Origin of the word "Patzer"

In German it means mistake or error and we don't really use it anymore, but somewhere along the line Americans started referring to chess players of poor skill as "patzers" which apparently stuck.

Was it really Kasparov who started the trend?

That actually reminds me of the movie Saving Private Ryan and the word "foobar" which is the English version of the German word "furchtbar", meaning terrible or horrifying.

The word "patzer" came to be when Garry Kasparov first saw of my games. He was in such disbelief that he said some gibberish. Upon closer examination of the video tapes, you can hear a word vaguely sounding like patzer, and thus the term came to be.

Who knows what he would’ve said if he’d seen my games before yours. 

Hey! I resemble that remark!

Although I do think a dummkopf is a bit better than a scheisskopf.   

In the Marines, we used “fubar”, which stands for fouled up beyond all recognition. (The first word wasn’t really fouled, but the real word is not suitable for this site.) It seems to be a bilingual play on words. Unfortunately, fubar and furchbar both apply to my chess style.

I'm not joking, my bullet rating.......

@BoboTheFlyingSheep67 

Buddy, you shouldn't be messing around on chess.com now, you need to be preparing for you UFc fight which is in a couple of days.

I used the word patzer before Garry Kasparov was born.

That was one of the reindeers' names, right?

A quick check (pun intended) shows it far predates Kasparov. The first chess reference I see is in Lasker’s magazine in 1905. It appears to exist in German before that also as a term meaning ‘to bungle’ or ‘a bungler’.

Patzer predates Kasparov entirely (1948 when first used to refer to blundering chess players specifically, at least according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary etymology). 

Fubar is an acronym, and came from the US military.  Some people have postulated a connection to the German word, but this would be largely incidental.  The main purpose of "fubar" was/is to allow servicemen to swear/complain about something using a term that won't get them in trouble.  The same way PEBKAC was/is used by tech support reps to make fun of the users they service without tipping their hand to supervisors, etc.  Eventually the acronym's definition spreads around to the point where the term isn't useful that way any more, but by that time it is just used openly in other contexts.

"Foobar" as a spelling was just to throw off the trail on the actual FUBAR acronym.  Even as late as 1990 this term's actual acronym was still being obfuscated by military enlisted, and they would tell people that "foobar" was just a funny slang word for "messed up"...a sanitized and softer version of the truth.

My South African version is "matsatsela" in the township lingo.

Back in the days of Lasker a large amount of leading chess literature was written in german language. Therefore some words like Patzer, Zwischenzug (in-between-move) were not translated or german authors like Lasker used theses words in their english texts, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugzwang

осооа

Daily and Rapid and Patzer and Blitzen.

LOL

Pabster (wink)

I always thought it just referred to someone inclined to make blunders!

never heard of this word til I saw a speed run account with the name, never heard the term 'bruh' before either, now every Tom, D1ck and Harry uses it for no apparent reason, look, there's a cloud in the Sky, 'Bruh'!