Why Chess Strategy Changes Every Year

Video written by Ben Doyle

[MitchlTmas]

Today I learned that chess has an evolving meta despite no balance changes in 100s of years

[CapnSnackbeard]

"If you see a good move, find a better one" is the best Chess advice I have ever heard. That guy had things figured out.

[keriezy]

The finger breaking technique seems most promising.

[palletlover]

By breaking your opponent’s fingers before or during the game you put them at a severe disadvantage because they are in so much pain they lose focus on the match. It’s a personal favourite of mine 😊

[NiX_xD]

It’s basically a meta that comes around every year or so when the top engines like Stockfish, Leela, or AlphaZero find something new. A new meta tactic in todays game is a pawn break of h4, h5, a4, a5, etc. A dominant opening meta on todays game is the Catalan, but e4 e5 is seen regularly as one of the most used openings today still.

[JoshuaDowdUSBC]

That magic line was completely uncalled for. I don’t need to go outside because I see all of the outdoors on the land cards in my deck

[quietsamurai]

0:49
Minor correction — Mathematically speaking, there *is* a perfect way to play chess, we just don't know what it is. As you mention, chess is theoretically solvable, but it is *practically* impossible to solve due to the incomprehensible size of the problem.

[Mats-Hansen]

At 3:26 I'd rather capture the queen on f6, but perhaps that's just me.

[danmcgoogleaccount]

Kinda sounds like this video was made by someone who doesn't know much about chess, but has read a wikipedia entry about its history.

[vader]

Actually, the King's Gambit is perfectly fine for average players. Even computers don't rate it that badly. Ofc they definitely rate it worse for white but for most chess players, it's still a marginal difference and because it's not as popular, you're more likely to know it more in-depth than your opponent. There are much worse gambits that people regularly play. And the reason it's bad isn't necessarily because you give up the pawn. The Queen's Gambit does exactly the same thing just on the other side but is a well-respected opening. One of the issues with the King's Gambit is that it opens up your king too much. And ofc you also don't quite get good enough compensation for the pawn. But in general, it's not too rare that giving a pawn for tempo/initiative can be the best move.

[lazydroidproductions]

Yeah, Magic The Gathering cannot be solved so as much as I am a fan of it I cannot argue with just leaving being the only truly reliable strategy

[marc-andreservant]

Zermelo's theorem shows that there must be a perfect strategy for playing chess. It's a perfect information game without randomness. Recursively applying Von Neumann's algorithm to the starting position would result in mathematically perfect moves. It would also take trillions of years, so real chess computers use imperfect heuristics to find strong but not quite perfect moves in seconds.

[kidk]

I could be wrong but chess's status as unsolved doesn't imply there is no right way to play, it just means we don't know if there exists a right way to play.

[Thebreakdownshow]

Just realized I am still stuck in 1850's based on my strategy.The jokes are on fleek as usual.

[Jacksiloution]

Litteraly everyone doing 1. E4, e5 though 💀

[ghussghuss]

you can though objectively say chess players have gotten better over time by looking at accuracy of games with engines.

[Mega_Umbreon]

As a chess player my whole life I love a video making the game sound cool. The text in the thumbnail is an outright lie though, 1. e4 e5 is still an incredibly popular way to start a game at all levels. @Half As Interesting please can you correct this by putting the king's gambit position on the thumbnail instead? The text would still be hyperbole but definitely true at the highest levels at least. I wouldn't want people to think e4 e5 is a bad opening.

[yesyes]

3:17 Mistake! People back then considered king's gambit to be the best opening, and countless analysis and top level tournament when players could only play king's gambit, nothing else proved them wrong

[Learn_Something_New]

One of the coolest things I've learned about chess players is that they don't necessarily have better memories or higher intelligence. 

A study was conducted on chess players of different levels of skill where they would set up a chess board and arrange the pieces into different patterns. They asked the players to memorize as many of the piece locations as they could in a few seconds. As expected, the players with more skill and experience memorized more piece locations. But when they ran the experiment again, placing the pieces in ways that didn't make sense in terms of how the game is traditionally played, all the players memorized the same amount. The pattern recognition of the different possible moves allowed more experienced players to essentially chunk the information more concisely, helping them get more pieces. Take away the patterns and their memorization performance was equal.

[johnped]

I was really hoping this would cover the shift from Classical to Hypermodern openings, and the highlight the influence of AI like LeelaZero on the use of flank pawns.

If anyone is curious you can look that stuff up.