• 22 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle














  • Use rated games to be matched with real players. After a few games that you will lose you will be matched with players against which you have roughly a 50:50 chance of winning / losing. Don’t focus on the ELO rating specifically at the start. Playing against humans is definitely different from the computer. In the lower ELO ranges you will see a lot of moves that don’t make sense and that the chess engine would never play. On the other hand opponents can be quite good at reading your strategy (as opposed to a dumbed-down engine).

    Use the Analyse game function after the game to get an idea of the mistakes you made.

    I would start with 10 minute games so that you can play a few games in a row (gives you more practice) but still have time to think.





  • We can handle a moderate deficit, especially if we’re keeping a positive bias to protein (such as eating 25% of calories from protein, basically keeping protein portions decently sized). I do it without any supplements, but with meats, eggs, yogurt, legumes. Our protein is where we get our dietary cholesterol from which we make cells, and it’s also an energy source so while we need all kinds of nutrition, keep that one from falling during a deficit to answer your concerns.

    I am aiming for 250g of Quark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(dairy_product) per day and I actively try to add kidney beans, white beans, chickpeas to my diet (which works okayish). Also had Salmon yesterday and smoked salmon for breakfast every other day.




  • Not sure I understand everything, although I think I understand that an influx of new players can totally skew statistics.

    It’s worth noting that this is about ELO ratings, so lichess may have a similar problem (I think it might be the case for Blitz on Lichess to suffer from a similar problem), but some of the proposed fixes are FIDE ELO specific (increasing starting ELO).

    The problem seems to be that the ELO ratings aren’t accurate to estimate the correct probabilities for a match between a long-time chess player with higher ELO rating and a player from the “Queen’s gambit wave”.

    Now the authors seem to paint this as a problem with the new players being underrated, the ELO distribution to be skewed. I agree that this can be a skew, I wonder however if the solution should be to boost ELO ratings of lower-ranked players.

    • Overall the best fix would IMHO be to bring together higher-ELO with lower-ELO players in matches in order to allow the ELO distribution to move ELO points down from the upper end, so that the ELO numbers again match the winning-probabilities between two players. I guess there is hesitance to do that because it means the old-guys might lose rating points and people are naturally protective in this regard.
    • bumping ELO points would lead to an inflation in ELO rating overall, it does not fix the root cause.

  • I have been overweight since childhood and after college I put on about 2kg per year on average. In between I managed to diet off some kg but quickly gained them back every time.

    This time I am combining my past dieting experiences with professional help from a registered dietician and a personal trainer (I am an emotional eater and hope to be able to use sport for mental stability as well as physical health).

    I am trying to stay <2000kcal on most days of the week and in any case under the estimated daily calories of my apple watch.





  • I consider sport and working out to be really helpful for weight loss, primarily for its positive impact on my mental health, which in turn, also helps me to keep up a healthy and restricted diet.

    I realize already that the same distance in swimming/running burns fewer calories than when I did them in a less-trained state, which is why my aims are now time-based (45 minute swim, 1h walk, etc.).

    A typical mistake people who start to count calories make is to select in the TDEE calculator an active lifestyle and then adding the workout calories on top, which kind of means they are added twice when in reality they need to be accounted for only once. So I decided to pick “sedentary”, even though I work out. Then all workout burnt calories may help in losing weight a little faster, but I don’t risk to plateau due to overeating / wrong estimated calories for a workout.

    Also, I do think a lot of advice in dieting should probably distinguish between

    • obese people trying to lose weight
    • normal weight people trying to lose the christmas-kilos

    What works to shed a few pounds may not work to lose 40kgs.




  • I am playing on Lichess and just dropped from 700-800 range where I frequently played >800 ELO numbers back to the 600 range and in some way its also true there. I dropped down on an evening where I probably should have just stopped playing and so now I have to make my way up very concentrated against players that objectively don’t develop their pieces well but somehow manage to make renegade moves that are challenging to counter…