Chess Pro Answers More Questions From Twitter

I'm Levy Rozman chess educator, YouTuber, and author.

Let's answer some of your questions from the internet.

This is Chess Support.

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@manthosh12 asks, Do chess players trash talk?

That way this game would be more fun.

You can't talk to your opponent during a chess game, period.

So you definitely can't trash talk an opponent

during a chess game.

But outside of it, oh, it's some of the best

passive-aggressive soap opera drama

you can possibly imagine.

Now that we have a young grandmaster like Hans Neimann,

who despite his checkered pass, no pun intended,

will actually go out of his way to trash talk other people

and have more eyeballs on the game.

So yes, but also no.

@AnnaCramling, what, you got Anna for this video, says,

Is there any more satisfying checkmate than this one?

First of all, hi, Anna.

Second of all, yes, obviously.

Probably the most satisfying checkmate in all of chess

is smothered mate, when an opponent's king

is stuck on the edge of the board,

boxed in by his own pieces,

and you used this knight and you gallop into the position,

and the king is smothered in the corner by his own army

while this knight attacks,

and there's nothing that you can do.

@KeenChess asks, Was the Hans Neimann-Magnus Carlsen

cheating controversy good publicity for chess?

What would you make of the drama?

Overall, it was a net positive for chess.

There was a massive controversy

between Magnus Carlsen and Hans Neimann

where the young grandmaster from the United States

defeated the world champion,

and Magnus withdrew from the tournament

basically doing everything

but directly accusing Hans of foul play.

Millions of people around the globe

started thinking of chess.

They were hearing all of these ridiculous headlines,

but at the end of the day, it just sparked their interest

in the game itself.

@neofight78 asks, Okay, chess peeps, what's the opening

or variation that's the most fun for you to play?

One of my favorite variations to play

is when I'm playing with the white pieces

and I open with the king's pawn e4

and black responds with c5,

which is the Sicilian Defense.

It's the most popular and combative opening for black

fighting for the center with a flank pawn,

a pawn that's not one of the two center pawns.

And now I will play what's called a delayed wing gambit.

I would go pawn to a3.

And the idea here is very, very sneaky.

You basically want to give up this pawn,

so black is going to take it,

and then you are going to take back.

Now black is gonna say, Wow, what a dummy.

I just won that pawn.

Now I have an extra pawn.

And then you start kicking out the knight

and you get this massive center.

You have a lot of pawns in the center.

You can even plug another one in.

And then you can use all of this open space for your pieces.

And a lot of players get overwhelmed in this position.

Find a chess opening or variation that you like,

that you understand, that gets you to a position

where you know the plans better than your opponent.

@ericfarley1 asks, How does the Elo rating work?

I'm intrigued.

An Elo is the number which quantifies your skill level.

It's not an acronym.

The first letter is a capital E, and then it goes L-O.

And the way Elo works is that it goes up and down

or stays the same depending on your results.

If you're rated 1200 and you play a 1100,

you will gain a certain amount of points if you win,

but your opponent will actually gain slightly more

because they're beating somebody with a higher Elo.

The minimum Elo to qualify for grandmaster is 2500.

So in over-the-board live chess,

the highest ever Elo achieved is by Magnus Carlsen.

But online, Stockfish,

which is the strongest chess AI in the world,

is estimated to be around 3600.

At my peak I was 2430,

then I lost to a bunch of nine-year-olds.

@jonnyceepembs asks, How hard would Capablanca be to beat

with modern preparation tools at his disposal?

How good would Capablanca be with modern preparation?

Ridiculously good?

Probably the world chess champion.

Jose Raul Capablanca was one of the best chess players

of his generation.

He was a fantastic positional player.

He was an expert endgame player as well.

The only thing that he didn't do

was live in the modern century in the age of computers.

He managed to do all of that with chess being on paperback.

Modern preparation tools are just a complete game changer.

They allow you to analyze positions

for 15, 20 moves in advance.

The information gap from 1920, 1930 to nowadays

is just absolutely absurd.

An 11-year-old now with modern preparation tools

could probably beat Capablanca in a match

just on the information that is available

to the 11-year-old that Capablanca

in the 1920s and '30s would not know.

@anuragsingh asks, What is going on in your mind

when you have to play your next move?

Like, what is your mind processing?

Combinations? Simulations?

It's a great question.

Jose Raul Capablanca said,

I only think of one move at a time,

and it's the best move.

Chess is all pattern recognition.

Most experienced chess players have studied a lot.

They have done thousands of chess puzzles.

So I might be remembering something in my memory palace.

I might be remembering there was this game played in 2012

between grandmaster A and grandmaster B in this city.

He was wearing a blue shirt,

and in that game he played this.

The more you play chess and the more you study,

that is how you are going to figure out

some of these good moves or an evaluation of a position.

@YourBudJosh asks, Do old people still play chess in parks?

What parks? Do you have to be old to play?

I wanna play chess in the park.

There is no minimum age requirement

to play chess at your local public park,

but historically chess has been associated

with old guys at the park.

When I was five or six years old,

my grandparents in Brooklyn would walk me to the park

where local 70-year-old men would sit there squabbling.

A lot of park chess players are actually really good.

The average park chess player in Union Square Park

or Washington Square Park is better than you

watching this right now.

So go play against them.

And many of them are very, very friendly.

They will give you some pointers.

And at least here in New York City,

it's customary to throw them, like, 3 or $5 for a game.

@sebilozano asks, Hey, Siri.

How much do chess players make?

Chess players make exactly what they win in tournaments.

Nowadays in 2023 there's also things like endorsement deals.

Magnus Carlsen is famously sponsored by Puma, MasterCard.

You can also get invited to paid corporate

or speaking engagements, which a lot of them do

because a lot of people respect chess players now.

So it used to be that if you were outside

of the top 20 grandmasters in the world,

I'm not even sure you would break six figures

on a good year.

If you're also traveling the world

constantly playing tournaments

and you're just not succeeding,

there is so much more pressure.

You're probably losing money in a calendar year.

@MackenzieWeber3 says, Learning how to program

has changed my perspective on a lot of things.

How does a chess bot able to analyze an entire game

and point out which moves are the best?

That's so wild.

Chess bots have been better than human beings

for something like 30 years.

Chess bots like Stockfish, Leela, AlphaZero

use really, really ridiculously powerful servers

and they can analyze tens of millions of positions

every single second.

What they do is then they go out into the future

40,50 moves in many, many different branches,

and they come right back

and they evaluate what a move would do

depending on what's out there in the future.

@_namori_fan_, that's a lot of underscores, says,

Does Stockfish blunder?

No.

A blunder in a traditional sense is a monumental mistake.

Stockfish doesn't blunder

anywhere near the traditional sense,

but at times it will place a piece on a certain square

and then not realize that actually 20 moves down the line

that piece is not supposed to be positioned there

and all of a sudden it's too late to defend itself.

Stockfish has lost. Not to humans.

It's lost to other bots like Leela, Komodo, or Torch,

but it definitely doesn't blunder like we do.

@erosindomita asks, How does chess notation work?

I'm going to bite someone.

No need for physical assault.

It is quite simple.

If I was gonna play a chess game right now,

I would play pawn to d4.

And the way you write that down

is just the square that the pawn moved to.

You don't have to write P.

So it's kind of shorthand.

So you would write d4,

and that is what that would look like.

And then your opponent would, let's say, play e6,

pawn to e6.

You would write e6 and it would be d4 e6.

White made their first move and black made their first move.

C4, so you would write c4.

Now let's say your opponent developed a knight.

They played knight to f6.

K is king, so knight is N, knight f6.

So it would be Nf6.

There's some moments where two pieces

can actually move to the same square.

For example, in this position, both of black's knights

can go to d7.

So if this knight went to d7, it started on b.

So knight b d7.

And if this knight went to d7,

it would be knight f to d7.

Bonus! What if both knights were on the exact same file?

Now, knight b d7 is the same exact thing,

so their only differentiator is what rank they're on.

So knight 8 d7, knight 6 d7.

You only ever really need to do this with knights and rooks

because the bishops can never go to the same square

'cause they go on opposite colors.

@aydenb_ says, Chess prodigies are so crazy to me.

How are you seven years old and beating people

who spend 60 years of their lives learning chess?

That's actually the beautiful thing about chess.

It's a timeless game.

And incredibly, children and adults learn chess

in vastly different ways.

People who start chess at a very young age

have a chance of getting to a much higher ceiling overall

in their chess careers.

That's why you'll see at a local chess tournament

seven-year-old playing a 60-year-old.

I played a chess tournament in St. Louis

a couple of years ago,

and I played the number four, number two,

and number one ranked 11-year-olds in America,

and I only scored 50%.

@ADVUniverse asks, What is the single piece of chess advice

that help you improve the most?

The biggest piece of advice that I give to kids or adults

trying to learn this game

is to completely disconnect your ego

from this learning experience.

Be prepared to lose a lot.

There is no other way to get better at chess.

You will probably lose three out of every four games

that you play, but there are four to five things

that you can learn in each of those games.

If you are unable to do that because it makes you angry

or upset or frustrated,

then you are never going to get better at chess.

@iamalisadiq says, Hey, what is the prize stake

for this Chess World Cup?

So the prize stake for this year's World Cup in 2023

was won by Magnus Carlsen,

and it was estimated to be something like $110,000.

The Chess World Cup is actually different

than the World Chess Championship.

The World Cup is a knockout tournament

that happens every two years in chess.

It starts with 128 players and ends with two.

@RoamWithJon asks, How is chess boxing a thing?

Chess boxing is a sport that combines chess

and boxing shockingly,

and essentially all it is, is a game of chess with a person,

and then you pause the game and you box for a round,

and then you finish the chess game

from the point it was started.

And then you keep going until one person either wins

in the chess or knocks the other out.

It's a fascinating sport, and it wasn't too popular

until 2022 when Ludwig, massive YouTuber,

actually put on the chess boxing event.

I was a part of it. I was a commentator.

I thought I was gonna fight, but I'm a little bit too scared

of getting punched in the face.

@RoudSync asks, I still can't wrap around the concept

of speed chest.

How can you decide a move under a second?

Form a strat?

And it usually lasts under a minute.

The amount of brain cells you use in this.

There's no brain cells at all.

The average really good chess player

probably doesn't know how to make toast.

There is no correlation between chess and intelligence,

except in my case.

Listen, speed chess is all pattern recognition.

If you've seen it before,

it's not always going to be a one-to-one,

but you're gonna have enough experience

that you know what parts go where.

These people can do it in two, three seconds.

Speech chess is my favorite type of chess.

If I have to get slowed down,

then that's where I really struggle.

@SabaOsmaanqazi asks, Where did chess come from?

Allegedly around 600 A.D. in India.

It was called Chaturanga,

and back then the rules were slightly different,

but that apparently is the first

earliest recorded instance of chess.

And I would know, I was there.

@bison_booze asks, Did chess ever change its rules?

I mean, for a game that old,

they must have made a few balance patches.

Over the years, there have been very, very few changes

to the game of chess.

There are things called variants

where they, let's say, shuffle the back row of pieces,

and now that's called Chess960,

or Giveaway where you try to lose all of your pieces,

and so on and so forth.

And the last time there was really any major update

is when they instituted en passant.

@rinnequan asks, Bro, what is en passant?

What the hell? I just found out about this rule.

En passant in chess is a rule that came out,

I don't know, something like 200 years ago,

and essentially all it is,

your pawn has crossed the center line

and your opponent makes a pawn move

and stands side by side with your pawn.

They have to move two squares.

For this move and this move only,

you can take that pawn diagonally behind it.

The only way you can en passant

is if a pawn moves two squares for this turn.

You cannot do that if it was another piece.

If your opponent just moved their knight to that square,

you cannot en passant a knight.

You would get punched in the face.

@Mzslayer1 asks, Chess lovers, what do you consider

to be the most famous move in chess history?

1972, Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky,

World Chess Championship,

United States versus Soviet Union, Cold War era.

They begin the match, and toward the endgame

Fischer captured a pawn

and got his bishop trapped in one move.

It was an oversight that, let's say,

an amateur player wouldn't even make.

It was just a complete just mental slip for a move.

Fischer captured a pawn

in the corner of the board essentially,

and all Spassky had to do was move his pawn one square.

And his bishop had no way out.

It was a completely inexplicable mistake.

Fischer had not made a mistake like that

in his entire career,

and he never made a mistake like that ever again.

Bobby Fischer went on to lose that game,

but a World Championship match is played over many games.

And even though he lost that first one

in this completely ridiculous fashion,

he actually went on to dominate and win the match.

@cozyKKyon asks, Why do chess players resign

instead of taking the loss?

People at the highest level resign

when they know they're going to lose

and they know that their opponent knows how to beat them.

Most of you watching this should not resign

because you never know.

Stalemate is possible at the end of a game,

running out of time by accident, Wi-Fi disconnecting.

To resign, you would either tip over your king,

which is the dramatic way to do it.

You would click a button on chess.com if you were playing,

or you'll see grandmasters often times just pause the clock

and I would extend my hand to my opponent to shake it,

which is just a silent way of saying, I surrender.

@QuoraQuestions4 says,

What is the greatest chess match ever?

The best chess match which took a long period of time,

you probably have to look at 1984,

Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov.

And back then it was decided

by the first person to win six games.

Karpov got out to a five-nothing lead,

and then Kasparov did not lose

and he defended, defended, defended.

He fought to make it five-three

with, like, 30 draws in the middle,

and the match basically had to be called off

due to health concerns.

It was like two months of playing chess against each other.

I would never survive.

So that's all the questions we have for you today.

I just wanna say a big thank you to all of you

for watching chess, playing chess,

supporting chess in any way, shape, or form.

Until next time, thank you for watching Chess Support.

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