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Nice piece of fish posted:This is an LP of a bunch of people playing chess as much for the demonstration of playing chess (as the main thread is no doubt observing us and commenting) which means that even should we lose - which is always a distinct possibility when playing black - we stand to learn a lot and gain a lot of knowhow from the aftermath and analysis of the chess nerds in the main thread. I thought there was a difference between consulting with a chess computer and playing against an intermediate AI. Nobody is throwing a temper tantrum here, I'm just suggesting a change in strategic focus given our poor position. Again, I'm against surrender and merely put it there as an option on the poll. Jesus christ guys, there's no need to be dicks about what is just a neutral suggestion. We can win this, but we need them to make an error. Otherwise, our earlier failures have left us far behind and I wholly blame myself for suggesting the Scandinavian.
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Aug 6, 2017 20:38
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:I thought there was a difference between consulting with a chess computer and playing against an intermediate AI. Nobody is throwing a temper tantrum here, I'm just suggesting a change in strategic focus given our poor position. Again, I'm against surrender and merely put it there as an option on the poll. Jesus christ guys, there's no need to be dicks about what is just a neutral suggestion. We can win this, but we need them to make an error. Otherwise, our earlier failures have left us far behind and I wholly blame myself for suggesting the Scandinavian. Herp, what you're doing is being a bad sport, which is honestly the worst sin you can commit in a chess game, doubly so when there's people watching it. We're going to try to win because it's more interesting for the viewers and more satisfying for us even if we do lose. If we do, we can at least say we did our best. So: kindly shut the hell up with this talk of surrendering and giving up. Mmkay?
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Aug 6, 2017 21:04
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Dr. Snark posted:Herp, what you're doing is being a bad sport, which is honestly the worst sin you can commit in a chess game, doubly so when there's people watching it. I'm not talking about surrender, how many times must I say this? But I'll give up mentioning it because it seems you're all going to put those words in my mouth anyway. It's pretty telling that everyone who bothered to vote on the poll went for draw or surrender, while the ones who are dogheadedly pursuing an impossible win didn't vote. AJ_Impy posted:Your poll has no authority whatsoever, of course people are going to ignore it. It has less credibility than you do. It's there for discussion, to evaluate what the focus of our strategy is going to be. I'm sorry that I thought giving people a chance to anonymously give their honest opinion in a democratic format was a good idea instead of acting as if my strategy was gospel. HerpicleOmnicron5 fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Aug 6, 2017 |
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Aug 6, 2017 21:08
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:I'm not talking about surrender, how many times must I say this? But I'll give up mentioning it because it seems you're all going to put those words in my mouth anyway. Your poll has no authority whatsoever, of course people are going to ignore it. It has less credibility than you do.
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Aug 6, 2017 21:25
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Please be civil in this thread about playing chess for the purposes of entertaining strangers on the internet  That said, aiming for a draw would in no way be seen as poor sportsmanship if either team reaches a position where they feel that the game is unwinnable. (And nor would resigning in a situation where a loss is inevitable)
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Aug 6, 2017 22:46
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Herp, let me be honest. I'd take the suggestion that we start playing for draws more seriously if it hadn't come from the person who said "YES, YES, WE HAVE THEM ON THE ROPES, WE'RE WINNING" after the second move.
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Aug 6, 2017 22:57
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I apologise for my discourtesy.
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Aug 6, 2017 22:58
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I dunno, I was gonna say it's not over till the fat lady sings, myself. Anyway, I don't completely think we're screwed?? Not yet.
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Aug 6, 2017 23:00
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Snorb posted:I dunno, I was gonna say it's not over till the fat lady sings, myself. Well, that entirely depends on what white does. So far they've not made a single mistake that I could see, however that could easily be my own failing as much as anything else. I'll be very interested to see the breakdown once we're done. As it stands, a lot can happen. Also, it's worth it to note that in chess championships, playing black to a draw is generally considered a soft win, because the tempo disadvantage of starting as black means you're likely to lose. If we were to be allowed to play white after this game, and we won - which is hardly impossible - we'd be at a draw even if we lost here. Honestly, this is all mostly for fun and learning, and I feel I've learned a lot already from this game. Covski posted:Please be civil in this thread about playing chess for the purposes of entertaining strangers on the internet Entirely fine, but I'd like to point out that you put us at a disadvantage when you saddled us with a pretty obvious disruptive presence. Now that things are coming to a point, I don't begrudge annoyance at Herp's behaviour and I won't apologize for speaking my mind about that behaviour. That said, I'll try to refrain from taking this seriously enough to get annoyed like this in the future, this is after all supposed to be fun and informative and my competitive eagerness is absolutely my own fault. All told I think this LP was an excellent idea, and I'm happy I got to participate, and I'm very much looking forward to reading the other threads because I've tried very hard to keep to the spirit of this competition, no sneak peaks and no goddamned chess computers. I'm keen to see people who actually properly know chess stand in judgement of my suggestions 
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Aug 6, 2017 23:26
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Davin Valkri posted:Herp, let me be honest. I'd take the suggestion that we start playing for draws more seriously if it hadn't come from the person who said "YES, YES, WE HAVE THEM ON THE ROPES, WE'RE WINNING" after the second move. Fair enough, but back then this was in the act of morale boosting and audience entertainment. Honestly, no bad blood between any of us. It's just a game, we've all contributed to this situation and we all have different interpretations of the situation. We can all just take a step back and talk about things without biases against anybody in particular. I'm bad at chess, but I hope we can move forward. E: Please Fish, can we just put this to rest and move forward?
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Aug 6, 2017 23:46
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:E: Please Fish, can we just put this to rest and move forward? I feel like you should ask this of the thread in general, and not just me. Obviously, I've already stated that I'm dropping it.
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Aug 7, 2017 08:44
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Nice piece of fish posted:Entirely fine, but I'd like to point out that you put us at a disadvantage when you saddled us with a pretty obvious disruptive presence. Now that things are coming to a point, I don't begrudge annoyance at Herp's behaviour and I won't apologize for speaking my mind about that behaviour. That said, I'll try to refrain from taking this seriously enough to get annoyed like this in the future, this is after all supposed to be fun and informative and my competitive eagerness is absolutely my own fault. No, you left a parting shot and blamed our loss (E: sorry, I mean our poor position and impending loss) on Covski placing me on this team, and then said you do not believe yourself to have been in any way in the wrong regarding this. I'm fairly sure that I've not at any point attacked yourself, in fact I've shown nothing but respect for your chess play except for a disagreement over a pair of moves I maintain were poor. Your conduct here is nothing short of disgraceful and your pure ignorance as to what you've actually said is appalling. There are definitely other posters who were out of line, but you're the only one who has so far continued this unreasonable unpleasantness after Covski stepped in. E: To get us back in the game, what really should our focus be from here on out? The poll shows a clear lead for draw, but it's likely the peanut gallery may have decided to chuck votes in too, so it is unreliable. What kind of line are we going to play, will we be offensive or defensive and how flexible can we be defensively for now? HerpicleOmnicron5 fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 08:56
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:No, you left a parting shot and blamed our loss (E: sorry, I mean our poor position and impending loss) on Covski placing me on this team, and then said you do not believe yourself to have been in any way in the wrong regarding this. I'm fairly sure that I've not at any point attacked yourself, in fact I've shown nothing but respect for your chess play except for a disagreement over a pair of moves I maintain were poor. Your conduct here is nothing short of disgraceful and your pure ignorance as to what you've actually said is appalling. There are definitely other posters who were out of line, but you're the only one who has so far continued this unreasonable unpleasantness after Covski stepped in. Uh, no I didn't, we haven't lost, and I've dropped the matter. Do the same.
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Aug 7, 2017 09:17
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Covski posted:Please be civil in this thread about playing chess for the purposes of entertaining strangers on the internet
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Aug 7, 2017 10:01
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 1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Nf6 3.d4 Bg4 4.Bb5+ c6 5.dxc6 Nxc6 6.Nf3 Bxf3 7.Qxf3 Qd7 8.0-0 e6 9.c4 0-0-0 10.Be3 Qc7 11.Rd1 e5 12.Bxc6 bxc6 13.Nc3 h5 14.dxe5 Ng4 15.Nb5 You have 24 hours to decide on a move.
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Aug 7, 2017 15:02
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Qxe5 is met by what, Nxa7, Rxd8, Bg5, these are all the plausible moves I can see. Maybe Bf4. In the case of Nxa7, we'd be placed in check and forced to move our king closer to a relatively undefended corner which I'm not keen on, plus they can pick off our C6 pawn. That risk alone makes me thing we should not even consider Qxe5. Alternatively, we make a push with Nxh2, followed by an enemy Nxc7 which we can match with Nxf3, they'll probably take with a pawn weakening their pawn structure on the F file giving us a new attack route and potentially cornering their king rather than getting their knight out. They have no choice but to take with the pawn or moving the king since it'd be check on the king. This creates the most predictable line possible for enemy response, unless they move the king to H2. I see no reason why they would take with the king on H2 rather than take the queen. That'd open them up to a check via Qxe5 and grant us the tempo to avoid the downsides of going straight in with Qxe5. We back that up with Bd6 and we win if they blunder (unlikely) or get a mass exchange of material that would arguably be beneficial to us (knight and rook for bishop and rook, past turns have shown that both our teams value knights over bishops for whatever reason) and open up the path on the back line for rook H8 to act defensively. On the other hand, we could pip this knight at the post and kill it with our C6 pawn, allowing us to maybe push to C2 with the queen and cause havoc in their back line. Their response to c6xB5 is probably going to be to simply take back with the c4 pawn, which would open up C2 for the Queen. From there, we can choose to take out the B2 pawn and see what the enemy do from there. Their responses will be rather limited on that end, probably rook to C1 for the bishop to defend it. If we use that opportunity to take the bishop to E5, we invite a trade of bishops, and their bishop is in a markedly better defensive position than ours is in so it would be a positive one. The position is piss poor and the most we can do is stir up the hornets nest and give the enemy a lot of food for thought. I'm not a good enough player to think of a way to create a stalemate trap, but these are all the lines I see available to us for hitting the enemy where it hurts.
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Aug 7, 2017 15:25
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xb5? What makes using the pawn to take the knight risky?
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Aug 7, 2017 15:29
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AJ_Impy posted:xb5? What makes using the pawn to take the knight risky? It's risky because we lose a key element of our queenside defence of the king. We're surely not going to keep our Queen nestled in the back forever, and without that pawn the king would then lose its frontal defender. This, coupled with limited defense on the c-file and no path for escape along the 8 corridor other than cornering ourselves makes xB5 a risky move. E: My issue with Nxe5 is that it doesn't make the enemy consider potentially making a bad move, the blunder of King H2. If we want to pull a win, we need to encourage mistakes from the enemy. Nxe5 achieves the same as NxH2, but without the potential for a major error. HerpicleOmnicron5 fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 15:32
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Another possibility might be a "tit for tat" attack by Nxe5.
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Aug 7, 2017 15:34
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AJ_Impy posted:xb5? What makes using the pawn to take the knight risky? If we do xb5, they do Qa8+, we're forced to play Qb8, they play Rxd8+, we're forced to play Kxd8, they play Qxb8+ We lose our queen and are in shambles, probably unable to ever recover.
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Aug 7, 2017 15:50
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Davin Valkri posted:Another possibility might be a "tit for tat" attack by Nxe5. I like it. It's as good a queen exchange as any. Opens up some new possibles.
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Aug 7, 2017 16:31
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:Qxe5 is met by what, Nxa7, Rxd8, Bg5, these are all the plausible moves I can see. Maybe Bf4. In the case of Nxa7, we'd be placed in check and forced to move our king closer to a relatively undefended corner which I'm not keen on, plus they can pick off our C6 pawn. That risk alone makes me thing we should not even consider Qxe5. "Risk" is underselling it: Qxe5 leads to Qxc6+ Kb7 Bxa7# or Qxc6+ Qc7 Qxc7#, so it's an outright loss. Nxh2 is nice if they Kxh2 but if they don't we're in a lot of trouble. Nxe5 is countered by Qf5+ and attempted playthroughs of that don't look too great for us either. EDIT: as far as loving up their plans I feel like g6 does a really remarkable job of gumming up their offensive. StupidSexyMothman fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 16:44
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oldskool posted:"Risk" is underselling it: Qxe5 leads to Qxc6+ Kb7 Bxa7# or Qxc6+ Qc7 Qxc7#, so it's an outright loss. I have to agree, Nxh2 is the better variant of the tit-for-tat trade of queens line. I'd like to ask that all those who would vote Nxe5 to use Nxh2 instead. I'm withholding my vote though until we get a good concrete line with a consensus behind it. CirclMastr posted:If we do xb5, they do Qa8+, we're forced to play Qb8, they play Rxd8+, we're forced to play Kxd8, they play Qxb8+ I missed that one, xb5 is now an unusable move unless we can think of a stalemate trap we can apply to it, this seems like the best way to set one up.
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Aug 7, 2017 16:53
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Stalemate is literally zero legal moves, we are miles away from stalemate traps at this point just based on the number of pieces we still have on the board.
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Aug 7, 2017 16:58
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Wow, I leave for a few days and things go rather downhill quickly. We're in a world of pain right now. In fact, there may be little we can do to NOT lose our Queen here. I've spent a few hours looking at this to try to figure a way out of it. I'll try to explain the most likely followups that I can see from the moves we have. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of good options... Obviously, the Queen is threatened here, so we have to assume that almost any move that isn't a Queen move or a move that puts them in check is going to be responded with the Queen being taken, or something to further pin us in. cxb5 - As CirclMastr said, this move is potentially ruinous as it leads to a more or less forced Rxd8+, Kxd8, Qxb8+, we're roasted over an open fire. Rxd1+ - This will lead to (likely) an Rxd1 or Qxd1 response. Rxd1 puts us in (almost) the exact same position after a Rook exchange (should we then continue with cxb5, we win Rook and Knight for our Queen, but we're still in a really bad spot as above as the Queen is in our back rank and going to shred several pieces). Qxd1 is a different story, and will relieve a lot of pressure off us (enabling the capture of the b5 knight much more safely). I don't think we can bet on them making this move, but... Any Queen move (as best I can tell) - Almost universally bad, some leading to mate or a serious loss of material in very short order. Consider Qb7. That will invite Nxa7+, forcing us to either capture the Knight with the Queen (which is then lost to the e3 bishop), or go Kc7 to attempt to continue protecting our rook on d8. That then easily invites Qxf7+ and I think we can see from there the position is almost unwinnable. The last "option" therefore being... Nxe5 - This is a gamble - we can offer an exchange of Queens here, but I see a potential bad spot for us that Qf5+ continues to tighten the noose on us, but doesn't utterly eradicate us in a matter of a few moves (again, from what I can tell). Queen exchange will relieve a lot of pressure on us but won't solve all of our problems in one go. I don't see a lot of good options. At this point the best thing I can see is that we either go Rxd1 and gamble that they capture it with the Queen (seems very unlikely as Rxd1 is basically staring you in the face), or to invite an exchange of Queens with Nxe5. I'm going to vote for Nxe5 as it's the most likely thing to bait a move that does not contribute further to the bad position we're in. DM Zero fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 17:59
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DM Zero posted:I'm going to vote for Nxe5 as it's the most likely thing to bait a move that does not contribute further to the bad position we're in. I see no way in which Nxh2 isn't the same as e5 but better. oldskool posted:Stalemate is literally zero legal moves, we are miles away from stalemate traps at this point just based on the number of pieces we still have on the board. Yeah, that is true. However, that line is probably the best thing we have in order to push towards that: everything's gotta start somewhere. HerpicleOmnicron5 fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 18:03
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I'm going to go with Nxe5.
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Aug 7, 2017 18:35
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Nxe5, maybe we exchange. Alright. They go Qxf5+, we can go Qd7. They then have to either take our queen with the rook, or move the knight to check. If they instead take the unguarded knight on e5, which might look might tempting to them, they lose. Qxd1+, Rxd1, Rxd1 and mate. Unfortunately, that would require white to make a mistake. Which they haven't so far. It's a hail mary, but at least it's attempting a win. I don't see the appeal of Nxh2. Okay, why the hell not. Nxe5, I'm tired of our conservative, risk-nothing playstyle
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Aug 7, 2017 18:50
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Nxh2 achieves the same queen exchange as e5 and it creates a chance for the enemy to blunder, a necessity if we want to win. E5 just gets the queen exchange. You give them e5 and we get put on the same average course. We need to maximise our chances.
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Aug 7, 2017 18:58
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Nxe5, since that seems to have some decent reasoning behind it.
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Aug 7, 2017 19:09
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Nxe5 seems solid to me.
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Aug 7, 2017 19:18
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:I see no way in which Nxh2 isn't the same as e5 but better. I strongly disagree. He can take our Knight with his King (Kxh2) which does not buy us anything even in the short run, however going Nxe5 we get the central pawn more or less for free while still inviting the Queen exchange. What protects him from just going Kxh2 and we're still, again, more or less in the same position after throwing a Knight away for a pawn?
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Aug 7, 2017 19:20
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Nxe5
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Aug 7, 2017 19:20
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DM Zero posted:I strongly disagree. He can take our Knight with his King (Kxh2) which does not buy us anything even in the short run, however going Nxe5 we get the central pawn more or less for free while still inviting the Queen exchange. What protects him from just going Kxh2 and we're still, again, more or less in the same position after throwing a Knight away for a pawn? Yeah, taking with the king is what we want. That gets them out of position and let's us set up a potential assault on the king.Qxe5 and Bd6 get us the win.
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Aug 7, 2017 20:18
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:Yeah, taking with the king is what we want. That gets them out of position and let's us set up a potential assault on the king.Qxe5 and Bd6 get us the win. No it doesn't. After Qxe5, what's their most likely move? Bf4 looks pretty clear/obvious to me to threaten our Queen and block the check. You would then still do Bd6? This would assuredly result in Nxd6+ from them (losing the Bishop, Queen remains threatened), and I hope I don't need to explain further that this game is all but over from there as we would lose our Bishop, Rook, and Queen in short order there almost no matter what we do. I'm not suggesting that Nxe5 is going to win us the game (things look poor for us as it stands and losing the Queen is likely), but no combination of Qxe5 followed by Bd6 is going to go well for us.
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Aug 7, 2017 20:44
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Nxe5 works for me!
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Aug 7, 2017 21:00
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Nxe5.
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Aug 7, 2017 21:28
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Let's see if White's willing to trade queens. Nxe5.
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Aug 7, 2017 21:34
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 1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Nf6 3.d4 Bg4 4.Bb5+ c6 5.dxc6 Nxc6 6.Nf3 Bxf3 7.Qxf3 Qd7 8.0-0 e6 9.c4 0-0-0 10.Be3 Qc7 11.Rd1 e5 12.Bxc6 bxc6 13.Nc3 h5 14.dxe5 Ng4 15.Nb5 Nxe5 White has 24 hours to decide on a move.
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Aug 8, 2017 15:15
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:So I played a few games on this board state against an AI but playing as White and I won most times. I apparently glossed over this before, but please don't do this I feel that this is a bit of a grey area, but I'd rather err on the side of caution with involving computers here for the sake of fairness.
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Aug 8, 2017 15:26
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