I’m better than most of my friends that play, but I never reached my dad’s level of chess obsession. Now I am a fully blown adult with a PhD, I’m a lot better at chess than I was a kid. I still lost a bunch though, because I blundered pieces. The resource imbalance of the missing queen made the difference. When I played “odds of a queen” against my dad, the games were fun again, as I had a chance of victory and he could play as normal without acting intentionally dumb. ![]() “Odds of a queen”, for example, refers to taking the queen of the stronger player off the board. ![]() When two players with very different skill levels want to play each other, the stronger player will start off with some pieces missing from their side of the board. This is a common problem in chess, with a well established solution: It’s called “ odds”. Not many kids have the patience to lose dozens of games in a row and never even get close to victory. In a purely skill based game like chess, an extreme skill imbalance means that the more skilled player essentially always wins, and in chess, it ends up being a slaughter that is no fun for either player. He was playing local tournaments and could play blindfolded, while I was, well, a child. The problem was that my dad was extremely good. ![]() As a kid, I really enjoyed chess, as did my dad.
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