Lol I'm excited to revisit this from over a year ago. Someone mentioned chess has been around, unchanged, for 1500 years, and so of course we've cranked out things like "openings" and "end game theory" and yes - correct - that's exactly the problem. It's less that chess is inherently "flawed" and more that we as a species have played it to death. Every finite game, no matter how complex, is by definition of it's being finite solvable. Chess, for all of it's beauty and diversity, IMO has arrived at the end of it's interesting life. 1500 years is a heck of a run and a testament to what a great game it is/was, and still as a lowly 1700 player I certainly haven't put in the time to climb to the summit of chess, so it's still fun for me to play. That said, the world top chess has too much history behind it to remain interesting to watch. People don't always win for being better at the game, they occasionally (and even often) win for slaving over a computer, watching a program play the game for them, and then achieving a winning or won position by the time they have to play a move they didn't memorize. I don't want to watch what Nepo "has prepared" for Magnus with white. I'm sure he'll play something uncommon by move 10 and it'll be at least a little interesting to watch Magnus try and find the best replies to Nepo's prepared tactics, but really, we're not watching chess. We're watching someone select a series of puzzles for their opponent to have to solve, and if he does well enough for 20 moves then we get to watch chess with 1/4th of the pieces for the other half of the game.
1500 years, helluva run. But Old Chess is weighed down too heavily by it's history at this point. We pumped the well for as long as we could, but it's dry now. It's given all it had. Accept it. Better Chess (aka chess 960) is the more impressive/true world champ. Excited to watch Wesley defend his title some day when FIDE inevitably acknowledges all I've said here and organizes the next tournament.
Spot on. The bigger problem is that most GMs (including Finegold in his recent video) and players are refusing to drop the emotion and misinformation and accept this. Fischer was right, and he wanted change - evolution. That's what chess needs... Fischer random is a start. But even there you have GMs playing online at 3 or 5 minute time controls - completely missing the point. Rapid and bullet have no grace or intelligence about them on the whole either in any case.
The shame of chess is that there just aren't enough GOOD variations up to move 10 to stop memorization. Apologists often tell you to play weird moves in the opening to get opponents out of their prep... but by doing that you end up in trouble straight away defending a crap position.
The flaw is in the fact chess isn't complex enough for those initial moves - many of them also transpose to known openings precisely because of this. It was always going to happen.
Apologists like to shout about Shannon's number - but the reality is the number of good positions you can get or practical games is a far lower number. And it doesn't matter because, as I've already said, the problem is in the lack of good positions in the first 10 moves - by which time, against a decent player (especially at GM level slow chess), you are already doomed.
in 2011, carlsen played this (as black) against Michael Adams, and eventually got a good position.
Nah, he eventualy lost the game.