Chess

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I don't play chess much, but I like the game. I am ok at it.

You're confusing tactics and strategy here. A tactic is a ploy which (if one calculates correctly) should give an advantage in the short-run, such as winning material, being able to mate within a few moves, and so on. Examples of tactics are, like you said, forks and pins and X-ray attacks, etc. Tactics are often employed consecutively in long, well-calculated sequences, called combinations.

Strategy on the other hand is the art of setting and obtaining long-range goals of a positional nature, such as capturing the center, extending terrain on the kingside, etc. Strategical decisions often shape the general "flow" of the game, whereas tactical mistakes or successes determine how a game looks on a move-by-move basis.

Of course the boundary between tactics and strategy isn't quite so sharp as this brief explanation makes it out to be, and with the very best players tactics and strategy often go hand in hand, they using tactics to achieve strategical ends, and using strategical set-ups to make possible certain tactical devices.

I love beating up chess AI's, and during a month long stint in jail (damn cops finally caught me... 1 them, like 100 me... but hey) I regularly engaged my fellow inmates in games of chess.

I hate playing it online though, the yahoo games with the stupid timers set up so people lose if they don't spam moves, the people who do these odd random openers specifically to make you second guess what is going on to tick the timer down.

Heck with that crap, got old fast, I like to sit and think and consider everything before I move, or I like to trade pieces with people I enjoy playing with, like my brain twin Cliff... he and I got subtly different versions of the exact same brain, so we just start throwing pieces at each other til we wind up in a standoff, he and I have both forced mate on each other with a king and a pawn on a couple of occasions, and it is an unbearable pain in the ass to do so.

I don't really like to play chess.

I understand how each piece moves, but I don't grasp the strategy of the game.....so when I look at the board, it's pretty much meaningless and my moves are more or less impulsive.....or maybe opportunistic.

I would always play it with my sister but she would always beat me at it thats how rubbish I would of been... My dad is actually rather better than me at chess and would literally defeat me completely at it... I always wondered if he had entered the chess competition?

If you were younger at the time I'd just put it down to kids not really doing strategic planning very well! My mum would usually beat me and my brothers at any game of anything we ever played (if she wanted to) when we were kids so that's my excuse.

I taught my kids to play and then played against them for a while until they moved on to other interests. So what I say may or may not apply to playing against an adult opponent, which I haven't done since I myself was a child.

Putting myself in my opponent's shoes was surprisingly easy, since the opponent's ultimate goal and perceived threats would be about the same as mine. Mentally turn the board around, mentally make the move you're thinking of making, and see how it looks like from the other side. If there's only one piece that's being obviously threatened, you're not going to end up taking that piece. If you're leaving an opening, how obvious does it look from the other side of the board? Can you get to a place where you're threatening two pieces at once, without the tactic jumping out at anyone looking at it from the other side of the board?

Actually, those chess games were about the first time I remember being able to mentally put myself in someone else's shoes and make good predictions about what they were going to do.

What I couldn't do was convincingly throw a game. About the best I could do was to force myself to rush certain moves sometimes. Even so, they got pretty good against me, which made me happy that I have smart kids.

Love the game.

I'm a decent player I think (about 2000 FIDE rating). I have won tournaments. These days though, I hardly play rated games or compete in tournaments. Instead, pathetically, I damage my game by playing lightning/blitz games on the net - it's become a stim.

I use that excuse alot..... But then I don't play chess often so I would often say, "I haven't played it in time" never works for me though, thats the funny thing about it.

Chess is too abstract for my tastes. I never can really seem to fully grasp it, and, unlike most things where I am able to grasp the big picture, here I do actually get too stuck on the details and miss the overall strategy my opponent is playing. I prefer games where the units operate using more real-world rules that I can relate to.

I've never been able to figure out how to play it. I've watched other people play chess, but didn't know why they were making the moves they did. So it was a bit like watching a TV show where you don't know the characters, the plot, the subtext or the outcome.

But there are always logical outcomes in chess, I thought...

I hate chess. I find there's just far too much information to process at once, become focused on a small part of the board (usually the last piece that the opponent moved) and end up neglecting the 63 other squares.

i took to it immediately i guess it was the year of Bobby Fischer; i was an unformed pre-adolescent & it gave me, for the first time, an area outside of school i could excel at.

i played passionately at the local chess club for a number of years, with a little bit of monetary success, & a lots of success for my ego. almost managed a master's rating, but not consistently (too many sensitivities, things that could throw me off my stride. my one out-of-town tournament was a total fiasco...)

i still play online a bit, after a long layoff in which i tried to concentrate at things i was good at that also mattered. well, i found out that talent can only get you so far, & the rest is politics. what's that, & how do i learn it?

so, i still regard chess as a kind of platonic ideal of human interaction. all the rules are there.

m.

I suck at chess. However, I like to collect chess sets. I'm saving up to buy the Harry Potter ones. Not to mention that one sculpture of whatever of Hogwarts.

I enjoy chess, it's very mentally stimulating.
I'm terrible at it, and I don't think that will change any time soon.