Comment by kyralis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyralis | Hacker News Reader

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Chess is not real-time, and it's intellectually very "pure" in that your ability at the game is not influenced by any ancillary skills- APM, hand-eye coordination, rapid scanning of multiple windows of screen when managing, say, multiple RTS expansions, etc. Your win or loss is never going to be driven by "I couldn't click fast enough" or "I mis-clicked in the heat of a battle".

Also, at least in my opinion, the very limited nature of the total set of states relative to the total set of states in something like an RTS lends itself to repeat engagement and analysis. You can, and likely will, see exactly the same board position in more than one chess game. You almost never going to see exactly the same game state in multiple SC games. That changes the dynamics of post-game analysis and skill development, IMO.

(Don't get me wrong, I enjoy both- but I do enjoy them differently.)

>Also, at least in my opinion, the very limited nature of the total set of states relative to the total set of states in something like an RTS lends itself to repeat engagement and analysis. You can, and likely will, see exactly the same board position in more than one chess game.

This makes it reactive, rather than proactive. Reactive judgments are driven more by depth of knowledge, habit, and memorization. Whereas proactive judgments are driven more by predictive/entrepreneurial reasoning. Both seem equally driven by calculated risk with a little psychology involved.

Ancillary skills are important in start craft, I'll give you that. But at least in DotA those skills could be learned by anyone relatively quickly. I don't play video games any more so no other examples come to mind unfortunately.

Turn-based strategy games such as the Civilization and Total War series are probably good examples to compare chess with. Aside from the potential asymmetries (which can be removed), they are both 'purer' than RTS games and less deterministic than chess. In 1v1s, they're probably a better test of predictive reasoning than chess.

> Your win or loss is never going to be driven by "I couldn't click fast enough" or "I mis-clicked in the heat of a battle".

True with 1 exception, 1/0 (all moves in 1 minute per side) bullet, some of the really strong players at that use high end/high accuracy gaming mice because with so little time even a slight decrease in move time pays off.

I don't play anything less than 15/15 or 20/10 though and your point holds for that.

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