The Future of Chess.

I think chess at the highest levels, by this I mean supergrandmasters and Centaur Chess will stagnate in the next hundred years.

Centaur Chess is a human playing with the help of the best chess engines.

At present Centaur Chess which is a kind of correspondence chess has a very high draw ratio. I think as much as 90%.  I have nothing against Centaur players as I know many are very talented and know a lot about chess.

Centaur players often discover things not known before.

Here is one of them.  The Petroff Defense for Black is 

1. e4  e5 2. Nf3  Nf6!  In Centaur Chess someone with the Black pieces using the very best chess engines can almost  always hold the draw.  What does this mean?

It means if you want to play the Ruy Lopez [1. e4  e5  2. Nf3  Nc6  3. Bb5] or even the Ponziani [1. e4  e5 2. Nf3 Nc6  3. c3]  you may be met by the Petroff and there goes your opening!

These kinds of happenings can only increase in the next hundred years until you have a situation [at the highest levels] where there is little point in playing certain  openings .

Now I know, that I refer to  the highest levels of chess but it is possible what happens at the highest levels will filter down to the 99% of players who are not professional and who are not Centaur.

I am not sure how this would affect the "ordinary player" However, I know for sure, it could not affect anyone reading this!  [because this is about what may happen 100 years from now]  

Checkers is "solved" but people continue to play it. The vast majority of players of chess will never be affected by the highest level players be they computers, cyborgs or humans.

If that cyborg (a technologically augmented human) decides to download a pirated copy of Houdini 15.0 prior to a tournament, it wouldn't be technically Cheating ...

And I believe that transhumanism will one day become a reality.

I will make a guess--this is just a guess. My guess is that the number of checker players took a hit after it was proven that checkers was, indeed, a draw?  [but only a small hit as checker players already knew it was a draw]

No matter how to look at it, from a very broad point of view the future of chess as we knew it seems grim. Almost as grim as to wonder whether Bobby Fischer might not have been right after all when saying that chess was dead.

OTB chess is in a steady decline; it has been for years, and this trend is sadly expected to continue. An obvious reason is the possibility to play online, which is deemed much more comfortable as it allows to save time and expenses and doesn't require anything beyond a computing device and an internet connection (i.e. things considered ubiquitous and universal in today's civilized world).

By now, many players of the younger generation are already looking down at traditional, physical chess sets as something clunky and entirely redundant. The propagation of such a point of view has arguably been reflected in a decline of sales of chess pieces, boards, and sets. Examples include the Drueke company being by now essentially out of business, and the once much-renowned House of Staunton apparently having made great efforts to cut costs on multiple fronts (there have been reports of quality of both the products as well as the customer service having dropped significantly in recent times), probably trying to salvage profit margins in the face of dropped sales. In an extreme case of this trend's continuation, the DGT company might emerge as the last-man-standing to still sustain production of sets of acceptable quality, due to their heavy entrenchment in the professional chess world.

Though, regardless of the fate of traditional chess equipment, computers might not spare OTB chess from an even more forceful death blow. With an outlook for increased proliferation of Google Glass-like technology, in the foreseeable future we might not be able to be certain anymore whether our opponent, seemingly sitting idly at the board right in front of us, is not using computer assistance. While inspection of spectacles of various kinds for circuitry would probably be more or less safe to assume in the case of larger tournaments or matches, lower-tier competitive chess as well as casual, recreational over-the-board play would essentially become as insecure as online chess is - surely so, if one considers an eventual further miniaturization of the technology down to the shape of contact lenses.

Online chess, which as said above seems to be uprooting OTB chess more and more, is not free of problems either by any means. One issue is that is strips off the traditional chess playing experience, reducing it to staring at screens of various sizes (then again, what does not involve that nowadays?). Two decades ago, personal computer chess software had begun making its elder brothers, the dedicated chess computers, nearly extinct, and now traditional chess equipment of all kind is possibly threatened to suffer a similar fate in the long run.

The arguably most profound problem concerning online chess itself is the phenomenon of players utilizing prohibited assistance from computers, commonly referred to as cheating. The main issue lies with the sheer difficulty to reliably detect this during the course of a game, while it's a bit easier (but still certainly non-trivial and not resistant to false positives) to prove such misconduct after a game has concluded. It boils down to fair players having to lay their trust in their opponents playing equally fair, and having to take possible losses to unscrupulous adversaries who have been able to avoid detection into account.

Another sour aspect of the fact, that nowadays cheating is possible in the first place is the risk of a fair player possibly having to fend off unjust accusations of cheating. Alas, such accusations happen to be raised by defeated players who don't want to take a loss in a sportsmanlike fashion, and decide to make desperate attempts to bite back at the victor.

In an effort to avoid being cheated upon, most online players prefer to play blitz (15 minutes or less per game per player) or even bullet/lightning (3 minutes or less) chess - according to the FICS statistics, over 95% of games played there employ blitz time controls. Given that, as laid out before, online chess seems to be supplanting OTB chess more and more, the combined effect is that the position of chess played with standard time controls being "chess proper" seems to generally give way to blitz chess, in that the majority of chess games played are probably already by now the latter. This is quite an unsettling realization, considering that blitz chess is widely known to generally have a poor reputation among serious players, namely being a much trivialized and intellectually inferior version of chess, where the game is not so much decided by thoughtfulness and brilliancies, but rather largely by blunders, time pressure, and falling prey to opening traps.

While trying to avoid cheaters is likely the most significant factor in very shortly timed games taking dominance, there are certainly others as well. One in particular seems to be a general lack of patience on the part of the average player in comparison to earlier times. Many of today's players are simply unwilling to spend many hours on one game, unquestionably preferring to spend one hour on many games instead.

A possibly associated phenomenon is a large amount of novice players taking what arguably might be viewed as an upside-down approach to studying the game. Instead of following the immortal teachings of legends such as Capablanca and Tarrasch - which advocate a thorough study of the endgame and middlegame before going into openings any deeper than the general principles - the modern neophyte often chooses to skip any endgame practice altogether (probably expecting, that not many blitz games and hardly any bullet game will be long enough to actually benefit from such study), and instead insists to rely on memorization (often a quite mindless one, given the lack of sufficient preparation for their understanding) of hundreds of opening variations and dozens of traps, hoping that it will allow them to decide the game in their favor in a relatively early phase.

Jaaas your essay was interesting.  I am not sure you are right about the last paragraph. I am not saying you are wrong either.

I believe much the same thing is happening in duplicate bridge [not the cheating]. I used to  travel and hour and an hour back to play in a dulicate game which was 12 boards and lasted 2 hours or so.

Now I can go online and play in 4 such tournaments a day if I wish. And do so from my own home.  Also, I have sometimes the opportunity to play against world class players. This will not happen at a local bridge club event once a week.

I have played in tournaments with up to 650 players all in one tournament and seemingly organized immediately. Doing well in those is really fun.

Wouldn't it be great is the US Open was on line with thousands of players?

Unfortunately I do not see how they could stop the potential cheating?

So what are we talking here as far as your flavor of rapid? In order for it to qualify for your "quick chess" rating in the USCF now it needs to be less than 30 minutes as a main control.  29/5? 

OTB in decline i hope not am glad to share my experiences of visiting clubs and seeing table after table of juniors playing the game so uplifting for a grey hair to see the club i play for has over 40 members competing at many levels with a broad age range only a little view of chess in general but hopefully will let you see that we can still be positive of the game we love and apire to increase its draw that holds us all

Rapid and Blitz chess are good for youngsters (below 30). After that age, speed of thought diminishes, so that they have a natural edge over older players, in general.

However, you will rarely see a battle of several plans and strategies in speed chess, just tactics.