Whatcha Reading?

Giant Nerd Books has a good selection on the occult.

https://www.giantnerdbooks.com

I like Amazon. Their recommendations have been pretty influential on the books I read. Of course, I feel like I had pretty strong individual preferences before I started shopping there, so mostly I use it to get books that I've heard of somewhere else, but sometimes I use it to research new titles that might interest me.

Also I browse the shelves at my local library.

For instance, my library had an older edition of Chess Fundamentals by Senor Capablanca. I decided to buy a copy on Amazon. Then I found a copy at Goodwill, that I bought as a present for someone.

I have five or six copies of this book.

I learned checkmate with rook and king from that book. It's a technical skill that a lot of lower-rated players don't have.

I also got to where I can checkmate with the minor pieces as well, but it's not easy and it would probably take me a while to figure out again. It took me like three minutes yesterday to figure out a mate with two rooks when there were some pawns in the way.

Capablanca’s explanation of how to perform this elementary checkmate is among the best there is.

No

Would you explain what you meant about not playing their bots a little bit more? That kind of confused me a little.

Playing weakened engines is vastly different than playing humans. To weaken a chess engine, you must program it to blunder. The “personality” of the dozens of bots this site promotes are two-fold: 1) they have names and avatars that are cute or timely, and 2) they blunder in a peculiar way. The way they blunder is nothing like human blunders. Hence, decoding the characteristic error in order to get an advantage and beat the bot rarely prepares you to play real people.

Many years ago, I spent a few years mostly playing bots (Chessmaster personalities), then returned to my local chess club after moving back to the city. My first night at chess club, I won three and lost three against the worst player in the club. All that bot playing left me ill-prepared for even a low rated human. Happily, I quickly learned to play humans again and never again lost to that player.

Playing engines, especially strong ones, however, is excellent training in most cases. Of course, from the starting position, they will always win, but you can still learn openings by playing such monsters.

I’ve spent a bit of time today playing some endgame positions against Stockfish. I’m working through 300 Most Important Chess Positions by Thomas Engqvist at the rate of five positions per day. I play many of these against Stockfish. Often I’ll look at the diagram, set it up and play it against the computer. If I succeed, I’ll read what Engqvist says about the position. If I fail, I’ll try again. If I cannot earn the intended result, I’ll read the book and try again.

I haven't played the chess.com bots enough to form a strong opinion of them, but I have played Chessmaster for the PS2 quite a bit. I have only played the bots in that game up to about 1400 rating. Usually they will drop a piece early on at that rating, but then put up a pretty good defense. They will never blunder checkmate or an obvious tactic the way a human sometimes will. Rather they will hang pieces seemingly at random (I'm sure they are leaving other tactics open that I'm just not seeing).

That’s the crux: drop a piece and then play normal strength, albeit usually with their analysis depth capped. Nothing like a human.

The last time I played Chessmaster personalities was probably 15 years ago when I played a bunch of games against Vlad (~1800). Vlad always made a gross positional error on move 4 or 5, then became a tactical monster. I has some chances because of the positional error, but I needed full attention to tactical complications and did best when I managed to avoid sharp tactics with solid positional play.

Yep, that sounds about right. I really haven't tried any of the GM personalities. I took the game over to my friend Brad's house one time, and he wanted to play Bobby Fischer. He said, "I'm hoping I can at least win a piece." He did, I'm sure, but I'm also pretty sure he lost the game.