Trash talking in chess.

Here is an interesting one from the OP in one of my threads

'Here we go with the mindless twaddle of snakesbelly.

I WAS interested in this thread until I saw who posted it.'

Note how he WAS interested ,then saw who posted it and immediately classified it as 'mindless twaddle ' there after.

You sir ,are a hypocrite and a shameless troll .

Getting people worked up with your thread on trash talking when that is what you yourself do best. I will not feed this troll any further and i hope nobody else does

Snakes, you are far and away the most amusing troll we've had here since Haywood.  Keep up the good work!

This topic is a joke right? Without pawn promotion, the majority of games would be draw. A lot of games end up trading pieces so only pawns remain. The whole game is played positionally to set up a good pawn structure and a winning endgame. That aspect is what requires a lot of skill! To think ahead and from the midgame start planning your endgame. You cannot checkmate with pawns only (if there are only pawns remaining), especially if they should be placed on the same file after promotion.

Pawn endgames are very entertaining and nice, also need a lot of calculation to win. I stand stunned to see what some people think about chess! Abomination? THIS is abomination.

You don't see much promotions anyways since players with skill give up many turns before promotion because they foresee the loss.

There are advantages and disadvantages to suspending the pawn promotion rule. It is true that the rule could benefit players who play overly aggressively and have little positional or strategic insight, but it also benefits highly sophisticated, tactically minded players. While I accept Snakebelly's conclusion that hacks have a great deal to gain from the traditional rule of promotion, he is overlooking the myriad of ways in which the rule enriches and complexes the game at the highest echelons of chess. The contribution of the traditional passed pawn rule to the art of attack in chess and tactical complexity is unmistakable and it was snakebelly's remiss to ovelook that.

For the sake of a thought experiment, let's imagine that the pawn promotion rule was suspended as of today. How would that affect the strategic the long term-planning of hacks or relatively low level players?

Obviously, they would be discouraged from playing hyper-aggressively by striving to win tactical struggles that increase their chances of promoting a pawn. They may still have an incentive to advance their grunts to the end of the board because the new rule could allow them to place pawns in more advantageous positions, yet in most cases, the strategic incentive of achieving a pawn promotion will be decreased substantially. In most end-game situations, an acquisition of a pawn is highly beneficial, yet a mere relocation of pawn is much less so. Besides, figuring out the most advantageous position to where the recently promoted pawn should relocate will require creative thinking and long-term planning.

So, for the sake of the argument we may assume that most low-level players will become much less likely to regard pawn promotion as one of their main strategic goals. What impact will this have on their game? Obviously, the unsophisticated players will be forced to play in a more strategic, even-tempered manner that aims to gain a general control of the game as opposed to merely gain a particular kind of an advantage that secures a promotion. 

The hacks generally seek to promote pawns through tactical trickery rather than through deep calculation or exploitation of their opponents' positional inferiority, hence, the suspension of the rule will motivate them to enhance their abilities in tactical calculation and positional assessment. There can be no doubt that at the lowest strata of chess competitions, the quality of the game will improve, but at what cost?

We must not forget that tactically minded grandmasters with a strong preference for attacking chess achieve pawn promotions through deep calculations and positional superiority over their opponents far more frequently than they do through trickery. Tal was frequently accused of being a "bluffer" or a tactician whose triumphs were merely a result of tricks. Yet even the most superficial study of his strategy almost immediately shows that his positional play was exceptional. Tal was able to dominate most of his opponents on a tactical level mostly because his positions were set up in a way that opened up the possibility for a host of attacking advantages. Similarly, Kasparov was seen as a tactically minded player who has confessed to playing overly aggressively on occassion, he obviously wasn't a hack and his richly creative tactical triumphs stemmed from his profound positional understanding of the game. Tactically minded grandmasters are often able to use the current pawn promotion rule to their advantage: that is not to say that they won a lot of games because they promoted their pawns, but it is to say that they gained an advantage over their opponents by forcing them to prepare for the possibility of a promotion. At the very least, the passed pawns of such grandmasters compelled their additional players to prepare for potential attacks that would have been impossible to carry out if the traditional pawn promotion rule was in abeyance.

Do we really want to eliminate thousands of complex tactical possibilities in games on the highest possible level of chess? It has become customary for modern grandmasters to play in a very risk-averse, nearly computerized fashion that often leads to a quick draw. Alexander Grischuk nearly reached the final of the 2011 Candidates tournament, but he did not win a single game under Standard Time controls. Anand and Gelfand drew 13 out of 16 of their games in the Final round of the tournament. If the passed pawn rule is to be suspended, even more games will be closed down early on.

The problem with the suspension is not only about the potentially excessive number of draws, the removal of that regulation will diminish the game's tactical complexity as early on as the mid-game stage. A lot of risk-averse grandmasters will choose to fortify their side of the board as opposed to push their pawns in staging an attack. If their opponent starts pushing pawns, they can choose to sit back and fortify just enough to make sure that the relocation of the promoted pawn does not undercut the solidity of their defensive position. In short, it will be much easier to strip many of the more imaginative players of their flamboyant attacking flair. That's not to say that every single game will be a draw or that attack-minded chess will become a thing of the past, but the modern game will definitely shift away from tactical complexity and more towards a semi-passive, defensive strategy. Today, a defensive player often cannot afford to continue to play passively when his opponent has a considerable chance of promoting a pawn, he will be forced to mobilize his forces to confront the opponent in a tactical struggle: this adds tactical complexity to the game. If the pawn promotion rule was absent, attack-minded players would have a much more difficult time drawing their more passive opponents out into the open tactical duel. Obviously, this would diminish the tactical complexity of the game and do away with much of the beauty that we associate with an exotic, sacrifical and hyper-attackings styles of play that belonged to grandmasters of Mikhail Tal's, Frank Marshall's or Garry Kasparov's caliber.

The suspension of the traditional pawn promotion rule is an effective way of forcing low-level players to step up their game, but this desirable result is achieved at an excessive cost. Unfortunately, it will diminish the game's tactical complexity and will deprive many advanced players of their attacking initiative. I am a very positional and a defensively minded player, I resent losing to tactical hacks who do not know a thing about positioning or chess strategy, but I am unwilling to sacrifice the beauty of attacking chess just to stop unsophisticated players from earning undeserved triumphs. The more sensible solution is to learn how to exploit their positional weaknesses rather than rewrite the traditional pawn promotion rule.

I think you constantly trolling my threads is bad form

You cant really stop the talker from trash talking, but you can just disable chat. And why would trash talking have a place in chess? In rap battle, maybe. If the two people disliked each other.

Last night I played someone from Romania. In our first game I played him to checkmate in 12 moves. I had greeted him and he said nothing. I said 'good game' and he said nothing. Then we rematched and after about 35 moves he had me. However, in the latter moves of the game he began with 'hahahahahaha' I've got you now...etc.

Yes, it ticked me off, yes, I could have disabled chat.

My question is...Do you think trash talking has any place in chess or do you think it is bad form?

Trash talking has not any place in chess (and nowhere) but since chess website owners don't care too much about that, it probably won't stop.