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the guy doesnt even play chess.

Yes he does. Why do you think he doesn't?

All true, with the proviso that draws can be very interesting. For example Reshevsky v Petrosian - Zurich 1953 in which, to quote from two of the comments: "24...Re6!! a wonderful example of an exchange sacrifice to set up an impenetrable blockade", and: "Beautiful draws don't get publicized nearly half or even a quarter as much as beautiful wins"

"That's different, in poker you bluff when the probabilities are such that your opponent will lose calling you in the long run. In chess you're creating an objectively worse but more complicated position in the hope that your opponent doesn't have the skills, time and preparation/experience to play it optimally. I rarely do it when we're even, but I've gotten better at doing it when I'm behind."

A good example of this at a very high level of skill is Geller - Korchnoi (Candidates Quarterfinal 1971) Sicilian Defense: Scheveningen. Classical Variation moves 22. Rg4 h5!?

I had to look it up, interesting rook sac - http://www.chessgames.com/perl...

Sorry wrong link, I was thinking of Borislav Ivanov: http://www.chessgames.com/perl...

Game on chessgames.com.

1. e4 Nc6 2. Nf3 is unusual but not crazy.

2. ... d4 seems suitably aggressive; the black queen backs her pawn up, the white king can't.

3. Bd3? Gates is trying to protect his pawn (and preparing to castle), but ends up blocking in his black bishop; better is 3. d3.

3. ... Nf6

4. exd5? Qxd5 lets the black queen out of her hidey-hole.

5. Nc3 Qh5 White tries to play queen-be-gone, but the queen is happy to be on her way.

6. 0-0? Dude, with the queen sitting on h5? 6. ... Bg4 after the knight on f3.

7. h3 trying bishop-be-gone; perhaps White should have played this instead of castling. 7. ... Ne5 again contending for f3.

8. hxg4 Nfxg4 aiming for h2 while keeping an attack on f3.
The only thing that saves White at this point is 9. Re1 giving the king an escape route and developing the rook. Anything else and, at best, 9. ... Nxf3+ 10. Qxf3 or gxf3 Qh2#. But White played about the worst move he could have made:

9. Nxe5?? Qh2#.

No decent chess player.... Calling bullshit on that....

Game of the century - Move 18
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008361

Well, of course Byrne should have resigned earlier because of his big material deficit. But he wanted the spectators to enjoy the finish. Anyway, he was only down a queen against rook and two minor pieces.

That's easy! Just use the Keres Attack!
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1136833

The Four Pawns Attack has not exactly killed off the Benoni for Black - in fact a Benoni was played in a recent top-level tournament (http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1482102), and White even passed up the chance to play 7. f4, which would not be likely if it was indeed a sure win. But in any case, most Grandmasters can and do evolve their opening repertoire as times change. Fischer was quite capable of finding something different to play if necessary.

But I agree that Karpov was very, very good in 1975 and would have had a good chance against Fischer. Many people would have wanted to see how a Karpov-Fischer match would turn out. We'll never know now.

You can see a version with commentary or an interactive chessboard version.

I will never forget his game vs. a great ranked player where he sacrificed his queen 17 moves ahead in-order to win, when he was 13.
But, man, this is a man which hated jews for being jews, although he was a jew!!! This shows that he was little minded man, he was a great player which I really admire as a chess player, but stupid man.
This is a great loss for the chess world

BTW, I'm jewish and loved his games, but hated his thoughts.
You can view is games at Robert James Ficher games

Why he is the best: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008361

There was a crucial move one of the early games where Kasparov essentially set a trap -- a situation where computers always opt for one move, but a more subtle human player opts for a different strategy. Given the computers play so far, which had conformed exactly to how computers play, Kasparov was fairly confident. But then deep blue went the other way, against anything any other computer would have done, and completely against all expectation. That really threw Kasparov; he thought IBM was cheating since the move deep blue made was so uncharacteristic for a computer

This positional move was unexpected by Kasparov and commentators - many called it a "Karpov-like" move. But the fact that it so surprised Kasparov was more an indication of how much he underestimated the chess knowledge and positional sense that was built into the hardware. The special purpose chips designed by Hsu allowed for a huge amount of positional evaluation in hardware that was far beyond the purely software "brute-force" calculation done at that time by PC programs like Fritz. Kasparov had trained for this match with Fritz and he evidently thought that Deep Blue would merely be a faster Fritz and hence was surprised when Deep Blue's play revealed a qualitative difference due to the special-purpose chess hardware.

Today, there would be no surprise since currently available PC programs routinely evaluate Be4 as the best move in that position. This is a consequence of both much faster CPUs (more brute force available thanks to Moore's law) and much more chess knowledge being built into the programs (faster CPUs also allow faster access to positional evaluation algorithms).
In other words, in the 10 years since the match, ordinary PCs (with better chess software) have caught up to Deep Blue - at least in some respects.

Dennett's article suggest to me that he himself does not know a huge amount about chess. For instance, he writes, "The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess..."

Sometimes, but not always. As is well known, computers excel in "random" positions where tactics predominate. That's because they have no concept of "general principles" or strategic goals as human chessplayers think of them - instead, they just calculate furiously and find the move that, against what look like the best replies by the opponent, gives the best "worst-case" outcome after a given search depth. They are programmed to follow the game theory "minimax" strategy, which essentially chooses the best (maximum) outcome if the opponent plays as well as possible (minimum). So in a typical open position with lots of pieces flying around, where there are dozens of variations to calculate, a computer tends to have an accentuated advantage over a human player of similar strength. For many years masters and grandmasters have carefully avoided wide-open positions (like those arising from the King's Gambit, for instance) for that very reason. Playing the King's Gambit against a really strong program looks very much like suicide. You start by giving the thing an extra pawn, which is enough of an advantage for it to win. Then you try to outplay it in its natural environment. It's like fighting a crocodile underwater.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are a few closed positions (i.e. with locked pawn structures) where even very strong chess programs fail to see what a reasonably good human player spots immediately - for instance, "this must be a draw because White's queen can never escape". (However, it might also sometimes happen that a program spots a clever and previously unnoticed way to break that kind of impasse).

Returning to my assertion that Dennett is wrong in saying that "The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess," I can immediately think of two classic counter-examples. First, the game in which Deep Junior, with the Black pieces, sacrificed a bishop on h2 and soon after forced a draw. If Kasparov had tried to play on, he risked losing. No one had ever even seriously considered that sacrifice before in the given position, although the general type (the "Greek gift") is one of the most familiar even to beginners. That certainly wasn't indistinguishable from human play, because no human had ever dared to play it. My second counter-example is the way Deep Fritz squashed world champion Vladimir Kramnik flat in the sixth game of their match last year. I was watching live on the Web, and when Deep Fritz played 10.Re3 I thought "Great! the stupid computer is going to get thrashed by Kramnik's ultra-sophisticated play". After some more foolish-looking moves by White, at move 20 I thought the game was definitely going Kramnik's way. But lo and behold! 25.e5! introduced, not so much a tactical melee as the threat of one. Kramnik shuffled his pieces anxiously, on move 30 Deep Fritz grabbed a pawn - and then it was over. Deep Fritz remorselessly ground the world champion down, forcing him to resign in just 17 more moves. In the final position Kramnik, still just a pawn down, could hardly move a single piece. In that game Deep Fritz played the final, technical phase like Bobby Fischer. But it played the attack between moves 10 and 30 better than Fischer could have! Its moves looked like a beginner's, yet they defeated Kramnik.

Strong programs have a big "psychological" advantage over human players, in that they don't have any psychology! Even super-grandmasters like Kasparov and Kramnik, on the other hand, very quickly start to exhibit signs of nervousness after a few games. Eventually, this can assume proportions that start to resemble post-traumatic stress disorder - especially if the human being has had a nasty shock, such as

Dennett's article suggest to me that he himself does not know a huge amount about chess. For instance, he writes, "The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess..."

Sometimes, but not always. As is well known, computers excel in "random" positions where tactics predominate. That's because they have no concept of "general principles" or strategic goals as human chessplayers think of them - instead, they just calculate furiously and find the move that, against what look like the best replies by the opponent, gives the best "worst-case" outcome after a given search depth. They are programmed to follow the game theory "minimax" strategy, which essentially chooses the best (maximum) outcome if the opponent plays as well as possible (minimum). So in a typical open position with lots of pieces flying around, where there are dozens of variations to calculate, a computer tends to have an accentuated advantage over a human player of similar strength. For many years masters and grandmasters have carefully avoided wide-open positions (like those arising from the King's Gambit, for instance) for that very reason. Playing the King's Gambit against a really strong program looks very much like suicide. You start by giving the thing an extra pawn, which is enough of an advantage for it to win. Then you try to outplay it in its natural environment. It's like fighting a crocodile underwater.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are a few closed positions (i.e. with locked pawn structures) where even very strong chess programs fail to see what a reasonably good human player spots immediately - for instance, "this must be a draw because White's queen can never escape". (However, it might also sometimes happen that a program spots a clever and previously unnoticed way to break that kind of impasse).

Returning to my assertion that Dennett is wrong in saying that "The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess," I can immediately think of two classic counter-examples. First, the game in which Deep Junior, with the Black pieces, sacrificed a bishop on h2 and soon after forced a draw. If Kasparov had tried to play on, he risked losing. No one had ever even seriously considered that sacrifice before in the given position, although the general type (the "Greek gift") is one of the most familiar even to beginners. That certainly wasn't indistinguishable from human play, because no human had ever dared to play it. My second counter-example is the way Deep Fritz squashed world champion Vladimir Kramnik flat in the sixth game of their match last year. I was watching live on the Web, and when Deep Fritz played 10.Re3 I thought "Great! the stupid computer is going to get thrashed by Kramnik's ultra-sophisticated play". After some more foolish-looking moves by White, at move 20 I thought the game was definitely going Kramnik's way. But lo and behold! 25.e5! introduced, not so much a tactical melee as the threat of one. Kramnik shuffled his pieces anxiously, on move 30 Deep Fritz grabbed a pawn - and then it was over. Deep Fritz remorselessly ground the world champion down, forcing him to resign in just 17 more moves. In the final position Kramnik, still just a pawn down, could hardly move a single piece. In that game Deep Fritz played the final, technical phase like Bobby Fischer. But it played the attack between moves 10 and 30 better than Fischer could have! Its moves looked like a beginner's, yet they defeated Kramnik.

Strong programs have a big "psychological" advantage over human players, in that they don't have any psychology! Even super-grandmasters like Kasparov and Kramnik, on the other hand, very quickly start to exhibit signs of nervousness after a few games. Eventually, this can assume proportions that start to resemble post-traumatic stress disorder - especially if the human being has had a nasty shock, such as

One needs a chess computer to look ahead many plys deep to be able to determine the best match continuation. The thing here is that the computer needs to be able to analyze a position to be able to determine whether it's better or worse. Just getting a score advantage doesn't always help, as the Polish Immortal shows (Java warning).

I think you're referring to this http://www.chessgames.com/perl/fischerandom

If the computer considers the library of Emmanuel Lasker, then it could be "more interesting". He was (in)famous for making -ahem- startling moves for someone of his caliber. Traditional chess theory would call them blunders, but they would serve to complicate the board to a degree that his opponents could not as easily determine the best moves before he could. He would thus confuse, recover, and gain advantage before they could adequately respond. A chess program designed to confuse more rigid chess programs could serve to benefit in the same way Lasker did.