> From my experience, many antichess positions can be tackled by a handful of mnemonics to find the correct move. This is further simplified by the nature of the game: a blunder is often fatal.
>
> Now that we are analyzing everything, little creativity is left.
Counterexample: checkers and connect 4 (maybe even chess with a caveat).
Examples above have been weakly solved already (except chess, which I will tackle in a minute), nonetheless they are still being actively played and are "fun" to play by many. Albeit, the theory memorization became huge part of checkers community iirc, it doesn't take away from their personal "creative" play style to an extent one would assume.
Chess, on the other hand, might be assumed to be "solved" in a game of Engine vs Engine (draw) or Human vs Engine (win). With this assumption in mind, we can see that standard chess isn't that too far from being "too theoretical", as raised by some SuperGMs. Even if true, though, chess still has huge playerbase passionate about it in the face of this looming "perfect play". Average human/player is just not too influenced by it, or might choose not to be.
At the end of the day, we ourselves will choose to either to go by the path of least friction and play the 'perfect' lines or play what is sub-optimal for the fun of it. When it comes to it, not everything needs to be constantly min-maxxed and optimized, so just having an option of better play isn't killing the game in itself. But it certainly does help it to happen.
@drooksh said in #9:
> So for me, this is a nice development, and in the worst case we switch to 960 in 10-20 years.
Funnily enough, most of them are either obvious wins or are +5 in 2-5 common theory moves/ideas. When it comes to those, which are not, they too will deplete themselves eventually out of "no opening territory", as ideas, patterns and logic is mostly the same across positions. XD
but it sure will be fun to see, as the depth of theory there will never bee as deep as it is now in Watkins or similar
These names for the openings are just crazy!
That’s has for everything a name...