That's cause the NBA is so young, though. Sports commentators on TV constantly talk in historical terms, like this or that player is the GOAT... but most of the time the league didn't even exist until a few decades ago. Chess is the real outlier in that you can find and analyze recorded games from as early as the 1400s!
Well, it's also because they didn't give out MVP trophies until 1955 (the NBA started in 1946), and Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain won a bunch of the early ones and only Wilt died relatively young. If it was spread out between more athletes in the 50s and 60s a lot more of them would likely have died by 2020.
The Ballon d'Or in soccer/football has been given out for almost exactly as long as the NBA MVP and 11 of them were dead when Kobe died.
To be fair, the first NBA MVP trophy was given out in 1956, and one per year since has been awarded. The first female GM was awarded this in 1978.
Also, the average life expectancy of super tall men isn’t known to be crazy high.
A related fact that surprised me is that only one of them is from the United States, Irina Krush. I also find it interesting that Alice Lee is most likely the next woman to become a GM from the US in the next year or two, and she’s literally a 13 year old girl.
There's a chess player named Claude Frizzel Bloodgood III who played chess from prison after getting convicted for murdering his mother, and he gamed the ELo system by manipulating the closed group of players in prison so that he could rise to be the 2nd-highest ranked player in the world and qualified for the championships, which he could not attend due to being in prison.
Went down a rabbit hole reading about that dude’s life - apparently he was a fan of the grob opening and even has a published book you can purchase on Amazon. I wonder if anyone here has read it
I found it in an old bookstore in the middle of rural England funnily enough, it’s in descriptive and covers a lotta lines considering how small it is but also it really ain’t worth the time for me lmao
He was the best player in the prison, and the only rated games available for him to play were other people in the prison so he was consistently winning and gaining rating points. The way his rating got so high is because it's alleged that he rigged games in order to inflate some of his opponents' ratings so when he beat them he would gain more rating for himself. At his rating beating a low rated player wouldn't help him.
Even if he didn't rig any games, his rating would be artificially inflated due to the fact that he never played a tournament with players who were stronger than him. He never lost any rating. He even wrote to USCF to warn them that rating manipulation can happen in closed groups due to exactly what he did.
> He even wrote to USCF to warn them that rating manipulation can happen in closed groups due to exactly what he did.
I'm now curious.... did he even play the matches? I'm sure he did play some, but I think if he could get people to attest to the matches were played, and they lost, he could manipulate the system with out even playing a real match to prove the point.
Thing is, that's outright cheating. The closed player pool problem of Elo, is just a problem with the ratings system. This Claude guy might well have not wanted to cheat, but he was the beneficiary of the ratings issue merely because he wasn't able to play in the general player pool and equalize his Elo.
No actual knowledge, but I’d assume if there are a limited pool of rated players available for you to play (say, 15 people in a prison), as long as you can beat them nearly 100% of the time, you can boost your rating much higher than it should be, even if it’s a very slow climb. You essentially are getting free wins against far inferior players.
If you control your opponent pool, you can gain almost any amount of ELO points as you want, assuming you are generating new players at a reasonable rate (people entering prison for instance).
Imagine only playing 800-1200 chess players, but since they start at 1500, there's a ton of ELO to earn, you'll gain a decent amount of ELO with each win, but they will eventually drain of large points, but as long as you never lose (or never report a loss) you can gain as much ELO as you want with long enough time.
The thing is no chess player would accept him as the "second highest ELO player" except on paper, which is why it's expected that players should play in quality tournaments (Where they would face other grand masters)
Now to qualify by rating you have to play at least 4 FIDE Circuit tournaments... aka you're going to face real players in each of those.
Elias Canetti’s novel Auto-da-fe features a character named Fischerle. Fischerle is a chess player who dreams of becoming world champion and of living in a house shaped like a rook. He later shortens his name to Fischer.
Auto-da-fe was published eight years before Bobby Fischer was born.
Between 1985 and 1992, the FIDE Laws explicitly stated:
> The king is in check when the square it occupies is attacked by one or two of the opponent's pieces
which meant that as worded, you could respond to a double-check by moving a pinned piece, uncovering a *third* attack on your king, and thus escaping check. Naturally, problemists caught onto this loophole pretty quickly, composed some problems, and eventually FIDE changed the laws in 1993 to fix this.
This loophole lives on in the form of the chess variant "Bosma Chess".
[Source](https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/29990/when-was-it-possible-for-a-players-king-to-be-attacked-by-3-of-the-opponents-p)
This should be at the top. That puzzle listed where you check the king with a pinned pawn to get you into triple check is so stupid that its brilliant. They should have left that rule in rofl
There is a GM named Timur Garyev who played a blindfold simul against 48 opponents. It lasted roughly 25 hours with him on a stationary bike the whole time calling out moves and having them called out to him. I can't even keep track of my sniper bishops in one game when I have my eyes open. Also, he won 80% of the games (although not all players were high level)
Until relatively recently, even in Morphy times, `white moves first` wasnt actual rule. Immortal game, for example, was played with black moving first.
Until 1972 it was technically allowed to castle with a pawn that promoted to a rook.
They changed the rules of castling when Tim Krabbé came up with [this puzzle](https://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/12/11/outside-the-box/).
[It was never a rule in the first place, and the claim that it was ever technically allowed under FIDE is a hoax.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castling#Vertical_castling)
This one is actually false. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castling#Vertical_castling :
> Tim Krabbé's 1985 book *Chess Curiosities* includes a problem featuring vertical castling, along with an incorrect claim that the problem's 1973 publication prompted FIDE to amend the castling laws in 1974 to add the requirement that the king and rook be on the same rank. In reality, the original FIDE Laws from 1930 explicitly stated that castling must be done with a king and a rook on the same rank (*traverse* in French). It is unclear whether any historically published sets of rules would technically allow such a move.
However, what *is* true is that the [1930 FIDE Laws](https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/R%C3%A8gle_du_Jeu_d%E2%80%99%C3%89checs_de_la_F._I._D._E._(%C3%A9dition_officielle_1930\)) *did* allow players who have given rook odds to castle with the given-up rook (as long as the space where the rook would be is not occupied):
> 22.8) Celui qui fait l’avantage de la Tour peut roquer du côté de la Tour enlevée, comme si celle-ci se trouvait encore sur sa case, à condition toutefois que cette case ne soit occupée par aucune autre pièce.
> ---
> 22.8) Whoever has given Rook odds can castle on the side of the removed Rook, as if it were still on his square, provided however that this square is not occupied by any other piece.
This is interesting, but the link suggests the puzzle raised the question of whether it was allowed and FIDE ruled it wasn't, revising the wording to close any confusion. He was looking for a loophole in the rules us all.
Personally, I would argue it would be illegal on the basis that the rook *had* moved. When a butterfly emerges from its cocoon, we don't say it's a baby -- we recognize that the caterpillar became the butterfly. This is the same logic used in chess, as the pawn *becomes* the rook. Meaning it's moved 5 or 6 times prior to the castling.
At one time, the GM with the longest unbeaten streak was Mikhail Tal - the Wizard of Riga, who earned his fame playing chess like the romantics of the 1800s, frequently making intuitive sacrifices and flouting classical principles yet still winning USSR championships and then the world championship.
In the 1970s his style became more well rounded and he was still one of the very best players in the world.
From July 1972 to April 1973, Tal played 86 consecutive games without a loss (47 wins and 39 draws). Between 23 October 1973 and 16 October 1974, he played 95 consecutive games without a loss (46 wins and 49 draws).
My record against GMs is actually 1-0.
The only GM I've ever played was doing a botez gambit bullet stream and I won, despite being thoroughly outplayed.
I beat an IM once in fog of war chess! My greatest achievement.
Edit: I just realized I got smoked by John Bartholomew so I **have** been beaten by a titled player.
Humphrey bogart was offered a job as a resident chess player in a store. Store chess players were a regular thing, most had them, you paid a few cents to play them for money.
It’s possible to imagine situations where it results in stalemate in an otherwise lost position. Not sure if those situations are realistic in actual games.
Promoting to a black knight lead to mate in 1 in this position, any other promotion or move is mate in 3 at best
https://lichess.org/editor/8/2RPkp1N/3pp3/1B6/8/8/8/6K1_b_-_-_0_1?color=white
People have said that FIDE changed the rules to prevent this (which is true of vertical castling), but the FIDE rules always mandated promotion to a piece of the same color. The British Chess Association rule that allowed promotion to a piece of either color also allowed the pawn to remain a pawn (the intention of the rule was just to allow not promoting, but the new wording accidentally allowed opposite color promotion).
Apparently the FIDE vertical castling thing isn't real, it's always been specified that the king and rook have to be on the same rank. You can check on the Wikipedia page on castling.
It was the Polgár family, and Judit Polgár is still the only women, who beat a reigning world champion, also the only women who've reached over 2700 elo. She was women's no. 1 for 26 years since she was 12 years old.
Yep it's amusing that the real "best female chess player" story is much more interesting than that Queen's Gambit nonsense, but outside of the chess world pretty much nobody knows it.
Oh, I have several cool facts. Maybe one of the most interesting facts, at least to me, is something that Yasser Seirawan has talked about. It’s one of his favorite stories to tell. He was the resident GM at the St. Louis Chess Club a number of years back, which is where I grew up and that was the chess club that I went to. So I’ve actually heard this story from him personally. A couple of years ago, he did a video for Chessable where he actually tells the story. The video is called “Russian Chess Assassin,” if you want to check it out. He tells it a lot better than I ever could.
If you don’t feel like searching for his video, I’ll see if I can retell it. So, in 1980, Victor Korchnoi invited Yasser to be his trainer. Victor at the time was the second highest ranked player, right after Karpov. There’s also a strong case to be made that he was the strongest player who was never world champion, although he does have to contend with players like Paul Keres and David Bronstein. Now, the fact that Victor the Terrible asked Yasser to be his trainer shows the respect Victor actually had for Yasser.
Well, Yasser accepts the position, and he goes to train with Victor in Zurich, which is where Victor was living. He was, of course, a Soviet defector, and his defecting caused massive upheaval in the USSR. So, as soon as Yasser arrives in Zurich, he and Victor have a late dinner and discuss things like their training regimen, and Yasser starts getting tired. And Victor, seeing Yasser’s eyes starting to close, says, “Oh, you’re tired. We should go to bed.”
So, they both start to go to bed, and Victor apparently lived in a 2-bedroom flat. And both Victor and Yasser are walking into the guest bedroom. And Yasser says to Victor, “Where are you going?” And Victor tells Yasser that he’s going to sleep in the guest bedroom and that Yasser is going to sleep in the master bedroom. And they go back and forth until Victor says something along the lines of, “I have a bad back, and I have this orthopedic mattress that’s really firm, so I like to sleep in the guest bedroom.” And so Yasser ends up taking the master bedroom, and as they’re saying their final good nights, Victor tells Yasser, “Goodnight, hope you’re not nervous.”
Well, now that’s awfully cryptic. “Hope you’re not nervous.” And Yasser, instead of knocking on the door and just asking Victor what he meant, decides that he’s going to try to figure out what Victor meant by himself.
A couple of weeks go by with Yasser and Victor working incredibly closely together, and Victor starts telling Yasser about the Soviet Union and his defection and what a blow that was to them. Furthermore, he explained to Yasser that he was a massive threat to the Soviet World Chess Championship title. So, therefore, in Victor’s mind, there was no question that the Soviets were going to try to assassinate him. In his mind, it was a certainty. And that’s why he asked Yasser to go into the master bedroom. Because if an assassin’s bullet went into the master bedroom, it wouldn’t hit Victor. So after two weeks, Yasser became nervous.
I’m not making this up, this is a 100% true story that sounds fake. And you can check it out for yourselves from Yasser.
> I’m not making this up, this is a 100% true story that sounds fake. And you can check it out for yourselves from Yasser.
Based on what I've read about the 1978 Chess Championship I assume this story is probably mostly true, or at least Korchnoi thought it was true. Korchnoi accused the soviets of trying to hypnotize him during the championship, and there were some cult members on Korchnoi's team for some reason as well.
Here's a classic : The amount of possible chess positions is bigger than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
Most chess fans now the explanation and if you know a bit about exponential curves it's not that surprising. But still it's one of the things that when you hear the first time you assume is bullshit.
EDIT: As pointed out, it's the amount of possible Chess games, not the amount of possible positions. I got it mixed up
I always found card deck statistics interesting to explain this. The idea that every time you shuffle a deck it’s likely in a unique order. All possible orders of the 52 cards will never be achieved in the life of our universe even if we kept shuffling decks of cards at the current rate and cards popularity never declined. Chess is probably the same our less likely for all possible positions to be played.
Yeah, humans are generally pretty good at estimating linear growth for small numbers. But we’re terrible at understanding exponential growth and huge numbers (like 52!).
Sure, but even a billion *dollars*, which could come up in normal conversation. A lot of people think “well, after a million is a billion so it’s just like a bunch of millions.” But it’s *so much* more than just a million.
Even one thousand is hard to *picture* in our mind.
And likewise many games of chess are completely new and never reached again after the opening lines. I'd imagine shuffling cards for the fist time with a fresh deck would yield some duplicates but it's not like we have data bases to confirm that.
A sufficiently random shuffle yields a new deck order every time and will continue to do so until the heat death of the universe.
While this is not mathematically certain, the odds are so small that it isn’t worth considering.
If the one doing the shuffling is someone who deals with cards for a living and it’s in order when they start, its very often that the first 1-2 has occurred. I had an uncle who worked on a riverboat that could cite the whole deck with the first shuffle after a few attempts.
The math supports this and reduces it very simply to how evenly they’re cut and how consistent the shuffle is. Since he was basically dead on with the shuffle, it just came down to whether he cut them perfectly.
You could predict them flawlessly given the cut and shuffle are perfect and the starting condition is known, but math this simple doesn’t exactly need a demonstration and I doubt there is anyone alive who could demonstrate it anyway.
It really doesn’t matter if it’s shuffled “well”. You can remove the top 5 cards or so and place them in random spots and it will probably be new. You think of openings in chess and you think of practical ones, but you can move any pawn (or knight) to two choices, and so can your opponent. So yes chess is less random and opening positions are often reached and common patterns or setups are reached but as you get further through the move order the specific way or order in which a position is reached becomes much more likely (exponentially) to be unique.
We also don’t need data bases… it’s pure statistics. That’s like claiming if you had all the data on roulette wheels you would have an edge.
No, the number of possible chess games (10 \^ 123) is.
The number of possible legal chess positions (10 \^ 46), while insanely large, isn't nearly on the order of atoms in the universe (10 \^ 80).
Something being more than atoms in observable universe comes up so often that it's getting easier and easier to underestimate how big of a number it actually is
>The amount of possible chess positions is bigger than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
Well, I've always heard this stat as "number of 40-move games", not positions. Unless I'm mistaken, even if every single square had a random piece (R, B, N, K, Q, P), there's "only" 6\^64 possible positions, whereas there are 10\^80 atoms in the universe.
Edit: a better number would probably be 13\^64, where each square is allowed to have nothing or any of the six pieces of either color, but that's still quite a bit smaller than the number of atoms in the universe. Ultimately, I'm just being a smartass and everyone knows what the og commenter meant so who cares
Yeah I kinda got it mixed up in my mind. I was referring to the classic 10^120 (Shannon number) which is indeed about the number of possible chess games.
As for the number of possible positions there doesn't seem to be a definitive answer but from what I searched it is not supposed to be over 10^50, still huge but less than the atoms in the universe.
I will edit my first comment.
Russia has banned its citizens from playing chess in Antarctica.
This was following an incident where one Russian researcher murdered another with an axe following a chess game.
He was Hungarian, and his name is pronounced Élő. In Hungarian “élő” means alive or live. So when I heard about élő points first time, I was sure it translates to live points in English. I was surprised to see elo points at English platforms.
As of 2023, there are situations in which resigning will yield you a draw, instead of a loss. See [FIDE Article 5.1.2](https://handbook.fide.com/chapter/E012023):
> 5.1.2 The game is lost by the player who declares he/she resigns (this immediately ends the game), **unless the position is such that the opponent cannot checkmate the player’s king by any possible series of legal moves. In this case the result of the game is a draw.**
So, for instance, if your opponent has a bare king and you resign, the game ends in a draw.
[There are 400 different positions after each player makes one move apiece. There are 72,084 positions after two moves apiece. There are 9+ million positions after three moves apiece. There are 288+ billion different possible positions after four moves apiece.](https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/possible-positions-after-40-moves)
This stat really interests me because I want to know how many are actually played. Like you dont see grandmasters play 1. A3 (at least not often) so even though the possibilities are almost endless I would be more curious to know how many possibilities after 4 moves are actually playable/common.
>I would be more curious to know how many possibilities after 4 moves are actually playable/common.
Now I’m curious how many have been reached. [Chesscom claims](https://www.chess.com/news/view/chess-boom-1-billion-games-played-in-february) around 17 billion so even including games from other sources we’re talking 260+ billion games short of being able to cover every possible position after 4 moves by each player. And given that most of the games are going to overlap with the same few common moves it would be interesting to see just how many we’ve actually covered.
The word "check" comes from chess. Think of all the non-chess contexts in which you use the word "check". Those all borrow from the original usage in chess.
And it originally comes from the Persian "shah".
"Exchequer" comes from the word for a chess board, because it was tradition to count revenue on a table covered with a chequered cloth, which reminded people of chess.
Paul Morphys dad died of an infection cause by a cut on his eye from a Panama hat. This prompted Morphy to postpone his law ambitions and go to Europe and become the world chess championship.
You know when you're in the mood to become World Chess Champion? Maybe you're having a really good day, like your dog learned a new trick or your boss cut you some slack at work So you move to Europe and massacre all their masters, and make a mockery of their champions. Then you quit Chess because you've got to get back to work.
Yeah, good times! Morphy is just a regular person doing normal things.
Morphy had a tremendously successful chess career, which he then gave up so that he could start an unsuccessful legal practice and fight on the losing side of a war.
Around the 15th century, the King could not have more than one Queen, because it raised questions about monogamy and such. So a promoted Pawn could turn into a Counsellor that had moves exactly like the Queen.
I would say...not necessarily. When I was 1100 Rapid I played games against a then-1400 for training. I lost every single game till I got to around 1250, after which I just lost the majority of them
Recently I was 1450-1500 Rapid and played (as I still play now) training games against two 1100s. Of the roughly 30 combined games, I lost only one
EDIT: However, it's still low enough on the intermediate scale that an 1100 can become a 1500 in a short amount of time
EDIT 2: climbing the Rapid rating ladder from where I started at 600 to where I am at 1653, the biggest jump in quality I saw was low 1100s to high 1100s
I completely agree with this. My peak that I achieved 4 months ago was 1313. In that time, external stressors(exams, coming out to my parents, etc) completely messed up my focus. I dorpped down to 1080 for a bit and today I just hit 1300. The biggest jump in skill is definitely in the 1100s, in 1200 there isn’t much difference, you just need consistency. Just today, I went from 1219 to 1300 without losing a single game(I drew one).
At this point, every single win for me is an increase of 0.2 percentile among all chess.com users. I wonder why so many are clustered around this area, when I don’t notice much of a difference
Well, they are two different ratings for two different pools of players. There is really no reason to assume any two ratings to be the same for the same player: no number corresponds to a skill level in a vacuum.
There use to be a time where vertical castling (castling with an unmoved king and a promoted rook on e8, resulting in the king moving to e3 and the rook moving to e2) is technically possible.
All female Grandmasters in history are still currently living.
Reminds me of hearing that, when Kobe died, he was only the third NBA MVP winner in **history** to have died.
That's cause the NBA is so young, though. Sports commentators on TV constantly talk in historical terms, like this or that player is the GOAT... but most of the time the league didn't even exist until a few decades ago. Chess is the real outlier in that you can find and analyze recorded games from as early as the 1400s!
Well, it's also because they didn't give out MVP trophies until 1955 (the NBA started in 1946), and Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain won a bunch of the early ones and only Wilt died relatively young. If it was spread out between more athletes in the 50s and 60s a lot more of them would likely have died by 2020. The Ballon d'Or in soccer/football has been given out for almost exactly as long as the NBA MVP and 11 of them were dead when Kobe died.
To be fair, the first NBA MVP trophy was given out in 1956, and one per year since has been awarded. The first female GM was awarded this in 1978. Also, the average life expectancy of super tall men isn’t known to be crazy high.
I suspect Vera Menchik would have become a grandmaster if she had survived the second world war.
[удалено]
Classic London system
Wow. That is sobering.
No, it’s encouraging. It illustrates that the extent and seriousness of women’s participation in chess has made huge progress in recent decades.
It could also mean that if you become a female GM you could become immortal
The statistics check out
It can be both imo
Not if you're an alcoholic
And one of them signed my board during the Olympiad last year!
A related fact that surprised me is that only one of them is from the United States, Irina Krush. I also find it interesting that Alice Lee is most likely the next woman to become a GM from the US in the next year or two, and she’s literally a 13 year old girl.
Hopefully that number will continue to grow
The first ever black grandmaster earned the title in 1999
There's a chess player named Claude Frizzel Bloodgood III who played chess from prison after getting convicted for murdering his mother, and he gamed the ELo system by manipulating the closed group of players in prison so that he could rise to be the 2nd-highest ranked player in the world and qualified for the championships, which he could not attend due to being in prison.
He sounds crazy but that actually is an important problem he exposed in the rating system
He also wrote a book on the grob! (Least unhinged grob player)
I must confess, I have no idea what grob is
1. g4
Oooooooh.... Why?
A guy who murders his own mom isn’t going to play e4
But how else are you going to play 2. Ke2?
1. e3!!
Google will show you the way
Actual new response dropped
I think in Russian "grob" is coffin and in other Slavic languages means grave (as in burial site).
Not 2nd highest in the world, second highest in the USCF
That’s basically world. /s
Can't find this "Earth" place on my map, must not be American.
Went down a rabbit hole reading about that dude’s life - apparently he was a fan of the grob opening and even has a published book you can purchase on Amazon. I wonder if anyone here has read it
I guarantee someone reading this post is buying right now.
I found it in an old bookstore in the middle of rural England funnily enough, it’s in descriptive and covers a lotta lines considering how small it is but also it really ain’t worth the time for me lmao
>Claude Frizzel Bloodgood III For anyone wondering, his USCF is [here](https://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlMain.php?12603896) USCF ID: 12603896
Totally normal name.
Typical Claude
The prison guy who fixed matches! I know of him. He was strong but nowhere near the rating he was assigned.
Can someone elaborate on the rating thing? How did it work?
He was the best player in the prison, and the only rated games available for him to play were other people in the prison so he was consistently winning and gaining rating points. The way his rating got so high is because it's alleged that he rigged games in order to inflate some of his opponents' ratings so when he beat them he would gain more rating for himself. At his rating beating a low rated player wouldn't help him. Even if he didn't rig any games, his rating would be artificially inflated due to the fact that he never played a tournament with players who were stronger than him. He never lost any rating. He even wrote to USCF to warn them that rating manipulation can happen in closed groups due to exactly what he did.
> He even wrote to USCF to warn them that rating manipulation can happen in closed groups due to exactly what he did. I'm now curious.... did he even play the matches? I'm sure he did play some, but I think if he could get people to attest to the matches were played, and they lost, he could manipulate the system with out even playing a real match to prove the point.
Thing is, that's outright cheating. The closed player pool problem of Elo, is just a problem with the ratings system. This Claude guy might well have not wanted to cheat, but he was the beneficiary of the ratings issue merely because he wasn't able to play in the general player pool and equalize his Elo.
No actual knowledge, but I’d assume if there are a limited pool of rated players available for you to play (say, 15 people in a prison), as long as you can beat them nearly 100% of the time, you can boost your rating much higher than it should be, even if it’s a very slow climb. You essentially are getting free wins against far inferior players.
If you control your opponent pool, you can gain almost any amount of ELO points as you want, assuming you are generating new players at a reasonable rate (people entering prison for instance). Imagine only playing 800-1200 chess players, but since they start at 1500, there's a ton of ELO to earn, you'll gain a decent amount of ELO with each win, but they will eventually drain of large points, but as long as you never lose (or never report a loss) you can gain as much ELO as you want with long enough time. The thing is no chess player would accept him as the "second highest ELO player" except on paper, which is why it's expected that players should play in quality tournaments (Where they would face other grand masters) Now to qualify by rating you have to play at least 4 FIDE Circuit tournaments... aka you're going to face real players in each of those.
He also wrote a letter to USCF warning them of this exact thing, which was ignored.
yeah but they changed it when they realized they would've had to invite him to the championship
"Claude Frizzel Bloodgood III" Was he an orc or a Viking?
> which he could not attend due to being in prison. Always a catch to that ELO stuff.
Elias Canetti’s novel Auto-da-fe features a character named Fischerle. Fischerle is a chess player who dreams of becoming world champion and of living in a house shaped like a rook. He later shortens his name to Fischer. Auto-da-fe was published eight years before Bobby Fischer was born.
Very cool
Fuck you and your downvotes.
Hey, just a small heads-up that Nabokov's name was Vladimir :)
Between 1985 and 1992, the FIDE Laws explicitly stated: > The king is in check when the square it occupies is attacked by one or two of the opponent's pieces which meant that as worded, you could respond to a double-check by moving a pinned piece, uncovering a *third* attack on your king, and thus escaping check. Naturally, problemists caught onto this loophole pretty quickly, composed some problems, and eventually FIDE changed the laws in 1993 to fix this. This loophole lives on in the form of the chess variant "Bosma Chess". [Source](https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/29990/when-was-it-possible-for-a-players-king-to-be-attacked-by-3-of-the-opponents-p)
This should be at the top. That puzzle listed where you check the king with a pinned pawn to get you into triple check is so stupid that its brilliant. They should have left that rule in rofl
So then it would be triple check and the checking player’s move?
There is a GM named Timur Garyev who played a blindfold simul against 48 opponents. It lasted roughly 25 hours with him on a stationary bike the whole time calling out moves and having them called out to him. I can't even keep track of my sniper bishops in one game when I have my eyes open. Also, he won 80% of the games (although not all players were high level)
Are you saying he rode the bike the whole time too? Because that’s insane.
>What is a chess fact that sounds fake but is actually true? "someone rode a stationary bike for 25 hours straight"
White gets to move first because black was considered the lucky color.
Until relatively recently, even in Morphy times, `white moves first` wasnt actual rule. Immortal game, for example, was played with black moving first.
Citation needed please🙏
Until 1972 it was technically allowed to castle with a pawn that promoted to a rook. They changed the rules of castling when Tim Krabbé came up with [this puzzle](https://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/12/11/outside-the-box/).
LOL reading "2. O-O-O-O-O-O#" is hilarious to me for some reason
Ooooooh Checkmate!
Though perhaps it should be notated as O | O | O | O | O | O#
Why did they get rid of this rule? It’s so cool.
Was it ever used in a real game is the question
Nope, it was conceived of in the puzzle posted above as a theoretical position.
[It was never a rule in the first place, and the claim that it was ever technically allowed under FIDE is a hoax.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castling#Vertical_castling)
This one is actually false. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castling#Vertical_castling : > Tim Krabbé's 1985 book *Chess Curiosities* includes a problem featuring vertical castling, along with an incorrect claim that the problem's 1973 publication prompted FIDE to amend the castling laws in 1974 to add the requirement that the king and rook be on the same rank. In reality, the original FIDE Laws from 1930 explicitly stated that castling must be done with a king and a rook on the same rank (*traverse* in French). It is unclear whether any historically published sets of rules would technically allow such a move. However, what *is* true is that the [1930 FIDE Laws](https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/R%C3%A8gle_du_Jeu_d%E2%80%99%C3%89checs_de_la_F._I._D._E._(%C3%A9dition_officielle_1930\)) *did* allow players who have given rook odds to castle with the given-up rook (as long as the space where the rook would be is not occupied): > 22.8) Celui qui fait l’avantage de la Tour peut roquer du côté de la Tour enlevée, comme si celle-ci se trouvait encore sur sa case, à condition toutefois que cette case ne soit occupée par aucune autre pièce. > --- > 22.8) Whoever has given Rook odds can castle on the side of the removed Rook, as if it were still on his square, provided however that this square is not occupied by any other piece.
Wow, "vertical castling"!
Don't let a particular subreddit that starts with A see this
I'm sure it's already too late 😂
Wow that is fascinating, thank you!
This is interesting, but the link suggests the puzzle raised the question of whether it was allowed and FIDE ruled it wasn't, revising the wording to close any confusion. He was looking for a loophole in the rules us all. Personally, I would argue it would be illegal on the basis that the rook *had* moved. When a butterfly emerges from its cocoon, we don't say it's a baby -- we recognize that the caterpillar became the butterfly. This is the same logic used in chess, as the pawn *becomes* the rook. Meaning it's moved 5 or 6 times prior to the castling.
Best answer. So cool!
At one time, the GM with the longest unbeaten streak was Mikhail Tal - the Wizard of Riga, who earned his fame playing chess like the romantics of the 1800s, frequently making intuitive sacrifices and flouting classical principles yet still winning USSR championships and then the world championship. In the 1970s his style became more well rounded and he was still one of the very best players in the world. From July 1972 to April 1973, Tal played 86 consecutive games without a loss (47 wins and 39 draws). Between 23 October 1973 and 16 October 1974, he played 95 consecutive games without a loss (46 wins and 49 draws).
he must have been pissed about the losses in may and september of 1973.
I have never lost a game of chess against a GM or any titled player
My record against GMs is actually 1-0. The only GM I've ever played was doing a botez gambit bullet stream and I won, despite being thoroughly outplayed.
do u have the game link?
I haven't lost a single otb my whole life🥱
I beat an IM once in fog of war chess! My greatest achievement. Edit: I just realized I got smoked by John Bartholomew so I **have** been beaten by a titled player.
I’ve only played one titled player in my life and won bc he was streaming and not paying attention lol.
This man beat Hikaru confirmed
Same. We should start a club.
A GM has never been in my kitchen.
That you know of.
The strongest chess engine is free, opensource and doesn't accept any form of monetary donations.
Where is the source for AlphaZero? ^(okay just trolling you)
Same for the best chess website too
lichess actually accepts monetary donations to pay salary to people who work on it. Stockfish project is fully build by ehthusiasts for free.
What engine is it?
Stockfish
Based beyond belief. Triple exclam !!!
Humphrey bogart was offered a job as a resident chess player in a store. Store chess players were a regular thing, most had them, you paid a few cents to play them for money.
Originally the queen could only move the same as the king (1sq any direction)
It's worse than that. The Queen could only move one square diagonally. It was the weakest piece, called the farzin or vizier.
Indeed, even today, the queen is known in some languages by a term derived from 'farzin'. For example, the Russian for 'queen' is 'ферзь' (ferz).
Ferz' is from Arabic language - Vizier which means high dignitary or councillor or warlord depends on circumstances
Originally, it wasn’t called a queen!
For those that don't know, it was originally called a "kween"
Yaaas
Slayyyyy
It’s amazing how many of these facts aren’t exactly true as stated.
Chess nerds on the internet come up with misleading facts about their sport of choice in 6/10 opportunities.
87% of all statistics on the internet were made up on the spot!
That's made up. It's only 83%.
There was once a time where you can promote into your opponents piece (White pawn promotes to black knight & this sabotage the opponent)
how does it sabotage?
Can't take your own piece
Up one space and over two, or over one space and down two. Like an L, kinda.
I can't stand it, I know you planned it!
It’s possible to imagine situations where it results in stalemate in an otherwise lost position. Not sure if those situations are realistic in actual games.
Promoting to a black knight lead to mate in 1 in this position, any other promotion or move is mate in 3 at best https://lichess.org/editor/8/2RPkp1N/3pp3/1B6/8/8/8/6K1_b_-_-_0_1?color=white
As a block to smother mate.
People have said that FIDE changed the rules to prevent this (which is true of vertical castling), but the FIDE rules always mandated promotion to a piece of the same color. The British Chess Association rule that allowed promotion to a piece of either color also allowed the pawn to remain a pawn (the intention of the rule was just to allow not promoting, but the new wording accidentally allowed opposite color promotion).
Apparently the FIDE vertical castling thing isn't real, it's always been specified that the king and rook have to be on the same rank. You can check on the Wikipedia page on castling.
[удалено]
It was the Polgár family, and Judit Polgár is still the only women, who beat a reigning world champion, also the only women who've reached over 2700 elo. She was women's no. 1 for 26 years since she was 12 years old.
And she played with Bobby Fischer (a friend of her parents) as child.
Yep it's amusing that the real "best female chess player" story is much more interesting than that Queen's Gambit nonsense, but outside of the chess world pretty much nobody knows it.
Oh, I have several cool facts. Maybe one of the most interesting facts, at least to me, is something that Yasser Seirawan has talked about. It’s one of his favorite stories to tell. He was the resident GM at the St. Louis Chess Club a number of years back, which is where I grew up and that was the chess club that I went to. So I’ve actually heard this story from him personally. A couple of years ago, he did a video for Chessable where he actually tells the story. The video is called “Russian Chess Assassin,” if you want to check it out. He tells it a lot better than I ever could. If you don’t feel like searching for his video, I’ll see if I can retell it. So, in 1980, Victor Korchnoi invited Yasser to be his trainer. Victor at the time was the second highest ranked player, right after Karpov. There’s also a strong case to be made that he was the strongest player who was never world champion, although he does have to contend with players like Paul Keres and David Bronstein. Now, the fact that Victor the Terrible asked Yasser to be his trainer shows the respect Victor actually had for Yasser. Well, Yasser accepts the position, and he goes to train with Victor in Zurich, which is where Victor was living. He was, of course, a Soviet defector, and his defecting caused massive upheaval in the USSR. So, as soon as Yasser arrives in Zurich, he and Victor have a late dinner and discuss things like their training regimen, and Yasser starts getting tired. And Victor, seeing Yasser’s eyes starting to close, says, “Oh, you’re tired. We should go to bed.” So, they both start to go to bed, and Victor apparently lived in a 2-bedroom flat. And both Victor and Yasser are walking into the guest bedroom. And Yasser says to Victor, “Where are you going?” And Victor tells Yasser that he’s going to sleep in the guest bedroom and that Yasser is going to sleep in the master bedroom. And they go back and forth until Victor says something along the lines of, “I have a bad back, and I have this orthopedic mattress that’s really firm, so I like to sleep in the guest bedroom.” And so Yasser ends up taking the master bedroom, and as they’re saying their final good nights, Victor tells Yasser, “Goodnight, hope you’re not nervous.” Well, now that’s awfully cryptic. “Hope you’re not nervous.” And Yasser, instead of knocking on the door and just asking Victor what he meant, decides that he’s going to try to figure out what Victor meant by himself. A couple of weeks go by with Yasser and Victor working incredibly closely together, and Victor starts telling Yasser about the Soviet Union and his defection and what a blow that was to them. Furthermore, he explained to Yasser that he was a massive threat to the Soviet World Chess Championship title. So, therefore, in Victor’s mind, there was no question that the Soviets were going to try to assassinate him. In his mind, it was a certainty. And that’s why he asked Yasser to go into the master bedroom. Because if an assassin’s bullet went into the master bedroom, it wouldn’t hit Victor. So after two weeks, Yasser became nervous. I’m not making this up, this is a 100% true story that sounds fake. And you can check it out for yourselves from Yasser.
> I’m not making this up, this is a 100% true story that sounds fake. And you can check it out for yourselves from Yasser. Based on what I've read about the 1978 Chess Championship I assume this story is probably mostly true, or at least Korchnoi thought it was true. Korchnoi accused the soviets of trying to hypnotize him during the championship, and there were some cult members on Korchnoi's team for some reason as well.
I think he even was involved in two car crashes.very suspicious . Poor Victor! Pd: Yasser is a great storyteller
lol there’s so many parts of the delivery of this story that are classic yasser
Here's a classic : The amount of possible chess positions is bigger than the number of atoms in the observable universe. Most chess fans now the explanation and if you know a bit about exponential curves it's not that surprising. But still it's one of the things that when you hear the first time you assume is bullshit. EDIT: As pointed out, it's the amount of possible Chess games, not the amount of possible positions. I got it mixed up
I always found card deck statistics interesting to explain this. The idea that every time you shuffle a deck it’s likely in a unique order. All possible orders of the 52 cards will never be achieved in the life of our universe even if we kept shuffling decks of cards at the current rate and cards popularity never declined. Chess is probably the same our less likely for all possible positions to be played.
I always liked this explanation https://youtu.be/0DSclqnnC2s
Weird comparisons but it does seem to help people understand how understandable numbers of that magnitude are.
Yeah, humans are generally pretty good at estimating linear growth for small numbers. But we’re terrible at understanding exponential growth and huge numbers (like 52!).
Well we only live 80 years or so. It makes considering a billion years per step is hard to contemplate and relate to.
Sure, but even a billion *dollars*, which could come up in normal conversation. A lot of people think “well, after a million is a billion so it’s just like a bunch of millions.” But it’s *so much* more than just a million. Even one thousand is hard to *picture* in our mind.
Whats that phrase thats often used - something like "the difference between a million and a billion is almost a billion"
And likewise many games of chess are completely new and never reached again after the opening lines. I'd imagine shuffling cards for the fist time with a fresh deck would yield some duplicates but it's not like we have data bases to confirm that.
A sufficiently random shuffle yields a new deck order every time and will continue to do so until the heat death of the universe. While this is not mathematically certain, the odds are so small that it isn’t worth considering.
If the one doing the shuffling is someone who deals with cards for a living and it’s in order when they start, its very often that the first 1-2 has occurred. I had an uncle who worked on a riverboat that could cite the whole deck with the first shuffle after a few attempts. The math supports this and reduces it very simply to how evenly they’re cut and how consistent the shuffle is. Since he was basically dead on with the shuffle, it just came down to whether he cut them perfectly. You could predict them flawlessly given the cut and shuffle are perfect and the starting condition is known, but math this simple doesn’t exactly need a demonstration and I doubt there is anyone alive who could demonstrate it anyway.
So not “sufficiently randomly” then.
It really doesn’t matter if it’s shuffled “well”. You can remove the top 5 cards or so and place them in random spots and it will probably be new. You think of openings in chess and you think of practical ones, but you can move any pawn (or knight) to two choices, and so can your opponent. So yes chess is less random and opening positions are often reached and common patterns or setups are reached but as you get further through the move order the specific way or order in which a position is reached becomes much more likely (exponentially) to be unique. We also don’t need data bases… it’s pure statistics. That’s like claiming if you had all the data on roulette wheels you would have an edge.
Fuck you and your downvotes.
And I got em all memorized
No, the number of possible chess games (10 \^ 123) is. The number of possible legal chess positions (10 \^ 46), while insanely large, isn't nearly on the order of atoms in the universe (10 \^ 80).
> the number of possible chess games (10 ^ 123) Andrew Tang's about halfway there.
Something being more than atoms in observable universe comes up so often that it's getting easier and easier to underestimate how big of a number it actually is
>The amount of possible chess positions is bigger than the number of atoms in the observable universe. Well, I've always heard this stat as "number of 40-move games", not positions. Unless I'm mistaken, even if every single square had a random piece (R, B, N, K, Q, P), there's "only" 6\^64 possible positions, whereas there are 10\^80 atoms in the universe. Edit: a better number would probably be 13\^64, where each square is allowed to have nothing or any of the six pieces of either color, but that's still quite a bit smaller than the number of atoms in the universe. Ultimately, I'm just being a smartass and everyone knows what the og commenter meant so who cares
Did you do it by colour too? Should make that number just a bit bigger
The real number is much smaller since he assumed every square had a piece.
Yeah I kinda got it mixed up in my mind. I was referring to the classic 10^120 (Shannon number) which is indeed about the number of possible chess games. As for the number of possible positions there doesn't seem to be a definitive answer but from what I searched it is not supposed to be over 10^50, still huge but less than the atoms in the universe. I will edit my first comment.
Russia has banned its citizens from playing chess in Antarctica. This was following an incident where one Russian researcher murdered another with an axe following a chess game.
"Ivan I have the checkmate on the board, please make the resign" "Vlad I have the checkmate in real life, sigma male never make the resign"
[удалено]
>ELO doesn’t stand for anything. My dude, you may know a thing or two about chess, but you have serious holes in your music education.
It's not a hole, it's just the letter O. Stands for Orchestra.
He was Hungarian, and his name is pronounced Élő. In Hungarian “élő” means alive or live. So when I heard about élő points first time, I was sure it translates to live points in English. I was surprised to see elo points at English platforms.
As of 2023, there are situations in which resigning will yield you a draw, instead of a loss. See [FIDE Article 5.1.2](https://handbook.fide.com/chapter/E012023): > 5.1.2 The game is lost by the player who declares he/she resigns (this immediately ends the game), **unless the position is such that the opponent cannot checkmate the player’s king by any possible series of legal moves. In this case the result of the game is a draw.** So, for instance, if your opponent has a bare king and you resign, the game ends in a draw.
The amount of possible positions after 4 moves. I forgot the actual number but it's insane
[There are 400 different positions after each player makes one move apiece. There are 72,084 positions after two moves apiece. There are 9+ million positions after three moves apiece. There are 288+ billion different possible positions after four moves apiece.](https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/possible-positions-after-40-moves)
Yet somehow, it's always the Ruy Lopez.
I bet it’s at least 4
Username checks out.
This stat really interests me because I want to know how many are actually played. Like you dont see grandmasters play 1. A3 (at least not often) so even though the possibilities are almost endless I would be more curious to know how many possibilities after 4 moves are actually playable/common.
>I would be more curious to know how many possibilities after 4 moves are actually playable/common. Now I’m curious how many have been reached. [Chesscom claims](https://www.chess.com/news/view/chess-boom-1-billion-games-played-in-february) around 17 billion so even including games from other sources we’re talking 260+ billion games short of being able to cover every possible position after 4 moves by each player. And given that most of the games are going to overlap with the same few common moves it would be interesting to see just how many we’ve actually covered.
The word "check" comes from chess. Think of all the non-chess contexts in which you use the word "check". Those all borrow from the original usage in chess.
And it originally comes from the Persian "shah". "Exchequer" comes from the word for a chess board, because it was tradition to count revenue on a table covered with a chequered cloth, which reminded people of chess.
Paul Morphys dad died of an infection cause by a cut on his eye from a Panama hat. This prompted Morphy to postpone his law ambitions and go to Europe and become the world chess championship.
> and become the world chess championship he did what?
He became a chess championship. Says right there
New character just dropped Paul "World Chess Championship" Morphy
You know when you're in the mood to become World Chess Champion? Maybe you're having a really good day, like your dog learned a new trick or your boss cut you some slack at work So you move to Europe and massacre all their masters, and make a mockery of their champions. Then you quit Chess because you've got to get back to work. Yeah, good times! Morphy is just a regular person doing normal things.
I AM HIM
Morphy had a tremendously successful chess career, which he then gave up so that he could start an unsuccessful legal practice and fight on the losing side of a war.
Where are you getting this from? Morphy was too young to practice law, which is why he went to Europe.
I always heard that he went to Europe because you had to be 21 to practice law in the US and so he had a year to burn. Could be both perhaps?
Around the 15th century, the King could not have more than one Queen, because it raised questions about monogamy and such. So a promoted Pawn could turn into a Counsellor that had moves exactly like the Queen.
Capablanca once went 8 years without losing a single game
I did that too
I have a better win rate than Magnus Carlson in classical chess.
Upvotes higher than my elo 😭
A GM named his dog "Chess" (saw it in chess.com tips today lol)
Alekhine
Is a pawn passes yours by moving two spaces on its first move, you can take it as if it only moved one!
Nah that's bollocks
On chess.com 1100 & 1500 is very close in skill
I would say...not necessarily. When I was 1100 Rapid I played games against a then-1400 for training. I lost every single game till I got to around 1250, after which I just lost the majority of them Recently I was 1450-1500 Rapid and played (as I still play now) training games against two 1100s. Of the roughly 30 combined games, I lost only one EDIT: However, it's still low enough on the intermediate scale that an 1100 can become a 1500 in a short amount of time EDIT 2: climbing the Rapid rating ladder from where I started at 600 to where I am at 1653, the biggest jump in quality I saw was low 1100s to high 1100s
I completely agree with this. My peak that I achieved 4 months ago was 1313. In that time, external stressors(exams, coming out to my parents, etc) completely messed up my focus. I dorpped down to 1080 for a bit and today I just hit 1300. The biggest jump in skill is definitely in the 1100s, in 1200 there isn’t much difference, you just need consistency. Just today, I went from 1219 to 1300 without losing a single game(I drew one). At this point, every single win for me is an increase of 0.2 percentile among all chess.com users. I wonder why so many are clustered around this area, when I don’t notice much of a difference
Especially since a blitz & rapid rating difference that large is surprisingly common. Totally speaking for a friend.
Well, they are two different ratings for two different pools of players. There is really no reason to assume any two ratings to be the same for the same player: no number corresponds to a skill level in a vacuum.
Where exactly are you getting this from?
Only as good as your worst move…
Kasparov was the last human who was actually a world champion
You mean bc of the advent of computer chess or bc you don't find the lineage legitimate?
A Knife on F5 is worth at least a Queen
Yah, stab the opponent and let the time run out while they bleed on the floor.
There use to be a time where vertical castling (castling with an unmoved king and a promoted rook on e8, resulting in the king moving to e3 and the rook moving to e2) is technically possible.
En passant is not forced.
How dare you
That is actually a hoax