Can anyone suggest a chess game that won't slaughter me?

January 31, 2015 5:33 AM

People advised Rybka. It has difficulty settings! I'm not a beginner, but playing against a computer that can slaughter me effortlessly is dispiriting.

Actually, I'm not looking to learn or even improve. I simply want to have fun playing chess. I've tried Chessmaster, which does have difficulty settings, but the problem is that these have no gradations: on the easier settings (my zone) the AI is ridiculously, suicidally inept. Ratchet up the difficult by even one notch and it wipes the floor with you.

Programming a computer than can beat the best players in the world is, to me, an uninteresting achievement. I guess I'm not from Von Neumann's generation.

What would be useful -- and thus impressive -- is if a company came out with a computer that could play against a human but win or lose barely, but convincingly.

Help, please!

posted by Opengreen to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (8 answers total)

About at what move do you start to lose on that difficulty setting?
posted by michaelh at 1:57 PM on January 31, 2015

I understand that your question is about AI versions of chess, but have you looked into playing humans online? There is a wide range of ability, and you can play games at the pace you choose, from real time to a move every few days. At a slow pace, you can have several games on the go.
posted by cincinnatus c at 6:04 PM on January 31, 2015

Response by poster: Michaelh: With Chessmaster only, you can tell it your rating is, say, 300, and it'll give you toddlers to play. But, as I write, the difficulty settings of that program don't scale smoothly. Once you improve your rating to about 500, there's a huge jump in the computer's proficiency.

Cincinnatus: Thanks for commenting. Can you please name a site where I can play other humans with a move every few days? That sounds interesting to me.
posted by Opengreen at 6:46 PM on January 31, 2015

Chess.com, International Correspondence Chess Federation (still supporting postal mail games!!!), Chess With Friends on your mobile device, lichess, 365chess. All have correspondance play, and some have tactics puzzles to solve, lessons, opening and endgame databases, Chess960 support, and other fancy features (some of which require payment, but hey). I'm in your situation, and my chess.com username is "mkb218" if you ever want to play.
posted by mkb at 8:05 PM on January 31, 2015

On iOS there is also an app named Social Chess that works like Words With Friends but with chess. It tracks your rating over time and can match you to players of similar strength.
posted by milarepa at 4:56 AM on February 1, 2015

Response by poster: The lowest lichess goes is 1500. I'm probably 800.
posted by Opengreen at 12:32 PM on February 2, 2015

Opengreen, what I meant was, about how far do you get into the game before it goes wrong? (As far as you can tell.)
posted by michaelh at 9:36 AM on February 5, 2015

Take a look at gameknot.com
posted by cognito at 8:03 PM on February 17, 2015