Championships: Competition vs. Inspiration

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

Out of curiosity, how much experience do you have actually playing chess?

Relatively little. Enough to know that I don't particularly like it. It's hard to be enthusiastic about a game which the principal challenge is in out-computing the opponent.

I know enough people who are clearly better than I am at that kind of computation, and doubt my own ability and motivation to hone my skills to that level; competing against them is no fun, and the outcome is basically a foregone conclusion. By contrast, competing against fellow novices is a less banal undertaking, specifically because we don't know what we're doing and/or can't be bothered to try to play efficiently—and that kind of outlook virtually guarantees we'll never be any good at it, even if we have somewhat more fun.

As I hinted at before, for those who enjoy programming, it's more fulfilling to focus on something that people are good at—conceiving and implementing efficient algorithms and effective heuristics—while offloading the computational chores to a computer. Chess makes a better computer science problem than it does a game.

Originally Posted by Oblarg

Because I live with a FIDE master. Who is also a (winning) poker player.

I'm not asserting that these are mutually exclusive skills. Poker is nice because, in addition to valuing computational ability (expected values of hands given the situation), it traditionally emphasizes the ability to interpret your opponents' behaviour and incorporates a high degree of uncertainty in individual hands (which can be won or lost independently of your ability to master the game). It's that uncertainty that allows a novice to have fun playing against an expert, because there's a plausible chance that they'll win any given hand, even when the odds are against them.