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1500 questions
17
votes
7 answers

Why would you want to trade pieces?

To preface this, I am very new to chess. I knew the rules for years but I started actually taking the game more seriously and learning strategies just over 2 weeks ago. One thing I consistently see in high elo games is that they trade same value…
Yuval Amir
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1 answer

How did a pawn appear out of thin air in “P @ e2” after queen capture?

I was playing chess against the computer and captured black’s queen. All of a sudden, a black pawn appears out of thin air, one space behind the captured queen for a total of nine pawns, and moves multiple squares diagonally. The computer calls…
gen-ℤ ready to perish
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17
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3 answers

Can a player resign after checkmating their opponent?

A friend of mine recently told me that once, he checkmated his opponent and then immediately resigned because he thought his win was unfair. This happened in a FIDE-rated tournament. Searching the FIDE Laws of Chess, I found (emphasis mine): 1.2…
double-beep
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17
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12 answers

Why do people even play chess?

Why do some of the world's best intellectuals spend their whole lives just on a wooden board, rather than working on the betterment of society ?
Aditya Sharma
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17
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5 answers

Is Houdini 6 a Stockfish clone?

I've been hearing this claim being bandied about quite a lot and I'm wondering if there's any substance to it. Apparently the details are in a certain thread on Talkchess, but it's not viewable to non-logged in readers, and it won't let me register.…
Allure
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17
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5 answers

Is there a trick to help kids know which direction pawns are going?

My 5-year-old old daughter very often forgets which direction a pawn is moving. This is confusing especially at endgame studies. I use a marker pen to draw two eyes on the pawns so that her pawns are facing the enemy and their pawns are looking at…
jf328
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17
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3 answers

Why is 1. Nf3 not nearly as popular as 1.e4 and 1.d4?

The opening move 1. Nf3 is considered as a perfectly sound opening and it is popular, but not nearly as popular as 1.e4 and 1.d4. Here are my thoughts about this: In most openings, white will make the move Nf3 sooner or later. Since white needs…
Zuriel
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17
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9 answers

Could a chess engine do retro analysis?

If I took a legal chess position, to what extent could an engine work out the previous moves? [in some other board games such as Othello such game reconstruction is done easily with an engine.]
Snack_Food_Termite
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17
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2 answers

With only a king left, how many moves remaining until a draw?

I am a beginner in chess. If I have only a king left, how many moves does my opponent have to mate me?
Subhash Singh Rawat
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17
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3 answers

Bad Stockfish evaluation

This is the study [fen "3B4/1r2p3/r2p1p2/bkp1P1p1/1p1P1PPp/p1P4P/PPBK4/8 w - - 0 1 "] As you can see, Stockfish gives an absolute decisive win for black, though it is clearly a draw!! Check it out yourself c4+ is a losing move, while Ba4+ is the…
William Kinaan
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17
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2 answers

Can an Irwin Cheat Detector catch a user who is using a Leela chess bot for cheating?

I’m a big fan of chess cheat detection apps, like Irwin that was created by lichess.org. But I heard that there is a new bot called Leela that is teaching herself how to play chess, and to think in a human-like way. Is that true, and are there any…
shar
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3 answers

Are there statistics on the results of armageddon games at the GM level?

I've tried finding statistics on the results of competitive armageddon games played at a high level (say, GM level), but to no avail. Evidently, these statistics must exist, as for example FIDE changed the time controls in the official rules from 6…
ATLPoly
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17
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3 answers

How to use dice to determine starting position in Fischer Random?

Using a set of Platonic dice (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron), what way of choosing the initial position in a game of Fischer Random Chess (Chess 960) uses the fewest dice throws? I am looking for a way that does not…
h34
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17
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3 answers

Computers in correspondence chess

In competitive correspondence chess, can humans win at all against computers? Do humans contribute at all to the game? Provided that it is allowed by the rules, I fail to see how it is not just testing who has the best computer or the best computer…
xyz
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1 answer

How does Syzygy store its information?

From reading everything I've found so far, I know that Syzygy uses both win/draw/loss files and distance-to-zero files, but I haven't found any information on the internal file format that these files use. I'm looking for the low level nitty gritty…
Oscar Smith
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