what happened to chess notation?

WillHeatb wrote:

I've taken up chess again after many years of not playing. when I last played the kings gambit opening move would be noted as simply kp k4 ( kings pawn to kings 4). now the natations are based on letters and numbers, as in a bar chart.

I guess you haven't played in 40 years.

No matter. It's algebraic. It's easy.

Columns are a to h. Rows are 1 to 8. Everything is from White's perspective, so White's Queen's rook is on a1 and the king's roook is on h1.

You will figure it out in no time.

It's much less ambiguous than descriptive notation.

Bye.

Descriptive notation is crap, too long.

KP-K4 is even more archaic than descriptive, it's descriptive long-form. How old are you? I'm old as dirt, been playing since I was six, and I never used long-form.

Even 40 years ago it would have been 1. P-K4

This is so stupid.

1.e4 means that a pawn moved to e4.

It would be like me asking if Scheiße has a meaning. Of course it does! I simply do not understand it.

Most likely it seems easier because that's how I learned. when I see KN-KR3 I can easily visualize the move, more so than B1A3, which I'm sure will just take practice to grasp as quickly.

To my best recollection, when I first joined USCF in 1978, _Chess Life_ was still publishing in descriptive notation. They switched to algebraic not more than two or so years after. Someone else may have a clearer recollection.

I didnt not call your thread stupid, I said urk's argument was stupid.

Something makes or doesnt make sense depending on who reads it. 

Personally I preffer algebraic notation more, there is no language barrier, I can read a Russian magazine as well as a American one, if we were using notation I would have to learn another set of letters for the Russian langauge.

Not to mention that I always found the perspective feature annoying, having to change ranks placement depending on which turn is obsolete. 

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Thank you Bronstien, you're a good man. According to Wikipedia descriptive notation ended in 1981 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptive_notation Seems I have some catching up to do...obviously with my game too.

Algebraic notation isn't automatically understood across languages - hence the popularity of figurine notation or "modern algebraic pictograph notation" as it's sometimes called.  One has to learn the various piece abbreviations for each language. (e.g. Nc3 in English would be Sc3 in German and Cc3 in French.  Oddly, Russian notation, dating back to the beginning of the 19th century was not only algebraic, but employed English abbreviations.

Springer, Laufer, Turm, Konig, Dame. (can't be bothered to look up the umlauts)

I watched an old video from the 60's where Fischer was going over one of Morphy's games speaking fluent algebraic notation like we do today.  It's been around. Just kind of surprised as in the initial post it seemed as if the OP has never seen or heard of it before. I do think the old notation sounds a lot more suave when spoken out loud though. Betcha that's the way James Bond would say it lol

 Geez, yes, you still have to learn those ones, altough they are easier to learn than descriptive notation I think.

Figurine notation may be the best notation on earth.