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Comment by yesenadam | Hacker News Reader

Am watching the World Cup right now. Before that watched the Sinquefield Cup. Both (so far) exciting events, not sure how you can pronounce classical chess dead.

Bullet, lol---chess without thinking. It's the thinking I like about chess. The carefully-worked-out combinations, brilliant defensive plans, drawing swindles etc. If people like playing bullet, great, but it seems another game entirely.

People complaining here about the draws in the last world championship: the WCC matches are much too short these days, players won't take risks as there's no time to catch up if they backfire. But "shorter, faster" is supposed to cure everything. Anyway, Karpov and Kasparov had a lot of draws, 17 in a row in 1984, in virtually the pre-computer era.

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Re classical, if you don’t want to take my word for it, look up the chess24 interview after the last world champs where magnus said it was so unenjoyable he wasn’t even sure if he’d defend his title.

No offense, only people who suck at bullet say it doesn’t involve thinking. It’s the same game, it involves developing and training your intuition. I could teach anyone how to get good, even you... if you were open to learn that is.

(And had the budget or could trade for coding hours :-)

If you have to say "No offense" to begin a sentence, it probably doesn't belong on HN. And "..even you..if you were open to learn" is in the same vein. I'm not interested in communicating further.

Edit: Gee, lots of downvotes. Not sure why. Should I have said nothing? I thought the way they spoke to me was utterly unacceptable, as I calmly pointed out. My initial points were mostly obvious things everyone in the chess world knows, including the person I was responding to.

> Should I have said nothing?

I'm hoping you want a reply here, or else I'm wasting my time ;-) I have found that letting others have the last word is both magnanimous and a great strategy for extracting myself from conversations with people I no longer wish to talk to. You seem like the kind of person who appreciates strategic thinking, which is why I thought you might enjoy that idea.

I read HN for civilised rejoinders such as this.

That's because you called his hobby "lol---chess without thinking" then got huffy when he replied in the same tone.

It's really ironic that you adopted such a sneering tone in your post and then tried to gatekeep what does or does not belong on HN.

> And had the budget or could trade for coding hours

I'm entertaining getting into bullet chess, what kind of dev work do you need? Presumably for LiChess?

Mainly full stack web (Node JS). I have a functional proof of concept integrated with Lichess and Stockfish API + custom chess code. It needs about week of love from a full stack dev to turn into an MVP I can test on actual humans.

Ok, let's talk. Email in bio.

Okay. Email sent.

I'm a total amateur but I could not stop watching some games at this year's Sinquefield cup.

So maybe it's boring for the players, but still fun to watch. Anand's games were super exciting.

When I first started getting back into chess a few years ago, I absolutely _could not play_ blitz or bullet -- after the opening, I'd squander all my time in a few moves.

After a few months of practicing, though, I really started to enjoy it -- it really _feels_ like time dilation / thinking faster when you complete an entire chess game, to mate, in the range of 2 to 6 minutes. I'm also certain that this practice has helped me a lot with focus when doing technical work. [I'm still a lousy player, but that's beside the point, haha!]

p.s. re : American chess : Nakamura is, in my opinion, one of the greats -- and he [like Carlsen] has that quality about him that gets kids excited to play chess. [On a different note, it's great to have Hou as a role model for girls who want to play - I feel like she's up there with Polgar in the 'inspirational' category]

And in the current round of the World Cup (16 games featuring 32 of the strongest players in the world) at least 6, probably 7 games are decisive: 9 draws. classical chess is not quite dead.

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