Talk:Chess

Suggestion

I suggest changing "Chess matches" to "Chess games" in section Time Control. Speling12345 (talk) 2:46, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Under the heading "Promotion" there seems to the no diagram as referenced in this sentence " In the diagram on the right, the pawn on c7 can be advanced to the eighth rank and be promoted to an allowed piece." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 114.72.192.68 (talk) 06:25, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

It's referring to the (left half of) the animated diagram on the right. --IHTS (talk) 07:13, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

IVC origin of chess

Logged in members, please include this reference on page 34 of "Chess and dice games" to denote Indus Valley Civilization origin of chess. Thanks. 2404:E800:E61E:452:7835:ABF1:C9FA:A4B9 (talk) 21:36, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

References

Unfortunately I don't think that source is useful for this article. There is only a single sentence mentioning chess: "Games like ‘pitthu’, Chess, cubical dice and folk tales of Panchatantra have been found to exist since Harappan times." Earlier the article says that the Harappan civilization is about 8000 years old. Since chess is only about 1400 years old, that single imprecise sentence isn't a useful reference for anything about chess. The sources actually used in the article provide much better support for the Indian origin of chess. Quale (talk) 05:36, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Agree with Quale. Note that the predecessor of chess called Chaturanga has not been established to have any link with the Harappan specimen. The specimen from Harappa was similar to chess but there's no link to that and Chaturanga. It could have been just another board game. Yathish1618 (talk) 18:13, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Rules

The reason I wrote, "The rules summarized in this section are those published by FIDE", rather than something simpler, was that there are multiple chess governing bodies that publish rules, some of them differing in small ways from those of FIDE, sometimes deliberately. For example, the FIDE rules regarding the Fifty-move rule have a history of revision, which was by no means tracked by the rules published by other federations, such as the U.S.

Over the years, FIDE has improved its own set of rules, to the point where other federations are more willing to keep up with changes made by FIDE, but even so, there are points of divergence, which are not likely to entirely go away. Moreover, postal chess and online chess are not generally sanctioned by FIDE, and rules used by their organizing bodies can easily diverge (an example is the postal chess organization that has no use for the fifty-move rule, as cited elsewhere in the article).

So I thought that the language that I used would effectively warn the reader that the situation is not trivially simple. Bruce leverett (talk) 02:39, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

I accept that. I think the rules differences are rather minor and the number of readers who would be interested in this general article who would care about esoterica such as differences in the 50 move rule must be vanishingly small. I could of course be wrong. I actually think the rules section is too long and detailed for this article. I would prefer a much shorter summary with readers directed to rules of chess if they want all the details. If you would like to restore your original wording or something similar, I have no objection. Quale (talk) 07:34, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

I'm happy to leave the sentence in its current simplified form.

As for the length and detail of the rules section, I can see that there is room for improvement. Comparing Chess and Rules of chess with analogous articles for other games, ours seem kind of unbalanced. Bruce leverett (talk) 18:09, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

I just skimmed the rules section and I don't think it's as bad as I made it out to be. A lot of the vertical space is used by diagrams demonstrating how the pieces move, and that's essential for this article. If you or another editor can find a way to trim the rules section a bit that would be great, but it doesn't seem urgent. Quale (talk) 22:56, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

I will consider, first, distinguishing between rules involving chess clocks and tournament directors, and rules that don't involve them. The FIDE (and USCF) rules just lump all the rules together, because they're only interested in their own sanctioned events. But for the purpose of an encyclopedia article about Chess, the rule about winning on time, or the rule about a director being allowed to call a draw after 75 moves without pawn move or capture, are of peripheral interest; they might be left out altogether (and included in Rules of chess), or put in a separate section.

As for the diagrams, they are cute, but I am skeptical. Looking at Poker, they only give a couple of examples of hands, and leave the detailed exposition of which poker hands are better than others to a separate Wiki article. I would like to take a similar approach, if it were possible. The rules of Chess are even more complicated than those of Poker, and our article gets bogged down there. Bruce leverett (talk) 01:37, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Well, you've convinced me that the rules in this article should only include the stuff you would expect to find in Hoyle or in a rules booklet that Hasbro might include with an inexpensive chess set. Time clocks deserve a mention in the article, but details of the tournament rules including timekeeping are probably not needed. Since I changed my mind so quickly I'm clearly wishy washy about this. I do think that rules are a more important part of chess than they are of poker, in part because there are many varieties of poker but basically only one variety of standard (Western) chess. Even so we have an entire article for the rules of chess. Any improvements you can make to the rules section in this article would be great. Quale (talk) 01:53, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

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women and men

why are there separate women's titles? Or perhaps, why are the best players generally men and not women?--Richardson mcphillips (talk) 02:24, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

As I'm sure is apparent, your second question answers your first question. The second question has received some attention but there is no universally accepted answer and I don't know that it has ever been investigated in a truly scientific way. It seems most likely to me that the causes are social rather than biological. If someone found some reliable sources on the issue it would be good to find or create an article that could give it an encyclopedic treatment. Quale (talk) 07:20, 29 December 2017 (UTC) And actually that could go in this article if a better place is not found. Quale (talk) 07:22, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

While looking for something else, I discovered that I was wrong to think that the question of differing levels of achievement in chess for men and women had not received serious academic attention. In and around 2014, Robert Howard studied this question. If you google "robert howard chess women" you will find some resources, and with some more effort you should be able to find his original publications. Here are a few links that look interesting. A search shows many other webpages, I list these here mostly in case someone decides to write something about this in a wikipedia article.

• https://en.chessbase.com/post/explaining-male-predominance-in-chess
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691400261X
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7331640_How_intellectual_is_chess_-_A_reply_to_Howard

Quale (talk) 06:30, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Cheating in chess

Cheating in chess can be done by neurologically transferring the signals from the body/throat of a person by a chess-computer to a person playing chess against the one who is being cheated against. Wanna try it out?
I lack the references for now. Please forgive me. 82.164.42.11 (talk) 07:01, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 5 May 2018

39.51.208.224 (talk) 11:10, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. — IVORK _Discuss 13:09, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 19 June 2018

197.184.101.151 (talk) 08:37, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. L293D (☎ • ✎) 13:02, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Would it violate policy to simply remove content-less semi-protect edit requests from IP users? In both the cases above, the IP user has no other user contribution than adding these "requests".--Nø (talk) 19:20, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

When a redlinked IP editor such as 117.228.115.21 posts an empty edit request, I regard it as an editing test, post them a {{welcome-anon-test}} and remove the edit request. I have never heard anyone objecting to this. Sam Sailor 09:04, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

Notice -- possible deletion of Flying Chess (and other variants)

The variant Flying Chess is being discussed for deletion here: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Flying chess#Flying chess

and other variants: Wikipedia:WikiProject Chess#Regarding the notability of chess variants

Please feel free to weigh in. --David Tornheim (talk) 10:09, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Why is History section not the first section?

Is it because it's assumed that most people visiting this article are here for the rules? That goes against the neutrality of the Articles. I propose to reorder the sections to have History as the first section followed by the rest. --Yathish1618 (talk) 18:07, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Interesting question. Looking around at other games, I found that Backgammon and Checkers have the History section far from the beginning, while Poker has it first (but it's only two sentences, and has a maintenance tag for being too short). Looking at sports, I found that Basketball, Hockey, Soccer, and Tennis have History first, while Baseball does not. I do not know why these articles are organized the way they are. I do not see how "neutrality" (I assume you mean WP:NPOV) is affected one way or the other. Bruce leverett (talk) 18:29, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

What I meant by breaking neutrality is that the article may have been structured with the express intent of offering maximum utility to users (based on the assumption that most users come here mainly for rules of Chess). I don't know if that's actually the case. In any case, isn't it a logical progression to have history and origins as the first section (where available) immediately after lead section? I can't find any guidelines regarding the sequence of sections but that's what seems to make most sense to me. As an anecdote, I came here to read the history of chess and I thought it was missing since it wasn't even the second or third section. yathish1618 (talk) 19:06, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

My personal opinion is that History should not be the first section because I don't think it provides the most utility for the majority of the readers of this article. Readers primarily interested in the history of chess are advised to go to History of chess. In this article I think a moderately detailed description of chess must come first, including the names and moves of the pieces and the key rules. It's difficult for a reader to understand even the outline of chess history given here without knowing this background. For example, the history section details some things about the term "check", castling, the move of the queen, stalemate, etc., and referring to these things early in the article before explaining them in an previous section seems like a profoundly bad idea to me. (Definition before use is usually better.) That said I think we could profitably discuss how to order the many sections in this article. At a glance I think the Notation, Strategy and Tactics, and Phases sections could be moved later in the article, and this would move History closer to the beginning. (Actually I think Strategy and Tactics section and the Phases section should be merged and rewritten, and Phases is a terrible section name.)

What do people think? These are the prose sections today:

1 Rules

2 Notation for recording moves

3 Strategy and tactics

4 Phases

5 History

6 Place in culture

7 Composition

8 Competitive play

9 Publications

10 Mathematics and computers

11 Psychology

12 Variants

My only real concern with having the Rules section first is that I think it would be great if the article could somehow give a sense of what game play is like without being bogged down in the minutia of the rules. (And a explanation of the rules doesn't give a very good sense of what chess play is like anyway.) Maybe this isn't really something that a wikipedia article is well suited to do. An online video for absolute beginners is probably the better way. Quale (talk) 03:19, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

I agree that because the history is tied up with changes in the rules, the Rules have to come before History.

Other than that I don't object to moving History forward. In fact, as I looked it over, each time I came to a new section, I wanted to move that section forward. They're all important! (Except, of course, that I agree that Phases should be merged with Strategy and Tactics.) But, unfortunately, if we move them all forward, we end up where we started :-) Bruce leverett (talk) 00:51, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

A random suggestion. Notation doesn't have to be near the beginning. I learned this from talking to the author of Chess for Dummies, which was a best-seller. That book teaches notation at about chapter 20! Most casual readers don't care for the notation; it only is helpful for people who already have a serious commitment to chess. Bruce leverett (talk) 03:26, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Consensus to move history section after the rules then? I'll just go ahead and do it. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 04:11, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. I was thinking that the sections might be put in the order that they appear in our best version of the article lead paragraphs, but I'm not sure that's a helpful indicator. Description of play should be first (that's the Rules section), History should be early, Psychology should be near the end. Culture should be near History as the subjects have affinity. I think Strategy and tactics and Phases should be near the end too just because they're so poorly written. I suppose that means that if we improved them they could stay earlier. Quale (talk) 04:42, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

218 moves

It says:

"Typically an average position has thirty to forty possible moves, but there may be as few as zero (in the case of checkmate or stalemate) or as many as 218."

It sort of sounds as of 218 is a feasible number in ordinary play, but, as far as I can gather, this 218 is an extreme contrived theoretical situation in which all pawns have been promoted to queens, such as would in practice never occur in actual play. I think this should be made clearer. 86.191.58.241 (talk) 01:37, 9 October 2018 (UTC)