It’s safe to say that your first racing experience probably wasn’t in the Tour de France. It was likely when you were a kid, on a bike with training wheels. Training wheels are those little devices that help keep you balanced while you’re learning, and largely allow you to immerse yourself in the learning process. After all, would it be so bad to be able to learn chess similarly, with some sort of training wheels, learning without pressure, with competition off the table? Read through virtually any chess forum online and you’ll be inundated, rather immediately, with a barrage of opinions against computer opponents. They play too stiffly, they produce inhuman moves, they make forced, silly mistakes, or lastly, they don’t adjust to the user’s skill level. Certainly, most chess bots fit this description. But there are also a lot of advantages to play chess against computer, which far outweigh these shortcomings.
Advantages of Playing vs. a Computer
Specific Practice
Think of a soccer team working on penalty kicks in practice, purely to improve their penalty kicks. Similarly, playing chess against a computer allows you to focus on your exact objective. Do you want to study the Sicilian Defence? No problem, you can sit your computer opponent down and have it play it over and over. Are you tired of losing equal rook endgames? Set up a variety of rook endgame positions and just start hammering the drills.
Select your Time Control
You could be playing a game of chess against a street hustler and wishing you could pause the game to take some time to think about that position. With a computer, you can do just that. On the computer, the game will patiently wait for you to observe the board and consider relevant moves, knowing it will not add to the pressure of a time limit; you can look at many moves. Most people tend not to take the time in their endgames; many will rush through them as they are always low on time. For those few times you are low on time, most people prefer the time of a blitz game to a slow correspondence game. Playing against a computer gives me a mix between the two..
Having A Beginner’s Mind
Playing against a human opponent, you are bound to have emotions, anger at making blunders, and competitiveness to win. From personal experience, these thoughts, while they can be addicting in a sense, frustrate a learning mindset. When you make an error, you are focused more on the dread of losing, not on learning from it. And after the game, while learning from your game will take time, you just want to play again, and win this time. Against the computer, you can eliminate the majority of the emotions, and you can focus on getting better.
Learning-Friendly
There are times, you do not mind a little help to make the most of your learning. Make a stupid blunder that costs an otherwise interesting game? Just take back the move and learn from it. The computer can also make suggestions to help you learn. As a beginner learning openings, you often want an opening manual next to you to help you through that jungle, and while in human competitive play, this would be an unfair advantage; there is no such concern with the computer.
Instant Feedback
What a wonderful opportunity is available while playing against computers: instant feedback after each move. Can you picture learning the piano with earplugs, only knowing if you played incorrectly by the reaction of the audience? That is similar to how it is to learn chess today. Quick, accurate feedback and error correction are fundamental to the brain’s learning process, but it isn’t possible when playing chess against computer humans, at least for the time being. This is where computers are able to change that.
Practice Incognito
Another nice benefit of practising against the computer is the ability to work on openings and themes without anyone knowing about it.
