What is the difference between respect and disrespect in chess (especially in chess.com)
As we see in chess.com, many players come here to lose game first on purpose to get the very low rating, and then troll these low rated players by disrespect. But how can we even decipher respect and disrespect, what is the main difference between them. Is playing a horrible gambit counts as disrespect? Well, the matter of disrespect is not that easy.
Well, first, what is respect. Respect in chess means to play very logically with both TWO players. For example, playing a game full of "Best", "Excellent" and "Theory" can count as a respectful game. Now, the opposite of respect is disrespect. By physical disrespect, when you eat or read book while others is thinking about the moves counts as disrespect. Or even when you look around or to your opponent's face while your opponents is thinking also counts as disrespect. But, there is also disrespect by moves. As GothamChess always say "when you play a move other than playing the center in the first move, you are such a garbage player...like you are not designed to play chess, you know..." Well not really, because I've asked a few friends about their favorite opening. One friend say they like "English Defense" (which starts with c4), and another prefers the Mieses Opening (which moves the white pawn to the center, but only for one square other than two squares). By this consequence, we cannot judge a person only by their openings, so we cannot say that playing these type of openings are disrespectful.
But, wait a minute, is playing all openings respectful. This facet is very interesting, because there is weird openings like the Amar Opening, the Sodium Attack (which GothamChess say that it is powerful), the Hippo Opening and the Englund Mosquito Gambit. I'm only an 800 hundred, and I've seen many people playing these type of weird defenses and gambits, but I cannot really judge them because I don't really have any ESP [to find out if they play these openings on purpose, or they have low elo and just misclicked or slipped]. But, as many players declare, that when your elo increase, and you reached a better level, there would be less and less people playing these type of opening, because the reason is simple, nobody is now as stupid as a person lower than 1000 elo, and any chess player that plays these type of opening would be easily punished. So, we can conclude that it all depends on elo. In lower elo chess game, we can't really judge the book by its cover. But in higher elo chess game, you could determine most of the time that they played these openings just for trolling (Magnus and Hikaru as world #1 and #2 respectively always do these type of things to intermediate chess players).
Wait, there aren't only trolling for openings, but also in endgames. (This is impossible to troll in middle game because, when you sacrifice any material, Stockfish either counts them as a brilliant, an inaccuracy or a blunder) Well, what especially in endgames? There are a two categories: Underpromotion and rare checkmates.
Underpromotion:
In all games of Lichess, only 0.6% of games have a promotion of a knight and 0.3% of games have a promotion of a bishop. Not all promotion counts as disrespect, some promotes to a knight or bishop because the promotion might cause valuable forks, others do that to avoid stalemate. (Credit in Youtube.com "The rarest move in Chess" Youtuber: Paralogical) But some of these promotions were caused by the determination of a chess player that think they can win using three knights or a bishop and a knight but leads to a stalemate, like this game:
In this game by two 1500s, white is 100 elo higher rated than black, but white immediately gets punished by black because he finds white have a weakness point on knight and bishop tactics and threatened a fork that leads to a draw and a draw. This could also be a lesson that might teach you: do not underrate your opponent. This game is a very common example of trolling and underrating the opponent, showing great disgrace to your opponent.
But for example, in this game:
As we can see, the highlighted squares is the illegal move black can make, which means now black can only move to one square to the corner. This forces white to not promote to queen or rook because they both lead to a stalemate, so in this position, underpromotion is eventually forced. The correct move is to actually underpromote to a knight with a check.
Now, the pawn can get control towards the opponent's king and win the game. In this type of rare drawish position, white is forced to underpromote to avoid stalemate so this did not count as disrespectful.
In conclusion, all credit and discredit in a chess games depends on what level you are playing on and what goal the opponent or you wants. When your level increases, the matter of trolling others decreases, and most of the "troll" you see may always count as a brilliant move or a blunder. Is it better to play chess with a people that likes trolling you or not? Well, it depends on what you prefer, but in most cases only a person who likes trolling others would play with anybody that trolls them as well (LOL reaction). Okay, see you next blog, bye!!!
