Chess is a simple game

11:33 PM

I ruined myself again today. Sabotaged myself. I don't know why I keep doing things like this, but I spent all day today just playing chess.

So it started a few days ago, I just randomly started watching Warcraft 3 videos again. Oh yeah, it was because this new Warcraft 3 expansion or upgrade came up recently, like a week or two ago. I'm not going to play the game again, because I have already spent a large part of my life playing it, but I did want to see some game footage again of the new graphics and features, so yeah I'd watch some videos again.

One of the most famous players of Warcraft 3 goes by the name of Grubby, and he was a former pro Warcraft 3 player who turned into a streamer. All he does is play Warcraft 3 and watch Warcraft 3 replays ever day, and makes commentary on them. He has this series called "Bronze League Heroes" and it's basically him watching and making commentary about newbie players. There is a skill scoring system called MMR, I think it stands for Match Making Rating, it's modeled after ELO in chess.

ELO is this system where you get a score based on how often you win and lose against opponents of certain ELO. I think the base is 1000 , and your score raises or lowers based on your win ratio against opponents of that ELO level. The best players in chess are 2500 or so ELO, and the worst are 100 ELO. It's similar in Warcraft 3 except instead of being called ELO it's called MMR.

So Grubby's Bronze League Heroes series consists of him watching players who are below 1000 MMR go against each other. It's only entertaining if you know what's going on. I think if you are an absolute newbie, you would have no idea what's going on. But for me, I have spent thousands of hours playing Warcraft 3, so I literally know every single unit, spell, building, upgrade, etc. There's literally thousands of units, buildings, spells, countless amounts of info, and I know it all. I have used every single hero, every single spell, I have played thousands of custom games in Warcraft 3 too.

If I'm watching a pro match, I literally know every single thing going on. It's the same with newbie matches. The Bronze League Heroes series is just so entertaining to watch, because the newbies are making constant mistakes. Like they are not good players at all. At my peak one of my accounts on Warcraft 3's Battle.net had like 83% win rate out of 50 games or something. It was pretty high, and that was my prime. There were two accounts that I had which had a win rate % like that. In one of them I was 36-6 in Random Team, 6-0 in solo, and 3-0 in Free For All. I don't know what win rate that is, but that one was my second best account. Or maybe that was my best actually, and the one I'm thinking of only had like 73% win rate.

So anyway, I would laugh out loud watching these Bronze League Matches because they were so bad. I mean they weren't so terrible. All of these players still played decently. There were no absolute newbies players that had absolutely no idea what was going on, they all seemingly knew all the basics. They just played terribly.

So I wanted to apply this concept to Chess, the original strategy game. Well, maybe there are other ones that are older, like maybe Go is older. But in the West, Chess is the original strategy game, even though I think it originated in India which is in the East. Similar to Guns, it's now associated as a Western invention even though it's not. Yeah, chess is only around 1500 years old, while Go is 2500 years old. It's similar age as Tofu, tofu was invented around 2300 years ago.

But anyway, I wanted to see how good I was at chess. What ELO would I have? I signed up for Chess.com, and played. You start with an ELO of 400. I lost my first few games. Let me see how many I lost initially before I won. I lost 3 games before I won one. The first player they put me against had like 400 ELO, of course, and then when I lost to him, my ELO dropped by 193, and then I played against a 200 ELO player, then I lost to them, and then played a 136 ELO player after, and I lost to them too. I did win against the next 100 ELO player though.

Even though I did lose that first game, I did stand a chance. Let me see. Oh yeah, I lost due to time out. I was winning too. Wait, no. I just watched it. I was not winning, but it was a close game. Literally my first game and I was nearly winning against a 400 ELO player.

So I spent the whole day playing chess. Now my eyes are blurry. This happens when I play games like Guitar Hero or Chess, apparently. I think I stare at the screen and focus on it so much, that my eyes become dry or something. I don't know. And I spent all day playing it.

By the end, I was winning most of my matches. In the past 10 games, let me see how much I won. I won 7 out of 10 games, I lost 2, and drew 1 (I was winning). I lost 1 game by checkmate, and the other by timeout.. I won 3 games by checkmate and 4 by resignation (I could have gotten a checkmate). At one point though I lost pretty much every game I was playing. I was still adjusting how to play.

I barely know how to play, even now. But my ELO is now around 250, after 1 day. At these low level ELOs, everyone sucks, including me. Everyone makes mistakes, and barely anyone knows how to play. There were several times I laughed out loud at myself and the opponent, because we would make really dumb moves. My most creative game was building a wall of pawns. The guy was white and his first move was to move some pawns on the side up one step. It's a weird move. So I just blocked him off, moving my pawn 2 spaces forward. He just kept doing it with all the pawns, so I just kept copying him. In the end, I won. He made so many blunders and mistakes.

One thing about chess though is that it's ridiculously simple. There's not much to it. There's barely anything to learn. There's a handful of rules, a handful of units, and that's it. There's a handful of known openings, middle-game, and endgame strategies. It is not a complex game at all, compared to games like Warcraft 3 which involve thousands of factors all going on at the same time. In chess you focus on a handful of units, and just 1 turn at a time. In Warcraft 3, it's a real time strategy game, and it's infinitely more complicated. There's literally thousands (all of these combined) of different units, spells, buildings, items, etc. You have to know and understand so much just to play the basics. In Chess, anyone can learn the rules in an hour.

In terms of popularity though, chess wis. I wish I would have just played Chess instead of any other game. It would have been a far better use of my time to have spent thousands of hours playing chess, than thousands of hours playing video games. They are both nearly the same thing, both mainly a waste of time, but in terms of players, Chess has so many more players than any video game.

Anyway I had fun playing chess and that's all that matters. It's a really fun game. Obviously it's not going to be as exciting and addicting as Warcraft 3, but it's not bad.