Chess Pro Answers Questions From Twitter (ft. GothamChess) | Tech Support | WIRED

I'm Levy Rosman chess educator and YouTuber today I'll be answering your questions from Twitter this is chess support [Music] revealer's app asks what is the origin of the word Checkmate and what does it mean hash that question hashtag do you know wow they asked this question in 2013 I really hope they've gotten it answered as far as I know the word Checkmate is a direct translation from Persian the word shock would probably refer to the king like the Shah and mat would supposedly mean trapped Frozen or something like that at urchman asks how do you become a chess Grandmaster the Grand Master title is the highest one that you can achieve according to the international Chess Federation and basically it means that you've achieved Mastery at the game of chess I'm not even a grand master I'm an international Master which is the title right underneath that basically to achieve the Grand Master title you have to have a series of tournaments that are officially recognized you also need to have a minimum ELO which is a rating that quantifies your skill level of 2500. if you want to become a grand master and you're watching this and you're young you still have plenty of time you should study as much chess as you can you should play as much chess as you can analyze your games over and over if it will take time but it is definitely possible at Matt Center asks dear hardcore chess players was the jargon and Queen's Gambit accurate where the games authentically staged did you examine the boards for Flaws in the narrative the Queen's Gambit was single-handedly the biggest thing to ever happen to chess it was viewed by hundreds of millions of people and that is why they had to make sure the show was super accurate apparently they even had one of the best chess players of all time Gary Kasparov fact checked so many details of the show and I'll tell you as a person that has been to chess tournaments sat around tables analyzing positions they did a really good job there's not quite as much substance abuse in the world of Chess but yeah people do party at Japan Tudor chess asks oh wait what's up Charlie why is Magnus Carlson so good at chess I always feel inspired when I look at his games Magnus Carlsen is the best chess player right now and there's an argument to be made that he's the best chess player of all time Magnus has an incredible stamina he will go on for five six seven hours and squeeze water out of Stone in many of his positions he has extremely good instincts and end game technique and that is what makes him the best chess player and that's what makes people inspired by his games because sometimes he makes it look so easy at Buco Capital asks okay serious question how do you cheat in chess the simplest answer to this is that you receive external assistance during a game that you play if you're playing online you might just toggle your tab you put all the moves in the game that you're playing into some sort of analysis board where a computer will give an evaluation of what the best moves are but if you happen to be playing live face to face you'll have to come up with a better mechanism otherwise you're going to be caught much faster so people have had accomplices in the past or vibrating devices in their shoe or elsewhere but that is the way you would uh win a chess game by cheating at chessify me asks what's the worst possible move in chess in general if you want to ask what's the worst first move that white can play from a starting position I think it's the move move F3 with the pawn because you weaken your King on the dark squares and you disallow the natural movement of your knight your knight wanted to move there but now you've got in your own way so you sabotage your own development and you weakened your own king of all the options that you had on move one which was 20. congrats you chose the wrong one at chess dump asks what's the best opening chess for me personally the best opening is the Karo Khan defense it begins with the move E4 so this has to be played and black now responds with the move C6 this is the Karo Khan defense and the objective of Black's move is to try to put the pawn in the center but not only be supported by the queen also be supported by this Pawn this opening holds a dear place in my heart because when I was like 12 years old I quit chess basically I said oh this is too difficult it's not cool I don't have any friends playing chess and I came back to chess after two or three years the first opening that I picked up was the Karo Khan and I won a lot of games I had a lot of success with this opening I beat a lot of very decent players and I play it to this day at Contra points asks I want to get better at chess what's the best way to improve just play a million games or do you have to read like chess Theory the best way in my opinion to improve at chess is to get the fundamentals down and when you talk about Chess Theory what theory means is the best way to begin a game but it's kind of necessary because if you're just starting a game of chess on your own it's sort of like going to a boxing gym without any proper instruction like one punch and you're gonna go down so you've got to learn to keep your hands up you've got to learn to move your feet the right way and if you're not doing that in the chess equivalent then it's going to go really poorly at Breeze chest times asks chess myths are there really three phases to a chess game there absolutely are three phases to a game of chess they are the opening phase the middle game phase and the end game phase the opening is something like the first 5 10 or 5 15 moves of a chess game played between white and black that has already been explored before what that means is maybe somebody played it some years ago at a tournament at some point you enter new territory a position that has never been reached which might surprise you but that happens as early as move five or six in some games a chess game that has never happened before that's called the middle game and that's kind of that stage of the game where one side goes to battle against the other and you try to overtake your opponent and the end game is basically when like half of these pieces have been traded off or all the pieces are gone and it's just Kings and pawns that's called a king and pawn end game so those are the phases of the game you can debate whether a position is middle or end game but there absolutely are three phases that's not a myth at Levine Maxwell asks chess enthusiasts is there a name for every possible move in chess after following the world championship the amount of names they have for different moves is infinitely fascinating like the Sicilian Defense win Gambit rosalimo variation yes so the way I would describe this is chess openings are named after people or they are named after places any given chess opening like the Sicilian Defense obviously Sicily russellimo variation is named after Russell limo the chess openings are the first five six seven ten moves of a game also in chess a lot of different tactical patterns have fun nicknames like Fork pin deflection and so on but those are just descriptive conceptual terms and they're not actually named after people or locations at by Brandon white asks is it harder to play with black pieces than white hashtag chess basically what Brandon is asking here is that white goes first in chess is that an advantage it really doesn't matter the truth is you're going to play half the games of your life with white and half of them with black you've got to be ready to play with either color now with black especially early on white can bring out their Queen they can try to Checkmate you in four moves which is called the scholars mate but as long as you learn to deal with early aggression and kind of nonsense open earnings you'll be fine in fact some people like playing Black more because they can respond to what their opponent does so their opponent shows their hand and now you get to respond with black at Patrick Bet David asks who's the greatest chess player of all time this list basically comes down to three people Magnus Carlson Gary Kasparov and Bobby Fischer there are some people out there that will argue for somebody else they are objectively incorrect and I will be the first one to tell you all these three players dominated in different ways Bobby Fischer was a transcended talent and hard worker he was better than everybody that he played and it wasn't even close but he was only world champion once and then he sort of stepped away from chess Gary Kasparov dominated for decades and Magnus Carlson is currently in the midst of his Reign if Magnus can go another six seven eight years as the world rank number one there is a legitimate case to be made that he will overtake Gary it's very close if I have to give you an answer right now I will say Gary Kasparov if we recorded this three years into the future I probably would tell you Magnus at K marzantowicz says what can we learn learn from a game deep blue versus Kasparov the match was basically the turning point where humans could no longer defeat computers at chess Gary Kasparov one of the greatest chess players of all time in the late 1990s played two matches against deep blue from IBM deep blue was a revolutionary chess computer and it was the pioneer of Chess engines and in the first match Gary won so Gary was still at his Prime and was stronger than his chess opponent the counterpart the AI but in their rematch Gary was defeated and since then computers have only gotten better and better and now they can fit on something as small as a smartphone at official fbma asks random question while playing chess how does your Queen's movements align with your overall strategy well the queen is the most powerful piece it can move up down left right and on an empty board it would control something like nearly half the squares she goes to show you its power its foresight its ability to jump into the enemy position on the other side of the board and then come right back but since it's your most powerful piece it's also your most valuable one you don't want to lose it just for no reason and I would compare a queen to something like the dragons in Game of Thrones where they can be World Enders they could burn fire all over the place but since both sides have one and any of the pawns can also promote to a queen it can get really chaotic really fast both sides have eight pawns and one of the rules of the pawn is that if it makes it all the way to the end of the board it can promote it can promote to a knight a bishop a queen or a rook at TV preds asks Knights or Bishops so this is a knight shockingly resembles a horse and I don't know why it's not called a horse basically a knight can move in L shapes and goes one one two Gallop Gallop turn and it's extremely Elusive and a lot of players at 99 percent of chest strength will miss the key defensive or offensive resources that a knight can provide but top level s say that a bishop is better because a bishop theoretically could travel the entire distance of the board in one move but personally I would say that the Knight is better it's extremely difficult to pinpoint exactly what a knight wants to do they're super tricky pieces top level this is better but for most of you this is the better piece at computer chess asks explain like I'm five how do chess computers work which is ironic because that Twitter account is literally named computer chess but I digress basically a chess computer can see the future in two three four ten 15 moves ahead come all the way back with all of the different possibilities and all the different combinations and permutations of moves which could be in the thousands or the tens of thousands or even the millions come all the way back to where we are right now essentially the computer evaluates its probability of victory that might mean the king is weak and I can tell that the king is weak and I'm I can tell the king is weak over the next 20 moves I'm going to be able to attack it just things that humans absolutely are not able to come up with all the best chess engines in the world are around the same strength the best one which is stockfish will do this process that I just described better more efficiently and more accurately over time than all the others at Brittany magic1 asks in chess what's castling castling involves your king and one of your Rooks and basically when the king and the Rook have a totally empty line between them the king would move two spaces like this king would go two and The Rook would come right next to the king that action gets the king away from the center over to safety like a vacation house if you will but black can also in this position Castle long this is the longer side it required three pieces to get out of the way and how does black do this black moves the King two squares just the same way and The Rook comes right next to it now there is enough defense over here for the king not to worry long term at spy747 asks how would you describe the playing styles of Magnus Carlson and GM Hikaru in terms of a particular animal this is a fascinating question and I am very bad at drawing analogies but I'm going to do my best I think that Magnus carlsen's suffocating playing style killing you slowly over time is best compared to a python and GM Hikaru also known as Hikaru Nakamura Grand Master one of the most accomplished speed chess players of all time I would probably compare him to a Jaguar like the elevated form of his species fast very very resourceful multi-talented and also very elusive at justify me asks quick tactic from Adams vs fabrego 1988. how fast can you find Checkmate in two white to move I found it Checkmate in two means you make a move your opponent responds and on that second move you deliver a Checkmate in this position in particular white is actually really in trouble because white is down a bishop and the Knight materially speaking white has a lot less but look at this powerful control over this king the king is completely stranded white doesn't have any options right because if white tries to get in with the Rook one of these pieces will capture but white does have this move this is called a sacrifice so the first move here is Rook F7 check black has no legal move here except capturing The Rook for free with the King you're able to do that because the Rook has no protection here so blacks just want a rook but our Queen now drives into where our Rook used to stand and this is check once again but this time the king is unable to run anywhere around the queen because obviously the queen would get the king but if the king takes the Queen the same way the king took the Rook our Rook would now capture that King Checkmate in two at unlimited chess asks our chess what is the rarest move ever played rarest move is a tough one but it basically means just an absolutely breathtaking move something that you cannot find anywhere else and if I've got to give one I would say the gold coins game that Frank Marshall played in the early 20th century where he sacrificed basically three pieces at the same time his last move Queen to G3 was just exceptional and people apparently showered the board with gold coin after the move was played at chessmate app asks can you solve this puzzle by Paul morphy White mates in two moves yeah I solved it Paul morphe is one of the most accomplished chess players of all time and one of the most famous ones he's the protagonist of the Opera game which was a Legendary game where a bunch of pieces were sacrificed to deliver a Checkmate and he was around about 170 years ago that was when he was in the prime of his chess career one of the things that he did though besides dominated chess was compositions not musical ones but chess ones and compositions are basically fake positions that have never happened in a real game with certain goals and objectives that make you think totally outside the box of what you would normally be thinking of during a real chess game and this is an example of one the right move here is the absolutely fascinating Rook to H6 that move puts black in what's called a tsukswang or a German word for basically having no moves except self-sabotage anything that you do will result in the loss of something essentially if the bishop moves to any Square we play Rook takes Pawn Checkmate that's the move that we wanted to play anyway but the bishop was standing there defending but what if black takes are Rook well then we use the cleared out G7 Square to push our Pawn and black as checkmated Boxed In by his own pieces so those are all the questions for today I really appreciate all of you who submitted them and if I have to give you any parting advice before I go it would be to absolutely give chess a try it's a lot less intimidating than you think and there's never been a better time to pick up chess with all the resources out there thanks for watching chess support

Channel: WIRED

Views: 5,898,409

Keywords: accuracy score, cheating, cheating scandal chess, chess accuracy, chess cheater, chess cheating, chess cheating scandal, chess questions, currents, elo, gotham chess tech support, gothamchess levy rozman, hans niemann, innovation, less rozman, levy rozman, levy rozman cheating, levy rozman explains chess, magnus carlsen, magnus carlson cheating scandal, ott tech support, science & technology, tech support chess support, tech support gothamchess, wired

Id: iQ190Bf-6J0

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/ILoveThisWebsite]

It’s official, if you suck, knights are better than bishops.

[u/AncientZiggurat]

The grob's a worse opening move than 1.f3. Even engines lose with 1.g4 whereas they can easily hold draws with the other nineteen opening moves including 1.f3.

Though explaining why 1.g4 is worse than 1.f3 is not at all obvious in human terms--certainly hard to fit in a video of this sort.

[u/imisstheyoop]

Neat little video. Well done by levy! Fun and informative.

[u/feralcatskillbirds]

Vibrating devices in their shoes and elsewhere?

Where?

[u/TrenterD]

Looking at Wired's recent videos, except for the ones with famous actresses, the chess videos are absolutely the most popular.