I tried Go, but found it somewhat boring compared to chess, because of its uniformity (which, on the other hand, has the advantage of beautiful simplicity and symmetry.) On another note: it is unfortunate, in my opinion, that chess has a special standing among board games. I would love to see some more variety in world-class intellectual matches, similar to what exists in physical sports. Something like a "board game Olympics".

Edit: Thank you for all the useful replies! In reply to some of you, I am a complete beginner at Go. Maybe the word 'boring' was not carefully chosen. As a programmer, I should have known better - that things may seem boring (tiresome?) until you become more fluent with them. I should certainly give Go another shot...

cjbprime2• 13 years ago

There's already something very similar to a "board game Olympics", it's called the Mind Sports Olympiad: http://www.boardability.com/games.php

I'd give Go another try. If you're interested in watching anime, I found the series _Hikaru no Go_ pretty good motivation to keep learning.

jere• 13 years ago

Agreed. I'm not even a big anime fan and Hikaru no Go really kept up my motivation when I was first starting. It's hard to believe how exciting they made Go look, when it's actually just two people quietly placing stones on a board for hours. Here's a trailer if you don't believe me: http://youtu.be/XpV4ZWh4NkQ

sganesh• 13 years ago

Have you heard about Arimaa?

http://arimaa.com/arimaa/

kybernetikos• 13 years ago

Arimaa is a good choice - it can be played on a chess board, has quite a bit of variety, and is deep as well.

TylerE10• 13 years ago

Not a board game, but Bridge.

Backgammon is also very rich also, although there is a random element there which, depending on your preferences, is either a good or bad thing.

laureny• 13 years ago

The random element in backgammon is inconsequential: a good player will always beat inferior players over several games. What makes good players good is not that they know how to win when they have a good roll but the fact that with regular throws, each of their move is optimal, which guarantees a win over the duration of the entire game.

The same could be said of poker, where the element of chance appears to be huge but which doesn't matter over many games.

cynicalkane2• 13 years ago

+1 for Bridge.

Bridge is a game of short-term and long-term memory, strategy (in long matches), tactics, deduction, induction, risk assessment, hidden information, and finally a strong test of character, and your judgment of the characters of others. Unlike chess it does not seem to have a "limit" where you stop getting smarter and start merely learning more about chess. There's a reason it's the favorite game of some of the world's smartest and richest men.

jmilloy5• 13 years ago

I played a lot of bridge through High School, tournaments, etc. I think it can become very robotic once you are just following conventions and can count cards without difficulty.

gnuvince• 13 years ago

Backgammon: the best way to want to kill yourself. I was playing a 21-game match against someone on the Internet, it was 17-16 for him, but I was in a very good position and I doubled and he (incorrectly) accepted. I was about to build a 5-prime between my 4 and 8 points when he got a lucky roll, hit two of my blots and closed off his home board. He won a gammon and the match. One lucky roll, 1/36 chance and I go from still being in the match to being a 3% dog.

sergj• 13 years ago

Boring compared to chess? As a Go player I take this as an insult. Go is way more interesting, there are more fights, more complexity and you make a lot of tactical and strategic decisions in one game. Also you have a great handicap system, playing stronger players is no big problem. Did I mention that there are no remis and pro matches are often decided by 0,5 points which is really little.

I am ending my rant with a quote: "Rather than being the image of a single struggle as in chess, Go is much more like the panorama of an entire campaign, or complex theatre of war. And so it is more like modern warfare where strategic mass movements are the ultimate determinants of victory. … As in modern warfare, direct combat, without supporting tactics, rarely occurs. In fact, to engage too soon in direct combat frequently spells defeat." -- Oscar Korschelt

jballanc3• 13 years ago

I agree, but just wanted to add that if you find Go boring, I suggest you pick up a good Go book or two. The really good Go writers can construct an entire war narrative from a game of Go, all the while giving you deeper insight into the strategy and tactics at play in the game. To be honest, compared to Go writing, I find much writing about Chess to be very boring and analytical (though I'm sure that has as much to do with specific authors as with the subject matter in question).

jcutrell• 13 years ago

As a Go player I take this as an insult.

I'd be of the opinion that boring-ness is fairly subjective, so being insulted probably isn't warranted.

You make good points about the gameplay differences, though.

anExcitedBeast2• 13 years ago

The bitterness between the go and chess communities is silly to me. There is more depth in either game than any one person could ever fully appreciate. Hell, checkers has more depth than any one person can appreciate, and that's a solved game. Pick a game and enjoy it, and don't try to yuck someone else's yum.

heyitsnick• 13 years ago

Poker

thenmar• 13 years ago

What board games have you played? In the last 10-15 years, the U.S. has experienced something of a German-style board game renaissance. Check out Carcassonne, Puerto Rico, Power Grid, Agricola, and many other less popular ones.

Kind of irrelevant, but board games seem like a great application of 3D printing. I wonder if there will be another surge in popularity when (if?) 3D printers become household items.

msluyter• 13 years ago

I'm not sure exactly what constitutes a viable "chess alternative," but if you're open to going beyond two player and investigating other styles of games, check out the top games on BGG (boardgamegeek.com). Many of these have a great deal of strategic depth and subtlety:

http://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame

bmslieght2• 13 years ago

Have another go at Go. The handicap system is wonderful. It make two players of what ever standard have an equal match. There is a reason why Go is old and globally the uptake is far bigger than Chess - it combines very type of thinking. Strategic versus immediate tactical. Thinking globally versus locally. Chess appears too 1 dimensional now by comparison.

pjungwir• 13 years ago

If you're looking for something close to chess, you might enjoy Xiangqi, or Chinese Chess. It has a similar layout, but with a few changes, e.g. rook-like pieces that capture not the closest piece, but the second-closest piece. Two on the same file creates all sort of weird possibilities.

username42• 13 years ago

Go is not boring, but what you see in the game evolves a lot with your level. I have stayed a couple of year at 5 kyu with monotonous games. Once I have improved to 3kyu, games were a lot more funny.

abvdasker• 13 years ago

David Foster Wallace wrote (I'm paraphrasing here) that "tennis is a combination of chess and boxing". Maybe try that.

scott_s2• 13 years ago

Chess boxing is a thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing

Anyway, every one-on-one sport makes a reference to "human chess."

phaus7• 13 years ago

Sounds like he thinks very highly of tennis. Most people like to think that the things they like are better than the things everyone else likes.

The truth is, any skill-based game can be extremely intense at the highest levels of play.

brd• 13 years ago

If we're going to start suggesting physical activities I'd say Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and rock climbing are both very chess like in their emphasis on strategic placement/puzzle solving. Your limb placement, your endurance, the way you shift your weight, the current momentum, they're all your pieces and you have to play them appropriately.

I'm a huge fan of both activities because of the combination of mental and physical demands.

S4M• 13 years ago

You can try Chinese chess (xiang qi) or Japanese chess (shogi). I particularly like shogi because it has the rule that you can reuse the pieces of your opponent you capture.

Both are a bit hard to learn though because the pieces are oriental characters.

se523• 13 years ago

Shogi is derived from xiangqi (same with Korean chess or janggi). And note that the characters are called hanzi or kanji (literally Chinese/Han characters), not oriental characters. It may be hard because the pieces don't have distinct shapes, but it's not after you learn/recognize the characters.

scott_s2• 13 years ago

Chess 2 ( http://ludemegames.com/chess2/). I'm not joking. USGamer has a good write-up on it: http://www.usgamer.net/articles/chess-2-the-sequel

I agree there's a certain amount of hubris behind the endeavor. But I'm interested in the design of balanced games, and the ways in which some old games are not balanced or rigid.

KVFinn2• 13 years ago

Chess 2 ( http://ludemegames.com/chess2/). I'm not joking. USGamer has a good write-up on it: http://www.usgamer.net/articles/chess-2-the-sequel
I agree there's a certain amount of hubris behind the endeavor. But I'm interested in the design of balanced games, and the ways in which some old games are not balanced or rigid.

The creator's blog post is quite entertaining, thought it was a joke but the game is quite real and looks interesting:

Chess 1 was a big hit, no question there, but a few issues have cropped up over the years. First, the original game ends in a draw uncomfortably often. Second, memorization (rather than on-the-spot intuition) ended up being much more important than the original developers intended. Even top players such as Fischer and Capablanca complained about this. Third, because it has no hidden information, the ability to capitalize on reading your opponent is more limited than it could be. And finally, the first version offered only a single army and one matchup.

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/30/announcing-chess-2.html

So Anand encountered a "mild surprise" in the opening moves that left him "flying blind" (meaning the board was in a position with which he had not previously studied) and because of that he decided to not keep pursuing the game. He just engineered a draw.
ntuitive understanding of the game and moments of brilliant improvisation are the most exciting aspects, and yet memorized lines of play are so deeply entrenched now that when a top player encounters anything outside of memorized, studied lines he heads directly for the draw. It's really the opposite of what you'd hope.

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/11/11/high-level-chess.html

smky806• 13 years ago

That actually looks pretty promising, but seems like it will have major balance issues.

To me the trick is preserve some kind of backward compatibility with chess while finding a way to increase the strategic content. Ironically stuff like increasing the board size like in 3D chess variants, can actually reduce the strategic content by reducing the role of long-term factors like pawn structure.

EDIT: I can see some combination of the game's features -- particularly the king "touchdown" -- sort of working against the strategic content. IE people just playing gimmick openings to sneak their king across.

jedberg• 13 years ago

Have you tried Chess960[0]

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960

jmgregory• 13 years ago

Off the top of my head, if you're looking for deep two-player strategy with zero chance element, besides Go there's Othello (Reversi), Hive, Checkers, and Khet. If you're willing to put up with some chance, Backgammon and Battle Line can be very satisfying. For more than two players, take a look at Puerto Rico (finite but negligible chance) and Diplomacy.

protomyth• 13 years ago

Diplomacy is a very good group game that even works by (e)mail. Colonial Diplomacy was also pretty good, but it felt like a sprint compared to Diplomacy.

schoen2• 13 years ago

Quoridor is a great abstract strategy game that doesn't seem to have beecome very widely known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoridor

A lot of the subtlety comes in because of the rule that you can never completely obstruct the opponent's path to the goal, but you can try to make it as convoluted as possible. Hence people try to multiply the opponent's options (so that they can be closed off at the last minute) and limit their own options (so that the opponent isn't allowed to block their unique path to the goal).

Cthulhu_• 13 years ago

Magic: the Gathering? It's a game of infinite possibilities and strategies and has a big meta game around it, too. Plus collectibles. Plus cool artwork. Plus good apps.

simon_renoult• 13 years ago

Plus - sadly - expensive.

GFischer• 13 years ago

(not the op) I love Magic: the Gathering and played on and off for 18 years now.

It has two big downsides, the main one for me is that it's extremely expensive (a brand new console + collection of titles is equivalent in price to owning a couple of top tier decks).

The other one is that it's seen as uncool or childish or nerdish. I'd rather not mention it in workplaces anymore.

That said, yeah, building decks playing the metagame is very rewarding intellectually :) and having games 24/7 on Magic Online is great.

phaus7• 13 years ago

In some ways, the internet ruined games like MTG. I still like to play, but the widespread availability of tournament decklists stifles creativity.

There are still formats where you see a wide variety of decks, but T2 play normally involves picking one of maybe 5 or 6 viable options.

dccoolgai• 13 years ago

Used to love MTG. Now I play Dominion more - because "building the deck" (which was always the most fun part for me) is part of the game and it's decided more by skill than who can buy the better cards (i.e. at start of every game each player has a statistically equal opportunity to get each card.) It's huge in the "board game geek" scene, so apologies if you already know of it...but if you like MTG, I'd highly recommend it.

jmilloy5• 13 years ago

I think Hive is the best chess "alternative". It feels lighter, but plays deeply and is never boring. It has an interesting geometric component. And there are annual championships.

(Get the Hive Carbon edition, it's much nicer looking)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hive_(game)

2mur• 13 years ago

Yeah Hive is a great game and I love the bakelite pieces.

jimmahoney• 13 years ago

Pente.

damonk• 13 years ago

What about Chess960?

jrs994• 13 years ago

If you see many, many people getting obsessed with a game, and you think it's boring, it's usually a sign that you're not understanding something.

Go and no limit poker are getting massively popular. They are both like chess, but much less tactical and a lot more strategical games. In other words, computers can't beat the best players in these games yet.

For whatever reasons, the status of games is somewhat related to whether they are "solved" by programs. Chess, like backgammon and checkers, is really on its way down.

I love chess, and play it all the time, and same with many other games. But the allure goes down once it is solved.

maybe all games will be figured out by software... but at the moment, no limit and go seem extremely exciting in terms of their possibilities/strategies.

schoen2• 13 years ago

Although the best chess players are now computers, chess doesn't seem anywhere close to being solved in the formal game theory sense (where we know how to produce perfect play that can't be beaten even in principle). There was a gap of over a decade between a machine becoming the world checkers champion (1994) and checkers becoming a formally solved game (2007). (Impressively, both of these were achieved by the same person, Johnathan Schaeffer.)

The difference, of course, is between "this machine can beat the best existing human player" and "this machine can beat any conceivable player as long as it's logically possible to do so". And right now we're at the former stage for chess (at least in some abstract sense: I'm not sure that a specific machine exists in operable condition that reflects the state of the art), but nowhere near the latter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess#Predictions_on_w...

phaus7• 13 years ago

If you see many, many people getting obsessed with a game, and you think it's boring, it's usually a sign that you're not understanding something.

I love chess, but this type of thinking is flawed. Using this logic, the Twilight movies are misunderstood masterpieces, Justin Beiber is the millennials' Mozart, and WWE style wrestling should be in the Olympics alongside the decathlon.

ternaryoperator• 13 years ago

Go and no limit poker are getting massively popular. They are both like chess.

Go is, poker is not. The key difference is that in go and chess, all the information about the game is known by both parties. That's not true in poker, where each player has data that's intentionally hidden from the other players.

adamconroy• 13 years ago

You can apply your first statement to most things in life. When people think things are boring, most of the time it is because they don't understand the nuances, history etc

bionerd• 13 years ago

If you’re looking specifically for an alternative to Go or chess then be sure to have a look at a list of the so-called abstract board games (Go and chess belong to this category too) on the BoardGameGeek: http://boardgamegeek.com/abstracts/browse/boardgame (sorted by popularity by default)

There are a few gems there that you might be interested in.

flud434• 13 years ago

You should really give No Limit Hold'em or Pot Limit Omaha a try. Poker is a game of astounding complexity once you start taking it seriously and it's quite fun. Combine that with the ability to take a small bankroll, $100 or whatever you're comfortable using as seed money, and turn it into a roll sufficient for high stakes poker (with enough dedication and time) and it truly does become quite an amazing game to play.

I personally play heads-up poker. Unlike 9-handed poker, heads-up poker is constant action. It's more dependent on opponent profiling and maximizing expectation on the fly, using experience and statistics. A game of infinite variety.

Since April I've taken $200 and, playing online and live poker, have profited in the following ways:

+$6458 - online poker heads up matches

+$2900 - rakeback/bonuses from pokerstars

+$12500 - live tournaments and pot limit omaha cash

And that's merely playing recreationally, completely separate from my full time job. You can play a complex, fun game and make money doing it. Who wouldn't enjoy that?

RRiccio3• 13 years ago

I used to be a professional poker player, and although I agree that especially in the beginning -- while you're quickly evolving -- it's a lot of fun, after a while you do it for the money.

It's very different from MTG, where me and my friends would play for the thrill of it, spending whatever little money we had to play.

The easy test here is: would you play a poker tournament just for fun, if there was nothing at stake? Few people actually do it. The thrill in both cases actually is (or becomes) the money made/lost.

lukev• 13 years ago

Are there any legal or quasi-legal ways to play online poker in the US, currently?

sejje4• 13 years ago

FWIW, this is called run-good.

It's unlikely your $200 was a proper bankroll when you started, and it's even more unlikely that you or anyone else could consistently replicate these results (when starting out).

That said, I'm an ex-husng player, and played them professionally for three years, and I don't disagree with your overall message. Poker is a wonderful game, heads-up play is great and has almost no boring parts, and you can conceivably make a living at it if you put in your time and manage your money well.

How are the games these days? When I played it was primarily before superturbos, and I three-tabled $105s on FTP for just under a 60% winrate and 14% ROI.

I imagine the average player has really upped their game, though, and that the regulars these days would crush me on average--I'm rusty and the game has matured.

gosukiwi2• 13 years ago

Pretty unrelated but you can try online strategy games, personally I've played League of Legends for about two years and I still can't reach Diamond tier. LoL does require some mechanical skill but once you get it down, it's 90% knowledge.

Another alternative is Magic The Gathering :) or HearthStone.

saraid216• 13 years ago

The discussion around Carlsen has led me to instinctively make comparisons to Starcraft professional play.

http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/How_to_Improve

If you listen to commentators discussing matches, they can explain why certain decisions are gutsy, what the history of each player is (so-and-so is amazing at Medivac drops, so you expect that going into a game with him; so-and-so prefers the late game, so you'll never see him build proxy pylons), and the long-term ramifications of certain events (it doesn't seem like a big deal to lose 5 workers, just like a pawn sacrifice doesn't seem huge, but at the pro level of play, you'd better get something of equal or greater worth out of that; it doesn't seem like a big deal to know when Zerg builds their first extractor, but scouting that timing can tell you a lot about build order).

LoL does require some mechanical skill but once you get it down, it's 90% knowledge.

At a certain point, LoL is about having teammates who you've worked with enough to anticipate and account for. There's a world of difference between baiting the carry and hoping your jungler will respond to your ping, and baiting the carry because you know there's three seconds until your jungler's dash is off cooldown.

Personally, I get the shakes when I PvP in LoL so what decent mechanical skill I have kinda fractures. :( I miss watching LoL streams, actually; they stopped working for me.

petegrif2• 13 years ago

Bridge

CatMtKing• 13 years ago

Since bridge was mentioned, how about majong? I could play either of them for hours on end.

sukuriant• 13 years ago

We should note for those that don't know, Cat is talking about real Mahjong, not the matching-game Mahjong that people know from 90's era computing.

girvo9• 13 years ago

StarCraft.

;)

baq• 13 years ago

Arimaa can be played using a chess set: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/. it's specifically designed to be hard for computers to play.

mattivc• 13 years ago

It's quite fun to see the media attention he has gotten here in Norway. For the last few weeks the sport segment of most news show spent as much time devoted to chess as football, which is not something i ever expected to see.

I'm not much a chess player myself but it still very satisfying seeing so much attention brought to a intellectual sport. I hope at least some of it will stick around.

gshakir• 13 years ago

Cool, it was held in Chennai, my home town. I remember some of my friends along with others (25 at a time) lining up to play Anand at the same time about 15 years ago. Anand was a Grand master at that time. Who else is from Chennai here at HN ?

JonFish85• 13 years ago

But has he played Judah Friedlander?

fedvasu• 13 years ago

Honest Question : So now Chess will be more fashionable game?

realrocker• 13 years ago

Congrats Magnus Carlsen! You finally unseated our beloved Vishwanathan Anand and made the beautiful game even more beautiful.

Allow me to go on a tangent to let me tell my personal story with chess. I began playing at age 7 when my elder brother borrowed a chess board from a friend. It was a nice break from the physical altercations between us(read mat fights). My maternal grand ma called it "Satan's Game". And my mother toed the line. Why? I don't know the exact reason, but I guess it was an amazing time sink. Or maybe they both had watched this Hindi movie by Satyajit Ray: The Chess Players(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076696/). When the game s between my brother and me became violent(You moved it when I was off to the toilet...) it was banned from our home. But we didn't give up. Our summers were spent playing chess in a nearby mango orchard or the graveyard a mile away. The chess board made out of paper with plastic pieces was the only "toy" we never broke. Those were the best days of my life. And it's still safe 20 years later. With every piece intact. What a game.

denisnazarov• 13 years ago

Intro to that film (amazing): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zCsn-he5Kk

RLC2• 13 years ago

Of course he won the name alone speaks for itself "Magnus!" Just fucking HUGE at anything you can think of! Compared to Viswanathan which sounded like a vegtable ready to be consumed or a rubbing oil or even like a dip for your prata.

hatred• 13 years ago

If I were you , I will show the "guy" on the other side of the table some respect too after all he is a veteran and a champion since 2007.

polar• 13 years ago

Viswanathan means lord of the Universe.

sigzero• 13 years ago

Didn't quite help him though.

wavefunction• 13 years ago

I downvoted you for your terrible bigotry. It's not welcome here.

RLC2• 13 years ago

Magnus seems more like a guy I could invite over for a couple of beers. No offense on Anand he seem to be more like a KOOL-AID type of kid and always a boy scout but a douche!

selmnoo• 13 years ago

Anand is a total class act. All the other top chess players only ever had good things to say about him. And Anand is one of the people who coached Magnus.

He's known to be focused strictly on the game and never do mind tricks to throw an opponent off. A lot of top players respect him for this.

qq66• 13 years ago

What do you mean by mind tricks?

phaus7• 13 years ago

So, no offense to him but then you call him a douche? Even if you did mean to be offensive, what exactly makes nice people douche bags? I find it far more douchey when people make fun of people that are different from them, and when they think that an appropriate way to judge a person's character is whether or not they think the person would be cool to drink with.

Its 2013, I think by now we should all be smart enough to realize that the desire to drink alcohol doesn't really have anything to do with masculinity.

lukekarrys• 13 years ago

You can watch IM Danny Rensch & GM Ben Finegold review the game right now on http://www.chess.com/tv

ktd2• 13 years ago

This is actually a good example of why I'm not particularly interested in chess anymore-- a game that's that heavy on draws and where so many of the situations are adaptations of well-known positions simply isn't that thrilling. I really enjoyed chess when I was a kid, but the better I became and the more I learned about it the less I found it a compelling game.

RBerenguel5• 13 years ago

The huge amount of draws and the almost-required bibliographical knowledge of opening theory (aside from the seemingly arbitrary sets of rules and pieces) are why I decided to play go. Have not looked back, except to see what's going on in the chess world.

elliptic• 13 years ago

I don't understand - when you made this decision, did you expect that you were going to be good enough so that these features of chess (draws and deep, well-studied opening theory) were going to be relevant to you?

ktd2• 13 years ago

I don't understand - when you made this decision, did you expect that you were going to be good enough so that these features of chess (draws and deep, well-studied opening theory) were going to be relevant to you?

Yeah. I played chess competitively as a kid, attending state tournaments, taking lessons outside of school, and so on. However, I found that the more I got into it and better I became, the less appealing it seemed.

Ironically, I felt that chess between relative amateurs was much more interesting than chess between more skilled players, because the improvisational component that I loved was much more relevant when people hadn't been going through the opening books.

icelancer• 13 years ago

Fischer et al saw it coming decades ago, unfortunately.

pdknsk• 13 years ago

I'm not a particularly good player, but the match was rather boring IMO, other than game 9, which Anand cut short with his blunder. I wonder if the dull first game, described by Anand as a "satisfactory draw with black pieces", set the tune for the remaining games.

reidmain• 13 years ago

As someone who played chess as a child but gave up after high school what are some apps that would get me back into the game?

Technophobe• 13 years ago

Books.

girvo9• 13 years ago

I have to say, the combination of your username and comment was rather perfect (even if it was on purpose).

And you're pretty correct there, too, according to the last person I asked this question of.

gk1• 13 years ago

Consider joining ICC (http://chessclub.com). It's the best place online for playing chess, and also comes with an app. Tell 'em gk sent you.

anExcitedBeast2• 13 years ago

Chess.com has a good app with tactics training, live play, and (my favorite) correspondence play (1-5 days per move; great for busy people). My favorite place to play live chess is lichess.org.

adrianmn• 13 years ago

www.chessclub.com and www.playchess.com have the best and strongest player pools. They also have educational materials and coaches if that is what you are after. Only ChessClub has a Mac client.

oconnor0• 13 years ago

Is the site down for anyone else?

girvo9• 13 years ago

After spending the last 18-months immersed in the professional StarCraft 2 scene, I can totally appreciate a lot of the meta-stuff around Chess now. I always enjoyed Chess, and was not too bad at it (compared to those around me, certainly nowhere near even an amateur-pro!), but for some reason SC2 "clicks" better for me (I think being addicted to Brood War while spending 6 months in South Korea probably has something to do with it).

The discussion of "mind games" {"nettlesomeness" here) is something that SC2 has an obsession with, and certainly can play a massive part in pro tournaments, and I'd never considered it applying to chess... but now that I think about it, everything in SC2's meta really came from Chess to begin with, only applied in real-time with 300+ actions per minute and hundreds of pieces with few illegal moves. And yet I struggle more with grokking the advanced strategies of Chess than I do for StarCraft!

Segmentation• 13 years ago

Comparing a centuries old board game with completely balanced rules, to an infant video game that still has major balance problems (if you looked hard enough), is silly. Chess is as balanced as it gets.

girvo9• 13 years ago

StarCraft has balance problems? So thats why the new patch got released!

I find it funny that you'd assume that I don't know that. Of course I do. The balance in Chess is what makes it a far more strategic and "complex" (in terms of strategy and tactics) game. I said as much in my post. I like Chess, I just thought it was funny that despite playing chess all throughout school and competing in various tournaments, I'd never made the connection with StarCraft's various terms, ideas, and strategies.

That's what I was expressing. I have no idea what you thought I was trying to say!

rthomas62• 13 years ago

Well... perfect balance has yet to be proven. But it's certainly better than Starcraft, at any rate.

Hasu• 13 years ago

Chess isn't close to perfectly balanced. White has a significant advantage, both theoretically and statistically. The win rates between races in Starcraft is closer to perfect balance than the white/black divide. Balance is achieved by alternating colors between players, but one player still gets white more in a BoX. You can't switch from zerg to terrain between games in Starcraft.

Scriptor3• 13 years ago

But...he didn't even mention balance. He simply was saying how Starcraft helped him appreciate the "nettlesomeness" aspect of professional chess more. It's just a comment about an interesting observation.

KVFinn2• 13 years ago

Chess is as balanced as it gets.

It's "balanced" in some respects but both sides use the same features and most games end in a draw, and high level play is less and less interesting. And for that matter it's not even balanced really -- tournaments have players play both white and black because they are so inequal. This is like balancing starcraft by having everyone play mirror matchups or swap races.

So Anand encountered a "mild surprise" in the opening moves that left him "flying blind" (meaning the board was in a position with which he had not previously studied) and because of that he decided to not keep pursuing the game. He just engineered a draw.
Most real people are "flying blind" after the first couple moves of the game, and it's the challenge of trying to solve a puzzle against a live opponent (who is also flying blind) that makes the game so fun. At the highest levels, Grandmasters go very deep into the game in positions they have studied exhaustively, and then the moment they feel uncomfortable they search for the emergency brake, and consider themselves happy to escape with half a point.
Intuitive understanding of the game and moments of brilliant improvisation are the most exciting aspects, and yet memorized lines of play are so deeply entrenched now that when a top player encounters anything outside of memorized, studied lines he heads directly for the draw. It's really the opposite of what you'd hope.

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/11/11/high-level-chess.html

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/30/announcing-chess-2.html

wavesounds• 13 years ago

I wish they gave the girl announcer access to the laptop as well so she could describe what she's saying using the screen just like the guy can.

KedarMhaswade• 13 years ago

Brilliant! Magnanimous. I am a Vishy fan, but this match was really one-sided when Vishy faltered at critical moments. Does it mean age matters? Will Vishy rebound? I hope so, but perhaps it's the sad reality that I acknowledge -- better player won and the problem with the chess world (the number 1 elo-rated player was not the WC for so long) got corrected.

Where do we go from here?

TylerE10• 13 years ago

Highly unlikely. It seems that most super-GMs start to decline around 40. Vishy is 44. There have been some that have stayed quite strong into their later years - Korchnoi, quite a strong player at his peak (Peaked at 2695 @ age 48, quite late in and of itself), played for the world championship in 1978 and 81 (age 47 and 50), and stayed a regular on the tournament circuit - he beat a 2700+ ranked GM in a 2011 at the age of 80, and continued to to play seriously until he had a stroke late last year.

edgarvaldes• 13 years ago

V. Korchnoi is (was) a great player. His matches with Karpov were always interesting.

McUsr• 13 years ago

I am Norwegian and fucking proud of it right now, due to Magnus Carlsen.

He comes from a Nation consisting of 5 mill. people, compared to Anand's billion people.

This is probably the greatest sports achievement our country will ever make, as there are really no comparable sports achievements in the world, not now, anyway.

IMHO: They should knight him the second he gets of the plane when he returns home. Because no other Norwegian has ever accomplished anything close to this, with regards to bring honour to our nation.

Gratuler Magnus!

hrkristian• 13 years ago

To clarify: While theoretically the title of knight is attainable in Norway, it's not something that is practiced, and has not been for at least 150 years.

Were there such a title I'd be happy to see our government/King knight him, though.

sanoli2• 13 years ago

You should be proud, Magnus is awesome! I'm Brazilian, and I would trade one of our World Cups for a chess World Championship. Hell, I'd even trade two-for-one :)

sremani• 13 years ago

Have you ever seen India's medal tally in Olympics - your logic will fade once your find India near the end of the tally with 2 medals one silver and one bronze.

Vishwanathan Anand was not the rule but an exception.

vijucat• 13 years ago

This may sound "negative" but I would appreciate if you can think about this : by "proud", you merely mean "lucky". You can only be proud of things that you achieve personally. Unless you trained him or helped him somehow) you have absolutely no part in Magnus Carlsen's success.

Probably without realizing it, your ego is merely interested in these false associations (Magnus > Anand => Norway > India, and parents-who-gave-birth-to-me-think-they belongs-to Norway => I belongs-to Norway) because it can grab a free ride to better self-esteem without any personal effort. I believe there are false notions of separateness and identity involved here.

Nationalism is also spiritually detrimental because it prevents you from realizing that you are not who you think you are. How can you even ask the question, "Who am I?" if you are so comfortable with who you think you are?

Sorry for the lecture. I hope there is something useful here for you despite raining on your parade!

sytelus• 13 years ago

I'm always amused by how people tie their pride to things they have absolutely no control over. In case of sports, it's even worse. Most sport outcomes aren't repeatable. When "your" team/person wins it is very likely due to random mistakes others made or you were fortunate to avoid this time. They may very well loose if the game was repeated again. Would your pride wash away then? Even if sport events were repeatable, why you should take pride when you had almost no contribution to their success (may be except buying a ticket or offering your eyeballs for TV ads)? In US, its even worse, considering teams are not even "national", they are actually owned by random zillionairs. I was almost floored to see people spending spending significant portions of lives and money in to cheer leading what is essentially absolute random team where members are pretty much from anywhere, sometimes even opponent teams! Why anyone should be spending their precious Sundays and take monumental amount of pride when some random zillionair's team wins because of what are essentially random non-repeatable events? Sometimes I think sport fans are people who skipped any or all education on probability and statistics.

PS: Before you all get on my case let me tell you I do get the fact that sports does have display of skills value (same as skills of artist) that is worth paying for. I also get that professional sports is hard and money hungry adventure and without fans it won't exist. What I don't get is why is it a matter of pride?

qw• 13 years ago

If someone loses "he lost".

If someone wins "we won"

asdfologist• 13 years ago

I don't understand at all the point to these negative replies to this comment. Magnus Carlsen made Norwegians happy because he accomplished something of great honor to that country. Is this really that absurd?

eneveu• 13 years ago

It seems like the official commentary is of sub par quality. According to the /r/chess subreddit, this commentary is pretty good and fun: http://www.twitch.tv/chessnetwork/profile/pastBroadcasts

mmwanga• 13 years ago

Move #14 (Nxc6) does not make sense. Why did Magnus do that?

Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion

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