Thinking about a conversation I was having with an acquaintance years ago. He was a friend of a friend and we were talking about food. I forget the exact phrasing but I brought up loving avocados. He said “what’s that?” I was a bit surprised and explained. He responded “OH thats crazy I thought that was one of those made up words”. The statement was like a flashbang I had to contemplate for a few minutes. PERSONAL STORIES ONLY, DO NOT INCLUDE A STATEMENT FROM A CELEBRITY OR POLITICIAN.
To be fair there’s several ‘types’ of Chess, like Bullet, Blitz, Rapid, etc…, and it’s not uncommon for high-level players to specialize in some of them. But given that they didn’t know what a GM is they probably didn’t know that either.
There’s also chess960, where the positions of the pieces are randomized (with constraints). I like it because it removes memorization of positions as a factor.
That’s interesting, one of the reasons why I don’t like chess at all is that it’s usually a memory game so you either need to memorize lots of plays or you will always lose to someone who has.
It starts out with a handful of standard movements which you have memorized, but the interesting part of the match isn’t about memory at all.