It seems to me that chess rather exposes a common fallacy in games now a days. So many games in an effort to create "deep" systems somewhat intuitively turn to creating convoluted and complex systems of rules. But the problem is in so many cases once you understand the rules in play, it reveals the game itself to be little more than a deeply obfuscated roshambo.

By contrast with chess you can learn every single rule in about 5 minutes, and then spend the remaining 80 years of your life exploring their depths.

Complex != deep, simple != shallow.

> you can learn every single rule in about 5 minutes

That might be true for the game of Go with its much simpler rules, but for Chess I reckon it takes at least an hour for someone to absorb all rules.

YES. This is the point of the book! Chess rule absorption is quite a painful, boring process for most people. It can take a very long time, especially for children and/or folks who are not intrinsically motivated but being forced to learn to indulge a family member, friend, or something.

Ideally the learning process can be both fun and high-utility, through minigames and the other activities laid out in the book! It took me 3+ weeks of multiple hour-long classes each week to get a classroom of smart 4th graders to absorb the knight movements and play Knight Battleship competently. In the end, they did enjoy it... and once they felt mastery, they wanted to learn more.

add in scoring for go and it will take an hour

>I'm always fascinated at how Chess can completely satisfy my need for intellectual stimulation and competition, and it never gets old. It has the ultimate replay-ability factor.

I really love chess, gotten into it back in 2018 and learned a lot. Since mid 2020 I got into the bad habit of just playing 1+0 bullet games mindlessly without caring about the result just to shake off the boredom. Always repeating the same old openings and attempting the same old boring traps.

I wish I could get back to that "never gets old plus ultimate replay-ability factor", maybe I should start taking on 15+15 games back again.

Often you don't have or don't want to spend the uninterrupted time to play a 15+15 match, this is why bullet and blitz are so popular. For those I recommend correspondence chess (e.g. on Lichess). This form of chess is asynchronously, so whenever you have some time, like waiting for the bus, you can deeply think about a chess position of your chess game. After a game I would recommend to analyze the game and learn from your mistakes in the opening, middlegame, endgame, missed tactics and so on. These games are much more meaningful than blitz games, where you obviously might have just lost a game due to a knight fork you hadn't seen because of few seconds left on your clock.

Correspondence games will help you to understand chess more deeply, fix your own mistakes and to become an overall better player. You can also open many correspondence games in parallel, this way you don't have to wait for days until you can make another move.

I love correspondence games! I cannot cope with the anxiety of short time controls, and the satisfaction for me is always thinking deeply and feeling like I’ve made the best move I’m capable of. That said unless you’re only playing people you trust, it’s hard to dodge cheaters, even with Lichess’s cheat detection.

> it’s hard to dodge cheaters, even with Lichess’s cheat detection

You can never be 100% certain, but there's a few things one can do. Before playing an opponent in correspondence check his profile. Never play against new accounts (e.g. join date in profile < 3 months). Don't play someone who never lose games (e.g. 80 wins, 20 draws, 0 losses is suspicious unless it's Magnus). Don't play someone who only has very few games played in total. Compare the other statistics if he has a beginner level blitz rating of 1600 and rapid rating of 1700, but correspondence is GM like level of 2500+ then this is also suspicious.

Playing on the internet can be a chess killer and a mind-number. Since 2014 I have been almost purely been "wasting my time" on 3+2 and shorter blitz without much improvement. The glory days for me were 2012-2013, when I could set aside a full day and play in G45 or G60 Saturday Swiss at the Portland Chess Club.

15+15 sounds great but you can also go for 30 or 45 or 60 minute games online! Even if not in person, with those time controls at the low end of classical, you will find yourself thinking more deeply to re-wire bad habits. The mistakes will have more investment behind them, so you will tend to review the games and learn/internalize from them more. Especially if you find a good sparring partner, or set the rating range -0 +500, and only play people who are better than you. I'm on Lichess if you like: https://lichess.org/@/andytratt :)

I disagree a bit with correspondence because I think few people are wired to take it seriously. I've been doing correspondence Go and some days I just make a move because I'm busy with other things, so it really has to be a priority over a long time period. Also, I tried Diplomacy a couple times last year with various groups (https://www.backstabbr.com/) and found that it's a rare breed of human who, even in hacker demographics, can focus on such correspondence activities to my (very minimal) level.

I know what you mean, although my drug of choice is 3 minutes blitz. Lately I’ve gotten into letter chess on Lichess. It’s nice to be able to really analyze position and possible variations. Games last for days and weeks and you get emotionally committed to win those, or get even draw after horrible blunder.

Oh, there's no choice :)

It always struck me as strange, among the many chess shelves in the Mechanics Institute and elsewhere, that there wasn't such a starter book out there already...I'm very pleased to hear it stacks up well against your hundreds!

P.S. I have another one for parents teaching kids, which is basically a simplified and expanded chapter 1 of the adult one: https://andytrattner.com/img/pdf/teach-chess.pdf