I beat the captain of my high school’s chess team and he just yelled at me “I only lost because you don’t know anything.” I guess he wasn’t aware of the Frenchman’s Cumsock. 🤷🏻♂️
I played hockey and was by no means good, but had a friend who was a good goalie, and said it was always tough with the less good players because you couldn’t cheat them at all, because even they had no idea where the puck was going.
Doesn’t work like that in chess though. If you lose, that’s on you.
The beauty of chess is that there’s always something new to discover, like the Bongcloud Attack.
The Bongcloud Attack (or Bongcloud Opening) is an irregular chess opening that consists of the moves:
1. e4 e5- Ke2?
It is considered a joke opening and is associated with internet chess humor.
And I laughed and laughed. Ke2? How delightfully absurd!
Just read this on Wikipedia. It’s great!
On 15 March 2021, Magnus Carlsen, playing white, led with the Bongcloud in a game against Nakamura at the Magnus Carlsen Invitational. Nakamura mirrored the opening with 2…Ke7, leading to a position nicknamed the Double Bongcloud.[2] The game was intentionally drawn by threefold repetition after the players immediately repeated moves, the particular sequence they used known as the “Hotbox Variation”.
But did the audience erupt in uproarious laughter?
And I laughed and laughed. Ke2? How delightfully absurd!
That’s chess humor for you. In 1975 Martin Gardner published an article (on April 1^st ) claiming that chess had been solved by a supercomputer. Where upon if a human opened e4, the computer would spin its fans for several hours, and then resign.
It’s a hoot and a half.
- Ke2 is absurd!
It would be like if you designed a play in football in which the quarterback is supposed to stand in front of his wide receiver teammates and try to physically hold them back.
Okay, but I wouldn’t call that a joke.
Bongcloud works because of how stupid it is. Your opponent doesn’t know how to respond.
Idk, a lot of pros talk about how boring chess gets at a certain level. Lots of lines are solved so deep that going to tournaments can mean learning who your opponents are, studying as many of the openings that you know they play as deeply as possible and hoping that you guessed the right openings and that they prepared the wrong ones against you.
Things like the bongcloud work once, when no one at a tournament has seen it before, then it gets solved and playing it is only ever a disadvantage again. It can work in things like rapid chess or whatever when it’s used to throw people off guard.
I joined chess club in middle school. I lost my first game in two moves.
I didn’t go back to chess club.
Ah, the “Fools mate”. Rookie mistake! (/s i suck at chess)
That pretty much describes accurately how I felt, so maybe it should be called that.
There is a two-move checkmate that is called that, he wasn’t making that one up. 😊
hundreds
To be fair Frenchman’s cumsock is a winning play in 87% of chess matches
I joined a Chess Federation sponsored chess club in Omaha in my late 20s. Nothing is more humbling than getting beat by a 12-year-old.
Kind of also something that changed with the advent of the internet.
Chess was popular for most of its history as a game where you basically only got better by playing and genuinely trying to work out better strategies. At best, you had some chess club or a book at hand.
Now, you could spend every day just reading up on different strategies and counters, and there’d still be someone more serious about it.
I guess, on the flipside, that makes it easier to not take it as serious anymore and we have ELO-based match-up systems now as well, so you’ll more easily find someone on your level.
we have ELO-based match-up systems
I don’t know, they look a little mismatched what with all the different instruments.
It’s like playing Smash Bros. You only play with people at your skill level. That one friend who likes the game a little too much and watches competitive events? Yeah, you’re not going to have fun playing against them. Just play with other people who don’t really know what they’re doing, and maybe consider throwing items on to even out skill with randomness (someone needs to invent random item drops for chess).
This is why I think Go is actually significantly more approachable than chess. With chess, you really need someone of very similar level; if one of you is a little better, that person will almost always win, and that’s often kinda boring for both of you. But Go has a handicapping system built in that makes it way more forgiving of differences in skill, so that you can both play a pretty challenging game. I think it’s contributed a lot to the culture around the game being more open and focused on teaching others, too.
That said, there are still a lot of things that high-level players memorize. But it seems like there are a lot more folks just playing for the joy of the game, and at the low levels, those folks will often outplay those who get very into the memorization too early.
My only problem with Go is that it can literally take days or weeks. That’s just more patience than I have with a single game. I love the concept, but the time required for a single game is just too much for me. Even played in chunks.
It’s possible to play games like that, but most folks don’t. Even professional or tournament games are mostly played over the course of an hour or two; there are just a few extremely high level tournaments where the games are split over a few days. I’ve played a couple of postal games that went on like that, but people do that with chess too. All my in-person games have been under two hours, including in tournaments, and most under an hour.
I’d encourage you to find a local Go club and check it out. As I say, the folks are very friendly and eager to teach newcomers.
The frenchman’s cumsock is a classic move, or at least it should be. Although I find chess interesting (as a concept) I completely suck at playing it, so much so that I could be the frenchman in question. Growing up, whenever I played my older brother he’d always know how to beat me in 4 or 5 moves. I’m much better at solitaire games, though there’s a version of solitaire chess I’d like to try.
Well, Knooks haven’t yet become mainstream. Someone coded up a mod for chess where Knooks are pieces that move like Horseys and Rooks.
https://github.com/PossibleEmuWrangler/AnarchyChess-DreamyDesktop
That’s why you should deploy the Cow Opening.
If it helps, geniuses in very narrow fields with immediate feedback, like chess, aren’t the smartest most of the time. They are just optimised for solving a particular problem with a closed feedback loop, much like an artificial neural network in machine learning.
Really dude. I love chess, I used to play with my grandfather when I was like 8. So I have too good of a grip for most of my friends to want to play, but I’m not playing like it’s a job to compete with people who read chess websites.
ah yes…The four-move gangbang
Try Go.
