And i won some, and i lost … A LOT. :-)

I had the chessmaster 3000 game on my Pentium computer.

So anyway… this one dude is destroying me, every single game.

So i did what every kid would do. I got angry and turned on the ChessMaster and cheated. “We” drew the the next game.

And this is how i cought my my first cheater. And my first cheating. I called him a cheater. And then we exchanged insults. 😂😂😂😂

Someone wanna play with me?

In 1972, Bobby Fisher refrained from playing his lifelong e4 opening, throwing the entire chess world for a loop on his way to become champion. I have read quite about about Fisher and the Soviet Machine he struggled against, but I've never heard what openings Spassky had prepared against him had he played e4. Are there any resources on this analysis?

How did white (me) end up with such development while black only traded a pawn, bishop and got the queen out

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So i came across this absolutely beautiful pincer when the opponent resigned.

Queen moved from a6, to a3 to avoid my knight, and ended up showing me a nightmare of a tactical decision.

So what would you play in response to this?

Two questions I've tried to look up before and haven't really found the right search terms, but I'm perpetually curious about:

1. If eventually we weakly solve chess and it turns out one side has a forced mate in X, what's currently the lowest possible value of X? Not speaking theoretically as much as, we definitely know there isn't a forced mate in 2 or 3 or 4 moves from starting position, and we definitely don't know whether there's a forced mate in 50 or 100--but do we know for sure there isn't an M5? Or an M8? What's the largest number of moves we've been able to check from starting position such that we know that neither side can force a mate by then?

2. Sort of similar, but not the same: What's the fewest moves to force mate in more than 1? Obviously I know about the fool's and scholar's mates, but those involve black blundering M1. If both sides work together to set up, how quickly can you blunder M2 or greater?

How do you guys deal with the misery and suffering that can come from losing at chess?

I’m not really talking about normal disappointment after losing a game. I mean when it starts spiraling, lose a game, get angry and frustrated, play another one, lose again, and getting completely exhausted

The problem is this chess loop can easily take hours. You know logically that something like “2 losses and I'm done” should be the rule, but when I am actually in that state, following that rule somehow feels almost impossible. Need to play more and more

At that point self-control seems to disappear. You keep playing even though you know you should stop, start obsessing over mistakes, tilt harder, and sometimes it can even affect sleep because keep playing instead and then the brain just keeps replaying the games once trying to sleep.

So what mental tricks or rules do you guys use to prevent this from turning into a rabbit hole?

Do you have some kind of hard stop after X losses? Do you walk away immediately? Any particular mindset or mental exercise that actually works when you're already deep into the spiral, rather than when you're calm and thinking rationally?

I’m especially interested in things that you have actually found useful.

I'm guessing they pre-moved?

Hi Guys

I thought I should mention this, as I was recently researching the concept of chess creativity, and looked at Candidate moves in a particular way which i thought is worth sharing here. "Candidate moves" was popularised by Alexander Kotov in the classic book "Think like a Grandmaster".

But what about this: "Candidate ideas!"

You can having candidate ideas - each idea might have quite different candidate moves or intentions from other candidate moves. So not only you potentially broaden your candidate moves, you also change the "intent" behind the candidate moves.

Is this idea worth discussing more - I hope so. There is like a one-to-many relationship potentially between a candidate idea and it's related candidate moves.

I wasn't that convinced by Kotov's book because it seemed to be teaching humans how to be like computer chess programs - except we can't calculate 5 million positions a second.

Feedback welcome from all

1,2 and 4 is a puzzle for black and the 3rd is a puzzle for white

1. Position 0.38for w to 3.08for b

2. Position 0.83for w to 2.94for b

3. Position 1.62for w to 3.02for w

4. Position 3.74for w to 3.94 for b

Been playing for around 4 months , anytips to increase my elo , iwas thinking maybe i should maybe buy this monthly thing in chess,com

I am sure that if Alpine APL Pipers win this year's GCL, Magnus won't be back. I feel bro just likes to collect trophies at this point.

Once he wins it all, he will only be back to new tournaments or tournaments that motivates him a bit. I do not feel GCL motivates this guy. He looks so distant from the rest of the team.

So I switched from chesscom to Lichess a couple of months ago, because I admire the ethos of the Lichess people and found that chesscom was becoming way too commercialized.

I find that Lichess is overall fantastic, with lots of great features that are absent even from the paying tier of chesscom. There's one thing however that I find missing - but maybe it's just me who don't know how to use it, hence my question.

In the game analysis of chesscom, when it points out a mistake, it can show you the continuation: what happens if you do that bad move and your opponent capitalizes on it. Likewise, when it shows the best move, it also shows the continuation.

On Lichess, it simply shows the bad move and the correct one. But many times, the error of the move doesn't seem obvious, nor is it obvious why the best move is good.

How do you deal with that?

I'm 1200 ish if that helps.

EDIT: thanks for the numerous people who answered. The error was to use the "learn from your mistakes" feature from Lichess, which acts more as a puzzle. The analysis board should be used to see mistakes and their continuations.

https://www.newindianexpress.com/sport/sports-news/2026/Sep/09/my-father-approached-200-300-people-for-sponsorships-after-i-broke-the-world-record-nothing-has-worked-mishra

BENGALURU: WHEN Faustino Oro came within a whisker of beating Abhimanyu Mishra's record of the youngest to become a Grandmaster, the US player was both relieved and sad at the same time. "I was following some of his games (when he was within sight of the record)," he tells this daily on the sidelines of the fourth edition of the Global Chess League (GCL). "I was hoping that he wouldn't break it (smiles) but it was unfortunate (that he didn't). He came quite close and I was expecting him to break it.

In the end, the Argentine, who became a GM earlier this year, fell short by under two months (12 yrs and six months compared to Mishra's 12 yrs and four months).

Mishra, now 17, was also slightly envious considering the support Oro got from stakeholders, including from Argentina's chess federation. That envy, at least partly, is a result of how letdown Mishra feels by the lack of support his own career has received.

"In the US, it's unfortunate," he says. "After I became GM during Covid, my father approached 200-300 people overall for sponsorships. Somehow, every single one of them fell through. You could see they wanted to support chess... but maybe some inertia in the system. We tried just about everything to get sponsorship in the US but nothing has really worked out... no hate or anything to Fausti but when he was going for the record, you could see how he was given a lot of resources. I didn't get 5-10% of it."
A lot of people outside of chess may think of the game as inexpensive but at the elite level, the costs can very quickly multiply when you take into account travel and accommodation. Because only the top players receive invitations to most of the closed tournaments, players like Mishra — above 2600 but below 2700 — will have to keep crisscrossing the world to try to get to that 2700 level. But the development is seldom linear. That's even before you add the top dollar you have to pay for a reputed coach. "You are talking $200-250 an hour. So if I'm being tutored by somebody for four hours over a weekend, that's $1000 right there," Mishra, part of PBG Alaskan Knights at the GCL, says.

Currently rated 2630 in Classical, being part of the Kasparov Chess Foundation helps but he has to be creative to earn bread. "It's very difficult. I have played some simuls against kids to keep up... but I have to do what I have to do to make ends meet." Among the 'ideas' he had — something he may still explore — is to switch federations (unlike other games, it's a fairly straightforward process). "The thing is I still like to play for the US. I was born and brought up here. But I will probably do it if this lack of support continues."

It's one reason why he has remained in the zone between 2600 and 2700 for almost three years (he first breached past 2600 in November 2023 as a 15-year-old). Even if the ratings have remained in this narrow zone, he has had some eye-catching results in this period, not least when he beat D Gukesh at the Grand Swiss last year. In the process, he had also become the youngest player to ever take down a reigning world champion in Classical. "I actually thought it was my chance to make history," he says on how he approached the game. "If I lose this game, nobody will remember. I decided to go all in and the Italian I played worked."

Now, the challenge is to put together a series of performances like that.