chess involves a certain aspect of luck as well, such as keeping your fingers crossed and praying that your opponent doesn't spot the one move that will enable you to check his king while threatening the Queen with a different piece, and blocking it with a piece of his or her own.
dunno how you ever got good at chess playing like that. serrously, you don't win games by "crossing your fingers and hoping for the opponent to not see your move," at least not at high level play when they pretty much see every move.
m0nkfish said:
pokemon is about as similar to chess as it is to fantasy football
not really. pokemon and chess have a few similarities, though you have to use your imagination a bit to see some of them. pretty much the biggest similarity is that long-term thinking is crucial in both pokemon and chess (and I'm not talking about looking 5 moves further into the game, I mean really long term). in pokemon, let's say you're running an offensive team. the moment you start the game, you have to put on your thinking cap, thinking about what kind of team you're going to face based on the lead and making really minor predictions and whatnot. as the game progresses and you see a few more pokemon, you have to decide what walls will be able to beat your primary sweeper and how to take them down. you have to decide what pokemon you need and what you're able to sacrifice to cement the win. you have to figure out a way to get your sweeper the free turn it needs as well. in chess, from the beginning you play your opening, and your opponent can react in many ways to it, leading to all manner of variations that are going to decide the type of game that is being played. in chess, you have to think about the long-term as well. you have to put your pieces in good spots, gaining very very slight positional advantages. and I know "putting your pieces in good spots" sounds kinda vague, but try to bear with me as I'm not the best at putting my thoughts into words. when I say "putting your pieces in good spots" I mean don't just develop (bring out your pieces) aimlessly. put your pieces in spots where they do something, whether it's pinning an important enemy piece, overdefending a key central pawn, or simply putting pressure on the opponent by covering a large amount of their space and keeping them from making moves that they'd like to make. at high level play, usually most wins or losses are decided by the long term thinking here, whoever had better positional play usually wins from here, assuming that nobody makes any huge tactical blunders. in the middlegame, stuff is much more tactically intense; this is where you'll be trying to make use of that positional advantage you have or make up for bad play in the beginning. the "pace of the match" is paramount in chess, just like it is in pokemon. whoever can control the pace, the one making the threats, has what chess players call the initiative. the player with the initiative usually gets it because of superior positional play to that of his opponent and can usually win if he keeps it for the remainder of the match. the initiative often leads to huge attacks in the middlegame, and just like pokemon, you have to decide what you don't need, not by looking at the walls and what can break them, but by hard calculations. because generally, if you're making sacrifices, unless you win huge amounts of material or checkmate at the end of your attack, you're going to lose. it's also important not to let the other guy cover a threat of yours while threatening something of his own at the same time, becuase that can lead to counterattacks, and if your pieces are offensively geared, you can often have no answer to this, just like in pokemon: if you sacrifice too many guys and suddenly can't break past their defenses, or if they have a certain pokemon you didn't expect them to have, they can usually either outstall your team that has been weakened by sacrifices, or bring in a sweeper you didn't expect them to have and run clean through your team.
then of course you've got the luck factor that doesn't affect chess, but otherwise, the whole concept of long term thinking is pretty similar. and while "minor tactics" (the ones that involve what I quoted from bad wolf and other similar stuff) are pretty much eliminated in high level chess play due to the fact that the other guy is going to see everything, minor tactics can involve just making a trick play to gain a positional advantage. and then of course you've got to look 9 or 10 moves into the game when you're attacking or up against an attack. then of course you've got openings like the dragon sicilian (yes, there's an opening variation called the dragon sicilian, or sicilian dragon) where basically both sides try to attack as much as they can and whatever attack reaches the king first wins, you've got to not waste any moves, and if you do, you've got to figure it out early by looking many moves in, so that you can pull the attack back before the enemy gets too close.
ok, I'm starting to rant about chess, so I better stop. what I want you to get from this is that a lot of the concepts are pretty similar.
