There’s fairy chess with custom rules. People historically have made changes they see fit to the game.
One thing I’ve been thinking about a but over the past few years is how standardization is really strange and sort of paralyzing. For how many hundreds of years were there hundreds of regional variants of chess, each with their own history and culture? But at some point these things have become standardized and whatever natural tendency they had to change has been neutered completely. Same thing with a pack of standard playing cards: are those going to have kings, queens and jacks on them forever, even after any sort of resonance these concepts once had have vanished?
Dialectics: standardization just changed the form of the diversity. As standardization came to resolve contradictions in rulesets, it allowed a broader amount of play and deeper tactics and strategies which now define the diversity found. It also makes accessibility higher, so the diversity came in the form of education levels and such too.
That’s not to say it’s all good, just that the shift is a very normal sort of centralization like you find in many fields.
Oh yeah I know and it’s really cool. This is more me malding about gamerculture
I get that, I just think it’s funny how people have bickering over chess rules as long as it’s existed
Oh yeah that is funny too
The chess subreddit is sort of like that still though. Just last month, Magnus Carlsen was disqualified from the World Chess Championship for wearing blue jeans. Then soon after FIDE changed the dress code so that Magnus could keep playing, maybe from the pressure of sponsors. Magnus Carlsen went on play in a final match against Ian Nepomniachtchi. After 3 drawn games, both players agreed to share the World Chess Champion title. It is the first time in history that a world chess championship title has been shared. There was a lot of criticism of the decision.
Just a small note: it was the world Blitz championship, which is a variant of chess that’s played really quickly. The current world champion is from India, Gukesh Dommaraju. I don’t want to be nitpicky, but I wanted to recognize Gukesh’s achievements.
Magnus Carlsen was disqualified from the World Chess Championship for wearing blue jeans
extremely serious crime
And that’s why I play konkr.io a real game for real genius boys.
I played that for longer than I wanted to
You mean you wouldn’t play chess with a skill tree or fog of war?
Seriously I’d call it a dog-brained take, but that’s an insult to dogs.
Chess with fog of war is just stratego
There already is chess with fog of war. It’s a fun variant, just not the most popular one.
I love the bombs 💣 😍
chess with a skill tree or fog of war
TvT Starcraft be like
I just noticed he was comparing chess to reality and not video games. Dude thinks tech trees exist irl. Lasers from space that never existed before are admitted in that very statement to not be part of reality.
He’s been out of touch with reality since at least the end of Apartheid.
But I hadn’t noticed him mixing real life with videogames. Lmao what a dweeb.
Reality doesn’t have a tech tree 🫨
It could with a chip in your brain.
Don’t forget the terrible takes that would come from the bazingaist of bazinga brains. Without the thousands of years of history of chess, these takes would be more popular.
if chess were invented today noone would play it because it’s from India
…I thought it was from Medieval Britain, and probably thought that cause I see it frequently in Medieval era movies/shows and novels. I never would have guessed somewhere outside Europe.
“Shah Mat” is from Persian. As in your leader, the “Shah”, is helpless, or stumped, “Mat”. This phrase is what slowly evolved into ‘Checkmate’.
Indoeuropean languages are fucking cool. Shah Mat in Persian, checkmate in English, Jaque Mate in Spanish. Jaque Mate is eerily close to Jeque Muerto (dead shah).
“Shah mat” is also how you declare the end of the game in Russian, “шах и мат” they say
Heeeeey, interesting note (and probably related?), ‘mat’ (or ‘maat’) is Arabic for died!
In Arabic we say كِش مات kish maat to mean checkmate. Here is the etymology of checkmate:
mid-14c., in chess, said of a king when it is in check and cannot escape it, from Old French eschec mat (Modern French échec et mat), which (with Spanish jaque y mate, Italian scacco-matto) is from Arabic shah mat “the king died” (see check (n.1)), which according to Barnhart is a misinterpretation of Persian mat “be astonished” as mata “to die,” mat “he is dead.” Hence Persian shah mat, if it is the ultimate source of the word, would be literally “the king is left helpless, the king is stumped.”
In Arabic a check is كِش مَلِك:
كِش kish means to recoil
and مَلِك malik means king
So when it’s a checkmate you say مات maat ‘died’ because it’s over now ت
It was in the opening cutscene from Age of Empires II, that’s how you know it’s medieval European in origin.
“eww brownies”
If chess was invented today you’d have a subreddit full of losers who’s sense of humor maxes out with 2. Ke2
It was invented hundreds of years ago and yet that subreddit exists
One lib rails against the divisiveness of hypermodern play, pleads for a return to the moderate centre ground. Another suggests turning the board sideways so everyone gets to attack the left.
Turning the board sideways to attack the left
Have you been hanging out at /r/anarchychess?
Another suggests turning the board sideways so everyone gets to attack the left.
r/cth flashbacks
En passant? What about castling bro? In one turn you get to:
- Move your king two squares
- Let it pass through your rook
- Develop your rook toward the central files
Nobody is gonna believe that’s a legal move.
I’m pretty sure a lot of GMs want it removed because it slows games way down
Castling is masculine so they’re gonna want more of it.
Castling: English word, cool and normal
En Passant: Fr*nch word, silly and weird
simple as
Castle comes from French too.
Castles come from the French in general. Stone castles were a post Norman thing. Big wooden halls, Rohan style were the pre-Norman Norm
they’re also prenorman, the roman ones. some of which were still used into the norman era: i.e. the walls of York
That’s true but they’re not quite the same as a full ass Chateau. Tbh, my pre-norman England knowledge is mostly downstream from my Tolkien nerdery it is something I should look more into. German history as well. I’m eventually gonna know all of history really really well one obsession at a time.
No trve anglish patriots will call it a burgh
They might call it a c(a)ester, which I think is a parallel etymology with castle both from the Latin castrum.
It gets a pass, cuz we anglicized it well enough
Here are some other French words that are anglicized well enough to be an English word of its own
Eg. war, guard, sturdy
If it was a cringe word like “rendez-vous” (showing all yourselves), castling would be ewww
Most war terms in English came from French on account of being conquered by the French via war
More like en pussynt because I got that dawg in me
The most sigma move frfr
I’m pretty sure there was backlash about the queen during its early years
To be fair whoever added the queen was clearly trying to min max without understanding the other side gets a queen too; she is like super OP.
Interestingly I actually read somewhere that when chess was first invented there was no queen on the board, and then just like the addition of Chun Lee to Street fighter led to a developer quitting because he insisted she had to have less health than everyone else, the queen became a staple of the franchise.
En passant was literally added as a balance patch.
give me the lore
Originally, pawns could only move one square. However, to speed up the openings, they started playing so that the first move pawns made could be 2 squares.
That created a dilemma, though; now, if an opponent pawn was in position to capture yours if it moved forward one square from its start, you could evade capture by moving two squares instead. So they created the en passant rule, which allowed the capture of a pawn moving two squares as if it had moved just one square instead.
Hope they release Chess Classic.
I know, and they’ll cry about that too. Like vanilla wow.
I would imagine everyone had it because the no E-Sports scene.
Why are half the characters black in that DEI hell hole??! So tired of that woke bullshit.
They insist that the point of the game is to capture the now-defenceless queen, at which point the winner screams “Cuck! And mate!”
Also the queen needs to have big tits
Insert that one meme about chess being a NTR harem simulator here
Do NOT google “rule 34 chess queen big tits”
And is renamed “M’lady”.
It would be funny if there was a mechanic by which the queen could attract/carry one of its own minor pieces or pawns. Call it “simp”
Already in the game! When a pawn reaches the end of the board (donated all its money to an e-girl) you can exchange it for a queen.
That’s actually woke because the pawn transitioned into a queen.
I (36F) always wear bright red lipstick whenever I decide I’m not going to let my husband (52M) win. AITA?
Wasn’t en passant invented to “balance” chess?
Something about the first pawn move being too powerful in the end game because it meant any pawn in a starting position could just skip being threatened by an opposing pawn if it moves two squares.
- d4
- d4 f5
f5 what da hell
- d4 f5
- c4
- c4 Nf6
- Nc3
- Nc3 g6
