The name sounds funny but chess below expert level is still quite psychological in nature and many players (me included) would not be able to beat a computer program the same strength. By "hope chess" what I am referring to is playing in a way that does not always expect the opponent to find the best moves or responses.
Why do we always assume that just because there might be a good, hard-to-spot reply to some attack, that the opponent will actually see what we are seeing - and play it? Instead it's a lot more fun to try and "bait" the opponent into falling for a trap, or simply trying to play some line where they might miss something, which you can then use to your advantage. Apart from being more fun, it also just works well till a certain level.
I have always tried playing the more "hope chess" way, and have had decent success and a lot of enjoyment with it. It actually feels like a "mind game" this way rather than a game of "find the most precise move in this position". I don't care about playing the most accurate moves, often I'd just knowingly play a subpar move if that might lead my opponent to a chance to blunder.
What is this?
Setting traps is good. Setting unsound traps is bad (unless it's bullet).
@Reasoner said in #1:
> The name sounds funny but chess below expert level is still quite psychological in nature and many players (me included) would not be able to beat a computer program the same strength. By "hope chess" what I am referring to is playing in a way that does not always expect the opponent to find the best moves or responses.
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> Why do we always assume that just because there might be a good, hard-to-spot reply to some attack, that the opponent will actually see what we are seeing - and play it? Instead it's a lot more fun to try and "bait" the opponent into falling for a trap, or simply trying to play some line where they might miss something, which you can then use to your advantage. Apart from being more fun, it also just works well till a certain level.
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> I have always tried playing the more "hope chess" way, and have had decent success and a lot of enjoyment with it. It actually feels like a "mind game" this way rather than a game of "find the most precise move in this position". I don't care about playing the most accurate moves, often I'd just knowingly play a subpar move if that might lead my opponent to a chance to blunder.
The issue is when you set a trap that would leave you in a worse position if the other person doesn't fall for it. Your position could be worse either because you sacked material for nothing, wasted time, or fell for another tactic.
I think there is an element of "hope chess" at every level, only it gets more subtle as you go higher. I sac a rook just to see what happens, a GM could play an opening novelty that engine evaluates as 0.2 worse than the main line to hopefully (!) outprep his opponent.
In Speed Chess including rapid, finding the Best Move isn't practical as it consumes plenty of time. Setting traps and speculative sacrifices work pretty well as long as it won't result to more than a pawn or exchange down. It's still relatively easy to draw when one pawn down.
I mean, ‘hope chess’ is fine in bullet and blitz. I can’t even count how many times it worked for me and for my opponents too, honestly. The thing is it works in these formats only because there’s less time and blunders inevitably happen on both sides, at least at our level.
Doing this in longer format makes no sense. For one, you have time to actually think, so you should calculate and improve your game. And lastly, it’s much more likely that your opponent will punish you, unless they play just as fast for no reason.
"HOPE CHESS – You don't consistently see if your candidate moves can be defeated by a forcing reply before you make your move (and thus when your opponent makes a forcing move that you did not foresee and cannot meet, you think 'Uh Oh! What do I do now?')." - NM Dan Heisman (2010)
https://web.archive.org/web/20140627071059/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/heisman111.pdf
At whatever speed, if I, in my own calculation, can see a crushing response for my opponent, I do not play that line. I play plenty of speculative sacrifices and traps, when the result is unclear to me. Sometimes they are refuted, sometimes not. But if I can find my opponent's winning line, I figure he/she can also.
@kaissa44 is right: a trap is fine if there is little risk, if it is "with the flow" of your game, but foolhardy when you have a lot to lose and are just hoping that the other player won't see what is obvious to you.
so where is the difference between hope chess and clever psychological planning that didnt work out?
Seriously why even use the term hopechess, i know its ingenius marketing to anchor a specially used term by an eminent scholar into the heads of chess public.
but do people really deserve fame for coining bs like bric, the novice nook or categorizing the useless.
why not just keep calling it bad chess, like we have for generations?
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