I wonder how many new-to-chess players would experience similar difficulties, first with the pamphlet that came with their cheap chess set, then with the USCF Official Rules.
Bill Smythe
What about solitaire games, especially puzzles?
Of course, there’s always Sudoku, which everyone already knows about. Newspaper puzzles seem to have a bland sameness from day to day, either too easy (Mon-Tue-Wed) or too tedious (Thu-Fri).
Much richer in its variety of solving techniques is Kakuro (also called Cross Sums). Major bookstores have plenty of books of Kakuro puzzles, probably next to Sudoku in the Games section.
Besides Kakuro puzzle books, there are three Kakuro websites I can recommend. All three provide legitimate puzzles, i.e. each puzzle has a unique solution:
Michael Mepham’s Kakuro puzzles are just the right degree of difficulty and interest, and are among the best in the business. You can work on them on screen, or print them out (landscape recommended) and solve them on paper. A new puzzle appears every day, and you can scroll back about ten days.
Also good is Kakuro Conquest. Puzzle quality is just a small cut below that of the Mepham puzzles. Working on screen is a snap, as the interface even allows the easy placement of multiple digits (candidates) in a single cell (these multiples don’t count toward a solution, of course). Unfortunately, these puzzles do not transfer well to hardcopy, as the diagonal lines and dark cells do not print. A new puzzle can be generated on demand at any time.
Another possibility is Binary Worlds . These puzzles, while legitimate, are noticeably inferior to those on the above two sites. The distribution of digits is highly asymmetric, with many more 1’s and 2’s than 8’s and 9’s. These puzzles cannot be worked on screen, but the printout quality is excellent (landscape is recommended, but in that case only page 2 needs to be printed). This site generates a new puzzle each time the refresh key is pressed.
There are at least two sites I definitely do NOT recommend, because most of the puzzles have multiple solutions, an absolute no-no in the puzzle business. You’ll never solve these puzzles by logic, because after the few properly unique cells are filled in, there is no way to prove what any of the remaining cells must be. Stay away from:
Kakuropuzzle.com – Even the beginners puzzle (4x4) usually has two solutions, and the standard puzzle (9x9) may have hundreds. EDIT: Oops, this site seems to have been removed.
Kakuro.net – Here, too (as of last look), virtually every puzzle has many solutions.
Bill Smythe
I see. In my opinion, I believe that Magic: The Gathering, hold 'm, baccarat, and blackjack are similar to chess; more so with Magic: The Gathering. Aslo some fighting games like the Street Fighter series is similar to chess. Some say that chess is the 1st fighting game.
I enjoyed reading everyone else’s posts as well1
Not sure why I excluded either Ylon Schwartz or IM Almira Skripchenko from this list. There are others, I’m sure.
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Lasker played a wide variety of games. I have a book he wrote on Checkers and he invented a fairly well known Checkers variant, which was named Laska. In addition to being a Chess champion, he was also a professional Salta player.
GM Zviad Izoria (winner of the 2005 HB Global) is now a US resident and a professional poker player.
The late Robert Felt dominated Scrabble circa 1990. (I had a winning score against him in tournament chess, but remember losing ten consecutive blitz games to him at Les Bale’s Lincolnwood club.)
I hope I have this story right (hearsay, from memory): Felt won the UK title by bluffing a bingo with a word not in the dictionary. His opponents formed a new word by adding an “s” to Felt’s bingo, so Felt challenged & won.
New Yorker and USCF NM Michael Senkiewicz was world-class scrabble player in the 1970s. He then went on to be a top-5 backgammon world-class player.
He also took the Bronze Medal in the Chess Olympiad in 1988 scoring over 75% playing with Bill Hook on the British Virgin Island team.
I’ve seen that poker is now declining, based on the number of entrants in the 2012 World Series of Poker championships
. .
My judgment of stratego is unfavorable. We all played Stratego a lot as kids, and we all loved the setup phase. But…
During play Stratego suffers from a severe lack of what makes chess great: coordination among pieces.
In Stratego, your 2 and 3 labeled pieces are very strong, but no matter how they coordinate, my 1 mows them down effortlessly: that is a major flaw in Stratego.
. .
Great posts. Keep them coming. I like to see other people’s opinions.
I’m surprised that as of late, the majority of the WSOP Main Event winners are in their early to mid 20s.
Just a quick comment: I gave up tournament chess years ago because I found the strain of commuting and competing to be more than I could handle.
I play, nearly daily, one of the MMO’s. I enjoy it because of the social interaction. I have met a number of social chess players that have switched to MMO’s as well.
For sheer intellectual competition nothing matches tournament Chess, Go, Bridge and Poker. However, they are not games that can be played at arbritrary times, places and environments. I admit that online chess comes close but tends to be a little too all consuming, at least it was for me.
To tell the truth, for me chess has never been about the competition but about the puzzle.
I saw the poker player with 1 million dollar poker winnings getting into chess in the January issue of Chess Life. He makes a comparison between the two.
M14 pretty much marks the 20th anniversary of Magic The Gathering.
Magic 2014 release is July 19, 2013 and Limited Edition Alpha release was August 5, 1993.
Everyone thought Magic was gonna die out in the 1990s and stuff.
Does anyone think Wizards will do something special for M14 like they did with Zendikar’s “priceless treasures”? Or maybe reprint some Limited or Unlimited cards. One never knows…
It seems that back in the day, bridge was a favorite card game of professional chess players. One of my favorite stories involves Efim Bogolyubov, a Russian-born German, I believe he was.
Anyway, his partner was an Englishman whose German was horrible. He did not realize that V was pronounced as an F, and the standard -EN plural did not apply to PIK (a Spade). So in one hand, Bogo opens, “Drei Pik!” Three Spades. His partner replied with “Vier Piken,” messing up the pronunciation so it came out, “VEER PICKEN,” which in the German slang of the day meant, “We’re screwed.”
Bogo laughed uproariously, threw his cards down and said, “I have nothing! I just wanted to hear you say, ‘Wir picken!’”
And at four spades with no hand and declarer facing his hand before the end of the auction, the expression was appropriate.
I learned chess as a kid from a cheap Milton Bradley set, which had the instructions written on the box top so they wouldn’t have the expense of including a sheet of paper. I had no problem understanding it, but it was missing half the rules. It wasn’t until I decided to get serious about the game as an adult that I finally learned about castling, pawn promotion, and en passant, because the MB rules didn’t include those things.
As for other games, I played a wide variety as a kid. In middle and high school, my friends and I were into various strategy games like Stratego, Othello, Axis & Allies, Shogun, Diplomacy, etc. But our biggest thing back then was role playing games, especially the original - Dungeons and Dragons.
As an adult, I decided to get into chess just to see what all the fuss was about. I wondered why it was so well respected, had serious tournaments, etc, so I wanted to know more. I enjoy the competitive aspect, but I don’t consider it a very social game. How can you be sociable in a tournament hall where absolute silence is required to play?
When I get into a slump in chess, I tend to get frustrated and take a break from the game for a few months at a time. During those breaks, I tend to pick another game to seriously explore for a while. During one such exploration, I discovered XiangQi (Chinese Chess), which is more similar than I expected to western chess, but I actually consider it a superior game. If there were more opportunities to play in the US, with OTB tournaments and stuff, I could see myself focusing on XiangQi instead of chess as my main competitive game of choice.
During my most recent break from chess, I wondered what the new versions of Dungeons and Dragons look like. So I ended up getting back into role playing games as my main hobby for the last year and a half or so, mostly playing a D&D spinoff game called Pathfinder. It’s a lot of fun, and far more social than chess, but I kind of missed the competitive and intellectual aspects of tournament chess, so now I’m getting back into chess seriously.
Developing expertise in many games requires you to learn some of the vocabulary, history, and various other arcana surrounding it. If one is not deeply into a game, listening to devotees talk about it sounds a lot like gibberish. The technical jargon of chess has grown considerably over the last couple of decades. We discuss openings differently than when I first learned the game. The King’s Indian Defense, Mar del Plata Variation, a curious name for the uninitiated, may be noted as E99. That is clear to an chess person, but is foggy to the rest of the world. Other games have their own jargons which are mysterious to we chess players.
Various board games of the strategic and race game variety have limits. Candyland and Parchisi have a common methodology, to get from point A to the end. Stratego, a nice little game, can be learned easily. It has a certain variety, but after a while it becomes a little old as the game doesn’t have enough variety or creativity involved to capture your attention. Same is true for a lot of other board games you find in a toy store. The two that have the greatest depth are chess and go. You really have to concentrate hard, know a lot, and make severe demands on your mind’s abilities in order to play even at an average level. The intricacies of each are such that you can take a lifetime of study to master the games, with the ultimate realization that you have only scratched the surface as there are many areas that you just do not have the time to learn. If you play a lot of different games, you are having a lot of fun, but don’t for one minute think you really understand any of them all that well. Which is better, to specialize in one game or to dabble in many? I don’t know the answer to that, but I have stuck with chess and ignored most of the other games because I like how the variables within the game of chess change. Maybe I just like looking for patterns in what seems like chaos. It has provided more fun for me than other games.
What a great thread. I spend too much time in the Issues Forum.