Daily Dose of English 218
Chess
Daily Dose of English 218
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you can make it today. In this episode, whoa, why did I say that weird? In this episode, we're gonna be talking about chess, the game of chess, a very, very old game that is also very, very popular. It's very well known. I would say potentially the most popular game in the world, the most recognized game. Uh, Pokemon might have a little more recognition, but not everybody knows how to play Pokemon. Um, and because they, they're, they're cute and colorful, but I think pretty much everybody has heard of chess or seen chess in some way. It's just, it's just so ubiquitous in the world is absolutely everywhere. And I want to talk a little bit about it because I think it's really interesting. So first, if you've only heard of chess and you don't know much, it is a game that you play with one opponent. It's usually competitive. You're trying to beat the other person. Your goal is to win. And each player has 16 pieces that they have on a board, and each piece can move in a slightly different way. Um, the 16 pieces, by the way, aren't just, aren't all different. There are many of them that are the same. I think there's. Like six or seven different unique pieces. Let's see. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. One, two, three, four, five, six. Yeah, I think there's six different pieces. I'm not a huge chess player, but I think there's six different pieces that have different ways of moving. And your goal is to capture the pieces of your opponents and eventually win the game by capturing their king, their key piece that they cannot lose or else they lose the game. And the interesting thing about chess is that it is solved. in many ways. When I say that it's solved, we actually can understand and we can analyze chess games to be sure of things. So going back to our episode yesterday about algorithms, there are very advanced chess algorithms and bots, robots that can play chess to the point where a human can never beat them. They are very, very good and can say with certainty something, right? Things that humans can never do. Humans are just completely incapable of being able to see that far into the future, basically, because we can't do hundreds of thousands of calculations per second to come to a conclusion. There are some humans that are very, very good at this, but it is a very different kind of game than, say, poker, because there is zero randomness in chess. There are variants of chess that have randomness, but a game of chess is always the same. Well, it always starts the same, and it can make different branches, if you will. There are more possible chess games than there are stars in the universe. There's an infinitely large number of chess possible games. However, Many of them don't happen because a lot of them don't make sense. They're completely nonsensical. And so when you learn to play chess, you're sort of learning about this history and how to play the game, how to do specific things in order to gain a very small edge over your opponent. And because of that, it is a very hard game to get very good at. because the people that are good know a lot about it and are very comfortable and confident with the way that chess works. And this is why I think chess is really interesting in that way, that you can study this system, you can get good at this system, which is set in stone. It does not change. It is always the same. And you can learn to beat people. You are better than the other person. Right. And so this happens, uh, in with big. Chess tournaments. They don't just play one game against their opponent. They usually play a set or a series. Um, it's typically like four or six, eight games or whatever. And they do usually go back and forth. However, if somebody can beat somebody else, it is generally because they are better or did it, sorry, in a whole series. If somebody can beat somebody in a whole series, it's usually because on that day or in that series, they were better. They played better. They didn't get lucky. They didn't you know, they didn't get lucky, they played better, they beat the other person. At the very, very high level when people are very evenly matched, there is a little, like, they can have a better day, they can sort of, they can play a little bit better. But especially if you look at lower levels, somebody that is better than, like, a lot better than somebody else is gonna win all the time, right? Basically every single game, unless they make some massive mistake or whatever. But like, that's their fault. If you lose at chess, it is your fault. And that is what makes the game also very bad, in my opinion, because there are better games out there. There are significantly better designed games, more interesting games, games that are also very simple in the way that chess is, right? Chess isn't actually that complicated. There's a couple of random weird rules, but there are plenty of games out there that are just as straightforward, but have better design, that are better games. I'm not necessarily saying that you need to have randomness for a game to be better, but chess is just not well designed. The reason that it's popular is because it has all this history and that it's so old and so popular, right? If chess was invented in 2004, nobody would play it. Nobody would care. It would not be as big of a game as it is. It's only that big because it's so old. I think a decent example is something like Checkers or Scrabble, which are both incredibly well-known, famous games, but the number of people that play Scrabble and Checkers every day is so much lower, like by an astronomically large number. Scrabble is actually interesting. There is competitive Scrabble, but it's also a very, not necessarily the best game. It is very interesting. It's definitely, I would say it's harder than chess. Maybe not if you want to be the, just like pretty good, but if you want to be very, very good, there's so many interesting things in Scrabble, but that's a different episode. But like the fact that a relatively new player cannot beat somebody that is better than them is just a bad way for the game to exist, right? There is significantly more interesting stuff that can happen in other games, right? The example that I go to that I also already use is poker, right? A person that is better at poker is going to win more than people that are worse, but not literally every single time. They have to take risks. They have to read people. There's a lot more involved in poker than just knowing the game really, really well. You also have to get lucky. You have to be able to calculate things. You have to know percentages. There's a lot more going on in poker. And another example that I've talked about before is something like Magic the Gathering, which also is a very, very hard, very complex game, much less popular than chess, but there is a pro scene. There are pro players, people that are very, very good at it, that win most of their games, even against other pro players, but they tend to win around 66 to 70% of the time. When they play against newer players, people that are worse, they're gonna win probably closer to 80% of the time, maybe even more depending on the scenario. But that shows that there's still a very high skill ceiling, but it does leave a little bit of room for things to go wrong or things to happen. So in my opinion, Magic is a better game than Chess. I don't think that it should replace chess or anything like that. I think it's too complicated for that, but it is a better designed game in a lot of ways. There's also many things that are wrong with it, but it is a better designed game. Or another really interesting one is Settlers of Catan, which is also played competitively. And that one's also really interesting because again, good players win way more often than people that don't know how to play or are just learning or are just okay, right? A professional player would crush me. Um, but there's a lot more interesting stuff happening in a game that makes it, uh, better. Like, cause what, yeah, when you watch chess, you can like, they have a little bar on the side of the board, um, that says who is winning definitively, right? The bar says, if this person doesn't make any mistakes, they will win. Um, basically it's not exactly like that, but they will win essentially. And if they make a small mistake, the other person might be able to win. And at a certain point, the robot might go, oh, there is a guaranteed victory for this player if they do these exact 22 things, which obviously humans can't do. 22 things in a row is such a big thing to calculate. But having that there on the side of the board, I feel like is not good for a game necessarily. It's interesting in chess because like people have to then be that perfect, right? That's sort of an interesting thing about chess. But when you look at another game, for example, it is a much bigger, like a game with randomness. It's very different, right? With poker odds, you can see so many people playing poker and you can see their hands if you're watching on from home, and you can see the percentage that they're going to win. This person has two cards and it says their percentage to win is 48% of hands, right? But you can actually see the other person's hand and you know that they would win, but they don't know that. And so they have to sort of play around that in a way that is very different from chess, where instead of like, it's like, okay, do they know this or not? Versus like, are they gonna take the risk? Are they going to read the person correctly? That sort of thing. And so, yeah, that's why I think that chess is a worse game than many of them out there. And the only reason that it's that popular is because of how old and how much history there is. It's not gonna go away, I don't think it should go away. I think it's a good thing to exist overall. But if you are not interested in games because you think of games as things like chess or Monopoly or whatever, I talked about this a couple weeks ago, I think, but try some new board games. There are a lot of interesting board games that are very simple and very, very fun, even though they are simple. I'm going over time here but I want to quickly talk about a board game that I recently got and love. It was given to me as a gift and I love the gift. Thank you very much. It is called Harmonies. It is called Harmonies. I think I talked about this already. But I'm really enjoying it because it's also one, you can play it alone, you can play it one player. And you build these patterns on your board. And so it's very easy to understand when you look at it, you go, oh, I see, I have to make a tree here and two rocks. Okay, cool. But then when you get into it, you go, oh, but if I make that tree here, I can use that tree to also make the habitat for a gecko by doing tree water. And then I can mix all these things together. And so you get a lot more interesting stuff happening in a game rather than just going, Well, I moved my knight into attacking range, I lost that piece, I'm going to lose the game now. That's so much more punishing than something that you can actually see and engage with and understand and still feel like you're doing something rather than just, well, I messed up, I'm gonna forfeit. Just to go off on a tangent, when you watch people that play a lot of chess, often if they make a little mistake, they know they're going to lose the game, so they just give up. right, they go, okay, I lost that game, move on to the next one, which is totally fine, right? If you are completely going to lose a game, you should probably just move on to the next one because you don't have a chance. But the fact that that happens really often in chess is, I think, makes it a worse game. And because it often is the right choice to make, right? If you are going to lose a game and you have nothing you can really do about it, you can use your mental energy on trying to win the next game. But in many other games, if you make a mistake, you're not punished for it. Sure, you're more likely to lose, but you still have options to come back and win the game. And so that is another, I think, really core piece of why it's better to have more interesting games that are less fragile, maybe, I don't know. Anyways, I'm starting to ramble now, so I'm going to sign off and say thank you very much for listening to this episode. I hope that you enjoyed. If you have a different opinion on chess, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below. But other than that, I will see you tomorrow. Bye.
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