Chess Gambling
Chess Betting Odds. View all available outright and match odds, plus get news, tips, free bets and money-back offers. All you need to bet. You are gambling on a chess tournament with three matches taking place: Alexey VS Maha Oscar VS Mahnoor Tyler VS Parker All players are equally matched, so the probability of any player winning a match is 1/2. You must guess which player will win cach match. It costs you $10 to play, with prizes as follows:. Jan 14, 2016 Chess and tables were also popular among the lower classes – indenture records for the reign of Henry VI show that apprentices were forbidden from ‘frequent(ing) the tavern or play(ing) at dice or chess’ Gambling on dice. We turn now to the most popular Tudor game of all – gambling on dice. Jun 16, 2015 Chess is a game, just like card based games, or backgammon. On their own they're not 'gambling games' but people have played, and still play for money over these games. Chess is probably used for gambling the least. The gambling can happen not just between players, but between observers, which is called chess hustling.
One of America’s most famous chess games took place at the 2007 World Series of Poker in a luxury Las Vegas house. Greg Shahade, my brother, played chess against Tom “durrrr” Dwan for $50,000. Greg, an international chess master, played without one of his rooks (the most powerful piece aside from the queen) to compensate for his skill edge. David “raptor” Benefield looked on, with a heavy financial stake in the outcome.
After winning the match easily, Greg was the envy of the chess world. He later called the experience “surreal, as I remember my younger days of playing anything from $2-$10 per game, and being extremely happy to win fifty dollars from playing chess.” Greg was the natural choice to freeroll off the intersection of chess and nosebleed prop-betting. A SuperNova on PokerStars, known as “curtains” online, Greg secured title sponsorship from PokerStars for his pet project, the U.S. Chess League. The USCL is a yearly team competition of the top grandmasters and champions from 16 of the strongest American chess cities.
As the U.S. Chess League enters its seventh year with PokerStars, a federal court in Brooklyn recently declared that poker is a skill game. The New York Times reported, “In a ruling that goes to the heart of what it means to play poker, Judge Jack B. Weinstein…[reasoned that] poker is more of a game of skill than a game of chance.” The decision compared poker to chess in several instances, and used 415 million PokerStars hands from April 2010 to March 2011 to prove that given a large enough sample, skill checkmates luck.
More and more poker players have been asking me about chess lately, how to improve, and how to reasonably gamble on the game. The chess world is structured around a ranking system (ELO) that leaves little room for error and is published next to a player’s name at every tournament, as if lifetime wins and losses were taped onto a poker player’s forehead. A chess player rarely agrees to play for serious money against a higher rated player. Indeed, the night before the WSOP main event, a poker pro rated about 2100 asked me (I’m 2322) to play a blitz match. The stakes he proposed? $5 a game — a full .05 percent of the tournament we’d be playing the next afternoon!
To give you an idea of some chess-poker player ratings, Greg estimated Dwan’s strength at 1000, while Greg holds an international rating of 2467. Chess prodigy-turned poker pro Jeff Sarwer was rated 1837 when he stopped playing and received a provisional rating of 2300 after resurfacing a few years ago in a rapid tournament in Poland. Dan Smith, EPT Barcelona high roller champ (and many other 2012 tournaments), is 2084. U.S. Chess Champion Hikaru Nakamura, who played in the 2011 WSOP is rated 2783, #5 in the world.
But as durrrr, curtains and raptor illustrated so dramatically, just because it’s hard to gamble on chess, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Welcome to the ultimate degenerate’s guide to chess:
1. Brother, Can You Spare a Bishop?
As in the Shahade-Dwan game, you can alter the number of pieces each player starts with to handicap a chess game. The pawn is used to scale the rest of the army and set at one point. The knight and bishop are three points each, the rook is five points and the queen is nine points. Piece odds are best used for extreme skill discrepancies like a beginner versus a seasoned tournament player.
2. Dude, Where’s My Clock?
Most chess players use a double-sided clock for every game — when you are thinking, your time dwindles down. After you make a move you hit a button that switches the ticking pressure to your opponent. If you run out of time, you lose the game. Time limits range from a casual “blitz” game, in which each side has five minutes or less to a match for the World Championship, when each player has hours.
Players can also start with different amounts of time, ideally tweaked so that a stronger player loses on time as often as he checkmates. At the 2011 WSOP, the aforementioned grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura and a strong chess amateur and poker pro, Brandon Alan Lee, agreed to play a high-stakes blitz match. Brandon would receive two and a half minutes a game to Hikaru’s 30 seconds. Hikaru told me he was optimistic about his chances, but neither of us had a chess set or clock.
So I tweeted, “Need chess board and clock ASAP for some high stakes #wsop #chess action involving world #6 @GMHikaru.” We soon got a reply that led us to the Amazon room, which led us to the Rio parking lot, which led us to a van stuffed to the roof with boxes and bags. The generous soul we interrupted deep in a pot-limit Omaha bracelet event had packed all his belongings in his van soon after Black Friday to save money while chasing a few more dreams at the WSOP. We searched for what felt like hours in the desert sun and amidst socks and VHS tapes, finally located the clock and set. Finding the clock turned out to be harder than the match. Hikaru won the first few games so convincingly that he gamely accepted a buy-out.
3. Roulette Chess
Combining chess with chance dates back to ancient precursors, in which the throw of a die determined which piece a player could move. I created a roulette chess wheel with curator and artist Larry List for a 2009 exhibition, “Chance Aesthetics” at the Kemper Art Museum in Saint Louis. The wheel incorporates graphics inspired by chess master and artist Marcel Duchamp. It is also a playable game. Before each move, you spin the wheel to determine which piece you can move — most spokes have two choices on them and the pieces are distributed to promote game flow. Like guessing whether a flop is red or black, the wheel can also be used for less skill-oriented side bets. My advice? Always bet on the bishop.
4. Heads-up Poker Chess
A pure way to combine chess and poker is a chess match with poker chips at stake on each game. For instance, we could play ten games of chess with 100 poker chips for the winner of each game. If I win the match 6-4, we’d go onto a heads-up poker match with me starting with 600 chips and you with 400. This system can be modified to include multiple players and to increase the weight of either poker or chess.
5. Chinese Poker Chess
I ironed out the rules of Chinese poker chess at this year’s WSOP. The two games merge well. Both can easily be played head to head on a small table and it makes sense to reward players who set their Chinese hands quickly. The hybrid starts with two-player Chinese poker. Whoever sets her hand first hits the other player’s clock. The slower player must set his hands before he makes his first chess move, while his clock is ticking down. The game works best with super-fast time controls aka “bullet”, because otherwise it skews too heavily in favor of chess skill. I was usually slower than my opponents at Chinese, but better at chess.
So we’d play one minute games and as I thought an extra 20 to 30 seconds on my settings, I’d have to win the chess game in about 30 seconds. The chess game is worth three points; beating your opponent in Chinese is worth two points; sweeping Chinese is four. You get a bonus point for sweeping the Chinese AND winning the chess game.
I usually played this hybrid with Chinese low (five-card high hand in the back, five-card low hand in the middle and three-card high hand in the front) but it could be played with Chinese high, or even 17 (five-card high hand, five-card low hand, four-card Badugi hand and a three-card high hand.) We could even merge chess with the latest Open Face Chinese craze, but isn’t open-face enough like chess already?
Try one out yourself. Even without $50,000 at stake, you may find your brain straining in a way that reminds you of your favorite skill game.
Jennifer Shahade is a two-time U.S. Women’s chess champion, author and editor of uschess.org/clo. She writes for PokerStarsWomen, produces videos at pokerfairytale.com and YouTube.com/XChessChamps and is a member of the Grindettes. Find out more on jennifershahade.com and follow at twitter.com/jenshahade.
Chess Gambling Site
Short Answer:
Real money chess doesn’t work well online because of the difficulty in enforcing the rules of the game. Even inexpensive chess programs can be used to simulate expert levels of play. All one has to do is load up a copy of any decent chess simulator and input the opponent’s moves into that program. This basically leaves the opponent playing against an expert-level computer.
But, you can play chess online for free with relatively little trouble. There are plenty of chess sites that host tournaments and keep track of your rankings online. No real money is involved, but these sites do offer a lot in the way of practice, training material, socializing and competition for bragging rights.
These are the three most popular multiplayer chess sites, ranked in order of their popularity and prestige:
There are a lot of other chess sites on the internet, but these are generally recognized as the best for serious students of the game. If you do a little research, you’ll see that most chess aficionados respect these sites the most.
Long Answer:
Chess is one of my longtime favorite games. The strategy implications are so deep that you can spend a lifetime mastering the game. In chess, there is no hidden information other than the intentions of your opponent. There are no hidden cards, chance outcomes based on dice or anything of that nature. Everything you need sits before you on the board in plain sight.
People do play chess for real money. It is inevitable that a game as competitive as chess will involve money to some degree. Chess tournaments around the world give out significant prizes to the winners. Private games often involve wagers on the outcome.
But unfortunately, real money chess does not translate well to the internet. The biggest problem with online chess is that it is too easy to get help with outside programs. There is no easy way around this so there is not a single place on the internet where you can play chess for any significant money.
Cheating at Online Chess
Win Money Playing Chess
You know how above I said that all the information you need in chess is available right in front of you on the board? Well, that is the game’s greatest downfall when it comes to the internet. Computer programmers have already solved the game of chess.
Even simple games like Chessmaster are capable of playing at extremely high levels. Set Chessmaster to the highest difficulty level and you’ll have a digital opponent who can beat all but the most elite chess players.
This makes it all too easy to cheat at chess online. All you have to do is fire up a second computer, turn on Chessmaster, set it to the hardest difficulty setting and then input all of your opponent’s moves to the game. The computer will respond with the most strategically correct move and you can then mimic those moves when playing against other people online.
Right now, we have no solution for that problem. Some websites in the past have required you to install software that prevents outside programs from running on your computer. The problem with that is you can just use a different computer to run a chess program.
Chess Gambling Online
The only way you can play chess with other people and know for sure that they aren’t cheating is to play those people in person. Cheating isn’t much of a problem at free chess sites because most of the people there are serious students of the game. But if you add money to the mix, the incentive to cheat suddenly becomes powerful.
So for now, it’s not realistic to play chess online for real money. Gamecolony.com does have real money games and a section devoted to chess, but I wouldn’t recommend going that route. The only possible method of detecting cheaters is to watch for players who make strategically perfect decisions every time. In that case, you are relying on the site’s security department to keep everything on the up-and-up.
Personally, I stay away from real money chess online. The risks of cheating are too real to make it worthwhile. And even if the risk of cheating doesn’t concern you, it surely concerns enough other people that you’ll have a hard time finding matches and making any decent money.
The Alternative
If you have an interest in real money online chess, you might want to try poker instead. Poker is a deeply strategic game and you can play online for as much or as little money as you want. Skilled players do make a lot of money playing online.
Cheating isn’t nearly as problematic for poker because there is enough hidden information that computers cannot effectively solve the game. Every person plays poker differently + you play against multiple opponents at a time. I’ve heard of people setting up bots to play poker, but those bots are ineffective in comparison to just learning how to play a smart game.
Poker does have an element of chance in the short run, but it is still a skill-based game. The best poker players consistently make money with poker. I can tell you this from firsthand experience. I played poker all through college and made enough money to pay off my student loans and live comfortably.
Give poker a shot. There is enough strategy in this game that you can spend a lifetime improving your skills. Some of the best poker players in the world earn millions of dollars a year at the tables. Sure, you’ll have bad days where the cards seem to always fall in favor of your opponents but over the long run, skilled players win.
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