Chess is random for most people?

?

i don't know if i would use a word "random" to describe chess. it's more confusing than random to me; especially improving in chess is. i seem to be struggling to find the right material to study from these days endless databases. i know something from everything and yet i know nothing.

Everybody is 50/50 against players of their own rating. If they weren't, then their rating wouldn't be correct, now would it?

dead good point though!

the Holy Grail of chess .... how to consistently improve all you like

Not so. When you deliver mate you know exactly what you are doing. When you open e4 you could tell me quite a lot about how your move changes things on the board. When you make a move which threatens one of your enemy's pieces or pawns you know that to be the case. Very few of your moves, probably not a single one, is made by mentally tossing a coin.

The fact that you don't have  20/20 vision in chess does not reduce your actions to those of a typing monkey.

fundamentals.  as a novice player for me often times when im unsure of what appears to a "neutral" move, just sticking to fundamentals leads to clear advantages later in the game.  basic stuff like keeping bishop lines open, placing a rook on an open file or one likely to be.  One thing that baffles me is the propensity (sp) of people who move the a or h pawns up one just to prevent I guess a knights advance.  Sometimes they do this on both sides.  Anyone agree or disagree about this a3/6 h3/6 preemtiveness?

I think it is a matter of perspective. For the players, it is not random at all. For spectators who want to bet on the outcome before the game has started, it may be. E.g. when giants like Fischer and Spassky clashed, it was not that one would always win every game over the other. You could place your bet, you could calculate in the factor of who is playing black ore white, but you would not know the result. From this perspective chess is random.

But if I would play against an IM, FM or GM, the result would be very forseeable and certainly not random.

I think I can see what you're getting at, OP, but I don't think random is ultimately an appropriate word to describe it. Lower rated players are of course more unstable, in that they may suddenly blunder in a position that seemed won. However, there must surely be skill that separates a 600 from, say, an 800. Perhaps the 800 hangs less pieces and mates; maybe their intuition, for what it's worth, is a little bit better. I know an 800's intuition would probably be misguided, but that doesn't mean they don't have one. And yes, perhaps an 800's positional understanding may be better than that of a 600, even if neither player is strong in that area.

Perhaps you could think of an encounter of 1000 vs 1000 as a situation where the winner will probably be determined by who remains stable for a little bit longer. Who knows. Although the matter may seem random, I doubt it really is.

ok, yes there is a  random factor of kids playing, lol. I watch them getting into sharp positions and then blundering it away or not seeing the immediate checkmate. It goes up and down, and the only ones who take the trophy really seriously is probably them.

brucester83 wrote:

Hello,

I have been playing chess for a little while now and it seems to me that for most people that dont devote themselves to the study of the game, the outcome is random.

For example, when i look at peoples historys under rating 1200, they seem to have 50/50 wins and losses against people of their own rating. When i beat someone, the i lose a rematch, then win another rematch.

Is the reason for this because of the complexity of chess, and if you are not an expert, you cant possibly know the future of certain moves therefore making the outcome fo games the same as playing heads or tails. I can beat beginners using a few cheap tricks that i learned off google, but when i play people that dont fall for well known traps, our analysis of each move is the same and the outcome is based on chance, not skill.

Am i just wrong about this?

Its hard to explain what i'm getting at :P Its like, without grandmaster knowledge or experience, each move made by amateurs has an unkown result, whether beneficial or detrimental due to the inability to know the results of said move making chess a game of heads and tails for most people.

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The first thing you have to know is that consistent winning chess is counterintuitive. In other words, almost everyone's intuition uses objects in the physical world in combination to arrive at intuitive (instinctive) decisions. What you are doing is using your very limited pattern recognition. In other words, in chess, while you are busy looking at your pieces and your opponent's pieces. In the meantime the strong player is concentrating on the squares that his and his opponent's pieces control with their imaginary powers. The strong player keeps track of his and his opponent's pieces indirectly thru their influences on squares on the chess board.

Learning to focus on the squares and not the pieces takes practice. What you begin to realize with practice is that the pieces in coordination create invisible fields of force that are like walls preventing the enemy pieces and pawns from entering because of the risk of capture in enemy controlled territory.

If you would like to know why chess is siege warfare in the form of a board game and lots more please let me know.

Yes, interesting and true.

I love the competition and the small talk I somrtimes encounter on chat.Not being of 1200 or more status am I condimed to absolute a poor chess player.I choose to study and learn by playing mostly my skill level and sometimes venture a little higher for the experience.Recently my most hardest fought match was from a lesser scale.Wow did I enjoy it and I ve been beaten by a lower ranking.Yes sometimes out of bad choices.Point is if Im not of a deadicated player or of caliber to go beyond 1200 should I quit or is there room for myself and others to continue to enjoy ?

Absolutely, yes, you should be able to continue to enjoy. And studying by playing games is known as being enrolled in the school of hard knocks. Fromthe moment we are born we are permanently enrolled in the school of hard knocks (experience).

Slowly but surely you will begin to build visualization pattern memory banks that will aid you I your analysis of positions.

There are other and faster ways to build up those visualization memory banks.

You choose to do it by just playing games. I defend your right to choose.

i played a "blindfold" game the other day and before moving i wrote down in little pieces of paper all the possible legal moves, then i made a draw and selected by chance 6 pieces of paper (if possible) and after assigning numbers and throwing a dice the chosen move was played.

my opponent was a total beginner who was also very drunk

i'd say that game was pretty random :D

true story!

NO! lol

News Flash!  Your drunk opponent's brain is still building a memory bank of visualization patterns from the position that he/she is imagining in her/his mind.  The little neurons in your brain form firing sequences.  Whenever your eyes see that pattern on the board that you imagined  even drunk during blindfold play, it sets off the neurons firing sequence.

The rating system is mathematically constructed so that you have about 50/50 wins at your level, just as you observe!   It's not random, but a single game of two players at the same level  from a pool that has been playing fairly together for some number of rounds should be.

Not the word 'fairly'.   It's interesting to see random results in a range of approximately  +/-500 which exists in mostly in live play and not in tournaments, and many individual U-shaped graphs of outcome vs elo.   You can just draw your own conclusions here because.... oops thread locked in 3... 2... 1...

No, draws rarely happen at 2000s level.