It should be noted that Stockfish chess heavily prunes its searches because it too plays a "loser's game". Instead of searching for the best move, Stockfish narrows its search and simply tries to prove that the move it does pick "isn't bad".
Ameatur level Chess is about figuring out a good "trick": a powerful pin or maybe a fork that the opponent didn't see. So low-level chess is a "winner's game".
High-level chess, at least computer chess, is more about making fewer mistakes than the opponent.
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Bogey Golf is another one. Playing for +18 leads to a score of ~88 after a round of golf, solid for an amateur. Not good enough for the pro-leagues. You get onto the green in 3-shots and only have 2-putts.
Pro-players of course take big, aggressive hits. Tiger Woods in his hayday would get onto the green in just 1-shot (throwing out his back and knee, it certainly wasn't a healthy swing). But a typical player who tried to hit that hard would end up missing their shots, whiffing the ball, or just straight up sending the ball out of bounds.
A common saying in chess is that the winner is the person who made the second to last mistake.
However, having played quite a bit against stockfish it certainly doesn't feel like that. It just crushes you, mercilessly and swiftly no matter what you do.
Well, Stockfish probably exhaustively checks all moves ~4 or 5 ply forward.
But the move that Stockfish picks has been searched to depth 30 or even 50, depending on how easy or hard the position is. Its infeasible to actually search all possibilities, but Stockfish basically is searching "deep", to ensure that most obvious tactical patterns are accounted for (orderings of captures and stuff of that nature)
That's roughly the "shape" of Stockfish's search tree. Super deep for the moves it picks, but very shallow on its exhaustive search.
Ameatur level Chess is about figuring out a good "trick": a powerful pin or maybe a fork that the opponent didn't see. So low-level chess is a "winner's game".
High-level chess, at least computer chess, is more about making fewer mistakes than the opponent.
---------
Bogey Golf is another one. Playing for +18 leads to a score of ~88 after a round of golf, solid for an amateur. Not good enough for the pro-leagues. You get onto the green in 3-shots and only have 2-putts.
Pro-players of course take big, aggressive hits. Tiger Woods in his hayday would get onto the green in just 1-shot (throwing out his back and knee, it certainly wasn't a healthy swing). But a typical player who tried to hit that hard would end up missing their shots, whiffing the ball, or just straight up sending the ball out of bounds.