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I'm the old guy who has played chess with strangers at airports and on cruise ships. My rating is mid-1000's.

On September 1st, I showed up on a college campus to look for players.

I am unfamiliar with this campus, so I spent 20 minutes walking around looking for an area that has the most foot traffic. I set up my chess set and my WANT TO PLAY CHESS sign.

I got 3 players in the first half hour. 4 players total before I had to go because I had other plans.

First player was a novice. I always ask if they are in a hurry. She was in a rush, so we played 5+0 time control. I beat her easily but she enjoyed herself.

Second person was a journalism major. We played 10+0. I always play hippo, and he mentioned the word fianchetto when he saw my opening. I smiled and told him that you must be good if you know that word. He was good but I beat him.

Third player was a fire technology student. He was the best player of the four. we played 5+0 and I beat him.

Fourth player was a novice. He was not a student. He was hanging out with his girlfriend who is a student. We played untimed. I told him to play slowly to avoid blunders. I beat him easily but we plan to play again in the future.

Now that I know how easy it is to find players there, I will play there often.

Try this at your local campus! Find the spot with the most foot traffic.

The waiting time for an opponent is too long with the 10+5 time control, compared to the 15+10. I like to play longer time controls with increment, but sometimes 15+10 is too much of a time commitment.

After playing chess my whole life, and after studying playing seriously for 4 years straight. I finally hit the random goal of 99% Percentile!!

The hardest plateau so far has definitely been 1700! I was stuck at there for months.

Don't give up if you're in a plateau !

Edit: How I did it

In 2021 I got bit by the chess bug, I played a lot as a child, so I was already around 1100 elo. But from then I read cover to cover Logical Chess Move by Move by Irving Chernev. That really helped.

I did hundreds of tactics, the right way! Not moving until I could visualize each move.

I played lots of slow classical games online and added them afterwards in lichess study, adding notes after eveymove. This helped me not only see weaknesses in my game, but helped me slowly improve my openings.

I went through: Winning chess Tactics Winning chess Combinations And now I'm working through Winning chess Strategy All by Yasser Seriewan.

And now what really helped me push past the 1700 plateau, blindfold puzzles! Ayden Rayner has a great podcast called Don't Move Until you See it. Has greatly improved my visualization.

Also I have Aphantasia

Black to play

source https://www.perpetualcheck.com/perf/index.php?lan=us&fed=all&t=standard&g=m&y=1 (I would have liked to use the internet archive for that, but it doesn't work on my side)

It is not my website and I am not sure what is happening with Ishmukhametov (that player went recently 11/11 in their last tournament)

It is interesting to see how solid Sindarov is, since the performance is based on 63 games

E: the pic didn't attach, well...

I’m a new player and I’m really enjoying learning the game, but I was quite surprised to learn that White side has a win rate of around 54–56%. From discussions I’ve seen online, it seems like this is just an accepted fact with the solution being that it will even out over time with enough games played.

In almost any modern competitive game, a difference in win rate of 5%+ would have people calling for nerfs immediately. So I started wondering whether you could make a single game of chess closer to 50/50 without ruining what makes it chess.

I asked ChatGPT to test several small starting bonuses for Black using Stockfish 18. The least disruptive option was cane out to this:

Black’s h-pawn starts on h6. White moves first. Everything else is normal.

The results were surprisingly close.

Strong Stockfish showed White’s advantage falling from +0.33 in normal chess to +0.16 in the h6 position.

I also had it run 1,000 randomized games between weakened engines.

White scored 51.55% in normal chess and 49.25% when Black started on h6.

There’s also a useful human comparison. If you rotate the h6 position and swap colors, it becomes exactly the position after 1.a3 in regular chess. The White player in those games corresponds to Black in this variation.

Across about 1.6 million rated Lichess games, the player who played 1.a3 scored 50.5%. Translated back to the h6 variation, that suggests a score of roughly Black 50.5% and White 49.5%.

Obviously, this isn’t proof. The experiment was AI-generated, weakened Stockfish isn’t the same as a human beginner, and people who voluntarily play 1.a3 may be an unusual sample.

Still, three different approaches point in roughly the same direction (i.e., starting Black’s h-pawn on h6 might come very close to balancing the game while changing very little).

Would you actually play this? Does h6 change the game more than I’m giving it credit for? Has anyone seriously tested this exact position before?

It seems like 1/3rd of my games where I start as white, the opponent instantly aborts the game if I play D4. Do people really hate that opening or something?

(Me and my opponents are like 1300-1400. But it happened at 1100 and 1200 too)

Folks, how exactly are we to add stockfish as an engine for CB 26? Every helpfile I can find talks about using the 'add UCI engine' button but I cannot find that option to save my life.

Thanks for any help.

By Leonid Kubbel. Who would have thought a stalemate would be possible

The actual match starts around 39:00

The September list is out, and August belonged to Praggnanandhaa. He won the Saint Louis Rapid & Blitz, then tied for first at the Sinquefield Cup and lost the playoff to Wesley So, then came back a week later and won the Grand Chess Tour Finals anyway, beating Keymer in the semi and Caruana in the final. The rating side of all that is quieter than the trophy side: 2761 in classical, which is enough to pass Erigaisi for India's #1 spot by two points, and 2730 in rapid.

So takes nine rating points from the Sinquefield win. Nakamura did not play a rated game all month and is the new USA #1 anyway, because Caruana gave back three in classical. The rest of Saint Louis was expensive: Caruana dropped out of the rapid 2700 club, So lost 19 blitz points across 28 games, and Jorden van Foreest went 2/9 in the Sinquefield Cup (yes, 2/9). Nobody joined or left the classical 2700 club. The most watched chess of the month, Carlsen beating Lazavik in the Esports World Cup final in Paris, was not FIDE-rated.

The girls' junior list turned into a proper race. Modipalli Deekshitha went from 2157 to 2454 in a single list, on two opens in Portugal and Spain, the biggest gain by any woman in the world this cycle. That puts her third among the girls' juniors, and the top four are now inside twelve points: Anastasiia Hnatyshyn, Alua Nurman, Deekshitha and Alice Lee. Lee took second at the Cairns Cup behind Tan Zhongyi with a GM norm, a week after beating Hou Yifan in the Women's Speed Chess final. Nurman, born 2007, is the oldest of the four.

On the boys' side, Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus, 15, is still the world junior #1 at 2716, thirteen clear of Gukesh, who sat August out. Aditya Mittal won the Slovak Masters in Skalica on tiebreak from Abhimanyu Mishra and Dardha, in a field that was mostly 2600s. Yahli Sokolovsky of Israel won the European Junior title in Cetinje, and Eline Roebers the girls' title. Vyom Malhotra, born 2014, went 2297 to 2438 in nine games at the Czech Open, with an IM norm along the way.

The strongest fields of the month were not the obvious ones. The Turkish Super League had twenty players rated 2600 or better (I wrote about it last month), the Sinquefield Cup had ten, and eight of the ten at the Rubinstein Memorial in Polanica were, which Awonder Liang won. Etienne Bacrot won a record ninth French title, beating Lagarde in the final. Alan Pichot won the Spanish title, and Jaime Santos Latasa won both the Spanish blitz and the Spanish rapid in the same weekend. Shreyas Royal, 17, won the British Championship ahead of McShane and Adams, the youngest British champion there has ever been, and in the same hall Bodhana Sivanandan took the women's title at 11. Elham Amar took the Sparkassen Trophy in Dortmund and Jakhongir Vakhidov won the Abu Dhabi Masters.

Events that finished in August produced 19 GM norms and 99 IM norms, plus 17 women's norms. Or Bronstein had the summer of his life, winning the Arad Open and finishing second on tiebreak at Kanizsa, behind Pranesh; he is over 2500 for the first time and has three GM norms on FIDE's register. Anatole Vlachos also has his three, at 2504. Khagan Ahmad, 15, crossed 2500 with his first GM norm from the Turkish league. Felix-Antonio Ilinca, born 2010, and Svyatoslav Bazakutsa are one norm away.

Ten federations have a new classical #1. Pavel Eljanov is Ukraine's again. Poh Yu Tian, born 2009, hit 2500 on the nose with a GM norm in Dortmund and now leads Malaysia. Kukudzarema Shepherd is Zimbabwe's #1 on the published list after a +186 August. Another ten women's #1 spots changed hands; Armenia's went back to Elina Danielian, born 1978.

Alireza Firouzja finished level on points with the winner Mamedov in the Balkan rapid championship in Sofia on the last weekend of August, then won the blitz outright the next day. None of it is in the September numbers yet. Neither is the Sants Open in Barcelona, where two Indians born in 2012, Shaurya Chaudhary and Aarav Amonkar, gained 189 and 157 points and are now 2419 and 2400 live, or the Slovak Open, the open section of the Skalica festival Mittal won, where Zsombor Pasti of Hungary, born 2009, picked up 108.

48,897 people played a classical game this cycle, 36,663 played rapid and 24,290 played blitz. Behind Deekshitha, the biggest classical gain by anyone over 2300 was Vedant Varasada, born 2010, +231 to 2464. Gleb Scheglov, born 2010, led rapid with +152 to 2364, and Martin Krauchi Romero of Spain, born 2011, led blitz with +176 to 2366.

Honestly, I'm a really sore loser. When I lose, I get really frustrated and it discourages me a lot. I know I have to suck it up and learn to play better, stop being sad because I lost since it's going to happen many times, etc. But idk, it's not that easy for me to just get over the frustration.

Was anyone else like this in chess and can help me with this?

Chess ratings are derrived from chessever.com, while population estimates are sourced from https://data.worldbank.org/ .

Another puzzle from one of my games. This one I played less than half an hour ago. It's White to play and win. Find the right moves and Black gets absolutely annihilated.

With the new points race beginning, this was a week that saw a lot of elite players in action, with the notable exceptions of Magnus and Hikaru (who I believe is doing an event).

3 players finishing on 10/11 has to be extremely rare.

​

After a great string of tournament successes, Pragg makes it back to top 10.

Wesley So also climbs up to #5 after an eternity.

The 2 Uzbeks still staying strong in top 10.

Arjun hanging in there as usual.

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DcvK6ManTDT/?igsi=MWJqMjR4anBpMGJ0Mw==

I’ve been trying to figure out where most of my blunders come from, and they seem to fall into these two categories.

The more common one is I miss things within a variation, a resource my opponent has that I didn’t see. Usually it’s because I calculated a line but didn’t accurately visualize the position somewhere throughout the variation, and that leads me to missing something my opponent has.

There’s the saying “Long variation, wrong variation.” Sometimes I take that to heart and try not to calculate super long lines, but sometimes I’ll analyze master games and there are long variations that win for someone, and they find it! Obviously that person was right for calculating some long line that wins for them. So it’s not like a rule to follow.

Which do you feel happens to you more?

In my experience most Caro players know a bunch of theory so I just play reasonable moves and get this boring position. I also usually reach this position in the French also. I get black is trying to equalize and are usually happy with a boring game but this position is so stale for me (1800 chesscom).

Usually from here I’ll try to make it interesting by playing Qc2 then a3 to stop the Nb4 tactics with Rc8 or Nxd4 if white’s knight stops defending d4.

I used to always play the advance Caro and French but most things I’ve read online say the exchange is more playable for white. I know the advanced variations are more testing for black but is there any way to make these games better for white? Starting from this position what would white’s plan be?

This may be a tired topic for some people so I apologize in advance:

I’m a 900-1100 elo player on chess.com, and my grandfather was a chess coach for his high school when he taught. The other day we were discussing this position, where assuming a1 is the bottom left, white’s queen is pinned to the king on the 6th rank.

It’s white’s move and they play eRd1+. My grandfather says, “Okay, I know the actual rules of the game, but I never understood why in black can’t play Ke7, since the white queen cannot move off of the 6th rank, and therefore cannot take white’s king the next turn. So why should black be in check if they play said move?”

Basically asking what it really means to “control” a square. Is this simply just poor language in chess terms? I’d like to hear from people

Edit: After hearing a few of you say the argument of “the pin doesn’t matter if the king is supposed to be taken”. And I have to agree, thanks guys!

I didn't find it :-(

I saw the sequence that was played in game and it's bad for both black and white

I started about a year ago and have improved gradually. I’m finding my biggest roadblock is visualizing possibilities. I noticed after a while that chess apps that show me where a piece can move when I click on it helped train my brain to the point where I no longer need that - it was a great and very helpful way to learn and helped me level up.

But mental viz of multiple pieces to see how they can work together - some part of my brain just isn’t clicking. Is there a chess program or setting on one of the main sites to see both what piece you are thinking about, but also the possibility space for other pieces? I think this would be a great trainer to help new folk begin to think about the whole army until they no longer need it and have a better intuitive feel.

I was generating some endgame statistics for my website and found some interesting findings I'd like to share based upon both type of pieces remaining and the ELO of the players using the pieces.

If you start at the top of the ELO range, 2700 and above, and just look at which endings hold. Of course opposite bishops are at the top, but double rook endings are second and are drawier at 78.7% than single rook endgames 72.8%, so trading one pair off in general makes the ending more decisive rather than less. Also a close 3rd was same-colour bishops which come out drawn 76.3% of the time which is actually ahead of pure rook endings at 72.8%, which is not what I would have expected. Also a pure minor piece ending (any minor v minor combo) sits at 70.7%, while rook and minor against rook and minor is 59.4% so it seems important to keep the rooks on for extra attacking potential in this instance.

Then the performance of endgames by ratings, which is where it got interesting. Unsurprisingly, endgames in general get more drawish as the players get stronger. But breaking it down by piece type lets you see where the differences really lie.

At 2200 for instance endgame draw rates for pure endgames: Pawn only 52.1%, knight 52.1%, queen 52.5%. However at 2700 those same three read 72.7%, 60.0% and 59.3%. Thats up to a 20% increased draw rate for these endings specifically.

Of course every ending on the list gains draw rate as ELO increases, so part of this is the general drift upward. But the spread is not that. Pawn endings, same-colour bishops, double rook and pure rook all pick up seventeen to twenty-two points between the two bands. While down the other end, queen, knight, heavy pieces and bishop against knight pick up a "mere" seven to ten percentage points.

The cleanest numbers are probably the single rook endgame which are far more likely to draw at higher ELO. These endings gain 19.2 percentage points from 2200 to 2700. I didnt expect there to be such a discrepancy for an ending as fundamental as rook v rook.

None of these to my cursory glance seem prone to sample size bias but a limitation I've identified is that a game can also land in more than one row. For example, a game where there was a trade of minor pieces out of a rook-and-minor ending into a pure rook endgame gets counted in each row. I dont think this impacts the findings however.

All of these games are sourced from year 2020 onward, classical games, both players inside the ELO band, and data points are defined irrespective of any material advantage heading into the endgame.

Thoughts?