Episode 7: "Cheese" in Chess

“Well, at the age of 11, I became the Junior Chess Champion of Northern Ireland.”

“Yeah, that's my recollection with chess, was that I tended to play it aggressively and not worry too much about what the opponent was doing as dictating what I wanted to do. But then since I've gotten older and learnt more, then I have, you know, you start to think of what's in your opponent's head.”

“It really is a fool that, the person that the fool's mate has perpetrated on really is a fool, because he has to move his pieces in the position that enables the opponent to checkmate him in two moves.”

“So you build a fort in your enemy, in the enemy's space. A bit like the wooden horse of Troy.”

“And the reason why you would sacrifice your queen is because it's rare that the defender would leave themselves open to this attack from the knight, unless there is something so tempting as the queen open for attack. So you lure, you bait them with the one thing that they can't resist, which is taking your queen. And in doing so, their piece that was defending the king from this attack is out of position. And then the knight swoops in and ends the game.”

“Well, here's the neat thing too. I was looking up about it. So it was called Chaturanga. And it actually is kind of the predecessor for lots of different games, like lots of Chinese games, and the Indian version of chess, and all sorts of other games, but including our chess today.”

“So that's kind of the, so we're now in the computer and AI era of chess. The computer would run all the analytics on it, do all the calculations, and come up with a move different than what the classic strategies or even the hyper modern strategies would have been. And people became aware of all these new approaches to the game that you really wouldn't have figured out without a computer doing all these calculations on it.”

“The main thing I that I take away from applying sort of chess strategy to StarCraft is to take some more time to actually think about having that sort of chess players' attitude about the game. Because usually, like I said, StarCraft players, we tend to just think like, oh, I just need to do things quicker than my opponent and then I'll win. But we very rarely step back and think, oh, how can I trick my opponent?”