Ruminations of an ageing chess bore

Aweh fellow Ruminants & Groupies in day 409 of Re-Modified Lock Down Currently Level 1.

Period as a semi-retired pensioner: 37 days

This week the topic for Ruminant Pink Friday™ relates to my reintroduction to playing chess in my fifties. When I was at school in the seventies, I was the captain of the school chess club. After that I played little chess and I was never particularly good in the first place.

Then in 2011 when I was 50 and both my boys were at the Ridge School, they needed a volunteer to help teach chess and I volunteered. I taught the basics from some textbooks and provided weekly chess puzzles. Sometimes I needed to use chess engines to solve the puzzles and I tried to keep them simple.  I practiced a bit against a chess engine.

Then in 2017 the Ridge hired Fwati Kunda who is a FIDE registered and rated coach originally from Zambia. It was then that it dawned on me that I was effectively totally useless at chess. If I played Kunda he obliterated me without even thinking and he said that you do not learn chess by playing chess engines or straight from textbooks. You need to play real people. I hired Kunda for weekly training sessions and my eldest son, Oliver and I embarked on our chess learning journey.

Chess is a geeky male activity. Notwithstanding the resurgence of interest in chess after the Netflix series the Queen’s Gambit and the female main character Elizabeth Harmon, chess is an overwhelmingly male game. There is not a single woman in the current top 100 chess players in the world. Judit Polgar is the best woman player in history and made it into the top 10 but she is an exception. This inconvenient truth is perhaps not politically correct but then again facts do not concern themselves with political correctness. I will leave it to you dear readers to provide explanations for this.  I will perhaps venture that women (who are evidently not the same as men) have better things to do with their time than play chess. I do not want to say anything more on this topic because I value domestic harmony.

For those of you who think chess is boring and women are excluded there is chess trash talk. Yes chess trash talking is a thing. Alexandra Botez a Canadian female international master is a leading exponent of this dark art. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9VKCxltLyQ.

There have been people who think they can learn to play chess well quickly.  Max Deutsch is an obsessive learner who has taught himself to solve a Rubik’s cube in under 20 seconds in a month as well teaching himself to speak Hebrew also in a month. He believed that with a month’s intensive training he could beat Magnus Carlsen the world chess champion. Magnus accepted the challenge. It did not go well. https://en.chessbase.com/post/beating-magnus-after-a-month-of-training. After 12 moves the position was lost and Max made beginner errors.

Oliver (20) and I have been on our chess journey since 2018 and initially I easily beat him, but it became more difficult and then he gradually got better than me. We both play on the online platform Lichess and his ratings are better than mine. I run the Rosebank chess club and we have online tournaments as well as meeting on Thursdays at the Dunkeld Bowls Club for chess and perhaps a few beers. I can still manage the occasional victory over Oliver, and I took this photograph last night after my (brilliant!) Ng5!! move.

I loaded this into the chess engine Stockfish and white has a decisive advantage and this time I managed to convert it into a win. There is life in the cocky old dog yet. Having said that chess is harder to master than any academic topic I ever studied in my lengthy university career.

In 2017 the view was expressed that our knowledge of the centuries old game of chess had peaked, and we knew all there was to know about chess. This was embodied in Stockfish 10 the world’s top chess engine. Stockfish is a human labour of love which has all known opening theory programmed into it as well as end game table bases. Chess is solved when there are seven or fewer pieces on board and you can just look up the best move in a table. This includes a forced mate in 545 moves! No human could ever work this out over the board. https://tb7.chessok.com/articles/Top8DTM_eng#:~:text=In%20truth%2C%20the%20longest%207,is%20a%20mate%20in%20549.&text=See%20the%20full%20solution%3A%20http,and%20avoid%20losing%20the%20queen. In the middle game Stockfish has a finely honed algorithm which has evolved over decades to calculate the optimal move. No human can beat Stockfish, but humans use Stockfish to help them improve their games and study. It’s an open-source program and anybody can download it. So is chess solved?

Not so fast. The foremost proprietary deep learning algorithm in the world is Alphazero owned by Google. The progress made by Alphazero has generated tremendous hype and some of this is entirely justified. In December 2017 AlphaGo after being supplied only the rules of chess and then playing against itself for four hours crushed the reigning world champion chess engine, Stockfish, in a 100-match contest and won 36 and drew 64. It did not lose a single match. Several of the matches involved deep sacrifices that Stockfish determined were losing positions only for the reasons to become apparent several moves later. No human can beat Stockfish, but it has influenced the playing style of grandmasters. AlphaGo has introduced new approaches and styles which grandmasters are still studying but suffice to say they are in awe. New ideas regarding how to play were introduced by Alphazero.

Thank you for all the helpful suggestions and comments. Please keep them up.

Regards

Bruce