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posted by LaminatorX on Thursday April 09 2015, @05:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the How-about-a-nice-game-of-chess? dept.

Randy Olsen has a interesting article where he explores a data set of over 650,000 chess tournament games ranging back to the 15th century and looks at how chess has changed over time. His findings include:

Chess games are getting longer. Chess games have been getting steadily longer since 1970, increasing from 75 ply (37 moves) per game in 1970 to a whopping 85 ply (42 moves) per game in 2014. "This trend could possibly be telling us that defensive play is becoming more common in chess nowadays," writes Olsen. "Even the world’s current best chess player, Magnus Carlsen, was forced to adopt a more defensive play style (instead of his traditional aggressive style) to compete with the world’s elite."

The first-move advantage has always existed. White consistently wins 56% and Black only 44% of the games every year between 1850 and 2014 and the first-move advantage becomes more pronounced the more skilled the chess players are. "Despite 150+ years of revolutions and refinement of chess, the first-move advantage has effectively remained untouched. The only way around it is to make sure that competitors play an even number of games as White and Black."

Draws are much more common nowadays. Only 1 in 10 games ended in a draw in 1850, whereas 1 in 3 games ended in a draw in 2013. "Since the early 20th century, chess experts have feared that the over-analysis of chess will lead “draw death,” where experts will become so skilled at chess that it will be impossible to decisively win a game any more." Interestingly chess prodigy and world champion Jose Raul Capablanca said in the 1920's that he believed chess would be exhausted in the near future and that games between masters would always end in draws. Capablanca proposed a more complex variant of chess to help prevent “draw death,” but it never really seemed to catch on.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Rickter on Thursday April 09 2015, @07:46PM

    by Rickter (842) on Thursday April 09 2015, @07:46PM (#168465)

    If you increase the amount of positions by (nearly) a thousand, then that's going to significantly hinder the ability of human players to memorize positions or openings. After all, if you have less than a 1% chance of hitting any given opening position in a given game, then who would have the time to devote 1000 times as much effort to memorizing positions to cover every possible opening variant.

    My own son is learning the game, and I'm considering giving him another year or two with the standard layout before throwing in 960, which will put us on a somewhat more equal footing as far as game history.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday April 09 2015, @09:14PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 09 2015, @09:14PM (#168500) Journal

    My own son is learning the game, and I'm considering giving him another year or two with the standard layout before throwing in 960, which will put us on a somewhat more equal footing as far as game history.

    IMHO: do him a favour and teach him Go [wikipedia.org] - large board, non-moving pieces, the strategy element is better represented than in chess (develops better the long-term thinking).

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday April 10 2015, @12:50AM

    by JNCF (4317) on Friday April 10 2015, @12:50AM (#168566) Journal

    When you switch to 960, I suggest playing two games with each randomly generated board. The advantage that white has over black can be staggering with some setups, so giving both players a chance to open each board is necessary for balancing.