He was notorious for doing just this. He would make what have now been engine analyzed as sub-optimal moves but which lead to such complex and dynamic positions that his opponent would eventually slip and he would exploit their error in dramatic fashion. This is one reason why he is considered one of the most creative attacking players ever.

You still see the general creative spirit in certain top players like Rapport, Mamedyarov, Firouzja, though. Magnus is particularly boring to watch, but it's what makes him great. Fischer was not so different, and felt that Tal was overly creative for the sake of being creative, rather than good.

IM Marc Esserman is probably one of the more exciting players to watch, but he's not a GM, though he arguably plays at GM strength often. He's the author of Mayhem in the Morra, well worth reading if you like Tal's spirit. Esserman is inactive OTB unfortunately, but he does stream chess online.

I don't like bullet, but 15-minute and 3-5 minute chess is wonderful to watch.

This strategy worked really well against other students' bots, but not terribly well against the students themselves. I'd be interested to see if it worked better/worse against pro players who think more algorithmically/analytically.

The board state is always known. Magnus is saying that at the top level, grandmasters know how to force draws in all of the lines that incorporate best-move, second-best-move, etc. That means that if you want to pull off a win, you have to incorporate unstudied lines that will force your opponent to calculate rather than draw from memory/experience.

But if you make a suboptimal move, then you are going down a path that is less analyzed and thus you are likely to have an analytical advantage.

So while the board state is well known, what your opponent has researched is not known, or partially known (since players have favorites and predispositions).

This is why playing against a maniac (seemingly random and not respecting bluffs or equity) is very difficult because if they get lucky enough times, they are able to "break the game" by getting the opponent to be extremely risk averse OR take on more risks.

I believe this is what Magnus is referring to, its that making yourself unpredictable by questionable moves and no longer playing in a way that has been taught.

For example the common strategy is to go all in with strong pairs like AA, KK but someone beats it with a totally random garbage hand (52o, 37o) and does so repeatedly, no theory can help you win against somebody who is just repeatedly lucky and brash.

This is less about playing mindtricks and bluffing, but more 'mundane'.

I.e. a decent player will know all the good mainlines of popular openings, and end up in 'comfortable' positions (among other things due to computer analysis).

The metagame is to prepare a non-garbage sideline, that your opponent is not so familiar with. Nobody at a high rating plays 'questionable' variations on purpose, in order to bluff. The resulting positions would be much too punishing.

Post-game thoughts from the players:

Inteviewer: "Let me pull you back; so you didn't understand the position, and so you still felt like you were scared to go into a piece-up situation?"

Alireza: "Yeah so, I just trusted him. (he shrugs) I just wanted to make a move.. and play a bit more you know (laughing)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT9orNSgk5w&t=55s

Niemann: "You have to understand, when I play the move Qg3, this is a purely pyschological move."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJZuT-_kij0&t=780s

Whether or not Niemann did cheat over the board, this shows that even top players can be susceptible to this kind of bluff.

So you're taking a game where your opponent has the upper hand, and you're playing highly suboptimal moves with the intent of putting your opponent in a position where they have to pick between a rock and a hard place:

- either they have to sit quietly and knowingly take your straight-up lies, or

- they are forced to play suboptimal moves themselves to call your bluffs.

- they see through your bluff, and punish you for it

So, it is a risky endeavor, since you don't know the mind of your opponent.

And so it makes sens to only take such risks when your opponent has the upper hand, as you mention.

But then you become predictable — when you behave erratically, people know you are in your death throes, and not a real threat.

So, you have to mix some erratic behavior in when you are in a strong position, too, to keep them guessing. But then you are weakening your game overall...

And on and on it goes (:

It's like an arms race, but circular rather than one-directional.

Both games rely on disguising the real play you want to make. Slow playing the best hand in poker, or making non-standard moves in chess to throw your opponent off.

You see this in all sports/games. In basketball/football a team will run their best player away from the real play. In Jiu-Jitsu I'll fake a choke I have no intention of seriously trying in order to force someone to defend and move their arm - which is what I wanted the whole time.

It's amusing how people feel bluffing in poker is the human element, but top poker AIs bluff more frequently than most humans

Good bluffs are when your range beats your opponent's range. Which gets back to your point, which is that you can do some pretty awful things to someone when your hand is outside the range they're putting you on

This goes at least back to Bobby Fischer. With the minor difference that instead of computers he was up against teams of Soviet Grandmasters. It's why he created Fischer Random chess where the pieces on the backrow are randomized. That (mostly) eliminates memorization and forces players to rely on their own creativity.

There was probably not a more booked-up player than Fischer in his prime, something he seemed to try to make people forget. Famously when asked about a young Soviet prodigy by the Soviets, Fischer responded that the kid was good, but that there was a better player in their women's division who had more signs of promise. Many of the Soviet masters had no idea who Bobby was talking about; but Bobby was reading all Soviet chess literature and magazines to stay up to date.

That said, FRC is pretty interesting.

That's what parent said. Fischer wanted to get the memorization out, since memorization makes the game unplayable for someone who doesn't have The Knowledge.

The bot hit a bug that chose a strange move, and since kasparov couldn't figure out what the line was, he resigned. If he analysed the board instead of what the bot was thinking, he would have won easily

The bug move (a rook) was in game 1. It was inconsequential to the game result. The position was already lost for Deep Blue. It made a random move because everything had the same outcome of losing. The bugged move simply made it lose sooner. Kasparov knew this and there was no controversy.

In game 2, Kasparov set a trap, offering a sacrifice of two pawns for great positional improvement. Kasparov thought Deep Blue couldn't calculate far enough ahead to see the positional improvement, but it did. This made Kasparov suspect and accuse IBM of human intervention in the computer's moves.

The fatal move (a knight sacrifice by Deep Blue) was in game 6. Kasparov deliberately played an opening with a known weakness, that he thought the computer wouldn't find as it wouldn't sacrifice material and calculate far enough ahead to see the positional advantage. Deep Blue found it. Kasparov again accused IBM of human intervention. The Deep Blue team then said they had added this variation into its opening database just before that game, pre-analyzing that line deeper since Kasparov had previously played it in game 4. There was some dispute as to whether the rules for the competition were intended to allow IBM to modify Deep Blue during the match.

There’s very seldom a single, obvious move that makes sense. The level of chaos in chess is still sufficiently high to make it an interesting game, even when you study all the available opening theory.

https://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=2346 https://www.sirlin.net/articles/solvability

Now whether chess really IS more about calculation these days is a difficult question to answer. It might just be that it values a different kind of calculation or skill than the past. Given the deep preparation necessary for someone to be a chess professional, I'm biased towards (micro-edit: believing that...) more calculation _is_ necessary for high level performance, and psychology is more gimmicky.

The difference is that poker isn't a game of complete information, chess is. This means that, technically, there is a _right_ answer in chess. With the ambiguity of poker, and other games, that leaves room for psychology to be more natural.

Hans' explanation made sense, even if he was wrong in his first interview and it came off weird.

I think that’s what Magnus is saying is that if you play by the book you go from opening to end game without much creativity or challenge.

So, the top “creative” players will try to go off script to make their top “book smart” opponents have to think on the fly.

But even in mid-game, it might mean that if you know that your opponent prefers open / tactical positions, for example, you try to force a closed position, even if it may be slightly suboptimal.

This reminds me of something I think I came up with in Blitz and Bullet games a decade ago and coined the name: a “time sac”.

It is when in the middlegame I make a dubious sacrifice (positional or material) — some possibly cool combination or a move that makes the opponent think in time pressure. It is not a bluff because it MIGHT work out, but I am not sure.

This works mostly in games without an increment. The idea is to make them get much lower on the clock than me, so even if I end up with a slightly worse position or down material, I can easily hold it until I win on time.

My opponents in chess, even over 2100 often got nerd swiped with this! Hahahaha

I don’t think those comments from Magnus support the point in this article at all really.

Who says it's bad that you now have to "engage in subterfuge, misdirection, and other psychological techniques"? Surely that just makes the game into a real sport and more exciting for viewers. Besides - hasn't the psychological aspect always been a part of chess? Maybe the most interesting aspect?

(Of course, there is no evidence of cheating, but arguably Carlsen's unsporting conduct is also the dark side. But anyway, none of this is new to high level chess.)

This is true of every sport, every single record always gets broken, because techniques and nutrition and training and everything improve. A world no 100 tennis player could easily beat a world no 1 from 50 years ago.

How is that bad or like poker? It just means the game is evolving. It might also mean more psychological games. The tennis analogy works here too, there's plenty of that in there too.

The whole premise just doesn't make sense to me. Because you have to psychologically think about your opponent, that makes the game worse?

> An eephus pitch in baseball is a very high-arcing off-speed pitch. The delivery from the pitcher has very low velocity and often catches the hitter off-guard.

The pitcher essentially lobs the ball at the hitter [1]. Major league players are so focused on hitting extremely fast and/or curving pitches that they whiff or stand idle at a pitch that your ten-year-old nephew could probably clobber. It's a risky pitch, because if the batter is able to adapt, they can hit a home run. The power of the pitch is entirely that it's unexpected.

I know it's not a perfect analogy, since chess players have so much more time to react to any sub-optimal moves.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eephus_pitch [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikLlRT2j7EQ

What you want to do is perhaps start with this random strategy, determine the realtive strength of your opponent, and only move to an exploiting strategy if they are weaker than you. If they throw Rock 40% of the time, you should throw Paper 40% of the time. If you were to enter a RPS tournament playing randomly, it is unlikely that you would reach the end. You need to exploit.

In Poker Cash Games, people just play the Nash and when opponents make flat-out mistakes they yield a little bit of profit. Do this enough with high enough stakes and it works out, even if its extremely boring. But this won't work in Poker Tournaments, where you only get payouts for top 10%, weighted heavily towards winning. So what happens in Poker is what happens in RPS - you attempt to find exploits, and your opponents attempt to find exploits in your play. In turn each of the players are attempting to move the environment of the play towards a position where they know it well and can find those mistakes.

If deviating from the Nash yields better results than the penalty of deviating because in that environment you are stronger than your opponent, you should take it. As this article points out, the same is true in Chess. And as you point out, this is also true of the Eephus pitch.

Incoming speed makes significant difference to exit velocity.

If you were going for max distance, you would want 100 mph pitches.

In home run derby, they are optimizing for ability to get a good repeatable swing with enough power to go over the fence. If they were playing in a park with like 440 ft fence, they would need faster pitches.

The distance the ball flies has a lot more to do with bat speed than ball speed (something like 5mph for 1mph, if I recall correctly).

If 'perfect' play--that we're approaching with engine analysis--results in a draw, you need to do something non-optimal and unexpected in order to get your opponent out of their engine prep and into thinking mode.

Whether it's better or worse is a different argument. Some find it a bit 'dry' in that there are often less blunders, dazzling tactics, and sacrifices because both sides now know the optimal approach. It's much more of a war of attrition in high-level, long time-control games. As an aside, that's potentially why bullet and other such chess is so popular...there isn't time to deeply analyse, so it's intuition, challenging positions, blunders, and less 'standard' play.

Not quite true; you can break ELO records by performing equally well in a larger pool of people-with-ELO-ratings.

Move A.

Move B.

From the best knowledge we have from our best engines, A is the better move (though I don't think we have formally proven such yet).

But if you play A, you are playing your opponent in a game of memorization.

If you play B, your opponent loses any memorization advantage. Thus they must play based on ability other than memorizing responses.

For a player whose memorization ability is equal or worse than their ability to play based on other ability, choosing move B is clearly the worse option. But if the player is one whose memorization is better than their other abilities at chess, then playing B means fighting them in an area they are worse at. The advantage of this can easily outweigh the disadvantage of move B compared to A in general.

Imagine a military commander choosing an engagement over terrain more familiar to their side even though it is a worse engagement if both sides had equal knowledge of the terrain, because the terrain knowledge more than compensates for the negatives.

When your opponent is the one doing the analysis. It makes perfect sense to me that anything your opponent is prepared for is less optimal than it would be otherwise.

Just that you are forced to make suboptimal moves. If you make optimal moves then your opponent will have analysed the position before and the game will end in a draw, which is a dissapointing result for whoever plays white.

Not necessarily. If black has a higher ELO rating then white is happy to draw and may aggressively seek a draw.

I think the problem is that seeking draws makes chess boring. And that it’s realistic for someone ranked well below another player to force a draw, while it’s near impossible for the lower ranked player to win outright. So you end up with a wide range of players seeking stalemates and a small minority looking for a win, but not at the expense of a potential loss.