Twice the same position at move 14, and an improvement that failed

Merry Halloween!, or whatever. It's fitting that today's the Halloween because this is a scary post--soon I'll add a category "Eerie" for posts like this one and the one about the invisible queen.

Yesterday I played two bullet games against the same guy within a few minutes, and astonishingly or not, we reached exactly the same position in both games at move 14. The move order was slightly different (starting at move 8; I tried to improve my move order the second time around). My opponent chose a different continuation at move 15 because he lost a piece in our first game, and it should have been a better continuation had he found the best move, but to no avail, he ended up losing an exchange in the worst way possible in the second game.

Here's a side-by-side comparison of the games:

Game #1:
1. e4 c6 2. Bc4 d5 3. exd5 cxd5 4. Bb3 Nf6 5. d4 Bg4 6. f3 Bf5 7. Ne2 Nc6 8. O-O e6 9. c3 Bd6 10. Ng3 Bg6 11. Bd2 Qc7 12. Be1 O-O 13. Nd2 Bf4 14. Bf2 Na5

Game #2:
1. e4 c6 2. Bc4 d5 3. exd5 cxd5 4. Bb3 Nf6 5. d4 Bg4 6. f3 Bh5 7. Ne2 e6 8. O-O Bd6 9. Bd2 O-O 10. Be1 Qc7 11. Ng3 Bg6 12. Bf2 Nc6 13. Nd2 Bf4 14. c3 Na5

Game #1: 15. Bc2

Game #2: 15. Re1

Game #1: 15. … Nc4 16. Bxg6? Nxd2!

Game #2: 15. … b5 16. Bc2 Nc4 17. Bxg6? Bxd2!

Game #1: 17. Bxf7+ Qxf7 18. Re1

Game #2: 18. Re2 hxg6

Game #1: Here I played 18. ... Nc4 and I'm up a piece.

Game #2: 

Here my opponent needed to play 19. Rxd2 Nxd2 20. Qxd2, 

still conceding the exchange (why not play 18. Bxh7+ otherwise?). 

Instead, he tried to deflect my knight from the defense of the bishop.

19. b3? Bxc3 20. bxc4 Bxa1 21. Qxa1 dxc4

And here I'm up an exchange with a protected passed pawn.

Here are the two games in full (1-minute games on lichess.org):

Game #1:

Game #2:

Lichess Founder on Cheating

I recently wrote a post on cheating in online chess. I just found a presentation by Thibault Duplessis, the founder of lichess.org, in which he address the issue of cheating on the website (from 17:45 to 24:45 in the video):

Chess Joke

Nothing beats a good joke about chess patterns:

Improving once you've stalled

I thought I'd write a quick post to point you guys to an interesting article I found on the /r/chess subreddit. The article was written in 2011 by IM Kostya Kavutskiy, and attemps to provide tips as to how to overcome a drought in chess improvement (i.e., when your rating has stopped increasing and has effectively stalled). The article is titled "... on Breaking 2366", and is about how this IM came to reach the rating 2366 after stalling around 2250. (Funnily enough though, 6 years later his FIDE profile shows a standard rating of 2390, with games played as recently as May 2017, so perhaps he's stalled again and would be due for another article...)

He separates the tips into the following categories:

Analyzing your own games

Kavutskiy recommends reviewing the opening of every serious game you play. You shouldn't make the same mistake in two different games that use the same opening. I've recently played in an OTB tournament and have definitely made (costly and annoying) mistakes in my openings. Also, if after a game you realize you had trouble finding a good plan once you reached the middlegame, then Kavutskiy says your understanding of that particular opening is lacking.

Psychological mistakes

A psychological mistake is "usually the main culprit of any chess slump". Kavutskiy gives as example the main mistake he found in his own play, namely relying too much on intuition (or rather, not relying enough on concrete calculations); he writes that he would sometimes refrain from sacrifices because (1) he didn't trust his calculations ("the hard part was convincing myself that my opponent hadn't set some nasty trap. A year ago I would have just assumed that I [had] missed something in my calculations and would have played some 'solid' move instead"), or (2) he was simply not "brave" enough. Unfortunately, I feel like this section doesn't really answer one very difficult question: how do you figure out the psychological mistakes you make during your games?!

Working harder

To get over stallation (if that's a word), Kavutskiy says that you need to work harder than you're used to, at home (by analyzing your games, reading books, etc.), but also during your games. In particular, you need to work harder than your opponent: stay more focused, calculate variations more deeply and accurately, etc. I think this advice makes sense, and for me this was one of the main takeaways from this article. It can be hard to stay focused for the whole duration of a longer game, or after you start feeling like you have a sizable advantage against your opponent.

Chess books ("Chess books are ridiculously helpful")

Finally, Kavutskiy recommends reading more chess books as a road to improvement. He recommends a few specific books, a list which you may or may not find interesting (and which I invite you to consult in his article). He does recommend Perfect Your Chess by Andrei Volokitin, which I own and would also wholeheartedly recommend; the book presents hundreds of puzzles that target more advanced players. I can also recommend Excelling at Positional Chess, which I've reviewed here almost 10 years ago. I think benefits you get from books depend on how much work you put into them (do you get invested, set up boards with the position and run through the variations in the book, or do you read passively?), and I think that was one of the main messages in Kavutskiy's article, for better or worse (I've been reading very passively these days).

Cheating in Online Chess

I was wondering: How prevalent is cheating in online chess? More specifically, it would be great to get an estimate of the percentage of games that involve cheating in the form of engine use.

I couldn't get an exact answer to this question, but I think the answer is that it's prevalent enough to be bothered by it. Chess.com even has a private forum dedicated to the discussion of online cheating in chess (you need to submit a request to be admitted into the forum, and there are some restrictions--like having been a member on the site for at least one month--but overall it's easy to gain access). Chess.com also employs two full-time employees whose only task is to research and prevent cheating on that site. Similarly, both lichess and the Internet Chess Club have systems in place to detect cheating (sometimes doing automatic checks while the game is being played).

Five Percent?

The question about cheating prevalence has been asked several times over the years on multiple forums (like here). One user estimated the prevalence at 5%; another user said that a chess.com employee told them that 70% of games involve cheating (that's just hearsay, and 70% does sound pretty implausible). Yet another user said that the prevalence is "considerably higher" than 5% if your rating is high enough (1800+). One lichess user who is a National Master mentions on reddit that looking through his history of games in the classical category (8+ minutes), “about 80% of my losses were to people that subsequently had their accounts closed for cheating”

The 5% figure is one that seems to come back in forum posts. This figure was also mentioned by one of the lichess developers on reddit, 2 years ago:

About 1.2k accounts are make on lichess each day, and each day some 50 or more get marked (this number is set to increase as our detection system has just become fully operational). So if we assume that all cheaters use new accounts, about 4-5% of new accounts are cheaters. This figure has remained about the same since I started on the site and there were half as many new accounts made each day.
It's far less likely for a cheater to be using an older account, so that figure drops dramatically once they've played a hundred or more games.

Miscellaneous Stuff about Cheating in Chess

• At least one person has proposed a hypothesis test to detect cheating in online chess, and one International Master (also an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo) used statistics on the case of Borislav Ivanov, accused of cheating at the 2012 Zadar Open.
• Wikipedia has an entry for cheating in chess. Among other events recorded there, one grandmaster was stripped of his GM title for cheating, though he was allowed to keep his IM title.
• Chessbase.com has a 5-part series on the history of cheating in chess.
• GM Vladislav Tkachiev shows on YouTube just how easy to cheat with an accomplice using an earpiece in a video called How I Became a Cheater.
• There used to be a user on lichess, who was later banned, with the nickname IMaDirtyCheater, who made it very clear that he was cheating; his profile read:

I cheat, it should be obvious!
Really obvious...

• Some users have written programs to cheat directly from the same window the game is being played on; one such example is shown in a YouTube video on a lichess bullet game (I don't provide the link to the video because the description contains a link to the program, which is freely available on github). The resulting board looks like this, with the move recommended by the engine being indicated through a dark square (starting destination) and red square (ending destination):

My Recent Encounters with Cheaters

I recently started streaming games with longer time controls on Twitch, and as luck would have it, my first 2 games were played against cheaters! (So we're 0 for 2!) Both players were later banned from lichess. I lost both games pretty quickly, and both opponents played their part very fast (adding to the misery). Here are both games, available on my YouTube channel: 

Chess without squares?!

I recently ran into an interesting post on Reddit, on the subreddit /r/dataisbeautiful. It's an image that shows the pattern of "78 million chess moves, from 1 million top-level games". The image looks like this:

There are some interesting comments on the Reddit thread, so if you're interested check it out. For instance, one comment points out that bishops & knights seem to move towards the center and very rarely towards the sides of the board-- a "large data" way of learning how to play chess like the pros, in a way.

But what I found striking with this image is that, of course, the pieces' movements are bound by the squares on the board (giving the image the jagged, linear, square-y appearance that it has, with a ton of untouched white space). "What if there were no squares?", asked John Lennon (I think). In other words, is it possible to imagine (no pun intended) a chess game where pieces move freely on the board, no longer restricted by the squares?

In truth, I don't know how we could figure out the legality of moves without the neatness of the squares. (Perhaps it would need to be more "physics-based", with a maximum distance [read: speed?] that can be travelled by the pieces at each move, which itself could depend on their previous momentum.) But those technicalities notwithstanding, it's fun to imagine...

Four-Player Chess

I don't know if you got wind of this, but Chess.com is developing what is supposed to be the first-ever variant of chess that can be played with four players simultaneously, which they call four-player chess. The variant was announced on September 1st 2017 on chess.com here. I first heard of this through IM Danny Rensch with Chess Today, who spends most of his video trying it out for the first time: https://youtu.be/f-cVupxkQpo

The board looks like this:

And prior to entering the game, you are shown this notice, which includes the gist of the rules:

I played only one game, and somehow I finished 1st out of the four players. I technically lost on time while there was one player left in the game, but the penalty for this is 20 points being awarded to my opponent, and because I had more points than my opponent even after they got their 20 points, I won the game. From one of the rules above, it sounds like I could have flat-out resigned and still win the game!

Personally, I did not enjoy the game that much. The board is huge, such that your opponents' long-range pieces (like the bishops) take a while to get used to because (1) they can come from much farther away than we're used to, and (2) they can come from 3 different players! You also don't have a choice of time controls--everyone starts with 4 minutes (with some minor increment), which I find pretty fast when you're not used to this variant.

If you want to try it out, four-player chess is accessible here: https://www.chess.com/4-player-chess

Importantly, the variant is still in beta phase, so my guess is it's bound to change in the upcoming weeks. Among other things, Danny Rensch mentions in his video that there is currently no notation system for this variant, such that developing theory is difficult.