Mayo you are the ****ing man and everyone should know it.

I agree 100% with what you said.

Hi, im looking at how to win consistently with a outside passed pawn. I add a video just to show what the board is like. I know you are supposed to eat villains pawns when his king commits to your a-pawn. But i cant win consistently, sometimes it just ends up in a draw or even a loss. This should be winning every time right?

So i wonder if there is any principles that you can always follow that leads to a win. For example dont allow certain pawn structures to form, or trade off certain pawns before you come in with the king etc.

Lol you know polgar was all "wtf why are you wasting my time with these stupid questions"

Best thing to do is post some of the games where you fail to win, and see what people say about it, and maybe you will find some common error that you are making.

But when it comes to K+P endings, instead of trying to learn principles, try to calculate it out completely.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1891903

Beautiful win by Nakamura in the GP

I'd be surprised if Max Deutsch could beat a 1300 with another month's training. You could probably implant a chip in his brain with a full opening db and he'd still lose to a 1500

Sick game. Def worth playing through.

I'm not going to dignify him with an actual link to his blog (but if you really want to look at the original, I'm sure you know how to look for it yourself), but here's a post by that fraud who claimed to be able to beat Magnus not after 30 days of chess study, but after 34 hours.

For some inexplicable reason 34 hours just didn't quite cut it. 500 hours and you should be fine, though.

I mean.... any chance that's tongue in cheek?

Given his ego, no

What a ****ing douchenozzle loser.

At this point he is an insult to those of us who spend a good chunk of our lives on the game of chess. It's too bad Magnus did not tell him "**** off, first earn the right to play me".

What exactly is "earning" the right to play Magnus tho?

Making NM?
Making IM?
Making GM?

Fwiw I agree with you.

I guess getting good enough to be invited to the same tournaments as Magnus? Although even making NM is not very much in danger of happening, so it's pretty moot.

500 hours to beat Magnus though!

Think of the product he could sell.

Is he really saying he can memorize a game tree with trillions of decisions?

He is a genius entrepreneur so anything is possible.

I'm clicking through all his posts on the subject for lols. Dude is completely clueless. He's trying to play a game he has no idea how to play with machine learning but has little idea how that works either. Some choice excerpts:

Uh huh. The obvious happened and after training on 7,000 positions he overtrained the **** out of it and then didn't even realize that is the problem:

It later turns out, hilariously, that 70% of the evaluations in his database of positions are "good", which means the computer can achieve 70% just by guessing "good move" on any candidate move.

After running into these problems, he decides that the way he's built his database of positions is no good. So this is, no joke, his solution:

He's going to build his own Chessbase and then use its win/loss percentages from each position as a position evaluation. This where I stopped reading. There's weeks and weeks of this ****, folks.

rofl

ROFLCOPTER

You guys can laugh all you want but right now this guy is no doubt toiling away in his lab, on his way to solving chess and attaining a 3000+ rating

LOLOLOL

THE VERDICT IS STILL OUT THOUGH

Lifetime bucket list goal met!!!! Just broke 1800 USCF!!! I would have to drop out of 2 monthly tourneys for it to officially show up on my profile, but my plan is to just keep playing well and do my best to win the tourneys. Once upon a time, I thought I would stop at 1800 and move on to something more financially rewarding (as opposed to financially draining like chess lol). But since 1700, I have known that I plan to keep going as long as I feel like I am learning and improving.

And yes, I have in fact learned the secret to rapid chess improvement:

1) Stop wasting time doing dumb stuff like researching chess books, stop repeatedly calculating hypothetical USCF ratings based on hypothetical scenarios, stop looking up your opponents' profiles to find some convoluted way that your opponent is "way underrated", stop planning obsessively, stop wasting time watching videos of your favorite GM playing with his cat, etc.

2) Your current chess library and software is "good enough". The time you waste perfecting your study plan could be much more efficiently spent studying and re-reading and then re-reading again what you already have. Book and board was more than adequate for monsters like Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, and Fischer. In my case, I just dumped the good chess books I already have on my coffee table and vowed to finish them before even considering buying more books or software. Jeremy Silman's books are good enough. Those weird Russian books from 1973 written in descriptive notation are good enough. Your chess.com study plan is good enough, etc. Get your face in the books and go. You're still going to dick around and have fun anyway, but do your best to get your ass in gear.

3) Poker is a game for pessimists. Chess is a game for optimists. Never let thoughts such as "my opponent is underrated" or "mathematically I have no chance because this guy is 450 points higher than me (untrue btw)" or "this position is hopeless, time to throw a hail mary or two and go home (pull your dick out from between your legs and find the stalemate, perpetual, fortress, intelligent complications that will save you... only give up against club players when you are down massive material or about to be mated... they will find ways to screw up!) You may suck at endgames, but find a way to believe that you can win or save a draw in game time. Maybe your opponent suck even harder at endgames or just hates them so much that he quits (quite common!)

4) Bring your poker hustle into your chess games! Watch for signs that your opponent is uncomfortable and know his weaknesses. Blitz your openings and create weird positions against "perpetual time trouble guy". Force long, slow maneuvering against "impatient attack, attack, attack even if it ruins my position guy". Sac a pawn and open up the position against "grindy, positional, endgame guy". Trade queens against "quits in the endgame guy". Learn how to psychologically break a wide variety of opponents. They will wonder how in the heck you play so bad, but get so lucky.

And an observation... chess and the chess atmosphere are absolutely awesome and refreshing compared to poker imo. Playing with kids and teenagers is fun. Playing with old guys who refuse to grow old is fun. Playing with "9-5 family man whose guilty pleasure is chess" is fun. Getting in melodramatic arguments with the tournament director is fun. I knew poker players were scum, but playing chess regularly has shown me that poker players are even scummier than I realized. Poker players can always benefit from spending more time around normal people.

Off to go study!