Post-Apocalyptic Sports
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Don't know about the rest of you lot, but I've been doing and coordinating extensive work on this for my sport, which is chess.
Competition chess is 4 arms - over the board (OTB), correspondence (originally by post, but email when that became common, and now via online servers), online, and problem-solving (get shown a position and find the best move).
Of these, OTB chess is basically out of the question until alert level 1 or elimination. The others are fine, and don't need any assistance, but clubs are based around getting together to play in person, so pandemics are an obvious block to that. Since it will be some time before we can go back to playing in person, clubs have been working together to set up online presences at online chess sites (Lichess.org and Chess.com are the preferred options), and to arrange events for members. Interclub matches are on the cards as well, which is great.
People had been worried about potential cheating (if you're using a computer to play, pretty easy to use chess programs to assist), which had long been a barrier, but turns out players having to identify themselves by name is quite a deterrent. Big changes ahead, but it's a lot more positive than it looked initially.
Incidentally, chess clubs in NZ have a long history - Canterbury Chess Club (my club) is the oldest and was founded in 1866, with Auckland, Wellington and Otago not long after. Otago Chess Club is the longest registered Incorporated Society in NZ (1895). The NZ championship is the longest running national championship in the world (Scotland has an older first event, but had breaks due to wars).
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@Godder great post fella.
My boy went into ChessKids for a while- any opinion on how that compares?
Chess is great, and the internet has massive video support for folk to improve. So differetn to my day with crappy books that were hard to work through.
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my only association with Chess is that when i was playing rep rugby, and having away games around the state, we created the Ingham Chess Club to tell people where we were from, so we didn't besmirch the good name of our Union when we were acting like fuckwits. Pretty sure that club is still banned from a few backpackers.
Also my son plays and really enjoys it
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@mariner4life said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
Also my son plays and really enjoys it
He beats you, doesn't he
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@nzzp said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
@mariner4life said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
Also my son plays and really enjoys it
He beats you, doesn't he
i haven't played him i don't think. He probably would, i haven't played in 25 years
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@mariner4life said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
@nzzp said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
@mariner4life said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
Also my son plays and really enjoys it
He beats you, doesn't he
i haven't played him i don't think. He probably would, i haven't played in 25 years
I play with my boys in winter, it's great fun. The older is a good player, he beats me if I do something stupid. And since I have brain farts regularly (supporting the Blues, for instnace), it's often a good game
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@nzzp Chesskids is good, both the English and Aussie businesses of that name have good programmes for kids (I'm not sure if they're connected or just came up with the same name independently).
Agree that it's so much easier to learn online or with software/videos than via books like I did, although successful club play still requires learning a bit of theory, and while videos are best for most people, apparently some people learn better with written material and a real board and set.
I also like that chess games can be notated (written down) so we can play through games from the 1500s.
@mariner4life That's awesome! I've heard a few stories over the years about drinking sessions from actual chess teams and tournaments, so it's not as farfetched as it sounds (the concept of a chess team being rowdy while on the turps).
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@nzzp said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
Mods, feel free to move - I couldn't see anywhere pulling together what post C19 sports could look like
Anyway, just reading the article below. Interesting, but they don't seem to raise the prospect of allowing people who have had C19 to slip the lockdown and attend sport.
But yes, big crowds are a massive risk unless there's a vaccine, or it's properly eliminated in the community (NZ only option I think at the moment).
Bursting the Bubble: Why Sports Aren't Coming Back Soon
The NBA, NFL and MLB are dreaming up ways to play amid a pandemic, with talk of isolating players in Arizona or Las Vegas or maybe on the moon. It all sounds great, until you talk to people who actually know science.
So if you've had it, you can't be a carrier?
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@nzzp said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
@mariner4life said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
@nzzp said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
@mariner4life said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
Also my son plays and really enjoys it
He beats you, doesn't he
i haven't played him i don't think. He probably would, i haven't played in 25 years
I play with my boys in winter, it's great fun. The older is a good player, he beats me if I do something stupid. And since I have brain farts regularly (supporting the Blues, for instnace), it's often a good game
I played my 7yr old today. I let him win, but he still did 2 moves that I hadn't seen and I had to pretend I'd left open on purpose...
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@Bones said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
@nzzp said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
Mods, feel free to move - I couldn't see anywhere pulling together what post C19 sports could look like
Anyway, just reading the article below. Interesting, but they don't seem to raise the prospect of allowing people who have had C19 to slip the lockdown and attend sport.
But yes, big crowds are a massive risk unless there's a vaccine, or it's properly eliminated in the community (NZ only option I think at the moment).
The NBA, NFL and MLB are dreaming up ways to play amid a pandemic, with talk of isolating players in Arizona or Las Vegas or maybe on the moon. It all sounds great, until you talk to people who actually know science.
So if you've had it, you can't be a carrier?
I don't think so. maybe some like @Kirwan knows though, or @canefan
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@nzzp my understanding is you can't be a carrier. It's like the flu. You get it and it goes away, it would appear that you can contract it again. But the second and consecutive times your body will be more geared to fighting it as it will have developed antibodies. The reason why it's so bad at the moment is it is so different from other coronaviruses we have faced before (cold and flu) that our bodies can't deal with it
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@Frank AlphaGo was very interesting to chess, and its successor, AlphaZero has dominated in computer chess (computer programme competitions are quite popular).
I remember Kasparov losing the match against Deeper Blue (he beat Deep Blue in the first match, and IBM put in more money), and programmes started winning all the matches, so it was good to see Australian Grandmaster (GM), David Smerdon, crush a computer programme, Komodo, recently - https://www.chess.com/news/view/smerdon-beats-komodo-5-1-with-knight-odds . Granted, the computer was giving him a Knight, but still, good to see humans are still able to roughly keep up.
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@Godder said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
I remember Kasparov losing the match against Deeper Blue (he beat Deep Blue in the first match, and IBM put in more money),
Not only that, but if I recall correctly, Deeper Blue was being recoded on the fly by chess Masters and 'tuned' to Kasparov to exploit his weaknesses (well, lack of strength).
Since then computer power has just gone nuts, and frankly it's not even close any more is it
I for one, welcome our new chess computer overlords -
Kasparov's complaint against IBM when he lost was that he suspected IBM changed the computer programming during the six-game rematch, after Kasparov won the first game in the rematch.
And when he asked IBM to show him the programming logs IBM said they couldn't because it had been dismantled.
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@Kirwan said in Post-Apocalyptic Sports:
When they get quantum computing working reliably, humans will be like a bug on a windscreen for games like chess.
we already are!
well, I am, and so are 99.999% of the population
Seriously though, humans can't compete with computers in theory games like Chess -
