Why I am a bigoted/why I dislike most chess players/why I suck at chess

Hey guys.

So this is a bit of an inflamatory post but I've wanted to get it of my chest for a long time. To me, (to me, not to everyone, I get that) chess is not the end goal itself. I play chess to develop my mind, spend some time, engage in some abstract thinking and so forth.

For these purposes I feel that "learning" chess (i.e. unraveling its mysteries) defeats the purpose of chess. In a way I am in agreement with some excentrics on this issue like Bobby FIsher.

Even moves that I know, I hate acting on, I sometimes walk into traps just to see if I can get out of them. Because for me, knowing moves, memorizing them or learning to recognise patterns equals to cheating.

If chess was reality it would have random positions, endless variations and endless amount of squares. Of course, it is not reality but learning how to beat a set of patterns simply by memorizing as much as possible seems as futile as playing the same distribution in a game of memory time and time again.

I don't like it...it's part of the reason why I could never get into Go. A Game that is even more complex, even more interesting to me but that has almost a pre-requisite in learning basic patterns to be able to play it effectively.

My head is spinning around all the time thinking about wars, economics, world politics and the usual social stuff so in a way I even have trouble learning these things because there's not much more room in there. I get that most people aren't as concerned and interested in let's say the patterns of global chess play and so they enjoy learning the patterns of this game.

I just wish they were... 


Are there players like me out there? That just patently refuse to learn patterns in chess? For whom each game is a new and ever more interesting excersise in foresight and abstraction?

My rating is about 1500-1600 if I try. Have any of you, if you exist heh, managed to get higher? What I mean by "I try" is simply that playing this way requires a lot of thinking (my biggest enemy is 99% the clock) and so if I'm tired or just playing casually I'm probably consistent at about 1200.

Cheers! 

1352 USCF and a chess coach at age 21. I'm sure it's not hard to understand that learning requires memorization and effort. Pattern recognition is not simply spitting out what you saw before. It's about making judgments about what works and when.

Yes I understand that it requires effort and it's a certain skill. But why put in that effort? For me it ruins the game. 

I can compare this to Axis And Allies (A board game I play). Most people play 1-2 variations and if the "dice" hits them badly the first few turns they immediately quit because they know (Or think they know) all possible patterns in the game. In chess I can imagine that people at my rating already know most strong variations 3 moves in as if its their second nature. That's already 3 moves completely ruined. Not to ention 5-6 moves in for the general gameplay. 

I sincerely take about 30 sec - 1 min to make even my second move in chess... Each game is like a new adventure for me. 

"Play chess to develop my mind"

Development of any faculty typically requires repeated cycles of stress & replenishment. And that's all I've got to say about that

On the contrary. I do not want to learn anything.

Learning something is the first step to defeat. 
Learning an opening move and its counters let's say means I do not need to think about it.  OR at least not as much. 

A-ha! I have a much, much better example of it than a board game that most people may not have heard off. Solving the Rubiks Cube! 

I used to be astonished at this damn thing. I could never understand how easily some people did it. (As a child  I mean). I'm not very god at geometrical puzzles and never quite managed to figure it out myself.

Then I learned that most people just learned a simple set of mechanics and they keep repeating them. Once I learned them and completed the cube once I never again picked it up and still haven't. Yet some people seem to indulge in completing it faster and faster. The purpose completely evades me. 

No, that's how a computer thinks.  And sadly that's what chess has become, a bloody tree-diagram. 

If you can see a move 20 moves ahead then that's more important and much more fun than seeing a set of 3-4 moves ahead, even if all 19 moves are complete black spots. Generally speaking that's how the masters defeat computers.  They are not following a labyrinth, they are making their own path. Sadly they have also probably memorized many different openings, patterns, reactions to those patterns and so forth. Of course without that they would be bound to make a small mistake somewhere or give the computer too much time.


But in playing humans I do not find it fun to open 99 doors only to hit a wall.  So even if you can beat me most of the time, generally speaking unless you're very good I'll probably beat you once in a while and I'll have far more fun while losing than you! 

 

By that logic, does the purpose of any sport/competition evade you?  Once a person learns to run, don't they want to run faster or longer?  Once you can throw a baseball, don't you want to throw it faster or farther?  What's the point of trying to improve anything then?  If you can lift weights, don't you want to see if you can lift more?  

Juggling is just patterns, 3, 5, and 7 balls are the same pattern, so why bother learning more than 3?

Why bother doing anything? Why play A&A if you know what's going to happen?

And, BTW, there's nothing "wrong" with your thoughts/feelings, and there's nothing "wrong" with others differing thoughts/feelings..

Some comments,

oneshot

I'm not that skilled at this silly game but to me it's like karate or wrestling - you learn to understand basic patterns and moves and over time you can apply those against your opponents - and eventually develop your own style with that basic foundation.  

There will always be people who can beat you.  Useful also in this context:  It's a game and supposed to be fun.  

Good luck and best wishes.

These are all good points and I have strong opinions on them too. 
Back in the good ol'e days sports was an amateur thing! The first olympics were filled with amateurs both in Modern times and mostly in Greek times too. I'm of the opinion that sports should be a pass-time. The only thing holding me back from a black-white view of the matter is that human excellence and advancement could be held back if so was the case. 

But this is not as simple as the chess question. While training hard at being a fast runner improves your agility, remembering a bunch of moves on chess does not necessarily improve your cognitive abilities the way analyzing every single move would. I guess learning running techniques is more comparable. But a better comparison to all that you have mentioend would be american football. A game truly based on memorizing different patterns of advance, full of rules of what you can and can't do. A game that bores me. 

_____

 Spell-checking is cheating too. I've disabled that as well. Unless writing a letter to someone of importance or for something important I do not use a spell checker. Not using it exposes my background, my writing style, my knowledge of the english language and so forth. 

It's just one more thing people use to hide their true self.  Besides, it doesn't help you improve at all. 

Why are you overthinking this stuff, Bertil? Your rating's in the 1600s as you say. What do you want out of (classic) chess as an endeavour? Have you tried chess960 (identifying with Fischer)?

I wish everyone played like me so I could feel it's fair. I'm at best 1600...And it takes too much effort to play like that for me to play more than 1-2 games per day. 

If someone plays like me I'd like some tips in abstract thinking, long term positioning perhaps even though I realise that conflicts a bit with what I've said. When to abandon a general strategic inclination is a subject that would be interesting to discuss, like when or if to ever shift the board and how that can be done smoothly. I suck at it because my pieces end up hitting each other on their way.

I haven't tried 960 because I haven't goten used to chess yet to the point where I feel that it's boring or where I can identify too many situations. I'm sure Fischer reached that point quite soon and got desperate for some meaning in his life.  

i'm more or less like u, learning very few, but <1400. In fact ALL allowing me to get the level an try to maintain is due to what i learned and worked, few. To have fun it's okay, to get 1500+ and higher and stay, you'll learn, using time to do allwaus same blunders, or avoiding them with knowledge. it is u p to everybody.

I dont really understand your angst Bertil. You dont like to play chess based on following established paths unthinkingly as this doesnt give you satisfaction. So you dont play chess that way. OK cool different strokes for different folks and thanks for sharing but whats the issue?  

I understand the reasoning why the OP does what he does, but I don't understand why he dislikes most chess players. He wants us to accept his reasons for his method of chess play, but he dislikes most other chess players for their more traditional methods of chess play. It sounds to me that he wants it to be a one-way street in his favor.

Gotta empathise better with others and remember my previous experiences to help me do this. No wait, thats like cheating at life.

8/10

Refreshing! Like iced tea on a hot, sunny day.

That's interesting you bring that up. I have pretty high social skills (I can pick up various clues from peoples body language, I often times know what they want to hear) but I refuse to "empathise" with them on that level too, because I feel that it's cheating. 

Trust me, I know it's bad for me, and it makes me look less "empathical" but it's just like George Carlin said, I'm sick of people asking me "how do I do" without actually caring to hear the answer and I'm just honest enough not to do the same to others. Then again perhaps I should just act the sociopath instead of having people actually elect, trust and hire actual sociopaths to positions of power and influence. 

This is one of the things I think about, not so much chess. 

Someone said that the main reason I dislike this was because I feel as if it's cheating. That's not really it. It's not cheating me, it's cheating yourself. It's like pushing the market value of a countries property while being in debt. 

If you're just learning moves, openings and studying reactions to them you're not improving your general analytical or cognitive abilities. You're just improving your chess skills. It sucks from my perspective because the game becomes far more rigid, less fluid and less about strategic initaitve and more about making or not making a little mistake here or there. Comparisons are good for learning and a comparison to this would be learning IQ-questions and their general layout to improve your IQ-scores. You won't actually be improving your intelligence unless you put in a whole lot of effort in understanding why those patterns exist. But you will have a nice Mensa board to hang in your office I guess.

So it worsens my enjoyment you could say, from playing the game. 

Oh and I hear that a lot of people cheat* here, on a free site, where no money is at stake. What the fuck? WHY. Does having a high rating on an internet site bring instant street cred or something?

*I mean really, not in some meta-self-righteous way that I describe it, but actually using engines and analytical programs while playing.

Why?

That's a very good point m8.

I guess I will "learn" from my "blunders" in due time, even if i don't study the moves. Unless I make an actual effort to unlearn it, or simply play chess when I'm really drunk. And when I start recognizing too many patterns, if that comes, I think I'll just quit and move on to an other board game...