It does exactly what it says it does, you not liking how people use it means nothing.
IMHO, what is amiss is that this kind of Game Explorer analysis is crazy and misleading.
Funniest thing I've read all week.
Is Game Explorer Misleading? It is!
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my coach goes by his own intuition. sometimes it is the second or third most popular move in the database, but he stays convinced that it is the best move.
when i started playing 'online' chess then i did not care to look for the result before playing the moves. i played about 35 moves copied from a database. on move 36, i realized i was in zugzwang.
In our vote chess we hardly look at Game Explorer. Could someone tell me exactly how it works? Whose games are on there? etc? Where do they get the games?
Guys, it's not misleading... It's a database, that's all.
It doesn't include analysis or say which openings are better; it is a collection of games, nothing more.
How is that misleading?
the best way to go about it is by the date last known played.
its not just chess.com explorer, but i hate all databases. ive only had trouble using them.
As pfren say: "use your grey matter instead"
Game Explorer can be helpful, I believe, if (1) you figure out for yourself what is the best move, which is what you are supposed to do anyway; then (2) check with Explorer to see if it agrees with you. If not (3) see how Explorer's suggestion can perhaps help you find a better move or the best move. I find it helpful if you don't make it a crutch or trust it blindly. It can be worthful in helping you hone you opening skills. At least, it works for me. Maybe for some others.
kco a écrit :
As pfren say: "use your grey matter instead"
+1.
It's not misleading, but a few of those using it are apparently misled. The database is a useful tool if you are capable of considering raw data for yourself and you do not need someone to preprocess the information for you.
If, on the other hand, all you can do is look at the database and play whichever move has the highest percentage without thinking, then you might as well play craps instead.
I totally agree with your post and your reasoning, and it can be misleading if improperly used.
I use the game explorer during my online games as another piece of information. If my candidate move is not there, it may give me pause, but I'll still play it if that's what I want to do. In fact, recently I did just that. I was picking moves which had terrible stats--but those were the ones I wanted to play, so I played them. I also like to play through the masters games from the key positions, but without any annotation they quickly become a mystery to me.
However, I never play by just picking moves. It will do you no good to play something you don't understand. But it is good at telling you whether or not you are generally considering good candidate moves--and that is a useful thing to know.
It's not misleading. Some people just don'tunderstand where those percentages come from.
So, you play a move from the database and hope that your winning percentage will improve?
Speaking of winning percentage, today I win 10, lose 3, and draw 1, gaining 60 points.
Try to copy my moves, and hope you can copy my winning percentage. But don't ever trust it.
People may be missing a key point. I will emphasise it again.
Game Explorer can tell which move has been "most popular among GMs in the past, albeit that it has a built-in lag. That information is probably worthwhile knowing because it should guide you along main lines, even if it misses recent refutations.
However the relationship between opening moves and win-lost percentages is totally misleading. It is fraught with risk. Anyone who thinks they are choosing "a game winning move" from Game Explorer needs to remember that we do not know how the game proceeded “after the next move”! Usually, Game Explorer peters out after 5-6 moves, and then, you have to think for yourself.
You do not know how or why – given a popular opening sequence – white or black went in to win the game, despite the win-loss odds
This is why I am so critical of Games Explorer. It encourages a mindless, mechanist view of Chess.
However, GMs do NOT think in terms of "the next move", but rather the calculated plan, involving a sequence of moves, to achieve material or spatial advantage. This is the type of skill, players rated 1200-1800, need to develop and which reliance on Game Explorer discourages.
Also, would life not be boring if we all played the same opening move for white and the same defensive response from for black?
The enormous literature on openings suggest other openings lines, which – because of Game Explorer’s emphasis on historical GM popularity, and a dubious association with win-loss game results – may otherwise have got little much attention.
If you want to win at chess, then play good chess!
You are right! I've never thought about that. Though I don't even use it.
When I became interested in chess, but before I had access to a chess engine,I would use the database of games on chesstempo.com to help me in openings.
My finding was that after the 4th or 5th move, unless I was in a mainline position, there were too few positions in the database to reliably know whether a move was good or bad on the basis of how frequently it had worked out.
The best use of a database is to narrow to games in specific openings and actually look at some of them in depth to see what plans are followed and what moves are played. A database is a way to quickly find a selection of similar games and analyze them, not for deciding your next move.
If you are out of your own opening book within the first seven moves, that is probably an issue. I think it's important to know the opening moves of whatever systems you play at least this deep.
If you are playing vote chess and a move is selected which you don't agree with, well that's just vote chess. We all play book moves, but we at least choose to play book moves that are up to date, like the Sicilian Najdorf for example.
I think that as someone above said, you have to be following a plan and there is little value to selecting a move from a book if it doesn't suit the plan that you are looking to follow. If you are not following a plan, then a database isn't going to help you figure one out.
I also want to say that in databases, it's pretty unlikely that the most common move isn't the best one. If another one appears to be better, it's either because it was a novelty and people didn't know how to defend it or because the sample size is too small.
In either case, choosing a popular move that confers a smaller edge is usually a better course of action (playing d6 in this case).
Also remember that when someone diverts from the mainline, the opponent usually starts to think how he can exploit and someone may have lost on time because of this. We may not even know the time control of the games.
In vote chess noone should just play moves that they like.
A very good vote chess team will require you to post the move and the reasons you like the particular move. And then there will be discussion and analysis on that move. [often it will be shot down]
Far too often I have seen people post moves that looked good to them but were losing. For vote chess there should be analysis of all reasonable candidate moves and this analysis should continue until there is a 100% consensus on a particular move.
I played in a vote chess team where moves were thrown out with no discussion and they have many losses in a row and I could not stand this and had to give up on that group.
I also played on Ponziani Power where each move and each candidate move was discussed and no votes until a consensus and very disciplined voters and they won 13 in a row--math chance less than 1 in a 100,000.
Lately when Im choosing a move in the explorer, I tend to go through a couple games that have been played to get a grip on whats going on and what kind of threats there are. After that you can decide what seems good to you.
Chess.com Game Explorer can be complete misleading!
In a Vote Chess game, i which I wass involved (were Black), some people checked Game Explorer In respect of "the next move" and found it that among GMs playing black (based on historical data), the results for the move d6 were Black won 28% of games, White 44% and drawn 28%. For the King-side castling move, the results were Black won 33%, White 41% and drawn 26%.
So, some people concluded we should castle (a passive move), despite White pressuring our 6th rank!
In order to make a decision about "the next move", one should at least lok at the chessboard!
What is particularly interesting in the example quoted is that although Black had a slightly higher win-rate with O-O, 10 times as many GM games chose d6. There is something amiss here – GMs are not dumb.
IMHO, what is amiss is that this kind of Game Explorer analysis is crazy and misleading.
We do not (or should not) play chess by looking solely at “the next move”, and checking Game Explorer to see what was a popular choice among GMs.
The bigger picture is that “the next move” may be:
1. the start of a sequence of moves or plan, or
2. an intermediate move within an existing sequence or plan
We should be focussed on “the sequence” or the plan for the current or next phase of our game.
In summary, Game Explorer is deficient (misleading?) in that it provides no chessic context for “the next move”.
It gives no pgn for those games in which Black went on to win, despite the odds in those 30% games, despite White having 1st mover advantage.
If only we knew which games had the sequence of moves to the current stage, AND THEN, the moves which followed which resulted in Black winning! Did Black outplay White, or did White make blunders? We do not know.
Chess.com should put a health warning on Game Explorer:
"Game Explorer can be dangerous for your Chessic life, quit before you lose!"