<story><title>Chess Minigames for Enjoyable Learning [pdf]</title><url>https://andytrattner.com/img/pdf/enjoy-chess.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>erfgh</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand the appeal of chess for the average player. Unless you are advanced (over 2000 elo) there is nothing really &amp;quot;deep&amp;quot; about it. It&amp;#x27;s like solving simple puzzles and you have to think like a computer, simply evaluating moves and responses. As GM Ben Finegold said, when you show a sub-2000 player what he did wrong he&amp;#x27;s not surprised; he just didn&amp;#x27;t see it, didn&amp;#x27;t calculate it.&lt;p&gt;Yes, if you reach 2000 elo the game becomes very strategic but 99% of people won&amp;#x27;t reach that due to not being able to play thousands and thousands of games and&amp;#x2F;or not doing so early enough in their life.&lt;p&gt;Can you play just for fun when you are below 2000? Yes you can but it&amp;#x27;s not much fun because in most games players will blunder and at that point the game pretty much gets decided; you can blunder at any point, you can never relax, you can never play a move and be confident that you didn&amp;#x27;t blunder. The constant struggle to be ultra-focused on your calculation quickly wears you down and makes the game tiring and stressful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JanneVee</author><text>Yes you can enjoy the game below 2000 if you play people at the same level as you. When you blunder the opponent will occasionally blunder back at below 2000. I&amp;#x27;ve had really enjoyable games where I got to make strategic decisions like doing an exchange sacrifice because the opponent decided to lock away his queen. Or the opponent that &amp;quot;Fischered&amp;quot; his bishop by grabbing a rook pawn and me getting use of light squares again. When both of these things happened the win wasn&amp;#x27;t clear and you needed to think more long term than just finding the right tactical sequences. But granted it isn&amp;#x27;t happening every game.</text></comment>
<story><title>Chess Minigames for Enjoyable Learning [pdf]</title><url>https://andytrattner.com/img/pdf/enjoy-chess.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>erfgh</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand the appeal of chess for the average player. Unless you are advanced (over 2000 elo) there is nothing really &amp;quot;deep&amp;quot; about it. It&amp;#x27;s like solving simple puzzles and you have to think like a computer, simply evaluating moves and responses. As GM Ben Finegold said, when you show a sub-2000 player what he did wrong he&amp;#x27;s not surprised; he just didn&amp;#x27;t see it, didn&amp;#x27;t calculate it.&lt;p&gt;Yes, if you reach 2000 elo the game becomes very strategic but 99% of people won&amp;#x27;t reach that due to not being able to play thousands and thousands of games and&amp;#x2F;or not doing so early enough in their life.&lt;p&gt;Can you play just for fun when you are below 2000? Yes you can but it&amp;#x27;s not much fun because in most games players will blunder and at that point the game pretty much gets decided; you can blunder at any point, you can never relax, you can never play a move and be confident that you didn&amp;#x27;t blunder. The constant struggle to be ultra-focused on your calculation quickly wears you down and makes the game tiring and stressful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Barrin92</author><text>there&amp;#x27;s a lot of pleasure in mechanical exercise, it&amp;#x27;s the reason people go to the gym or play starcraft. You don&amp;#x27;t really need to be good at chess to get fun out of calculating chess moves. It&amp;#x27;s true that it&amp;#x27;s like solving puzzles, but puzzles are very popular! It&amp;#x27;s like working out for your brain. Even at the GM level by the way chess is really 99% tactics. It&amp;#x27;s not like some 4X strategy game, it&amp;#x27;s by its nature almost always concrete.&lt;p&gt;And &lt;i&gt;because&lt;/i&gt; everyone can blunder at low level play a blunder doesn&amp;#x27;t mean you lose the game. It&amp;#x27;s with higher ELO that the game starts to become more punishing.&lt;p&gt;And you definitely can get to a good strength as an adult. 2000 is strong club level, which if you really want to do it is a few years of dedicated training. And even at your average club rating of say 1700-1800 you can play decent games.</text></comment>