i love when ILX gets all chessed out (ILX hot chess action is here)

I'm certainly not covering myself with honours. though I guess it's early days. Also realised my ~1000 rating for correspondence is completely bogus since I don't play with randoms.

xp yeah i know the feeling :( kinda obvious advice, but my tip when you're on a bad run is to give yourself loads of time to think through moves (if possible)

also that karpov vid, he made a GM resign with almost all the pieces still on the board, fuckin hell

kramnik accusing hikaru of cheating is pretty delightful considering he streamed them all

anal beads don't show up on stream

hans is back baby

Organizer of the Zagreb event with a pretty shocking quote to Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten:

"Niemann's performance is out of this world, but we have no definite proof that he is cheating. We have some indications, but we don't know if anyone wants to report him." https://t.co/8vEPLQitH3

— Tarjei J. Svensen (@TarjeiJS) November 30, 2023

“Nobody’s Fault (Butt Mon)”

Two lone Americans up against the world, facing immeasurable odds

Victorious 53 years apart at the legendary Tournament of Peace

8/9: 2946 performance rating

I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible pic.twitter.com/qjZlhRIYJp

— Hans Niemann (@HansMokeNiemann) November 30, 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_4gGUJ3qxs

loving carlsen's troll era

its really something

fucker didnt let me finish it but there it is baby the famous smothered mate

https://i.imgur.com/FcAAxhx.png

i would like to thank my new found commitment to "doing puzzles" for this spectacular win

probably the most i've ever laughed at a chess video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3G4KenJolU

fucker didnt let me finish it but there it is baby the famous smothered mate

???

Rook takes Queen?

What am I missing?

rook takes queen, then knight to f7 checkmate (king smothered by rook and pawns, hence the name)

Very nice! Yesterday I reached a draw by insufficient material as I let my opponent promote his last pawn to a knight, forking my queen and king. If he promoted to queen it was mate in 1. Safe to say, I'm not having a good run right now

Very difficult for me to watch a Chess video without a Croatian accent but that Magnus magic video was worth it.

Your chess simp though Imago....I want to invoice you for the time

3 minutes, including the 2 greatest premoves of all time? money's worth imo

It's my fault, I should have turned it off the second I heard that grating robotic voice but I thought whatever was going to happen would be worth the pain. What happened was good, but there is no good in the world that can make up for the sin of being overdubbed with text-to-speech

rook takes queen, then knight to f7 checkmate (king smothered by rook and pawns, hence the name)

Ah yeah, of course.

its considered one of the sickest mates

theres a known pattern with the q + n to execute it, which i had just been doing puzzles of and was stoked to recognize, which i def would not have without the puzzles

I need to do more puzzles, what skills I had have atrophied.

i have done puzzles here and there but never really with any focus, and still im not focusing that hard, but i saw a video by this guy who was saying just doing a bunch of random puzzles even if theyre loosely grouped as like forks or whatever isnt that effective for training your pattern recognition, he was into studying more specific patterns together and repeatedly, he made this chessable course that has ~600 puzzles grouped by type which i bought and have just been working my way through repeatedly, he wants you to do them until you know them so well that you can basically solve them instantly, im not nearly there yet except for the easy ones but def in a few games ive recognized patterns that ive drilled and i feel like maybe im just thinking more tactically generally, i have leveled up since i started doing the puzzles tho its something that mightve happened anyway, its within my general trend

https://www.chessable.com/common-chess-patterns/course/13348/

Right on, thank you.

I read Fischer's and Kasparov's books years ago. Not surprisingly, they took radically different approaches. I did learn from them, but I haven't played in years. A friend of mine and I just started playing online.

playing online is good cause you can always get a game and it will match you with similarly skilled players, and you can analyze yr games after with and engine, use other stats/tools etc

I went to a chess tournament years ago, my buddy was upset that he lost to a blind guy.

that is pretty wild

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/27/chinese-chess-champion-stripped-of-title-after-defecating-in-hotel-bathtub

https://i.imgur.com/ZNN0EP3.png

Thankfully this graphic doesn’t reveal how bad I am at this stupid game

i played 7000 some odd games this year lol

Welp

That’s uhh, 18 per day?

i do play 2+1 fwiw

Damn here I was thinking my 916 was a bit much! I do split my time between chess and lichess tho

bout an hour of chess a day, the cool thing about playing bullet is if you work on the computer you can just take a lil break and play a couple games no prob

prob not gonna play yr best under those circumstances but hey who cares you know, i def play best with a longer block of time and at night for some reason

https://i.imgur.com/dOVoBUh.png

Endless endgame

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05ouOyAPIQs

"when I watch this game I imagine Rashid Nezhmetdinov watching the game and saying "nice"".

Love this one

nice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Bb_TyhC1A

some light viewing here

Just reached 1400 blitz and am feeling ready to take on magnum, ding, and the ghost of bobby Fischer all at once, blindfolded.

Literally unstoppable right now, don't even talk to me 😤

Was sitting high 1300's went 2-13 to get myself down to a nice 1200's figure again, then the next day pull a 14-15 streak to get a new top rating. My brain literally just chooses each day whether it can play chess or not. Streaky as hell

nice re the pb, feel like spend most of yr time in about 100pt range is pretty normal with occasional visits to above or below, and of course the midpoint is subject to change too

tho the other day i looked at this guys graph cause he was higher rated than me but id beat him seven out of seven, and his swings were all over the place veering wildly two three hundred points, maybe he drinks idk

I get caught chasing the rabbit after a loss. The next game is all about making up for the previous one, so I'm not completely focussed. It then snowballs until I finally give up and give my brain a refresh. Thankfully I am not a gambler, I would have all my money sucked dry in a day

I think 200-300 swings maybe more common the lower the rating, definitely rarer when swinging that much within a the 4-digit rating range

the big swing guy was at like 1750 iirc

sometimes people resign when you do a cool move on them even if its not that big of an advantage theyre just like oh no i gotta get outta here

yes hello

Gotta love a bluff win