Tuesday, January 29, 2008

TPS Report #14

Been experiencing an ebb in my chess enthusiasm lately, partly because the seasonal viruses knocked me flat on my back for a while. Partly because observing some poor sportsmanship has bummed me out about some chess players. I wrote some stuff about sportsmanship, but am reluctant to publish for fear that I'll become known as some kind of moralista and also for the negative repercussions of airing others' dirty laundry.

Annotated my most recent loss.

Tried to work on tactics at Chess Tempo with the following result:



I don't drink or bang my head on the wall, but I occasionally have this fear that all my chess brain cells are jumping off a cliff somewhere in my head. There's some new research on bombarding the head with infrared radiation leading to new growth of brain cells. Perhaps they'll have that perfected in a decade or two when I might need it.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Ernie, everyone experiences an ebb, I wouldn't worry about it.

I hope you're not referring to Brandt and Shoemaker the other day with regards to sportsmanship.

If...If you are, then you have it all wrong. Barry and I are rivals and we always have these heated discussions. Then we come back to the board like nothing ever happened. Neither one of us takes it personally.

I know for a fact that in most variations of the King's Indian Defense, the light-squared Bishop belongs on the "e2" square. It happens in the "Four Pawns Attack"; in the "Borisenko-Averbakh Line"; in the "Classical Variation." It's on "g2" in the "Fianchetto Variation." But it is seldom on "d3" as Barry believes.

In fact, you find it on "d3" in the Queen Pawn Openings that do not strive for the advantage, but just a playable game, i.e., the Colle System, the Stonewall Attack, the Trompovsky, etc.

Barry plays these lines and is confused. When he got home, he probably realized it right away.

When we play this Thursday, it will be a battle as usual, but none of us take it personally.

The real problem is that we have so many "passive" individuals at the club (maybe they didn't stand up for themselves on the playground, I don't know what happened to them) that they cannot discern the false conflicts from the real conflicts.

At any rate, I haven't noticed any poor sportsmanship at the club. The only thing I've noticed is that the club is significantly stronger than it has been in the past. It seems rather sudden, but for some reason, it has happened.

Robert Pearson said...

Since I haven't been to the club very much lately I must have missed something interesting--I have an interest in sportsmanship issues in chess, maybe you can share what happened privately.

It seems to me you're going through a rebuilding of your game and that there is always a period before results catch up with work--at least you're considering double bishop sacs by move 6! That's a good sign...

Drinking a moderate amount is good for you, and I highly recommend the Bombay Sapphire Martini, but only one per day. :)

BTW, I lost to Soltani in our make-up game Sunday, it's posted at my blogspot.

See you Thursday!

chessboozer said...

Hi Ernie,
I know you update the Reno Chess Club website on your own time and I am not trying to criticize. Just to let you know the results page, particularly for Class A is scrambled, some peoples ratings are on the same column as other peoples first round results etc.