Soapstone's Studio

Endgame Caveat #5: Space Invaders

2012-01-12T16:28:00.000-08:00

Researching for this post, I came across this 80's music video at YouTube. Cross-links at YouTube eventually led me to this free online Space Invaders game.

The Lucena position is an intermediate endgame position involving a non-rook pawn on its 5th rank, with the defender's king cut off from the queening square, generally precluding a Philidor defense.

The first caveat is that just because your king is cut off doesn't mean that the Lucena is inexorable. If Black doesn't pay attention, White could try 1. Ke2 Rf7? 2. Rf1!. Exchanging rooks allows a drawn pawn ending. If the Black rook moves away from the f-file, the White King crosses to g1 and White can choose either the Philidor (camp the rook on a3 until the pawn reaches g3, then go to a8 and harass the Black King from behind) or even the First Rank defense against a rook pawn or a knight pawn (just shuffle the rook back and forth from a1 to f1).

Black to play wins starting with 1... Kh4 2. Rh1+ Kg3 3. Rg1+ Kh3 4. Rh1+ Kg2 driving the rook away. After Rh6

Now 5... g3 6. Rg6 Kh2 7. Rh6+ Kg1 8. Rg6 g2 9. Rg7 sets up Lucena

Standard Lucena continues with 9... Re8+ 10. Kd2 Re5 11. Rg8 Kf2 12. Rf8+ Kg3 13. Rg8+ Kf3 14. Rf8+ Kg4 15. Rg8+ Rg5

The Space Invader will land at g1, spelling doom for the White King. Notice that the White King on d2 is too far after 16. Rxg5+ Kxg5 17. Ke2. From the previous diagram, had Black proceeded with 9... Rf5 10. Rg8 Kh2 11. Rh8+ Kg3 12. Rg8+ Kh3 13. Rh8+ Kg4 14. Rg8+ Rg5? 15. Rxg5+ Kxg5 16. Kf2 would be a draw.

Whew! So that's the background. From the first diagram, what if we move Black's King and Pawn back one step?

1... Kh5 2. Rh1+ Kg4 3. Rg1+ Kh4 4. Rh1+ Kg3 5. Rg1+ Kh4. Black's attempt to land the Space Invader is repelled because he can't protect the pawn at g5 while driving the rook away as he did before. The crucial thing is that the White Rook maintains distance from the Black King and Pawn. If White plays Rg2 to stall at any point, then he may be lost again. e.g. 1... Rf7 2. Rg2? Kh5! 3 Rh2+ Kg4 4. Rg2+ Kh4 5. Rh2+ Kg3 and the rook has to run, giving Black time to get into the Lucena groove with g4. Even spotting Black another file won't always give him the win.

As long as White keeps his king in the red zone and his rook at g1, he should be able to draw using the Space Invaders defense. One subtlety is that with White to move or a Black finesse, 1...Re7 2. Kd2? is losing. 2... Re5! protects g5 and creates enough forward momentum to let the pawn squeak to g4. 3. Kd3 (second thoughts?) Kf5! 4. Kd4 (4. Rf1+ Kg4 5. Rg1+ (5. Kd4 Ra5) Kf3 6. Rf1+ Kg2) Re4+ 5. Kd3 and either 5... g4 or 5... Rf4 stay on track toward Lucena.

There is still some trickiness to deal with. After 5... g4 6. Rf1+ Rf4 7. Rg1 Kg5 8. Ke2 threatens the aforementioned drawing maneuver, but calmly advancing 8... Kh4 removes the danger of Rf1. e.g. 9. Rf1 Rxf1 10. Kxf1 Kh3. After the trickier 5... Rf4 6. Ke2 g4! is the lone winning move followed by 7. Rf1 g3! another lone winner. Game Over, Man!

A long time ago, I read Jeremy Silman's When a Philidor Position Goes Bad. But missing so many RPvR endgames at ChessTempo continues to reinforce that it's not all just Lucena and Philidor.

The Karate Kid

2012-01-08T10:56:00.000-08:00

When he made Daniel Russo wax his cars, paint his fence, paint his house, and sand his floors, Mr. Miyagi was secretly training him, not to be a slave, but to have strength and muscle memory to be able to block all kinds of attacks. This week, I overheard a martial arts instructor talk about the stages of training the other day. She highlighted these four:

Unconscious Incompetence - You have no idea what you're doing right or wrong.
Conscious Incompetence - You know what you're doing wrong but can't fix it.
Conscious Competence - You are able to do things right if you think about it.
Unconscious Competence - You do things right without thinking about it.

A lot chess training is pattern recognition and I agree it is important. If you know the beginning landmarks of all the checkmate patterns, then your analysis tree doesn't have to re-invent those checkmates every time you see them, especially when those set-ups show up at the end of your own analysis horizons. Wheels need not be reinvented every time. But when you get to the state of unconscious competence, it's hard to trust that stranger upstairs when you don't even know his name or party affiliation.

Perhaps this is a totally different part of chess competence, but when I analyzed a postmortem with future world champion Steven Zierk, I was dumbfounded at how quickly he could snap through variations to get to the truth about a line. I have difficulty buying into the oft-held forth de Groot assertion that around the expert-master level, the depth of analysis is not different, but the intuition and experience of evaluating different positions is where the difference lies. Arthur C. Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Well, Zierk was so advanced, I thought I was watching wizardry. He seemed to be able to find a 10-ply refutation with ease. That kind of concrete ability I think is at least as valuable as a 9-ply calculating ability with a 1-ply correct intuition.

I listened to the entirety of Malcolm Gladwell's audiobook Blink. Here's an article about intuition pertaining to emergency room physicians that briefly mentions de Groot and some research gender-typing chickens. They used the term "sexing chickens", but I prefer gender-typing as a safer term. :)

Maybe I'm stubborn and mistrustful of the non-concrete. Or maybe de Groot's analysis doesn't even apply if I'm a Class A player masquerading as an Expert. Until I'm able to correctly verbalize or at least demonstrate deep-ply understanding of a complex tactic or position, I won't be focusing on my intuition to get me to the truth. I guess I'll be stuck at training stage 3 for a while trying for conscious depth and accuracy.

A Song of Ice and Fire

2012-01-05T17:09:00.000-08:00

I spent most of my leisure time during the holidays reading A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. This is more or less a review with a bunch of quotes at the bottom. It's probable that I'll give away some ***SPOILERS BELOW***, so there's your warning.

Where to begin? It's difficult to summarize a work of such grand scope. Let's start on the positive. George R. R. Martin is a great writer. If you took the story-telling gifts of William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and J. R. R. Tolkein and rolled them all into one person, George R. R. Martin might be that person. He has a vivid style, flowery, but not excessively so. He has great instincts for pacing such that during climactic moments, the flowery words drop away and things happen in a rush. He has certain vocabulary mannerisms that seem very British ("arse") and some that seem a part of his invented fantasy universe ("Ser" instead of "Sir", "septs" instead of "churches", "sellswords" instead of "mercenaries"). There are also character mannerisms (every bearded character dribbles while drinking wine) and settings mannerisms (how many ways can you describe bone-numbing cold?) that mark his style. He also revisits about 10-15 themes such as "Winter is coming" (prudence) and "A Lannister always pays his debts" (monetary honor) that act as touchstones through the long tracts of pages.

The series is about a struggle to rule Westeros, a land of pre-gunpowder medieval chivalry, rival lordships, simmering feuds, legendary heroes, and ancient castles. Magic and mythical monsters seem extinct, although the very first chapter sets the tone for the return of an ancient inhuman evil. Martin's world includes a continent beyond the Narrow Sea that allows him to extend his tale beyond Western European culture into exotic Eastern cultures, such that if Scheherezade were an actual person, I would include her among Martin's inner muses. Most of the first book lays out the missteps and opening salvos of a war that engulfs a noble family of seven called the Starks. But the land is filled with carnivorous rivals: Lannisters, Targaryens, and Baratheons (oh my!). Against the backdrop of the rebirth of myth and magic, Martin weaves a Gordian knot of plots and murder mysteries among seven powerful families trying to grab the brass ring, or in this case an Iron Throne. Martin's characters run the gamut between stupid to genius, saintly to demonic, vivacious to listless and at least for the characters he concentrates on, they jump out from the page, warts and all. And just like in Shakespeare's tragedies, main characters die.

The deaths of main characters were jarring to me, especially since I hang on to childhood notions of "happily ever after". I hated the ending of Oscar-winning "Million Dollar Baby" and judging by the surplus DVD bin, so did much of America. But I was able to forgive Martin and keep turning the pages in hopes that enough of my favorite characters survive to justify my investment in their causes. But I now realize that perhaps Martin had little choice to create real danger and surprise. When I read the David Eddings' Belgariad (Pawn of Prophecy, Queen of Sorcery, Magician's Gambit, Castle of Wizardry, and Enchanter's End Game) or many of Asimov's works, I felt somewhat bored because their protagonists intelligently hatched plans, and executed them, perhaps improvising a little when things go wrong. Danger to main characters seems only a distant possibility. Martin actually gives his villains the elements of surprise, initiative, intelligence, and victory. Good guys haven't always won so far and perhaps I will grudgingly admit that the story experience has been richer for it.

This series is not for the faint of heart. George R. R. Martin originally started out in 1995 making a trilogy, but like the horizon, the final book keeps moving away, until now he estimates the final act to be book seven. He has only published the first five so far. The reading is voluminous. To finish book five, you have to read about 4,000 pages. Compare that to J. R. R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings at 1,200 pages. There is a cast of thousands and I am not exaggerating too much here. The books have appendices that show family trees out to four or five generations of semi-significant characters plus perhaps thirty minor families. There are so many names that it is almost a necessity to consult A Wiki of Ice and Fire to keep from being hopelessly lost in the crowd. The content of both the book and the first season on HBO I would definitely rate at NC-17. Martin does not shrink from describing the horrors of war including amputations and maimings, gang rapes, infanticide, and torture. He is also not one to gloss over consensual sexual situations; sex sells. But there is at least one child rape that I can think of and some tangential references to an underage sex trade from which I have some trouble withholding Victorian judgment. It does add realism and cultural richness to Martin's world in a time of war that such ugliness is not covered up.

Martin also tackles weighty issues within his fiction framework using a realistic and sometimes satirical viewpoint. In this endeavor, he follows Mark Twain whose Huckleberry Finn focuses on slavery and whose A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court take on chivalry. Knights follow codes of honor for each other, but treat the common folk as less than dirt. Slaves are not just servile robots, but human beings trying to survive through obsequiousness and insidious rebellion and the little resources that they can muster. One writer took Martin's work as a commentary on statecraft, concluding that Martin seems to advocate use of soft power.

In summary, the 4,000 plus pages of "A Song of Ice and Fire" are well worth the slog. For chess players, there are references to the "Game of Thrones" in the first three books. In book five, a game similar to chess named cyvasse makes its appearance. The plots to win the throne include of course the defeat of other kings with the death of the losing king the standard consequence. There's nothing like a tale of regicide to get a chess player's blood flowing. The characters in the first book roughly map out to a group of chess pieces:

King:	King Robert Baratheon
Queen:	Queen Cirsei Lannister
Queen's Bishop:	Lord Varys - "The Spider"
King's Bishop:	Lord Petyr Baelish - "Littlefinger"
King's Knight:	Ser Barristan Selmy - "Barristan The Bold"
Queen's Knight:	Ser Jaime Lannister - "The Lion of Lannister"
Queen's Rook:	Lord John Arryn
King's Rook:	Lord Eddard Stark
Pawns:	Robb Stark, Brandon Stark, Sansa Stark, Arya Stark, Jon Snow, Joffrey Baratheon, Tommen Baratheon, Theon Greyjoy

Here are some quotes from the book that are tangentially relevant to chess.

Volume 1: A Game of Thrones
Ser Jorah Mormont: The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends. It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace. They never are.

Queen Cersei Lannister: When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.

Lord Eddard Stark: Lord Baelish, what you suggest is treason.
Lord Petyr Baelish: Only if we lose.

Volume 3: A Feast for Crows
Lord Petyr Baelish: Always keep your foes confused. If they are never certain who you are or what you want, they cannot know what you are like to do next. Sometimes the best way to baffle them is to make moves that have no purpose, or even seem to work against you. Remember that, Sansa, when you come to play the game.
Sansa Stark: What... what game?
Lord Petyr Baelish: The only game. The game of thrones.

Lord Petyr Baelish: I am tempted to say this is no game we play, daughter, but of course it is. The game of thrones.
Sansa Stark (thinking): I never asked to play. The game was too dangerous. One slip and I am dead.

Lord Petyr Baelish: I might have to remove her from the game sooner than I'd planned. Provided she does not remove herself first. In the game of thrones, even the humblest pieces can have wills of their own. Sometimes they refuse to make the moves you've planned for them. Mark that well, Alayne, It's a lesson that Cersei Lannister still has yet to learn.

Volume 5: A Dance with Dragons
Haldon Halfmaester: The day you beat me at cyvasse will be the day turtles crawl out of my arse.

"Prince Aegon," said Tyrion, "since we're both stuck aboard this boat, perhaps you will honor me with a game of cyvasse to while away the hours?"
The prince gave him a wary look. "I am sick of cyvasse."
"Sick of losing to a dwarf, you mean?"
That pricked the lad's pride, just as Tyrion had known it would. "Go fetch the board and pieces. This time I mean to smash you."

They played on deck, sitting cross-legged behind the cabin. Young Griff arrayed his army for attack, with dragon, elephants, and heavy horse up front. A young man's formation, as bold as it is foolish. He risks all for the quick kill. He let the prince have first move. Haldon stood behind them, watching the play.

When the prince reached for his dragon, Tyrion cleared his throat. "I would not do that if I were you. It is a mistake to bring your dragon out too soon." He smiled innocently. "Your father knew the dangers of being over-bold."
[..]
Smiling, he seized his dragon, flew it across the board. "I hope Your Grace will pardon me. Your king is trapped. Death in four."
The prince stared at the playing board. "My dragon..."
"...is too far away to save you. You should have moved her to the center of the battle."
"But you said..."
"I lied. Trust no one. And keep your dragon close."
Young Griff jerked to his feet and kicked over the board. Cyvasse pieces flew in all directions, bouncing and rolling across the deck of the Shy Maid. "Pick those up," the boy commanded. He may well be a Targaryen after all.
"If it please Your Grace." Tyrion got down on his hands and knees and began to crawl about the deck, gathering up pieces.

The thin man shifted an onyx elephant.
Across the cyvasse table, the man behind the alabaster army pursed his lips in disapproval. He moved his heavy horse.
"A blunder," said Tyrion. He had as well play his part. "Just so," the thin man said. He answered with his own heavy horse. A flurry of quick moves followed, until finally the thin man smiled and said, "Death, my friend."

Tyrion Lannister: I play better with a full belly and a cup of wine to hand.

Quiescence

2011-12-14T19:52:00.000-08:00

Someone once asked where I get the pictures posted here. I usually just use keywords on Google Images to find the picture of my heart's desire. I suppose I'm remiss in crediting the sources. Today's image comes from http://wallbase.cc/wallpaper/13271 where you can get a wallpaper-sized image. It's not a natural photograph, but it fulfilled two of my major criteria: a lone tree reflected in a placid lake. The thoughtful person and random birds were a bonus as was the general grayscale dreariness.

This blog has been frozen, reflecting a coldness I've had toward chess for an extended period. I keep thinking Caissa's absence might make my heart grow fonder, but prolonged estrangement seems to better follow "Out of sight, out of mind." Have I forgotten what it's like to have fun playing chess? The rush of solving a problem, the triumph of victory, the mystery of Zoroastrian symbolism. The siren's song is faint. Sometimes, I visit ChessTempo to test my mind against the middlegame and endgame puzzles, but sometimes it makes me fall asleep at my computer or prompts me to curse my failings. My blogroll seem similarly inactive these days, most surprisingly Castling Queenside, but I still click over to the three who seem at least somewhat active. Temposchlucker took a summer hiatus but seems back to the tantalizing world of trying to organize the cognitive hash that we amateurs call our chess thinking. I tried to add my two cents, but he shot me down with a dismissive "Nope!"

My attitudes towards chess are much too messy to summon the discipline of organizing my thoughts. I'm trying to get past the first few pages of Charles Hertan's Forcing Chess Moves who urges "use computer eyes." Perhaps it's too simplistic to blame mere geometry, but when I miss a problem, I tell myself that I just didn't look deep enough or wide enough. Full width-depth search is a labyrinth that only computers can hope to navigate by brute force. Perhaps we humans can only hope to cut through the thicket with concepts and patterns as our signposts. On ChessTempo's endings, I groan when I get a QP v Q problem. When I miss it, the winning move is tagged with "Win in 48 moves". As if that's humanly possible. I do see patterns in the RB v R endings now and I daresay I can get a decent percentage correct. But the RP v R endings are still quite confusing which is aggravating because it offends my delusion that knowing Lucena and Philidor are enough.

Sometimes, the move that was too lateral for my narrow mind is tantalizingly close.

I saw that Qd1+, if legal, would be checkmate, but I couldn't find Qg4 skewering the Re2. Why? Because I was too focused on not losing the queen or the rook.

And the two recent problems on Temposchlucker's blog:

Here, Tempo said I was in good company as GM Rowson couldn't see this through the thicket. But even being given Qd5+ Ke3 Qg2 c1Q Qg5+ Kmoves Qxc1, I couldn't see it all the way through. I saw Qd5+ Kc3 Qd4+ Kb3 Qa1 prevents both queening and the bishop pawn stalemate. The real problem came from Qd5+ Ke2. At no time did I even consider Qa2. Perhaps in retrospect, I could say "When there is a bishop pawn stalemate possibility, pin the pawn from the drawing corner" might be a helpful recitation to keep my sieve-like brain from dropping this lesson. "Depth and breadth," I say. "Insufficient signposts," someone else might say.

And here I missed almost everything because I had such an attachment to my evaluation that Black was in danger of one or other family check. Did I prune these variations before they even budded? Or did I have human bias? I saw that Qg5+ Kf1 Qg2+ Ke1 Qg1+ Kd2 Rd8+ Kc2 probably was going nowhere. I tried to consider Rd8 when I knew it was strong, but pruned it as soon as I thought of Nf7+ Kg8 Nxd8, forgetting that Qxf7 puts the losing ball back in White's court. So I opted for Qg5+ Kf1 Rd8 hoping that the full family check Nf7+ Kg8 would end with Nxg5 Rd1#, Qxg5 Rd1# or Nxd8 Qxc5. Never in my wildest dream did I consider Qf8+ Rxf8 Nf7+. Zwischenzug is German for "How the heck did I miss that?!"

My fear of losing material seems to be hindering many of my tactics. Vinny tells Josh, "See, he didn’t teach you how to win. He taught you how not to lose. That's nothin’ to be proud of. You’re playin’ not to lose, Josh. You’ve got to risk losing. You’ve got to risk everything. You’ve got to go to the edge of defeat! That’s where you want to be, boy. On the edge of defeat!" I'm pruning variations before they get good. Whether it's Hertan's computer eye blindness, or whatever I choose to call it, it's all discouraging. Chess isn't 100% discouraging; maybe only 75% so. One bright spot was this problem:

I was proud of myself for finding Re2+. But I didn't find it from the initial position. Only when it was one ply away did I see it. I wrap up with my own theme for the top picture: "Do not prune a variation until quiescence has been reached."

The Terminator

2011-05-18T09:07:00.000-07:00

I have never been into slasher movies, but if you replace the hockey-mask-wearing psychopath with a cyborg assassin, and throw in some time paradoxes and impending Armageddon, then I'd be popping some popcorn. TV Tropes gives The Terminator as an example of the archetype called Implacable Man.

Since his announcement on Monday that he fathered a love child about 14 years ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been all over the news.

Coincidentally, I had been reviewing a problem I had missed at ChessTempo.com. It had the following initial position. Black to play and win.

I had missed the problem on February 5, 2010 by playing Bh1. How do I know such detail? I broke down and bought a one-year Gold Premium Membership for $35. The information geek inside me couldn't resist the siren call of database drill-down to try to figure out why this game eludes me. Temposchlucker's post on the drills he was doing made me realize that I have to get back to fundamentals of tactical vision and calculation.

If you haven't tried your hand at the above diagram, then
***SPOILER ALERT***

Before the diagram, White had just won a pawn by playing the sequence:
40.Bd3xNf5 exf5
41.Qxf5

Black has impressive batteries along the a8-h1 diagonal and the a8-a1 file. Is White safe? Apparently not. The solution to the diagram begins with

41...Ra1

Of course White can't capture because it brings the Black Queen to his back rank with deadly consequences. Perhaps he can wait for escape later, but for now he can try to hunker down with

42. Qf4

The key move brings the Terminator onto the scene. (See if you can guess why I call the queen the "Terminator")

42...Qa4!
43. Qd2

White runs for cover.

Now what? You might be tempted to put the queen in a mating battery with 43...Qe4, but after 44.f3 Rxc1+ 45.Qxc1 Qxf3 46.Qc8+ Kh7 47.Qc2+ g6 48.Qd2 Qh1+ 49.Kf2 Qxh2+ 50.Ke3 50.Qxg3+ Kd4, Black has a winning endgame, but more technique will be required.

A young Alexander Ivanov, playing in I think an under-26 championship in Riga in 1980, goes for the killer move.

43...Qd4!

Black keeps advancing to unsupported positions, purposely hanging the Black Queen as if it lacked any regard for personal safety. But the Black Queen is immune to capture (44.Qxd4 Rxc1+ 45.Qd1 Rxd1#) as is the Black Rook (44.Rxa1 Qxa1+ 45.Qe1 Qxe1#)

44.Qe1

White tries one more retreat before throwing in the towel. White now has both heavy pieces on the back rank with his own battery threatening to capture Rxa1. Black plays his ace in the hole and only now goes to the a8-h1 battery. Now that g2 can't be protected by playing f3, Ivanov played 44...Qe4!, forcing resignation as the best White can do to avert checkmate is 45.Qxe4 Rxc1+ 46.Kg2 Bxe4+ a rook-down endgame with no chances.

Back at the 43rd move, I wondered what if 43.Qe3? It still protects the rook right?

43...Qd1+!
44.Qe1

All four heavy pieces are on White's back rank attacking each other!

44...Qxe1+
45.Rxe1 Rxe1#

The unstoppable Queen reminded me of the unstoppable hanging Rook in the Steinitz-Von Bardeleben "Battle of Hastings" game.

That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead. — Kyle Reese

I'll be back. — T-800

Greed

2010-12-12T15:43:00.000-08:00

"The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much."

- Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), Wall Street (1987)

"There are seven deadly sins, Captain. Gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, pride, lust, and envy."

- Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), Se7en (1995)

When the subject of the Seven Deadly sins comes up, I can remember them without too much difficulty because of the movie Se7en starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. I can picture the scene for Greed of a lawyer having died in his office trying to excise and place a pound of his flesh onto a scale.

On Saturday, Mark Madoff was found dead in his home of apparent suicide on the two-year anniversary of his father's conviction. Mark was the 46-year old eldest son of Bernard Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence for committing perhaps the largest fraud in history via a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Romans 6:23 says "For the wages of sin are death..."

Greed seemed to be the theme of the last two games I played in the Holiday Swiss. In the first, I was the beneficiary of my opponent's excess greed. For you readers, I'm giving away some of my opening secrets as this is my gambit variation of the 2...Nf6 Scandinavian when I let White hold the extra pawn and offer a second one on move 8.

It was fun being a gambiteer since I could foresee the negative consequences for my opponent giving into greed. To demonstrate that this glass-house dweller is not here just to cast stones, here is the more recent game where I was summarily punished for my own greed mixed with a little sloth for not calculating thoroughly.

So the wages of greed in chess are checkmate.

In Jonathan Rowson's book, The Seven Deadly Chess Sins, he spends some time in the Extended Preface discussing sin and theology and its relevance to chess. It's quite a good read that makes me sorry I haven't made more time for more of Rowson's writings. He enumerates the deadly chess sins as thinking, blinking, wanting, materialism, egoism, perfectionism, and looseness. Specifically, he tries to equate materialism with gluttony, to which I cried foul because I thought materialism was squarely equal to greed.

It doesn't seem fair that for the most part, avaricious computers can do well with greed and materialism because any negative repercussions are usually within their brute force calculating horizons.

"What shall it profit a man if he gains material but loses the game?"

- Caissa 16:26

Moria and Lucena

2010-11-07T21:12:00.000-08:00

From Wikipedia:
In the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, Moria (Sindarin for "Black Chasm") was the name given by the Eldar to an enormous underground complex in north-western Middle-earth, comprising a vast network of tunnels, chambers, mines and huge halls or 'mansions', that ran under and ultimately through the Misty Mountains. There, for many thousands of years, lived the Dwarf clan known as the Longbeards.

From Baby-Names-Meanings.net:
Lucena - Illumination. Light. Mythological Roman Goddess of Childbirth and Giver of First Light to Newborns. Also Refers to Mary As Lady of the Light.

Speak, friend, and enter. The magic word to open the door into rook endgames is Lucena, which is actually a class of positions with material of King, Rook, and Pawn against King and Rook.

The Pawn must be a non-rook pawn advanced to its seventh rank. The attacking king stands on the queening square of its own pawn. The attacking rook cuts off the defending king from the pawn by one file (e.g. pawn-file-king). The defending rook hinders the escape of the attacking king from the queening square.

The winning maneuver begins with a check from the attacking rook to create some breathing room for both the king and the pawn.
1.Re1+
If 1...Kf6, then 2.Kf8 and g8=Q on the next move. Note that if Black tries to checkmate with 2...Ra2 3.g8=Q Ra8+, 4.Re8 is conveniently available. If 1...Kd6, White may have to deal with a counterattacking king after 2.Re4 Kd5, but 3.Rg4 should win. So the generic case is
1...Kd7

Now comes the key move of the Lucena position.
2.Re4

The purpose of the move is to provide cover for the White King who must dodge a series of checks from the Black Rook. The White Rook will block the check just as the White King disconnects itself from defense of the pawn on g7. Hooper and Whyld's Oxford Companion to Chess (1992) attributed the phrase "building a bridge" to Aron Nimzowitsch.

Now, a typical sequence of moves would be:
2...Rh1
3.Kf7 Rf1+
4.Kg6 Rg1+
5.Kf6 Rf1+
6.Kg5 Rg1+
7.Rg4

As the attacking rook intercedes in this bridge-building maneuver, my mind drifts to the Lord of the Rings scene where the Fellowship of the Ring is running from the Balrog found in Moria. His fellows having safely crossed the Bridge of Khazad-Dum, Gandalf in the middle of the bridge turns to face the Balrog and shouts:

You cannot pass! I am the servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor. The dark fire will not avail you, Flame of Udun! Go back to the shadow!

You shall not pass!

Then Gandalf sunders the Bridge and the Balrog falls, but pulls Gandalf down with his whip. To the Fellowship, Gandalf's last words are, "Fly, you fools!"

It is not until the return of Gandalf the White in the Two Towers are we told what happened.

"[We fell] through fire and water. From the lowest dungeon to the highest peak I fought him, the Balrog of Morgoth. Until at last, I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin upon the mountainside. Darkness took me and I strayed out of thought and time. Stars wheeled overhead and every day was as long as a life-age of the earth. But it was not the end. I felt life in me again. I've been sent back until my task is done."

You can watch the epic battle here.

If Black chose to exchange rooks
7...Rxg4+
8.Kxg4
it would look as if Gandalf (the White Rook) and the Balrog (the Black Rook) fell into the abyss and disappeared, leaving the diminuitive Ringbearer to reach the queening square and win the battle for Middle Earth. Note that because of the first check in the variation, the Black King is separated enough from g8 that he cannot prevent queening.
8...Ke7
9.g8=Q

As useful as Lucena would seem, I have not actually used it in a tournament game. Of 425 tournament games I have played since 1991, zero have ended in a Lucena position. Three have ended in Philidor type draws. My other heavily Tolkeinized post parallels the Battle of Helm's Deep.

Snowbirds and Cold Turkeys

2010-11-04T00:15:00.000-07:00

For the third year in a row, my chess activity has gone into a seasonal lull. Except for occasionally skimming Dana Mackenzie's blog, I almost quit chess cold turkey. No blitz servers, no tactical servers, no books, no games, no engines. Hardly even any visits to the club since about late March. I think I played two skittles games in August. Period. There's a pattern developing: I played no tournament games in the months of June through October in both 2009 and 2008.

I had been doing a lot more computer programming primarily because of a career change. Information technology is mostly the transformation of one type of data into another. When I was young I used to try to dam up the gutter water with rocks or twigs or sand, perhaps to control the flow of water. Information is like a creek that keeps flowing and changing course. It's essence remains information, yet its pattern morphs in and out of recognition. Logic governs the 64-bit world as it does the 64-square world. IT problems seem less bounded and more amenable to creativity and sheer improvisational hacking, but there is still the search for the ideal solution, the best move. Programming ideals include speed, effectiveness, efficiency, scalability, object orientation, reusability, readability, abstraction, portability, maintainability, reliability, accuracy and freedom from bugs. The passion for chess that I used to feel seems to have translated directly into a passion for information technology.

Back in sixth grade, I tied for second in the individual state chess championship. But in seventh grade, I discovered the Atari 800 computer and BASIC and when the Computer Chess beat me handily on level 3, I pretty much gave up chess for eight years until junior year in college when I found out that one could study books about chess. My adult tournament career began in 1991 and went strong until career and family brought tournament chess to a halt between 1998 and 2002. There were short stints in 1999 and 2001 when I was crazy deep in programming, but chess came back strong from 2003 to 2006. The last four years have been a struggle against plateaus and valleys of strength and enthusiasm.

I was a professional programmer for 4.5 months. I would say that being laid off was a novel experience to add to my sheltered life. My logical brain hibernated for the past six weeks, but it's starting to throw off pangs again. I'm going to try to stay away from theory and books and the search for perfection and try to concentrate on remembering the fun of chess.

Two Scents

2010-11-03T00:21:00.000-07:00

A musty-sweet decadent odor exhaled
From piles of sodden leaves sloshing beneath my feet
Rose to meet the comforting scent of wood smoke
Drifting on a chill breeze from a nearby hearth
And formed an elixir of molecular keys
That swirled within my nostrils
And unlocked a forsaken memory
Of chess battles won and lost
Within the safety of my warm den.

Chessays

2010-04-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

Back in the mid-1980s, I was preparing for college entrance examinations and/or the Advanced Placement examination in English. I read lots and lots of essays that either tested reading comprehension or served as models of good writing. Reading those essays was the single most helpful thing that improved my own writing. One essay that remained stuck in my mind was one that compared and contrasted chess and fencing. As I recalled, the writer's main point was that the dominance of chess masters over chess beginners was much greater than the dominance of fencing masters over fencing beginnners.

Over the last few years as I wrote about chess, I occasionally thought of that essay from over twenty years ago and wanted to know exactly what the writer said and how he said it. I tried in vain to find the essay on the internet. My main method of searching was to plug the terms "chess fencing SAT" into Google. My efforts were fruitless, so I decided to write my own essay partly in hopes that a reader could help me find the original. But I was handicapped because I really knew nothing about fencing other than what I read at Wikipedia. Google did help me find two good quotes about fencing:

"I consider fencing to be a great art which raises men to Knights in their thoughts and behavior. Fencing is a school of humility and develops speed, perfect control of the body, balance, beauty, and strong grace. It should be recommended to all men wanting to master their feelings and actions during their lifetime. Through this art they will think clearly and act always with style in their decisions." - Marcel Marceau in the forward to Julius Palffy-Alpar's book Sword and Masque

"Using a sword is like sex. You can't get good by practicing by yourself or with your relatives." - Jack Sparrow

Here's my effort:

-----

Essay Test Question: Compare and contrast chess and fencing.

Chess and fencing in their purest forms are one-to-one contests where the combatants employ a repertoire of discrete offenses and defenses in an attempt to outmaneuver their opponents. Both disciplines share some warlike features, but they differ in complexity and the degree to which they can be mastered.

Both chess and fencing owe their heritage to war and are some of the best examples of warlike abstractions. More than most other games, winning and losing are metaphors of life and death. Because both are played in the physical world, health and physique play their parts in the outcome, but each has a panoply of maneuvers and strategems that to a large degree push the contests into mental realms.

Fencing is played with one weapon per side, chess with thirty-two pieces per side, but fencing ultimately seems to have the greater number of variables. It has been estimated that the total number of possible moves in chess is on the order of 10^120 which is more than the number of protons (10^80) in the known universe. Even though chess has a very large space of possibilities, in a given position, the variables are largely within the chess master's ability to understand and control. Ultimately there are only 64 squares on the chessboard with quantifiable elements of space, force, and time. Also, the rules of chess are quite rigid as to what is a legal and illegal move. However, the fencing master has many real-world variables which are out of his control. Fencing includes the interplay of hundreds of unknown muscles, reflexes, angles, and material strengths. Additionally, wielders of the sword who don't fight by the "rules" conspire to reduce the fencing master's ability to control the situation. While players at tournament chess can spend an average of three minutes per move, the fencing master has only split seconds to parry and thrust.

A chess master can see an amateur coming from a mile away and can prepare. The Elo rating system predicts that Garry Kasparov, at his peak rating of 2800, has a win expectancy over an expert rated 2000 of 99%; against an adult beginner of about 1200 rating, the win expectancy increases to 99.9%. Chess thought involves a scientific process of collecting data, testing hypotheses mentally, and then acting. Preparation in chess beats improvisation and the role of luck is minimized. In Romeo and Juliet, Tybalt is usually represented as a skilled swordsman, significantly better than Romeo. But the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt illustrate that Romeo's restraint of the former and Romeo's rage against the latter were pivotal to the outcome of the duels. Third parties who hold one's arms down or players who play in blind rage do not turn the tides of chess games very often.

-----

As I looked back at this fourth paragraph, I noticed that I'd made the mistake of using a fictional example about sword fighting instead of fencing. This prompted me to consider that perhaps all these years I should have been searching for an essay on chess and swordsmanship, not chess and fencing. Using Google with "chess swordsman essay," I finally came across this:

White, Edward M., Assigning, Responding, Evaluating: A Writing Teacher’s Guide

"The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do; and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot." --Samuel Clemens

Write an essay that explains what Clemens means by his description of the "best swordsman" and the "ignorant antagonist." Relate Clemens' concept to an area about which you are well informed.

Further down on this webpage is one sentence referring to a student's essay mentioning chess that triggered my ancient recognition. I bought White's book for $6.50 + $3.99 shipping from an Amazon partner. It came in the mail today. Here is the student's chessay which scored the highest rating of 6 out of 6:

The Expert Is Always on Guard Against Checkmate

When Clemens speaks of the "best swordsman," he brings up the trained expert, the professional who has mastered the rules of the game. This expert is ready for antagonists who play by the rules. The "ignorant antagonist" stands for the untrained or rebellious outsider who reserves the right to make up his own rules. The opposition between these two ways of fighting, playing, or living applies in many different ways.

When revolutionaries break diplomatic rules by engaging in acts of terrorism, the governments affected are often "caught out" and government leaders sometimes "ended on the spot." In today's world, the superpowers ready their defense for major confrontations with other superpowers or "second best" powers, but not for isolated and unpredictable acts of terrorism such as the taking of hostages, the assassination of political figures, or the hijacking of a plane - often for personal or even crazy reasons.

On the other hand, unconventional chess players don't have the slightest chance against an expert unless these outsiders are well beyond the novice stage. The brilliant innovations in chess have nothing to do with ignorance. No expert can lose to the novice opening with rook pawns or carelessly throwing his queen into opening positions. A brilliant amateur can win at chess, where nothing can by this time be entirely new, but the innovator cannot be ignorant. However, chess is here, as elsewhere, atypical. What Clemens says does not apply in this tight, square world, so unlike the disorderly real one.

Any proverb has a basic truth but needs to be applied with care. Maybe the very best experts are those most alert to the ways unconventional moves can work. Our swordsmen in foreign relations need to be ready for mobs, terrorists, and others who will refuse to acknowledge our rules. If the ignorant antagonist can do in the duelist, the swordsman has more to learn.

Serenity Prayer

2010-04-11T01:08:00.000-07:00

Serenity Prayer for players of chess endings:

God,
Grant me the Serenity to sacrifice the pawns I cannot salvage,
The Courage to save the pawns I should,
And the Wisdom to know the difference.

Noir

2010-04-10T13:13:00.000-07:00

She hung up and I set out the chessboard. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency. - from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye.

My brother-in-law suggested that I might like Mad Men, an AMC TV series about advertising executives of Madison Avenue, New York during the early 1960s. So I watched the series premiere. I liked the period style and the dramatic tension of ambitious people trying to out-create their co-workers and other advertising agencies. And I liked the debonair main character until it was revealed that he wasn't a very honorable person. Then I remembered that my brother-in-law told me Mad Men is noir genre.

Noir means black in French. But in English, it's used to refer to a black-hearted style or mood of film art. So nobody would say "I've got the noir pieces in the next round." Instead, it's more like the mood in Pearl Jam's "Black" when Eddie Vedder sings, "All the pictures have all been washed in black, tattooed everything. All the love gone bad turned my world to black. Tattooed all I see, all that I am, all I'll be."

The visual style of noir incorporates both black and white in high contrasts. One quote from Wikipedia's article on film noir uses one of my favorite SAT words: "The low-key lighting schemes of many classic film noirs are associated with stark light/dark contrasts and dramatic shadow patterning—a style known as chiaroscuro (a term adopted from Renaissance painting)." Chiaroscuro, light/dark interplay, is not unlike chess.

Film noir incorporates common themes of social desolation and existential survivalhood in a cruel, corrupt, crushing, and arbitrarily calamitous world. Not really being an authority on film noir, I'm going to resort to many more quotes. One blogger defines "Film Noir is that film genre in which a morally ambiguous and complex hero struggles against — and almost fails in — a corrupt world before he encounters a seductive and dangerous femme fatale who simultaneously challenges and saves him."

The heroes of noir are of a certain mold. Classically, they are private detectives such as Philip Marlowe of the above-quoted The Long Goodbye or Bogart's Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Encyclopedia Britannica Online says "The heroes of noir generally share certain qualities, such as moral ambiguity, a fatalistic outlook, and alienation from society. They also exhibit an existential acceptance of random, arbitrary occurrences as being the determining factors in life." Comic book writer Frank Miller said, "The noir hero is a knight in blood caked armor. He's dirty and he does his best to deny the fact that he's a hero the whole time."

I prefer to respect my hero for his adherence to honor. Because I have a pessimistic view and am usually a little south of balanced mood, I prefer my endings storybook happy and trite or at the very least redemptive so that they lift me up. Watching characters who are alienated from society gives me a feeling of alienation from them. However, I much prefer the flawed darkness of Batman to a perceived untouchable perfection of Superman. Show me a little human frailty and I'll relate to the character better. But the main character in Mad Men proves to be a philanderer, a liar, a flake, and an identity thief who smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish despite the fact that he has a high-paying job, the respect of his peers, the house in the suburbs, a gorgeous wife, and beautiful kids. He has everything, but seems determined to be unhappy.

I was going to devote a post to my comeback from chess after a six month hiatus, and speak of the renewal of my desire to get lost in calculation, lost in the moment solving pretty chess problems at Chess Tempo and in my games. But I think I already described the beauty of the moment two years ago in this post. In my comeback, I had a great tournament where my chess seemed to flow. That six-rounder dovetailed into the 11-round championship qualifier which with some luck continued my good results, but even before my streak came to an end, I lost the taste of sharpening my tactics at Chess Tempo. I recovered some ganas after rediscovering my cruel side, but over Easter I discovered "How quick the sun can drop away, and now my bitter hands cradle broken glass." I'm not alone in this feeling, but Caissa has left me again.

Pinocchio

2010-04-03T13:23:00.000-07:00

The first time I saw Star Trek: The Original Series, I made fun of the cheesy sets, dated costumes and ham-fisted acting of William Shatner, but eventually I came to love the science fiction ideas played against a backdrop of sociology interpreted through the personality antipoles of Kirk and Spock. I identified a lot with Spock's struggle to fit in using intellectual means.

When The Next Generation came, Data became the logical heir of my character affections. Whereas Spock struggled to control his human half's emotions, Data sought integration with humanity despite being designed without emotion.

I credit chess with bringing me out of an oblivious shell I had inhabited for my first two decades of life. I thought only of pursuit of truth and achievement in a very egocentric manner. My manners must have been atrocious. But chess forces you to think about the mind of another. What is he thinking? What is he planning? What makes him tick?

For most of my life I've considered myself a man of science. Computers, medicine, science and mathematics were my milieu. Language arts and social studies were some of my weaker subjects. I did well and even had some moments like AP 5 on U.S. History, AP 4 on English, but only AP 3 in Spanish. But I once cried because I got a D- on a 6th grade social studies test on the French Revolution. But I find I care more now about music and writing and history and culture. I'm not exactly like Sting in having lost my faith in science and progress, but more often these days, I fall on the judgment that we're foolish in putting our efforts into technology that is within our reach, but beyond our grasp.

My brain has gone through changes the last few years. No longer is my memory as perfect as I remember and I find myself using shortcuts more and more to grasp things that my steel trap twenty-year old mind would have stored in entirety. As I've grown impatient on my way to becoming the grumpy old man I expect to be in twenty years, I also dump a lot more information into the recycle bin. Don't need to know that. This trumps that, so forget that. Information management in my mind seems to involve throwing out yesterday's papers keep a clean and orderly workspace.

One consequence of these changes is that I think my Myers-Briggs personality has shifted. I took a web-based personality test at humanmetrics.com and was informed that I was INTJ. The N, which stands for iNtuition, was the weakest attribute at 12% while Introversion remained 100%. I had always thought of myself as ISTJ before where sensory information dominates my perception. But now this test says I'm more intuitive. Am I becoming more an artsy-fartsy and less a scientist?

What exactly is intuition? Is intuition seeing more of the forest and less sensing the trees? Is intuition of higher order or BETTER than sensation? Zbigniew Czajkowski, a fencing master, seems to place sensation near the bottom: "To look is not the same as to see, to see is not the same as to perceive. We perceive, really – on a higher, conceptual-functional level – only what we know, understand well and can give a name to."

A month ago I visited Alaska with the express purpose of seeing the Aurora Borealis. I was lucky that the terrestrial and solar weather cooperated on one of the six nights and I got to see one of the tamer versions of the Northern Lights. I bought a DVD that included a nice ending paragraph that I wish to quote both for its beautiful imagery about the aurora, but also for its separation of senses and intuition.

From "Aurora - Rivers of Light in the Sky" written by David John Rychetnik.
There are many secrets yet to be revealed about the forces that create these majestic lights in the northern sky. Like many things, we see these events in the heavens very differently depending on our worldly point of view. When the physicist and astronomer, the scholar and mathematician look skyward, they see energy and matter, motion and time weaving together, helping make visible an infinitely variable process normally hidden from the human eye. When the poet and storyteller, the mystic and the artist gaze above, they see revelation and meaning, mystery and imagination weaving together, helping make visible infinitely variable expressions normally hidden in the human mind. But anyone lucky enough to witness the aurora will above all find beauty and hopefully be thankful that this tiny fragment of the invisible has been revealed and that the infinite variety of nature's creative hand has touched us once again, stopping us for the moment to enjoy this marvelous and mysterious universe from our simple place within it. This is the aurora, the magnificent rivers of lights in the sky.

Besides Intuitive Perception, Feelings seem to have usurped some of the power I had given to Thinking in my Judgments. I think that I was always a little moody, but like Spock I could push those feelings into a dusty corner. Now I feel more acutely aware of feelings and allow them to rise in value relative to my thinking processes.

I'm still oblivious to all kinds of things. If the Blue Fairy one day turns me into a real boy, I hope I can still recognize the man in the mirror.

Ganas

2010-04-01T08:27:00.000-07:00

With sadness, I read that one of my heroes died in my town a couple days ago. The movie Stand and Deliver tells the true story of how Bolivian immigrant Jaime Escalante set high expectations and transformed a tough Los Angeles school into an advanced placement calculus powerhouse, exposing as myth that inner city kids can't learn.

I'm not a teacher by trade, but the part of me that wants to teach is mostly inspired by Escalante's story. I remember the movie sometimes when I'm struggling to find motivation as a student of chess. I can hear Edward James Olmos' gravelly voice as he spoke of having "ganas" - the desire to learn.

We all begin as students. It is a rare blessing to encounter a teacher who inspires not only students but also other teachers to continue the tradition of passing on knowledge to those who follow.

Rest in peace, Mr. Escalante.

Little Shop of Horrors

2010-03-29T16:48:00.000-07:00

In the Little Shop of Horrors movie, Steve Martin plays Orin Scrivello who speaks of a childhood when his mother discovered that he was a sadist. Martin then segues to the chorus line "You'll be a dentist."

My most recent opponent is an insightful fellow who observed that I had trouble getting in touch with my inner mean. I usually think of myself as a person who steers clear of making trouble or saying anything controversial. I might even admit that I'm a nice guy like Seymour Krelborn, who is played by Rick Moranis in the movie. When I play chess, I see it as a genteel exercise without hard feelings. It's a game right? Except for my own internal feelings of joy of winning and despair that mastery is so far away, I distance myself from outwardly directed emotions such as being angry at my opponent or holding them in contempt.

But the game of chess includes a ruthless element in taking away your opponent's chances. Not only was I proficient at this cruel technical element in this last game, but I discovered that I also enjoy it. I can recall several recent games in which my opponent resigned with me having about a 2-pawn advantage, and I would ask, "Are you sure you want to resign?" usually followed up with the self-effacing "I can still screw this up." But perhaps, I was subconsciously asking, "Can't you let me torture you for a little while longer?" Perhaps that was why I was somewhat unhappy recently with a quick victory, as if the masochistic Arthur Denton played by Bill Murray had come to my office and welcomed the punishment I was dishing out.

In my final game of the championship qualifier, I played White against the Burn Variation of the French Defense. I gave up the bishop pair early and castled queenside. Later I got rid of my opponent's bishop pair, but at the cost of giving him a pawn majority in the center. I worried about a pawn storm coming for my queenside castling position. Finally after 20 good moves, my opponent made a weak one that gave me a pawn and the initiative to open the center and attack his king. His king made a death march from e8 all the way to a7 while I defoliated his pawn cover and neutralized his ability to attack by trading pieces. The position had enough danger to remind me that the game won't win itself, but not so much danger to make me play too defensively. I was able to live in the zone of controlled aggression from about move 21 until move 57. And I thrived.

A perfect adult set of teeth includes eight incisors and eight bicuspids along with four canines and twelve molars. I extracted all eight of my opponent's pawns and got the sixth piece. It was pretty clear I was going to get the last two bicuspids, so he resigned. So my Heart of Darkness is closer to the sadistic dentist than the nice guy nerd. The horror!

Juggernaut

2010-03-27T20:38:00.001-07:00

There is an old paradox posed by the question "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?" I believe that this is just a problem with semantics because when a force meets an object, only two things can happen: either the force is resisted or the object moves. The words "irresistible" and "immovable" apply only to the past record and cannot both be true at the end of the meeting.

Juggernaut is often the nickname of an irresistible force. I first learned of juggernauts in the Dungeons and Dragons module "Tomb of Horrors" which has one pictured here powered by a Heffalump. But Google's imagery is dominated by the X-Men villain named Juggernaut. In the comic, Juggernaut is such a physical force that he can only defeated after his helmet is removed and he's incapacitated telepathically. The triumph of brains over brawn reminds me of chess. The helmet reminds me of paranoid delusions that wearing aluminum foil on one's head can block mind control. Juggernaut appeared in the 2006 X-Men: The Final Stand.

In the Reno Chess Club Championship Qualifier, a classic match-up was built up between Nate Garingo and myself, the highest and second-highest rated players respectively in our section. We had both racked up seven wins and no losses to that point. I had been nicked for a draw on the previous Sunday, but ever since coming back after a break from chess, I was on a streak of 14 games with no losses. Game #3 of that streak was my first and only win against Nate in our then six-game series, the other five games being all losses for me. Nevertheless, I dare say that I had built up some reputation as an immovable object.

I had prepared a weird line of the accelerated Dragon, but Nate opened 1.d4. I had briefly looked at my old modern games and wondered why I had given up the old plan of g6, Bg7, d6, Nc6, and e5. So I gave it a whirl. Nate deviated with a weird Nb5 and the struggle moved to the queenside. I tried to open the center and take advantage of his uncastled king, but his bishops tied me up. White's advanced queenside pawns had me cramped for the whole game. On move 19, I overlooked a tactic that lost me a pawn and forced me to blockade a pawn on a7. I got in time trouble and couldn't calculate accurately any more. When Nate briefly took his helmet off on move 27, I incorrectly evaluated a complex endgame and missed my chance for a draw.

On move 31, I resigned. Nate the Juggernaut triumphed against my no-longer immovable object.

I Like Dem Hippos

2010-03-22T20:09:00.000-07:00

My favorite song from Madagascar 2 is Alex on the Spot, but the title of this post comes from a line in "Big and Chunky" in which Will.i.am channels the late Barry White in a song of attraction between hippopotami.

In The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal, Tal tells of a mental fugue that interrupted one of his games. I can't resist retelling this popular chestnut in its entirety.

JOURNALIST. It's perhaps not convenient to interrupt at such a culminating moment, but I would, nevertheless, like to know whether extraneous thoughts ever enter your head during a game?

CHESS PLAYER. Oh yes! For instance, I will never forget my game with Grandmaster Vasyukov in one of the USSR Championships. We reached a very complicated position where I was intending to sacrifice a knight. The sacrifice was not altogether obvious, and there was a large number of possible variations, but when I conscientiously began to work through them, I found, to my horror, that nothing would come of it. Ideas piled up one after another. I would transport a subtle reply by my opponent, which worked in one case, to another situation where it would naturally prove to be quite useless. As a result my head became filled with a completely chaotic pile of all sorts of moves, and the famous 'tree of the variations', from which the trainers recommend that you cut off the small branches, in this case spread with unbelievable rapidity.

And then suddenly, for some reason, I remembered the classic couplet by Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky:

Oh, what a difficult job it was
To drag out of the marsh the hippopotamus.

I don't know from what associations the hippopotamus got onto the chess board, but although the spectators were convinced that I was continuing to study the position, I, despite my humanitarian education, was trying at this time to work out: just how would you drag a hippopotamus out of the marsh? I remember how jacks figured in my thoughts, as well as levers, helicopters, and even a rope ladder. After a lengthy consideration I admitted defeat as an engineer, and thought spitefully: "Well, let it drown!" And suddenly the hippopotamus disappeared. Went off from the chess board just as he had come on. Of his own accord! And straightaway the position did not appear to be so complicated. Now I somehow realized that it was not possible to calculate all the variations, and that the knight sacrifice was, by its very nature, purely intuitive. And since it promised an interesting game, I could not refrain from making it.

And the following day, it was with pleasure that I read in the paper how Mikhail Tal, after carefully thinking over the position for 40 minutes, made an accurately- calculated piece sacrifice...

The game became known as Tal's Hippopotamus Game, but it doesn't feature a Hippopotamus opening which I learned from Andrew Martin's book, The Hippopotamus Rises, was mostly a name credited to J.C. Thompson. But Thompson's usual formation seems different and it's sometimes hard to define what the fully chunky Hippopotamus Defense really is, but I've taken to defining it as this Wikipedia article does with double fianchettoes, both center pawns to the third rank, and both knights sitting in front of the Royal Couple. As such, I played it four times in tournament practice before this year. My record in the four games is okay:

2 wins, 1 loss against experts
1 win against a Class D

I also played it once in a simul against former World Champion Boris Spassky not knowing that Spassky himself had played it even in his 1966 world championship match against Petrosian. Spassky crushed my hippopotamus.

In my eighth game of the Club Championship Qualifier, I was playing Black against a Class B player whom I guessed would play a Reti opening. I usually find it disheartening when my fianchetto gets neutralized by an equal and opposite fianchetto from the opponent's corner, so I aimed for a Hippopotamus Defense. My hippopotamus neither got drug out nor drowned. It neither rose nor fell. From seemingly nothing, my opponent created a serious attack and I had to fight off a raging kingside and center attack.

It was with relief that I escaped into a more or less even endgame. It's possible I could have ground out a win, but having dodged a bullet, I decided not to tempt fate and go home with my skin, if not my perfect record, intact. My 7-0 record in the qualifier went to 7-0-1.

Hippopotami kill about 100-150 people a year which puts them at #7 on this list ahead of bears, sharks, and jellyfish.

Timecop

2010-03-10T09:15:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of a recent round, one player who was scheduled to have the white pieces came up and asked me to confirm that when delay is on, you are supposed to deduct one minute per second of delay. e.g. a five second delay in a 30/90 time control becomes 30 moves in 85 minutes with the delay. I told him it's a TD option and that to keep things simple we usually don't deduct it unless we are running a tournament where the rounds are tightly scheduled together and timeliness of the schedule is a priority. Actually, I wasn't aware of a club decision to make our standard 30/90 with or without the delay. Since this was just one game on a Thursday night, it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me to worry about five extra minutes, but the player claimed that it would be better for his schedule if he didn't have to play a game late into the night. I just shrugged, since I don't consider it my job to make TD decisions. "I'm not the TD" is a commonly heard statement out of my mouth at the club in 2010.

The player of the black pieces then came to question me in a huff insisting that our time control was 30/90 not 30/85. I said it didn't matter to me. Someone suggested he call our TD at home. He did question me about delay and got me to agree that delay is supposed to last the whole game from the first to the last move. I don't know if he heeded that advice to call the TD or whether the game started 30/85 or 30/90.

When the second player had only 12 minutes on the clock left in the sudden death second time control, he brought the matter to my attention that he didn't think that the delay was on. I was still playing my game. Another TD was available who wasn't playing his game. In irritation, I privately wondered why I was always the go-to TD. Since I presumed it was an honest mistake, I suggested that they write down the remaining times and substitute a new clock with delay since it was white's claim and intention that he set the delay and Black had in my opinion done all he could to make sure delay was set short of checking it at the beginning of the second time control and providing his own properly set clock. I think the players expected me to be knowledgeable about their clock so that I could fix it. I just shook my head. Someone else produced a clock instruction manual. I went back to my game. After another five minutes of chaos, I think the resolution was that the players substituted a different clock with the correct times and the correct delay and finished the game. The player of black who had less time won. I never found out if delay was improperly set on the original clock.

I've been trying to pretend that I've given up directing tournaments, but perhaps I need to get a custom baseball cap to wear in the club that says, "I'm not the TD". Six months of staying away from the club last year and declining to run as incumbent Secretary were probably negated when I stepped in to help organize the Holiday Swiss and Club Championship Qualifier. Like Michael Corleone in Godfather: Part III, "Just when I thought I was out...they pull me back in." Luckily, my game was already decisive enough that the externalities didn't mess up my move selection.

The relevant sections of the United States Chess Federation's Official Rules of Chess, Fifth Edition are:
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5F. [..] Players, not tournament directors, are responsible for knowing how to properly set (16B) their delay clocks.

5Fa. The tournament director has the right to shorten the basic time control, up to the number of minutes equal to the time delay used in seconds. Examples: Clocks for G/60 with a 5-second time delay (t/d5) may be set starting at 55 minutes through 59 minutes instead of 60; [..] There is no requirement to advertise this option in advance. It may also be used for games starting later than the official starting time of any particular round even when not used otherwise. TD TIP: Using (a), while acceptable, is also a problematical option that does not come highly recommended due to the confusion involved in properly setting an assortment of different clocks from a variety of manufacturers, all with diverse time control setting capabilities. Whatever option the director is using should be announced at the start of round one.

5Fb. A game with a mixed time control, e.g. 50 moves in two hours followed by sudden death in 30 minutes (50/2, SD/30), is to use a time delay clock set with 5-second delay from the beginning of the game, if available. However, if the game starts with an analog clock it should remain, except in the procedure described in rule 14H2, Claim of insufficient losing chances in sudden death.

14H2d. TD TIP: There is no rule allowing players, after the game has started, to ask for a properly set delay clock to be placed on their game, which would replace an analog clock or delay clock not set properly. Only the TD can initiate placing a clock with time delay capabilities on a game after a 14H claim has been made and the steps of 14H2 have been applied.

16P. [..] TD TIP: Often digital and delay clocks are a challenge to set properly. The director should use judgment in deciding if a digital or delay clock was set improperly deliberately, or inadvertently. Adding two minutes to the injured player's unused time should penalize deliberate incorrect settings. In either case the error(s) should be corrected.

39A. Choice of equipment. If the organizer does not provide one of more elements of equipment, the players should agree on any that meets the standards or, failing such agreement, play with Black's choice if it meets the standards. TD TIP: Players of the black pieces sometimes misunderstand this rule when they want to use an analog clock on a game with sudden death times controls. If any part of a game is composed of a sudden death time control, a properly set delay clock is preferred equipment and supersedes Black's choice in cases where White has such a clock and Black does not (42D).

42D. Delay clock preferable in sudden death. A properly set clock with time delay capability is preferable to any other clock in a game with any sudden death time control. Therefore, if White has such a clock available and Black does not, White's clock should be used. The only occasions where Black retains the right to use his/her analog clock are in games with no sudden death time control, in cases where both players have the same type of clock, or if White is late and Black has already set up standard equipment.

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In 2006, a similar problem cropped up in a club game involving a friend/TD, asking for my ruling to substitute a delay clock for a digital clock that was set without delay by his opponent. I chose to go with the 14H2d prohibition on dropping in a delay clock. I had been a TD since 2004 and the Fifth Edition rules were newer back then, published in 2003. I think my ruling injured my friend in that he had a winning position that was spoiled by his lack of time and he took a draw. I think today in 2010, I would rule the opposite and replace the non-delay digital clock with a delay one, mainly since there has been time for people to learn how to use their digital clocks to the point that there is tradition in properly setting the delay and also I am now more familiar with Bill Smythe's unofficial DIRTY POOL rules. In both situations, a digital clock is available, everybody presumably wanted delay and meant to have it, but the complexities of these devices defy our abilities to properly set them, so the right remedy is to just fix it. I think that 14H2d is to prevent a person who is in time trouble on an analog clock from buying more time by requesting a delay clock.

Back when digital clocks took the tournament scene by storm, there were all sorts of arguments about what standards should govern their use. It's a little obscure to those without access to the USCF Tournament Directing forums, but since 2005, Chicago Senior Tournament Director Bill Smythe developed and regularly posted at his tournaments a DIRTY POOL sheet to supplement what he perceived as deficiencies in the USCF Fifth Edition Rules:
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DIRTY POOL

It is DIRTY POOL to use a digital clock without setting the delay. Such a setting can confuse the opponent into believing there is a delay when there is none. This confusion can result in questionable time forfeit claims and unnecessary disputes.

If you furnish and use a digital clock without the delay set, any or all of the following may happen to you:

1. The TD reserves the right, at any time during the game, to point out to your opponent that the delay is not set.

2. The TD may allow your opponent, at any time during the game, to substitute ANY other clock, digital or analog, furnished by him.

3. If you claim a draw by insufficient losing chances, the TD may summarily disallow your claim and subtract time from your clock. Your opponent, however, will receive the usual kind, gentle treatment should he make such a claim.

4. If you claim a win on time, the TD may dismiss your claim and give your opponent up to 5 minutes, plus delay time, to finish the game or reach the time control. No such consideration, however, will be given to you, if the shoe is on the other foot and your opponent claims a win on time.

If the tournament has two time controls (such as 40/120 followed by SD/60), the delay should be turned on for both controls.

Clocks which do not permit this, such as the Saitek and FIDE, should be set for just one time control, with the delay on. After move 40, reset the clock manually, again with the delay on.

If your opponent furnishes a digital clock, you should watch its operation closely, during the first few moves, to make sure the delay is on. Request TD assistance if necessary.
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Normally I'm the kind of person whose eyes glaze over when I read legalese. I don't know why I was juiced enough to even research this, but perhaps someone will find it useful. When I found the title for this post, I read that Timecop was actually one of Van Damme's decent movies involving time travel and lots of action without being too stupid. Now if I could go back in time to that fateful day when I chose to be a TD you wouldn't be reading this legal mumbo-jumbo. We now return to our regularly scheduled program of trying to enjoy chess without the legal distractions.

Wonderland

2010-03-09T00:22:00.000-08:00

“'But I don’t want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can’t help that,' said the Cat. 'We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.'
'How do you know I’m mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,” said the Cat. 'or you wouldn’t have come here.'”
--Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventure in Wonderland

Since Alice in Wonderland is currently in the theaters, you'd think that my cause for posting this would come from that movie. But actually, I remember this quote from Batman's trip through the world of his nemeses in the graphic novel Arkham Asylum. Interestingly enough, Alice in Wonderland's sequel, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, replaces Wonderland's deck of cards with a set of chess pieces.

Chess and mental illness are often portrayed together. I'm thinking particularly of Luzhin Defence from Vladimir Nabokov's The Defense which is based upon Curt von Bardeleben. Paul Morphy and Bobby Fischer are popular fodder for psychoanalysis.

I personally can understand how chess can push a person towards mental illness. When I fell madly in love with chess during college, I neglected my studies and spent all of my waking hours playing chess on the old Internet Chess Server, reading chess books, or scouring bookstores for more chess books. I had many of the signs of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Paranoid Schizophrenia has made me stop posting a lot of club games at the Reno Club website for fear that the Las Vegas team is using it as preparation against us in our yearly match. A couple posts ago, I ranted that I had succumbed to Narcissistic Personality Disorder. A Dissociative Identity Disorder creates a voice inside of me that refuses to allow me to take full credit for my wins because they're "just luck". Especially after playing tournament games, I experience Bipolar Disorder's euphoria where my thoughts race and replay my game over and over and over, leading to insomnia. Wins make me manic while losses make me depressed.

Maybe I should take a break from this game soon.

Saving Private Ryan

2010-03-08T20:14:00.000-08:00

Steven Spielberg's 1998 foray into cinema verite depicted the Battle of Normandy and its immediate aftermath. The story was based on the premise that saving the life of the last surviving brother of four was worth the risk to a squad of eight men. But a converse theme involves a principal character's pacifism versus the life worth taking embodied by a ubiquitous German soldier.

Actually, when I saw the movie, I thought that the German soldier who killed Private Stanley Mellish in the knife fight near the end was the very same Steamboat Willie the squad had let go free earlier in the movie. While researching Saving Private Ryan, I came across a website that debunks this common mistake. Steamboat Willie does come back at the very end of the movie, where the man who helped spare him earlier executes him. However, for the purposes of this movie-chess mashup, I'm going to go with my original mistaken impression and utilize the character of the enemy soldier who keeps coming back to make you pay.

Piece	Character	Actor
Black King Bishop	Bombardment prior to H-Hour
Black King	Captain John Miller	Tom Hanks
Black Queen	Private Daniel Jackson (sniper)	Barry Pepper
Black Queen Knight	Private Adrian Caparzo	Vin Diesel
Black King Knight	Technician Fourth Class Irwin Wade (medic)	Giovanni Ribisi
Black King Rook	Corporal Timothy Upham (translator)	Jeremy Davies
White Queen Rook	German sniper in Neuville
White King Bishop	Steamboat Willie, the German POW	Joerg Stadler
White Queen Bishop	German machine gun nest

My sixth game of the club qualifier had actually been scheduled as round 2. I drove about forty miles to Fernley to meet my opponent on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I had hopes of driving back while it was still sunny, but that did not happen. I BS'ed my way through the White side of a French Defense and managed to get the opening advantage, but then I began to play moves without looking at my opponent's replies - Dan Heisman's Hope Chess. A faulty combination got me in trouble and I played the late middlegame one exchange down. At one point, my opponent had a tactic that would have made my deficit one full rook, but he didn't see it.

I felt bad about winning this one. My opponent had me dead to rights with 32...Qxd5! and was winning for most of the game. I tied him up for most of the late middlegame until time trouble helped him blunder away the a-pawn. Still, the endgame should have been drawn. A couple more careless moves when his clock was down to about five minutes allowed me to complete my swindle. My record in the Club Championship Qualifier remained spotless, but I felt dirty. I didn't break any rules, but I felt like I had won without honor.

Ernie The Great

2010-03-07T10:42:00.000-08:00

So I was reading a blog this morning and thought to myself, "What a pompous ass! All he does is say 'I'm so great. Look how fast I can win.' You'd think he had become a grandmaster overnight. Why do I waste my time reading his self-absorbed mental masturbations?" Then I looked up an saw that I was reading Soapstone's Studio. My blog.

I scrolled over my post again and thought, "Where's the witty stuff that would divert and entertain the reader? Where are the nuggets of knowledge and wisdom that I (great writer and teacher that I am) always impart to my audience?" Huh. Could it be that I've lost my humility and perspective? Or maybe I never had it?

In college, my friends used to tease me about my GPA and came up with a chant: I am Ernie! I am great! I have a 3.958!

I thought they were just jealous of my good grades, but perhaps, just perhaps, they were jokingly and gently pointing out that I'm really an arrogant bastard.

One reader castigated me for my paranoid rantings a few posts back. Chastened, chastised, criticized, censured. There are a lot of C words to cut people down to size. Here's one more: chess.

Anatomy of a Miniature

2010-03-06T18:42:00.000-08:00

My opponent chose this tournament to trot out an opening he had just added to his repertoire, a version of the Accelerated Dragon Sicilian. At move seven, the position became unfamiliar to him and he tried to strike out on his own with a tactic in the center that seemed correct, but unfortunately I found the direct refutation. Up to my second-to-last move, I found the best ones and even my second best move carried a heavy psychological toll on my opponent who quickly resigned rather than face a difficult endgame.

My coach had gone over some of the ideas and I had some experience in two games, one I posted in Quagmire, facing this kind of Sicilian against one of the club's Class B members. I was lucky to win the second game.

My style is more of a ground and pound positional and endings game, as opposed to the flying strikes and knockdowns. But lately I've had some success with quick victories. Here's a histogram I generated using Chessbase 8 by highlighting all my games, right clicking and choosing Statistics. There's a radio button that changes the window from the win-loss stats to the game length stats and shows you a histogram.

The mean is about 42 and the mode is 45.

This game is one of my seventh shortest games at 16 moves.

Five weeks ago was my second shortest Flawless and Hollow game at 8 moves.

The longest game at 110 moves is featured in my post Never Give Up. Never Surrender.

Sliding Doors

2010-03-05T18:53:00.000-08:00

The 1998 movie "Sliding Doors" showed two parallel universes in which Gwyneth Paltrow's character could have lived depending on the quantum event of her boarding or not boarding a train on time. From that moment, her love life and career diverged dramatically.

Cliche alert! I've been struggling to find writing inspiration and this post ended up with lots of cliches.

The fifth game of the club qualifier was against an opponent I know who liked to trade queens in the exchange King's Indian. So beforehand, I decided to trot out my old Modern Defense as somewhat of a surprise. Unfortunately, my Modern is so elastic and apparently undisciplined that I ended up tricking myself into a poor opening scheme. My opponent had space, development, king safety, and pawn targets. It wasn't quite a dagger to the heart, but he had a sacrificial line that should have eventually won.

But he hesitated and didn't board the train on time. This gave me time to castle my king to safety and mount a counterattack in the center. An advanced knight needed to retreat to safety, but my opponent chose to lose a tempo with 17.h3 and then the game shifted when I cut off the exits.

It was that moment that he chose to sacrifice. But the die had been cast, the chips had fallen, and I rode off into the sunset. Except for finding a nice queen creeping move (16...Qc6!) I felt like I didn't so much win this game as let my opponent to lose it. I could say that my poor opening play lured him into overreaching, but that would be taking way too much credit.

The evaluation profile shows that my opening sucked, but the late middlegame turned in my favor and then I never looked back.

The brilliant knight sac on move 13 became a blunder on move 18. Timing is everything.

Iceman Revisited

2010-02-21T14:13:00.000-08:00

Blogger tells me that this is my 127th blog post. Back in post #4, I introduced Iceman. Not the one from Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, but the one played by Val Kilmer in Top Gun. Iceman is a cool cucumber who makes no mistakes but mainly just waits for you to make your own mistake and then he pounces. In post#4, I cast my opponent as the winning fighter pilot.

Last Thursday's game was no brilliancy. In fact, Fritz's Evaluation Profile shows that I was slightly worse a lot of the time.

For forty moves, we kept the game pretty much balanced, each missing small opportunities here and there. But similar to my game 10 weeks ago against this same opponent, one pawn got too far ahead and all of a sudden the game tipped in my favor. For this performance, I got to play the role of Iceman.

It wasn't as if I just turtled up, since I did make use of the queenside expansion. But sometimes I wish my game was a bit more like Maverick's wild and dangerous style. Still, being an opportunist is not a bad way to go in chess. My old Iceman post has a collection of chess adages surrounding the role of mistakes in chess. I'll reiterate just two of them here:

"One bad move nullifies forty good ones." - I.A. Horowitz
"Without error, there can be no brilliancy." - Emanuel Lasker

Labyrinth

2010-02-08T18:23:00.000-08:00

From the Encyclopedia Mythica:

When the Minotaur was born, Daedalus built the Labyrinth to contain the monstrous half-man, half-bull. For years Minos demanded a tribute of youths from Athens to feed the creature. Eventually, the hero Theseus came to Crete to attempt to slay the Minotaur. Ariadne, daughter of Minos and Pasiphae, fell in love with Theseus and asked Daedalus to help him. Daedalus gave her a flaxen thread for Theseus to tie to the door of the Labyrinth as he entered, and by which he could find his way out after killing the monster. Theseus succeeded, and escaped Crete with Ariadne. Minos, enraged at the loss of his daughter, shut Daedalus and his son Icarus into the Labyrinth.

I had the opportunity to visit the site of Knossos on the Island of Crete, the seat of the Minoan civilization. From ground level, we saw what seemed like the ruins of a many-roomed basement with rock walls between each room. Our guide suggested as does this article that the ruins of a complex palace inspired the impression of a labyrinth.

Early in my chess career, I liked booked lines of the Sicilian and King's Indian, but eventually figured out that I was not very good at memorizing them, at least not to the point that I could rely on my memory for the myriad positions that crop up. Eventually, I gravitated toward the conceptual approach of the one-size-fits-all Modern Defense and a Botvinnik style English with pawns at c4, d3, and e4. But I became bored of my game with its closed positional maneuvering and nurturing of small advantages. So I struck out for the tactical grounds of 1.e4. But the Sicilian Labyrinth - as Lev Polugaevsky named his two-volume treatise - intimidated me. So I played irregular lines like the Grand Prix and the Morra and tried to research the Alapin. But good results eluded me and I began to rethink my approach.

My game last Thursday was an adventure into the Sicilian Labyrinth. My opponent chose the Nc6 Sicilian. I chose the Open Sicilian with d4 cxd4 Nxd4. Then my opponent chose the Labordonnais-Lowenthal-Kalashnikov variation which I knew only superficially. The game once again became a close positional maneuvering struggle with me pressing toward weak light squares on his kingside, but I was frustrated by my queen having to do a chess maze to get to the attacking squares (Qf2-d2-d3-e4-g4-e4-h4).

Rather than an open tactical game, I ended up with a positional one out of the Open Sicilian. Except for some weak moves between moves 20 and 23, I felt in control for much of the game. The Thread of Ariadne was on my side. After I annotated my game, I decided to try to get a Icarus-eye view of the Sicilian Labyrinth and came up with this map.
Of course, there are all kinds of omissions on this map. The small area that says Dragon/Najdorf/Scheveningen might as well say "Here be dragons" and there are myriad transpositional secret passages that move from one corner of the map to the other.

Three pieces of wisdom: 1. Don't fly too close to the sun or your wings will melt. 2. Never start a land war in Asia. 3. Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

Flawless and Hollow

2010-01-31T21:13:00.000-08:00

An old adage goes, "Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it." In my last post, I wrote of the flawless victory and the pursuit of perfection. I suppose perfection in one game isn't really the same as pushing toward perfection in my overall chess game. Sheryl Crow sings, "It's not having what you want. It's wanting what you've got."

My game is hardly worth posting because it was too flawless. To protect the innocent, I'm just going to refer you to this game and say that I was on the black side of such a game.

I think this would go into the category of me being too spoiled to be happy with things that other people would be thrilled to have. An eight-move book checkmate. Eight moves for both sides. About five minutes total. No thinking. An early night with plenty of rest. Budapest players dream of luring unsuspecting players into the blunder axb4?? and then playing the fun mating move Nd3#. But my victory was tainted with disappointment and suspicion: disappointment that my chess skill was not really tested and suspicion that my opponent really knew the trap and threw the game.

I just need to count my blessings and be thankful.

Mortal Kombat

2010-01-19T00:05:00.000-08:00

Chess is the opposite of bloodsport. With a few notable exceptions, it is competition between minds.

Yet, it is intimately tied to war, like war's noncorporeal spirit.

In my opinion, chess will never be a spectator sport. The essential action during a game takes place within the players' minds in the setting up of hundreds of lines of analysis, arrayed like tin soldiers and knocked down with equal dispatch. Only one candidate move emerges from each line to do battle with your opponent's champion. In analysis, I have slain legions of pawns, knights, bishops, rooks, queens and kings. Reading through an unannotated game seems rather Hemingway-esque when you haven't seen and appreciated a representative sample of the blind alleys and parallel universes connected to the eighty or so positions that appear in an average forty-move game.

Last Thursday, I played one of the lower rated players in my championship qualifier group. Although the ratings predict a 98.2% win expectancy. I still feel challenge in making sure that the other 1.8% doesn't catch me. But I also challenge myself to try to win well. In the bloody Mortal Kombat video game as well as in the movie, a completely one-sided victory was announced: "Flawless Victory". I chase the equivalent of chess' flawless victory with better odds when my opponent is significantly more prone to mistakes.

While I was enjoying a middlegame advantage, I overheard a friend speak the word "bloodlust" at a neighboring board in skittles analysis. Amused, I asked what the context was. He explained that "bloodlust" was the craze that befalls you when you are trying to figure out which one of your pieces surrounding the enemy king can deliver the killing blow. I thought of Edward Lasker's book, Chess for Fun and Chess for Blood which I haven't read.

My game didn't end up flawless. In particular, I regretted my 21...Kh7!? as an inaccurate waste of time when I could have played Re6 right away.

I am but Mortal and therefore flawed, yet still I chase perfection.

Creativity

2010-01-18T19:58:00.000-08:00

I haven't written for three weeks partly because I was waiting for my inspiration to crystallize, but my thoughts are getting too expansive to reign into a coherent essay. But I just thought of a scatalogical metaphor for my creative process, so I going to let the thoughts pour out like diarrhea before they make a fully formed stool.

Until recently, I thought that creativity was originality. Within our brains, the spark between dendrite and axon gave birth to a new thing in the universe. But it could be argued that nothing enters our brain but what God created for our brains to consume. Often I despaired that "There is nothing new under the sun" and that perhaps creativity is God's perogative. Artists are but scientists of a different name observing small pockets of unusual phenomena in God's magnum opus and regurgitating what they see. Perhaps the great Playwright predestined that today, this actor would muse about the nature of creativity.

A friend made me listen to William Burroughs' "Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales." One line that struck me was his musing that God cannot act because acting implies resistance. In my world where God is the only Executive Producer and we men and women but plagiarizers, it occurred to me that perhaps God couldn't be an actor because actors have limitations and flaws and affectations which approach untruth. God wouldn't make a very good audience either because none of the humorous punchlines or plot twisting dramatizations would be surprising to omniscience. But I digress.

I was watching a Nova special about dreams and sleep researcher Sarah Mednick stated, "We define creativity as putting together disparate ideas in new and useful combinations." Wikipedia also allows in its definition "new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts." Ahhh...so...mashups are creative! And here I just considered myself an eclectic plagiarizer.

Recipe for creativity: In a large mixing bowl, combine any two disparate things such as a game of chess and a movie. Salt to taste. Mathematically, x + y = z. Music + sex = rock 'n roll. Writers select words and put them together in metaphors and similes and in ever complex combinations that will take the monkeys a bit more time to copy on their typewriters. The Vulcans have a saying "Infinite diversity in infinite combinations."

I find I'm most creative when I'm on the elliptical exercise machine at the gym. I'm moving, but I can't really hurt myself so I don't have to concentrate on safety. My blood is pumping, creating a heightened state of activity in both mind and body. TV, people, and mountain vista push visual stimuli into the front of my head , my MP3 player pours melodies and lyrics into the sides of my head, and my pumping legs probably throw proprioceptive data into the bottom of my head to the cerebellum. My brain is a mixing bowl. "The overcast sky reaches down with a gauzy hand and touches the stubbly pate of the mountain, like an angel checking a febrile child's temperature." Using a simile to anthropomorphize the relationship between mountain and sky is just another example of a mashup.

But the creative process also involves winnowing. Another friend introduced me to a rejection letter attributed to Samuel Johnson (publisher of the 1755 Dictionary of the English Language). "Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." Not every combination deserves to be expressed within the bounds of tasteful discourse (see paragraph 1 for an example). Standards come from somewhere and create evolutionary pressure on these ideas that would otherwise undergo dissemination and miscegenation, ensuring survival of the fascinating-est. People tuning out is a sign that some extinction is going on. Your yawn just weeded out my meme pool.

For those of you who lasted this long, here's a pot o' gold: the artists of the world need a Magic Eight Ball that makes mashups: two windows each with near-infinite diversity that produce near-infinite combinations. Such a device would probably contain a microprocessor. But what self-respecting artiste would admit that his muse was a computer? Solve that problem and you might follow the inventor of the Snuggie onto Easy Street.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

2009-12-22T12:40:00.000-08:00

I was going to call this post "Swindler Swindled", but then the executive producer of Soapstone's Studio reminded me that I'm supposed to do movie themes whenever I can. "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" was a 1988 comedy about two swindlers played by Michael Caine and Steve Martin who enter a battle of wits and one-up-manship. There is a point in the con games that you begin to lose track of what's real and what's just part of someone's elaborate con.

In 2007, my opponent and I played a similar opening and had a seesaw battle with a comedy of errors ending in his mistakenly going for a perpetual check when he had a winning line.

During my latest game, I just couldn't figure out if the advantages I saw in the tips of my analysis tree were illusory or not. Fear played a big part: I had the tournament's top standing at stake (pride only, no money). A draw would clinch clear first. I had 17 rating points from rounds 1-5. A draw would pretty much preserve the rating points at 18. Winning would push it to 27; losing would cut it down to 10. My rook on e7 looked sickly next to the knight and I knew that the two rooks together could beat my queen in the right circumstances. My king had his back against the wall. The game had already run past midnight so fatigue was making it difficult to track all the dangers. Knight forks began to haunt some of my lines like the Headless Horseman. This time I forced the draw by repetition.

After I got home, I powered up Fritz who told me that I was the one left holding the bag at the end. I had about a 9-pawn advantage in the final position and two winning plans to choose from. I feel a bit hypocritical for having recently reposted Never Give Up. Never Surrender. where I saved a draw from a losing position. Converting a win should take similar will power. When annotating my game, I had this faintly nauseating feeling in the pit of my stomach as if I had been swindled out of something of significant value. Let that be my lesson for the next time I throw away a half point. My opponent showed good swindling technique by keeping the pieces on and throwing problems at me until the end.

Self-assessment:
1. Made correct evaluations of the variations after 11...Na6 and chose active development over passive defense early in the game. Made incorrect evaluations of the variations after 31...Qb6 and chose passive defense over active development late in the game.
2. Completely missed the advantages of 14...Qf6 and misevaluated White's queenside advantage after 15.b4 and 16.b4.
3. Made good decisions to open the position, to castle into an advancing h-pawn, and to sacrifice the exchange.
4. Played hope chess on moves 25 (missing Qg4) and 37 (missing the Rh3-g3-g7 mate problem).
5. Missed many continuations in the endgame.
6. Had problems with #1.Queen complexities: 20...Qb6!, 24...Qe8!, 31...Qb6!, 37...Qa1+!, 38/39...Qb1+!, and 42...Qa1+!.
7. Missed a good #9.Backward #7.Bishop move, 27...Be8!.
8. #8.Knight complexities figured into missing 28...Bc2+! and the fatigue of watching the knight on e6.
9. Missed #14.King zwischenzug in 48...f4 49.Nxf4? Kg7!.
10. Not knowing the strength of my #13.Rampaging g-pawn, and #10.Fear/overestimating defense fed into the incorrect decision to give up playing for a win.

Thus completed the weird symmetry of my opponent swindling himself by forcing a draw from a winning position in 2007 and now my doing the same for him. I have another pair of swindles with less symmetry against another expert member of our club.

I was asked how I use Fritz to help me with analysis. I use ChessBase 8 with the Fritz 8 engine plug-in chewing on positions and spitting out optimal lines. But if you have Fritz without ChessBase, you can do something similar by choosing New Game and before any one makes a move, select menu option Engine->Infinite Analysis. Not only will the program allow you to play moves for each side, but there should be a window that shows what Fritz thinks of the position and possible moves. Each line is prefaced by a +/=/- evaluation and a decimal number (e.g. -1.00 is a pawn's worth of advantage for black) to quantitate who has the advantage and how much.

When I did the games bulletins for the big Reno tournaments, Fritz's blunder check helped me crunch the 60-100 games so that I could zero in on the critical moments. This is something that takes a while per game, so you should expect to set the computer on the game and walk away for an hour. With the game(s) highlighted in Fritz's Database view (File->Open->Database), select Tools->Analysis->Blunder Check.

For the most recent game, I wanted to demonstrate at a glance that White didn't have much advantage the whole game, at least according to Fritz. After doing Blunder Check, I selected menu option Window->Panes->Evaluation Profile to view the Evaluation Profile. Colored bars below the line indicate Black held the advantage almost the whole game with only slight advantages for White around moves 15 and 28.

Beauty and the Beast

2009-12-16T11:33:00.000-08:00

Chess is the art which expresses the beauty of logic.
-- Mikhail Botvinnik

What is the art of chess? Diminuitive sculptures dance about a well-demarcated field with choreography drawing from geometry, time, logic, and pure improvisation.

In my concept of chess beauty, there should almost always be a perfect move, the most logical one. Somewhere on the board, hidden among inaccuracies, weak moves, and outright blunders, the best move is waiting. We as chess enthusiasts appreciate the art of the masters when we understand the logic that guided them.

In the comfort of my study, I often ask my pocket Grandmaster Fritz 8.0 what was the proper continuation? As long as positional considerations remain small, Fritz's materialistic evaluations are usually the truth. Fritz is often my guide to the truth and beauty, but he is like having a know-it-all art major explain a masterwork to me. I appreciate it at the level of hearing his words, but not at the level of knowing in my heart each gossamer strand in the tapestry.

Sometimes beauty manifests as symmetry in the piece formations. I missed 26...Rf4xf2! in this recent game that would have made this rook cluster. Sometimes beauty is the quiet strength of a quiet move such as the missed 29...e5!! in my Mona Lisa With Three Warts. Sometimes chess beauty shows up as tidiness in the lines. I really love the how the delicate obliques of the bishops mesh in the Evergreen Game and I well-nigh mourned when I missed my chance to be like Adolf Anderssen.

In my analysis of my analysis, bishop complexities contributing to my mistakes stood out as #7. I got smashed quite artistically in the following game from five years ago. The bishops chased my queen into a spider hole at d8. The way the queen bounces from d8 to e8 to h5 and back to e8 and d8 reminds me of a pool shark declaring "Eight ball in the side pocket" just before he sinks it and takes your money.

My last club game was against the same opponent. It had all the subtlety of a berserker pawn running up the board and cleaving my opponent's army in twain. In time trouble, my opponent heaped blunder upon blunder atop the bonfire at the end. It was an ugly win. Only Cadet Shawn from "Taps" could say, "It's beautiful, man!"

I have to admit that my egotistical self commands a higher priority than my aesthetic self. I prefer the ugly win over the beautiful loss.

Parallelisms, Chunks, and Visualizations

2009-12-07T13:42:00.000-08:00

On move 4, I castled. He then proceeded to move two pieces and take two of my pieces. "You can't do that," I protested.

"Why not?" he retorted.

"Because chess is a turn-based game. Each player gets only one move," I explained.

"But you just moved both your king and rook," he said, an annoying passive aggressive tone. "I should get two moves also."

Angrily, I made a move to sweep his entire army from the board with my arm, but the pieces came alive and fenced with each other, not turn by turn, but simultaneously, mano a mano across the span of the board. After a few seconds, the entire front froze again and my vision held it for a moment... And then I woke up.

In trying to understand more about de Groot, I came across a research paper by Reingold and Charness which referenced de Groot. Reingold and Charness researched chess playing abilities to get at the nature of what is at work. A review of past related papers showed:

1. "Experts" (ELO 2200-2400) have a larger "visual span" as compared with "Intermediates" (ELO 1400-1700) and "Novices" (ELO U1400). Visual span is the ability in speed and area to remember details of a chess position at a glance.

2. Experts (ELO 1950+) have fewer saccadic eye movements in check detection than Intermediates (ELO 950-1400) and Novices (ELO U950), implying greater peripheral vision for detecting checks.

3. Experts spend less time looking directly at pieces and more time looking at empty squares between them than intermediates and novices and when they do look at pieces, they spend more time on "relevant" pieces.

The experimental contributions of this particular paper were to try to suss out if there were time costs for interpreting incremental increases in the complexity of chess positions.

1. Experts didn't seem to be slowed by adding one piece to various check detection tests.

2. Cueing a piece improved the reaction times to correctly identifying check status of that piece for weaker players, but did not help experts. In fact, the cue actually seemed to hurt the experts' reaction times.

The authors suggest that their results indicate that experts have an ability to encode position information in a parallel as opposed to a serial manner. Parallel processing was the force multiplier used by Deep Blue to ultimately defeat reigning world champion Garry Kasparov on May 11, 1997.

A friend of mine pointed me to the "My Brilliant Brain" series about Susan Polgar available on YouTube. The series' central finding seemed to be that extraordinary mental feats of memory utilize "chunking" and that Susan Polgar's ability may reside in the fusiform face area of her brain. An example of chunking would be to use "a Black kingside fianchetto" instead of black king at g8, black bishop on g7, and black pawns on f7, g6, and h7. After one game, Susan said that pattern recognition and intuition guide her through a game, especially at fast time controls. A PET scan indicated that the fusiform face area in Polgar's brain was being utilized as a specialized chess information recognition center.

I think I'm going to try to chunk some of my tactical exercises at Chess Tempo and do them blindfolded to exercise my chess eye.

Here's a Chess Tempo exercise I failed:

Chess Tempo #71555
White is up a pawn. Black's queen is awfully deep in my territory - trap it? cxb4 can happen any time. Black's Bg7 and Re8 look pretty inactive thanks to my pawn shield. Black's knight with the Bc6 help can check on f3 forking White king and rook.
Candidates:
Bc4 hits queen and cuts off its escape along a2-g8 diagonal. Then Qxa3 loses a pawn. Re3 hits queen again. a1-a6 are all covered, a3-e3 attacked by the rook, b2 and b4 - no escape! If Nf3+, I'll have to move to g3. Rxf3 allows Qxf3. I'm going with Bc4.

I played Bc4. Chess Tempo responded Qxa3. I played Re3 thinking, "I have you now.". Chess Tempo played Nf3+. Kg3 looks best. Failed.

Through #6.overconfidence in #1.queen complexities, I #4.cut off analysis prematurely and #3.overlooked a defensive resource of a #9.backward #8.knight move.

Kg3 fails to Nxd2 Rxa3 Ne4+ forking king and queen and material becomes even. I didn't even consider Qxf3 Bxf3 Rxa3 to know that White ends up a piece ahead.

Never Give Up. Never Surrender.

2009-12-06T11:59:00.000-08:00

I originally published this as a PDF file at the Reno Chess Club website about 4 years ago in the days before my blog. It seemed apropos to republish it now since my last two games seemed to provoke discussions about the proper time to resign. By using the title, I don't mean never resign. Perhaps my definition of a clearly won or lost positions may differ from those of other chess players, but at least, I'd like to see the winning line all the way to an overwhelming material advantage or even mate. Today it occurs to me that if I had one of them Omega 13 contraptions, I could take back my chess blunders and nobody but me would know.

This 2003 game taught me a very valuable lesson that can be summed up in a slogan in the Star Trek spoof, Galaxy Quest. The slogan is, "Never give up. Never surrender." While there are times to resign in chess, this game showed me that you should wait until it's completely obvious that you're lost before resigning. This game also taught me that I have within me a very stubborn defender that refuses to lose. Every chess player should have a game like this to test his resolve and teach him what he's made of. Six years and 255 games later, it is still my longest game.

Dark Energy

2009-12-05T20:32:00.000-08:00

According to Wikipedia, "dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy that permeates all of space and tends to increase the rate of expansion of the universe." Albert Einstein, frustrated that his original equations of general relativity did not allow for a static universe, added a fudge factor termed the cosmological constant. When Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is not static, Einstein abandoned the cosmological constant, calling it the "biggest blunder" of his life. However, research on Type Ia supernovae revealed that the further away the supernova is from us, not only is the red shift and speed greater, but it is greater in a nonlinear fashion, implying an accelerating expansion as opposed to constant expansion predicted by inertia overcoming gravity or deceleration predicted by everything pulling gravitationally on everything else. The cosmological constant idea has gained new life in theoretical astrophysics as the quantification of this acceleration. What causes the universe to accelerate its expansion? The proposed cause is dark energy.

Last Thursday, in a contest of Blogger vs. Blogger, I had the black pieces against the Dark Tactician. The opening was the King's Indian Defense Four Pawns Attack which quickly transformed into Gunderam's Six Pawns Attack. I struggled with the opening because I mixed up my systems and tried to use Na6 recommended in Joe Gallagher's Beating the Anti-King's Indians after I had already played c5. Even though I was ahead in development since my opponent pushed the c through h pawns inclusive, my pieces had almost no activity and were bumping into each other. In My System, Aron Nimzowitsch wrote of both the passed pawn and the isolated queen pawn having "the lust to expand" meaning they have a tendency to advance. The Dark Tactician used Dark Energy to send six pawns expanding toward me. The h-file became half-open on move 12 and I got the usual paranoid feeling when I defend the Dragon and Bobby Fischer's "sac, sac, mate" begins to echo in my ears. Luckily, the expansion decelerated in a gravity well of undeveloped mass and he allowed me to poke a hole in his Big Bang. A queen-rook battery down the open e-file landed a heavy piece on his second rank and then his whole pawn front imploded in the Big Crunch while I retained three pawns in a battle of rook and knight versus rook and knight. My opponent almost conjured up a mating net or a brutal fork, but I sidestepped these plans and achieved simplification to a winning plan.

I did not consider my opponent at all insolent for refusing to resign. It's an admirable trait in a chess player as I myself have been on the other side struggling for the swindle. As long as someone's not deliberately trying to waste my time by letting his clock run, I welcome the chance to test my technique. In fact, when someone resigns in a position just two pawns down, I feel their resignation is premature as in my game just two weeks prior. I don't think my technique deserves that much respect...yet.

After the game, my opponent pointed out the 26...Rxf2 tactic. I was disappointed that I missed such a thing. Tactics first, then positional considerations.

Self-assessment:
1. My Four Pawns defense sucks. Gotta book up.
2. Tactics like 26...Rxf2! tell me that rooks aren't always so simple.
3. Knight complexities like 40...Nd1+ continue to be a problem.
4. I have to add to my checklist of things to try not to miss #13.pawns running amuck (moves 31 and 41) and #14.king zwischenzugs (move 41).
5. I was heartened by my calculation and move choice at moments like 24...Bxc3, 32...Re3, 38...a6, and 53...Nc3.

de Groot Exercise

2009-11-29T19:36:00.000-08:00

As part of some recent analysis of my analysis, I decided to do the last two exercises at Chess Tempo using a de Groot exercise. Most of what I just learned comes from NM Dan Heisman's Novice Nook #29. In the late 1930s, Dr. Adriaan de Groot published research on the thinking processes used by players of all grades from world champions down to class players on a small series of positions. Mr. Heisman has an excellent discussion of both Dr. de Groot's conclusions and his own from administering the de Groot exercise to hundreds of his students. One set of Dr. de Groot's conclusions was quite interesting:

Strong players have four phases of thought process:
1.Orientation to Possibilities.
2.Phase of Exploration.
3.Phase of Investigation.
4.Striving for Proof.

Without reading more on de Groot, I'm a little fuzzy on the difference between steps 2 and 3, but 1 and 4 seem clear.

The proper de Groot exercise utilizes positions that are rich in possibilities, not tactical move and win positions like at Chess Tempo. Nevertheless, I am trying not to miss things that are there, so I'm curious what things are slipping through my dragnet. My de Groot exercises involve two successes, so in that sense, perhaps I will not learn much, but perhaps eventually I'll meet more failures and then be able to produce refinements.

Chess Tempo #41477

Material is even. My black queen is attacked by white's last move g4. Wild checks go nowhere. I have a threat of Bd4 pinning White's queen to his king. The Nc3 is a little insecure from a removal of the guard on d2 either from Rxd2 or from a queen trade offer and takeback. My Nb4 is loose.

Candidates:
-Qa5 to hold my knight in the middle of the melee?
-Bxg4 fxg4 Qxg4 doesn't look so good, but the threat of Bd4 increases the possibilities of crazy moves working. My evaluation says that I'm simply losing material.
-Nc2 threatens White's queen and if gxh5 Nxe3 forks rooks, but Bxe3 Bxc3 is just equal.

So back to main line Qa5 Qf4 Rd4 or better yet Qa5 Qf4 Qc5+ to hit c3 twice.
But what about simply Qa5 Kh1 then Nc2 Qg5 (Qf4 Bxc3 Ah, the Qa5 was also hitting c3.)

After Qa5 Kh1 Nc2 Qg5 what about Bxc3? Qxa5 Bxa5 Bxa5 Rxd1 Rxd1+=

What about Qxg5 Bxg5 Bxc3 but doesn't Rc1 get one minor back? Bd2! holds the extra minor. Then Bxe7 Bxc1 Bxd8 Be3 Bf6.

After Qa5 Kh1 Nc2 Qg5 Qxg5 Bxg5 Bxc3 Rxd8+ Rxd8 Rc1 Bd2 Bxe7 Bxc1 Bxd8 is still a minor up.

My line was correct. The problem had a rating of 2103 when I did it. I could have been #6)overconfident, not seeing my own hanging knight at b4. I also could have #3)overlooked the defensive resource Kh1. I almost #4)pruned too early after Bxc3 and before Bd2!

Chess Tempo #50698

Material is even. White has doubled b pawns, Black has two bishops.
White is fully developed, Black is behind on QB and QR development and has vulnerable dark squares around his king.
Crazy checks: Nf6+ seem to dead end, but there is a discovery from Re1 if I get the bishop out first.
Forcing moves: Bc5 hits queen, Rxh4 distracts queen. Preparing Nf6+

Line: Bc5 (One fantasy is Qd8? Rxh4 Qxh4 Nf6+ Qxf6 Rxe8+ Kg7 Bf8+ Kg8 Bh6#) gxh5 Bxe7 Rxe7. White comes out with the Q vs R+B advantage of +1 nominal material. Black's kingside pawns are messy.

Other line Rxh4 Qxh4 Bg5 {intending Nf6+ and Rxe8} Qxg5 Nxg5 Rxe1+ Kh2 seems worse -1 disadvantage of Q vs 2R.

Bc5 was right! Rxh4 suckered a lot of the commentators. This problem had a 2125 rating when I did it. I probably still #4)pruned too early because I didn't think about what to do about my pinned Ne4 to my loose Re1 at the end of the Bc5 variation. I have to go back to my mini-study to figure out why I missed some #7)bishop complexities, like the key move here. I almost missed #3)defensive resource and #1)queen complexities on the Qxg5 ending to the Rxh4 line.

I'll try to Google some more resources on de Groot to try to understand the difference between Phase 2 Exploring and Phase 3 Investigating.

TPS Report #17

2009-11-27T22:53:00.001-08:00

I made it to #4 on the list of Chess Tempo endgame theory rankings. I recommend training with Chess Tempo to players trying to improve their knowledge of endgames. Although there are several endgames such as QvR, RBvR, and NNvP that are fairly impractical, I enjoy their challenges and collecting their weird secrets, that someday I hope to present in a coherent manner. However, there are many RPvR and a few QPvQ which are quite practical.

I went through and fixed a lot of my blog entries with games that used to be on Chess Publisher and converted them to ChessFlash.

No openings work. No master games. No middlegame tactics. No checklist training.

Skill, Luck, or Pity?

2009-11-24T09:33:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday I played against my friend and coach Nate Garingo. The night started off rocky. Jerry was late and the TD duties once again sucked me in. I can't seem to avoid working for the club. I asked myself, "Why didn't someone else make the pairing cards by now?" "Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in." I'm trying to avoid responsibilities because they detract from the fun of the game. So the pairings were almost an hour late. My passive aggressiveness kept me from suggesting that I could pair the round in 2 minutes on my computer. Jerry wouldn't approve of the computer and USCF pairings anyway. It's his tournament, not mine.

So my mindset was that even though the round was starting an hour late, I would still get home at a decent hour because my defeat would be quick. When Nate and I sat down, he asked if this was our sixth game. I thought it was our fifth. He recounted each of our games by their openings. I didn't remember the first one, but eventually his description of an errant knight maneuver in the English jogged my memory. A couple dragons, a bayonet King's Indian, and a Scandinavian. Yeah that's five. Nate won them all. This would be the sixth.

The game itself also started off rocky. It was my second French game ever. Book was quickly thrown out. First I made mistakes, then he made some. And then a surprising thing happened...

Here are three crucial positions from the game:

White to play. White has wedged his Queen into a tight spot. Is he genuinely in trouble? What's the best move for White?

White to play. Can White get some compensation for his pawn?

Black to play. How should Black deal with the threat of Nc7+?

The answers are in the analysis of the game:

I was proud that I found 11.Ne5, 17.Nxd5, and worked out almost all the lines of how to rescue my knight. I'm disappointed that I didn't see moves like the first 13.Bb5+ and the analysis Kb8 Rxg5 idea. Most importantly, I broke through a psychological: that I could no longer beat the strong tactical players in the club.

Capablanca said, "A good player is always lucky." "Luck" in chess seems to happen when your opponent's blind spots coincide with with your good plans. I was lucky I didn't blunder 9.Qh8?, didn't miss Ne5! with alternatives h4/g3/Be2, didn't choose 19.Bxc6, and didn't "blunder" 22.f3. I was lucky Nxd5 worked out with the knight getting away. I was lucky Nate missed 13...Bd7, 14...Rh8, 17...Rb8, and overlooked 20.Rxb5.

I half-jokingly accused Nate of throwing the game in order to prop up a friend's fragile chess ego. My case would include points like: he chose to give up his book advantage, he allowed the trade of queens which dampened his dynamic strength, he miscalculated the critical phase, and he shuffled his pieces around almost aimlessly (Nb8-d7-f6xh5-f6-d7, Bc8-d7-c6-b5-c6). Funny enough, the last game we played was 364 days prior in the 2008 edition of the Holiday Swiss. He knew that my enthusiasm for chess had tanked around then. Nate assured me that he wouldn't lose a game on purpose, but my ISTJ personality keeps the nagging doubts close.

Nate and I have discussed chess and pity before. I think Larry Evans tells a story about the most beautiful chess move in history involving someone resigning before his opponent's flag fell. This move doesn't strike me so beautiful as dumb. Chess is not a place for mercy and pity. If you play with pity for your opponent and somehow play weaker because of it, you not only hurt your game, but you also rob your opponent of part of the spoils of victory because you have only allowed him to triumph over your sympathetic chess avatar. "Oh, I was trying to go easy on him" is a rather lame excuse unless you're trying encourage a child, and even then, it's questionable. A French Proverb says "You cannot play chess if you are kind-hearted."

Broadening Vision

2009-11-22T23:06:00.000-08:00

My friend showed me this problem about a week ago. He said that he couldn't get it. I similarly failed. Here's your chance to show you're better than two experts. White to play:

Highlight this box for a light hint [Nd8 is in most lines somewhere.]

Highlight this box for a heavy hint [The first four moves are all checks.]

Highlight this box for the solution [1.Qd6+ Kc8 2.Qd8+ Kb7 3.Qxb6+!! Kxb6 (3...axb6 4.Nd8+ Kc7 5.Nxf7) 4.a5+ Kc6 (4...Ka6 5.Nc5#) (4...Kb7 5.Nd8+) 5.Nd8+ Kd7 6.Nxf7 +-]

* SPOILERS *

* SPOILERS *

* SPOILERS *

I think the reason why I missed this problem is that both the width and depth of my thinking were insufficient. I thought I solved it with 1.Qd6+ Ka8 2.Qe8+ Kb7 3.Nc5+, but I overlooked the defensive resource 3...Kc6. I couldn't even see Qxb6+ because it looks too daring. I noticed the knight could fork after 1.Qd6+ Kb7, but once the queen went to d8, I stopped thinking about it. The mating pattern also seemed novel. Many features that I noticed on my tactical evaluation are here:

#1.Queen complexities
#3.Defensive resource (3...Kc6)
#4.Horizon/Premature cutoff (3.Qxb6+ can't work)
#8.Knight complexities (Nd8 fork)
#9.Backward move (3.Qd8xb6 and Nd8 forking things behind it) AND
#10.Complex new pattern (Nc5 mate)

Here's one I'm proud didn't get away. Chess Tempo #61744 is one of the higher rated problems I've gotten lately.

Highlight the following for a light hint. [What is White's chief advantage?]

Highlight the following for a heavy hint. [Invite more people to the party.]

Highlight the following for the solution. [1.Nd2! Ke7 {unpins} 2.Rc6 Qxc6 4.Qxc6]

* SPOILERS *

* SPOILERS *

* SPOILERS *

I started off moving around the queen and rook in my head, but I couldn't get much traction after 1.Rc6 Qb3 stops the idea of 2.Qe6+ Be7 3.Rc8+ and 1.Rc6 Qb3 2.Re6+ Kf7 3.Qd7+ Kg8 isn't much of an advantage. Suddenly it occurred to me that White's queen and rook are already putting heavy weight on Black's pressure point, the pinned bishop on d8. The pieces might be as good as they're going to get for the time being. Black's pieces were also about as good as they could get, almost in zugzwang. Because of the recognition that White's queen and rook don't get much out of moving, I turned my attention to White's knight which is not participating. Nxe5 and Ng5 didn't look good, so I began to think about the backward and quiet-looking Nd2. One thing I did gain from the early Rc6 lines was that the Black Queen could harass my king a little bit. Nd2 is useful for preventing both Qb1+ and Qc3. It also threatens Nc4 removing the queen as guard of Bd8 and blocking the attempt of the move Qb3 to protect e6 from the White Queen.

The problem has the following difficulties from my list:
#1.Queen complexities
#8.Knight complexities
#9.Backward move
#11.Zugzwang (not exactly, but close enough)

I'm still not consciously saying to myself, "Look for backward moves and zugzwang and weird defensive moves" but I'd like to think subconsciously my board vision is improving a little.

Chess Is Hard

2009-11-18T05:26:00.000-08:00

"Chess is hard." - Jerry Weikel, NTD and organizer/director of Reno's two large annual chess tournaments
"Chess is ludicrously difficult." - Stephen Fry
"Chess is mental torture." - Garry Kasparov
"Chess is so deep, I simply feel lost." - Vladimir Kramnik
"Chess is horribly, heinously, and hellaciously hard." - me, on maximum verbosity
"@#%*!" - Anonymous

Hearing Jerry say "Chess is hard" for the umpteenth time like a mantra got me thinking about chess and hardness. This thought led me to the traditional Mohs scale of mineral hardness:

Level 10	Diamond	Super Grandmaster/World Champion
Level 9	Corundum	International Grandmaster
Level 8	Topaz	International Master
Level 7	Quartz	Master
Level 6	Feldspar	Expert
Level 5	Apatite	Class A
Level 4	Fluorite	Class B
Level 3	Calcite	Class C
Level 2	Gypsum	Class D
Level 1	Talc	Class E

FYI, soapstone is Mohs hardness 2, alabaster 3, marble 6, granite 8, cubic zirconium 8.

I imagine mineralogist Friedrich Mohs in 1812 rubbing two rocks together and recording the result in a notepad. This reminds me of a "scientist" who published a research proposal on Cragslist to find the genetically strongest M&Ms in his own Highlander tournament to the death and then breed them into a super-race of champion M&Ms. "There can be only one."

"Oh, Andy loved geology. I guess it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes really, pressure, and time. That, and a big god-damned poster." - Red from Shawshank Redemption

RED: The man likes to play chess; let's get him some rocks.
(later)
HEYWOOD: Guys! I got one. I got one. Look!
FLOYD: Heywood, that isn't soapstone, and it ain't alabaster either!
HEYWOOD: What are you a fuckin' geologist?
SNOOZE: No he's right. It ain't.
HEYWOOD: Well what the hell is it then!
RED: It's a horse apple.
HEYWOOD: Bullshit!
RED: No, horse shit, petrified.
HEYWOOD: Oh Jesus! Damn!
(later)
RED: Despite a few hitches, the boys came through in fine style. And by the weekend he was due back, we had enough rocks saved up to keep him busy 'til Rapture.

I ain't no geologist and I wouldn't know a petrified horse turd from granite. I ain't no writer either. I just flesh out these ideas I get using Google and Wikipedia. My writing ability is simply a multimedia content aggregator which simulates originality only through eclectic plagiarism. Alfred Lanning asked, "When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter mote of a soul?"

A geologic age ago, my passion for chess was like a mass of hot lava which, like my heart, was about the size of my fist. Exposed to the atmosphere, the outer layer solidified into a shell of rock. Over time, the shell thickened until the only heat left was at the center, encased in cold inert laziness and anxiety. The shell is of a dull soapstone, lacking in any brilliance whatsoever.

Simon and Garfunkel sang "And the rock feels no pain. And an island never cries." Lately, I had experienced some unwelcome emotionality with regard to chess. I think my sportsmanship until this year had been impeccable, not showing too much animus toward myself or my opponent when the result was subpar. If I lost, I patiently accepted it as just another of Caissa's gifts of wisdom for her humble follower. I was a happy and dispassionate chess enthusiast. But recently, I internalized failures at the board as outward signs of weakness and lost sight of my happy place. The losses became a bitter medicine that I couldn't stand any more. I think it stemmed from forgetting that this game is fun and instead focusing on both the self-imposed mandate to improve and the frustration that comes upon seeing the paltry returns on investment of effort. I must return to my rational center. What would Spock say? "Frustration is illogical." What would Data say? "I am an android. I do not get emotional about chess."

During my recent forays into Scrabble, I found that sportsmanship as a lowest grade Scrabble player is surprisingly difficult. Scrabble has a much larger luck factor in that the tiles you draw from the bag can make or break your game. In Word Freak, Stephen Fatsis wrote of the tendency for Scrabble players to curse the tiles when they're losing, but true Scrabble champions play through adversity. I rapidly became one of the cursers.

Susan Boyle sang from Les Miserables, "I dreamed a dream in time gone by." I believed I could get to where the chess masters are if I only had enough time. But over the years the belief turned to lost faith, especially this past year when work hardly interfered with my chess study time. Instead of seeing the milestones recede in my rearview mirror, I was stuck in neutral, realizing that I had neither the skill nor the passion to see it through. "But the tigers come at night with their voices soft as thunder. As they tear your hope apart. And they turn your dream to shame."

In round 3 of this year's Western States Open, I had to substitute on the demo boards for a few hours. As I stood in the eye of the silent and invisible hurricane of variations calculated by the surrounding masters, I capitulated to the idea that they are just too far ahead for me to catch them in my lifetime. So I'm not destined for greatness. Well, boo-fucking-hoo. Have I become an ingrate who cries that his cup is only half full? Perhaps, I should count my blessings. Sheryl Crow sang, "It's not having what you want. It's wanting what you've got."

My lava lacks gravity and its main geologic manifestation: pressure. My lava doesn't flow or grow; it is stagnant. The vain hope that the residual nidus of lava can still cool into a geode or a thunder egg will soon evaporate. It's just soapstone through and through. Still, there is a chance for a certain kind of order and beauty. If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. If life gives you shit, polish it into a thing of beauty. I've got soapstone and for now I'll keep on sculpting.

Phoenix

2009-11-17T15:48:00.000-08:00

Having been frozen in the near-absolute zero of entropic Ennui and then shattered by Heartbreak, my chess avatar now lay in scattered shards of glittering pyrite atop the velvety black asphalt. I had neither energy nor will to gather the pieces, so I left them there and walked away. In the first fifty paces, I felt nothing, not a trace of regret. I walked twenty-five more and wondered if I'd ever feel normal again. On my hundredth step, I suddenly turned to look back. To my utter disbelief, the angled, crystalline fragments had melted into pools of mercury and were coalescing into larger and larger pools, guided by a sinister unseen force. I turned and began to run...

TPS Report #16

2009-11-16T15:31:00.000-08:00

During the summer, I stopped by a yard sale and to my delight found Office Space on VHS for fifty cents. So I promptly bought it and went home to watch it twice. My general fuzzy feeling that the movie was genius has now been sharpened into specific scenes that I have memorized for mental replay at any time.

Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment.

It's just that we're putting cover sheets on all TPS reports. Did you get the memo?

The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy. It's that I just don't care.

I told those fudge packers I liked Michael Bolton's music.

Now we had a chance to meet this young man, and boy, that's just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.

BOB: Looks like you've been missing a lot of work lately.
PETER: I wouldn't say I've been *missing* it, Bob.

I can't believe what a bunch of nerds we are. We're looking up "money laundering" in a dictionary.

I do want to express myself, okay. And I don't need 37 pieces of flair to do it.

As the beginning of the end of my break from chess, I took up with Chess Tempo again in late August. One of the features I really like is the separate Endgame drill. They're not quite endgame studies, but a lot of the tests are some of my favorite endings: rook and bishop versus rook or queen versus rook. It allows me to test myself and fill in the holes of my understanding on these endings. One disadvantage is that if you don't pay the subscription fee, the endgames tests are limited to 2/day. If somehow this blog creates a mad rush to subscribe to Chess Tempo, perhaps someone can say "Soapstone sent me" and the proprietor there will give an honorary Gold membership to this cheapskate blogger who so far has resisted the urge to pay for tactical training.

On Chess Tempo, regular middlegame tactics have no daily limitation even if you're a nonpaying registrant. I used to have an accuracy of the untimed Standard tactics of nearly 84%, but that's dropped to 81% lately, aided by inexplicable streaks of failure after failure. My tactics rating has climbed back over 2100, but a lot of the time, I have to concentrate more than 30 minutes on each problem.

A month back a friend asked me whether I had a checklist to thoroughly analyze positions. The question is 'How does one see what one cannot see?' I stated that I didn't have a rigorous method. The reasons are myriad, but it still boils down to me stubbornly refusing to take my medicine and do things right. Up to now, I had just looked at positions and chaotically moved wherever my eyes and thoughts took me. The chaotic method had served me well to this point, but I think it has begun to fail me because my mental clock and attached calculator are no longer as nimble.

So after a particularly miserable streak of getting problems wrong on Chess Tempo, I got so frustrated I decided to do a root cause analysis. Why am I failing to get these problems right? I compiled my last 30 misses and tried to verbalize where my thinking went wrong. Then I went back through and tried to categorize the errors or difficult features. I generated this spreadsheet. The main categories in order of highest to lowest frequency were:

Queen complexities
Missed key
Defensive resource
Horizon/premature cutoff
Creeping move
Overconfidence
Bishop complexities
Knight complexities
Backward move
Fear/Overestimating defense
Complex new pattern
Zugzwang

I gained some ideas about what should go on my checklist. Here is my first approximation:

Checks on his king; follow all crazy sacs to quiescence
Checks on my king; follow all crazy sacs to quiescence
Moves that threaten material
Pieces that have limited mobility to withstand direct attack or assist in defense of the king (e.g. trapping the queen)
Loose pieces to fork
Pinned pieces to pressurize
Pieces on ranks, files, or diagonals - pins and skewers
Pieces on intersecting diagonals and files - forks
Knight forks - pieces on the same color square (from Andres Hortillosa)
Forcing a piece to a vulnerable square
Removing or overloading a defender
*Try to look at least 2 full-width ply to find implausible key moves such as defensive resources and bluffs, creeping and backward moves, wild knight jumps, rampaging pawns/promotion, zugzwang.

I think that I was always looking for the things on the list, just not thoroughly and methodically. The last item is the recent addition from my error analysis. Temposchlucker talked a lot about checklists, but after using some keywords, I couldn't find a tactical checklist that he published for the public benefit.

A week ago, I wandered over to chessloser to see that he blogged twice in October. Then I followed one of his links to Chessgasm who seemed to be interested in proper analytical methods. He reviewed Forcing Chess Moves by Charles Hertan and mentioned it again later as a comparison to Aagard's Excelling at Chess Calculation. I've mentioned Hertan's book before without actually knowing the content of his book, but now I think I've got to go buy it.

Computers play chess by brute force. They look at a position and generate all legal moves and then make those moves in its 'mind' and then generate all subsequent legal moves. This is what's called full width search. Besides the move generator, there is an evaluation function which checks statically who's winning and by how much.

Looking back at my spreadsheet, I surmised that the reason queen complexities were such a problem for me is that they have so many moves, making width quickly unmanageable. It suddenly occurred to me that many of my other weaknesses were problems of insufficient width: missed key, overlooked defensive resource, creeping and backward moves. Premature cutoff/Horizon effect is mostly the perpendicular axis of depth, but often times I'm pruning a variation because I don't see that the next move disturbs the quiescence rather violently, which makes it partially a width problem. The question once again is how does one see moves that one cannot see? Hertan's solution seems to be USE COMPUTER EYES. It's probably impractical for me to emulate the computer, but perhaps it would benefit me to at least calculate the first two ply completely in some settings to try to achieve better width in my searches and see past my blind spots.

So I've got some directions to go in my training. I'm still not conscientiously using my checklist, but like my many unopened chess books, it's there for me to pick up.

Holey Repertoire!

2009-11-15T10:44:00.000-08:00

There was a period a year and a half back when I tried to learn intensively from a coach. I'd say my main weaknesses were tactics and a suitably tactical opening repertoire. So he showed me many different lines from tactical openings, and I nodded my head and said things like, "Neat!" and "Whoa!" But a few weeks later when he showed me the same openings, my neurons could only muster a fuzzy and faint recognition. I've almost always picked things up quickly and vividly, but the lack of retention really frustrated me about chess in particular and made me distrust my own brain in general. Grasping these slippery lines was like fishing with my hands for black eels on a moonless night. Part of it is laziness toward the role of drilling. But part of it I internalize as a hopeless decline of aging. But that's my mental enemy talking again.

Back in April, I was trying to qualify for the Club Championship and played Drunknknite. It was a quick loss mostly from an opening inaccuracy. Afterward I remarked that I had hardly faced the Gligoric in my years of playing the King's Indian and Drunknknite said, "So I found the hole in your repertoire." A week later he asked if I had seen Gelfand-Polgar. At least my opening mistake had been made by a grandmaster once.

For last Thursday's game, I eschewed the well-trodden paths of the open Sicilian for the trappiness of the Morra Gambit. But the choice backfired as I was out of book at move 6. My opponent found good moves and I soon found myself two pawns down with no compensation. Luckily, I managed to get some play and exchanged into a theoretically drawn endgame.

So repairing my leaky opening repertoire is climbing my To Do List again.

Rust

2009-11-09T12:25:00.000-08:00

A while back I wrote a comment to my own post Ennui.

Come, rust, enclose me in thy ruinous embrace. Silence these incessant ply-crunching gears so that I may hear the music of the other dryads.

Except for one skittles game in September, I did no pawn pushing for six months. Instead, I spent some time consorting with the dryads of Scrabble and elliptical, the naiad of the swimming pool, and the muses of writing and piano playing. But the autumn chill prompts both vestigial hibernation instincts and thoughts of Caissa. I wonder what she's been up to lately?

I have come to a place where getting back into chess is not currently eclipsed by the fear and loathing that I'll discover how hopeless improving my game is. As long as I can, I'm going to concentrate on what's fun and try not to get overwrought about what's impossible.

With a thunderous screech not unlike the roars of the T.Rexes that roam Hollywood, the gears lurched into motion, breaking the seals of rust and grinding them into an orange powder which floated up and merged with black diesel smoke.

So I returned to the club and entered the first round of the Holiday Swiss. It wasn't a bad game. I think I limited my opponent's chances throughout and I found interesting ideas, just not all of them.

Chessaholics Anonymous

2009-06-27T08:51:00.000-07:00

ME: Hi. My name is Ernie and I'm a chessaholic.
ALL: Hi, Ernie.
ME: It's been forty-four days since my last pawn push.

I wish to start out saying that I don't do drugs. I hardly even drink since I dislike the bitter taste of alcohol and it wreaks havoc on my digestive tract.

In considering my dysfunctional relationship with Caissa, I concluded that my relationship with chess is less like a codependency with a sadistic girlfriend and more like a drug habit. I've heard that the hallucinogen LSD was popular because of its mind-expanding effects, but I've also heard that "bad trips" discouraged its use. Chess is like a drug where your wins are good trips and your losses are bad trips.

Polly calls her addiction to time scramble chess "cracktion".

In my ninth game of the Reno Club Championship Qualifier, I won against strong A player Mark Rand. Going into it, I really had a defeatist attitude. "I'm facing the three highest rated competitors in my section. I just came off a loss. I'm out of form. I can't calculate any more." I made some opening choices that further hurt my confidence. I decided to play into the main lines of the Najdorf even though I've never played a tournament game against it. I hardly ever castle queenside because I think my king is a sitting duck on c1 as opposed to g1. But I grimly set myself to the task and memorized a few lines. Of course I was out of my book in seven moves. I even gave up my beloved bishop pair to double his f-pawns. The game was good on some levels, disappointing on others. My opponent said he kept checking for the thematic Nd5, but just when he forgot, I played it and ended a tactical exchange one pawn up. Both sides had some pawn weaknesses, but the black pawns seemed worse especially since they blocked his bishops. I had some good ideas restricting his play like a boa constrictor, but missed some of the best ideas. Basically, I just exchanged all the pieces except for my good knight against his bad bishop and ground him down with the extra pawn. Although I knew I had the advantage, the endgame wasn't very clear to me until the h-pawn dash at the end. When he played f5 and broke up my pawns, I thought, "Uh-oh. There goes the win." At one point, seated at the board, I lifted a cup of water to my lips, but halfway there, I noticed that I was shaking like a junkie. I don't know if my opponent or the couple of spectators noticed, but I quickly grabbed my left hand with my right, just to get it to stop shaking. This was my sixth longest tournament game ever.

My knowledge of the Najdorf was limited to the thematic Nd5 move, e5 and f5 pushes, and play against weaknesses on e6 and f7. Fifteen years ago I had a similar pawn formation playing Black and survived a missed mating attack to win my first three-figure prize. In this game I think I was basically lucky that my opponent walked into positions that I knew how to milk in a general fashion without actually knowing specific variations of the terrifically booked Najdorf.

After the game, you'd think that I could sleep better than after my previous round loss, but I actually slept worse, about three hours. However, this time all the bad variations were in my nightmares and when I awoke, the win was still mine. Still, I wonder if I'll have to completely kick this habit some day because of the weird things it does to my mind and body.

The wins send me into a euphoric mania while the losses send me into a wallowing obsession. Both paths lead to insomnia. The day after is a hangover of sleep deprivation and guilt that I let a stupid game mess me up. Here's my pale imitation of the inimitable Chessloser.

ME: Um, Caissa? I think our relationship has taken an unhealthy turn. Maybe we need to take a break.
CAISSA: You're breaking up with me? YOU'RE breaking up with ME? I'm a goddess! You're a lowly expert and a weak one at that.
ME: See, you're cutting me down again. I need someone who will be a positive influence on my life. Someone like...Scrabble.
CAISSA: You're choosing that skank with the shapeless tiles over this statuesque beauty? Don't think that I didn't know you've been two-timing. You're gonna regret this. You'll come crawling back. Best of all, I won't even miss you. Drop dead, you patzer!

Maybe I'm just trading one crazy girlfriend for another, but I'm participating in a Scrabble tournament here in town next week. My wife will not only be there to keep me grounded, but she'll be playing, too. I predict that Scrabble won't be able to inspire the same depth of passion as chess, but maybe a little less insomnia is healthier for now.

Freak Show

2009-06-15T01:10:00.000-07:00

Here are two book reviews. I hope people don't get offended by my broad-brushes with the word “freak”. Taking a cue from Mr. Fatsis, I consider these personalities freakishly accomplished.

King's Gambit by Paul Hoffman
In my review of The Chess Artist, I ended up panning the book mostly because I felt robbed at the end by the author's disillusionment and estrangement from his friend and chess itself. After reading King's Gambit, I would say that Paul Hoffman's book is the one I had been seeking.

King's Gambit explores the lofty aeries to the depths of abyss experienced by those chess artists that commit the best part of their lives to the game. The heights include interviews with Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short. The depths include analyses of the usual suspects: Morphy, Fischer, Bloodgood. Not only did Paul Hoffman interview FIDE President Kirsan Ilzhuminov, but he also played a tense King's Gambit against him which ended in an agreed draw. The author's friendship with Pascal Charbonneau allows us to vicariously live the triumphs and tragedies near the top, including the penultimate aspiration chessplayers can have aside from becoming world champion: becoming an International Grandmaster.

One of the most amusing parts was reading about Charbonneau's terrible study habits. The most dramatic part was the intimation of threats of bodily harm in Libya.

Paul Hoffman himself is quite a character with an amazing resume including: graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College, steering Encyclopaedia Britannica, steering Discover magazine, and being color commentator for ESPN on the man vs. machine match between Garry Kasparov and Deep Fritz. When I found out he was also the man behind the pseudonym Dr. Crypton, whose puzzles I had played with as a teenager reading Science Digest, I had a "No way!" moment. Ridiculously ubiquitous.

The inclusion of his complicated relationship with his father points up the subconsciously patricidal psychology of chess illuminated by Ernest Jones' analysis of Paul Morphy. I felt disappointment that the author's marriage fell apart, but perhaps feel privileged that he confided this with me as the reader of his memoir. I hope that his own experiences are a cautionary tale on how to maintain his relationship with his son. As with Chess Artist, I sensed an estrangement between the author and chess, backed up from what I see in the USCF databases, but Hoffman recently defended his legitimacy as a continuing chess player by pointing out his participation in an unrated 2007 city team league. Whereas there is still disillusionment at the end of the book, there are still relationships to fall back on in the larger scheme of the author's rich life. Since the book was autobiographical in scope, the larger context of accomplishment makes the disillusionment less jarring. This time, I didn’t feel robbed.

Word Freak by Andrew Fatsis
Word Freak is an entertaining and thorough treatment on the history of Scrabble and the colorful (read dysfunctional) personalities that inhabit its upper echelons. Again, the story follows the author's own efforts to find some level of accomplishment in the game while hanging out with amazingly skilled anagrammers. Many of the chapters are entitled simply with a four digit number which was his rating during that time. Ups and downs and self-loathing are all too familiar.

I was most amused when he described the craving for more legitimacy for Scrabble as a socially important pastime relative to chess which has its own inferiority complexes, usually craving the legitimacy of golf and tennis. The question "Why can't tournament Scrabble be as legitimate as tournament chess" makes me laugh when I think about chess' current sad state of governance. The doubters' refrain "It's just a game" hounds the Scrabble players who like chess players seem to be hopelessly behind the house in terms of life spent in questionable pursuit. Books like these help to document and legitimize the common effort of a chosen - or stigmatized - few.

Being a book about Scrabble, the words themselves became a star subject. Having spent some time memorizing a few 7-letter bingoes myself, I appreciated it when Fatsis worked words like ETESIAN (an annually occuring wind) and SENARII (Greek or Latin verses consisting of six metrical feet) into the everyday vignettes. One gets the impression that the English language is one massive fusty museum with entire wings of forgotten words that only get visited by the pedantic Scrabblers in search of their next bingo or clever word hook. The sheer mental exertion required to cram hundreds of thousands of obscure word patterns into a mind is reminiscent of the herculean task of cramming chess openings and tactical patterns into these fallible brains. The sieve and the sand. A visit to a lexicographer who seemed to possess the keys to the entire English language in his modest ascetic apartment came off as positively surreal.

In both of these books, the authors are fairly proficient practitioners of the games, nearly experts. They feel the inferiority complex of hanging with the masters without being able to really hang with the masters. I think this is the sweet spot of writing for an amateur audience. They are both skilled writers who can describe in beautiful detail the promised land from a lofty vantage point, but like Moses, they themselves are not allowed to enter. Author and reader commiserate in the bittersweet wistfulness of mediocrity. I highly recommend both King's Gambit and Word Freak as clear and luxurious picture windows on these freakish worlds within our world.

Spy vs. Spy

2009-05-11T08:29:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite features of Mad Magazine was the Spy vs. Spy comic. The twists and turns and the convoluted traps that the spies set for each other were so outlandish. Just like chess, the ideology of Spy vs. Spy was a clash between black and white.

A few months back, a commentator at Drunknknite's blog mentioned that games from the Far West Open had shown up at Mark Crowther's The Week In Chess, issue #754. I became a little concerned because I hadn't even published the paper copy of the 2009 Far West Open games bulletin that was being paid for by subscribers at $7 apiece. To my relief, I found that TWIC contained the games from 2008 which by convention were released to the public about a month before the 2009 tournament. All was copacetic.

Games being produced in an event are a small way to advertise for the tournament if people playing through them happen to notice where they were contested. I was a little tickled that a website about high class chess that I had followed since the early days of the internet was publishing some of my games. I believe that the ChessBase Megabase databases derive most of their new material from reconditioned TWIC data. I don't know this for a fact, but why duplicate the labor of entering games?

A year from now, a few more of my games may appear in ChessBase Megabase 2010. Right now the Megabases contain three of my games from the 1993 Illinois Open when I beat Expert Erik Karklins, smashed NM Kevin Bachler in a Saemisch King's Indian, then lost to Karklins' son SM Andrew Karklins by a hair in a queen ending. If ChessBase takes all six of my games from FWO2008, then I'll become 5.0-4.0 in their files.

Having been a collector of scoresheets for a half dozen years now, I appreciate that the games are being preserved for posterity. In fact, someone emailed me before the Far West Open and asked if I had his games from the previous Western States Open because he had misplaced his records; I was able to supply most of his games. But the games archive is also available for reconnaissance. Myself being included with sterotypical paranoid chessplayers, I experience reluctance relinquishing my opening secrets to a public which can include my next opponent. On the one hand, it would be a long-term advantage to have people rectify my opening holes. But given a choice, I think I would almost always prefer winning a game to learning something from a draw or a loss. If I give up the element of surprise, won't my results be poorer?

For a while, I've been reluctant to collect games from my fellow club members to put on our website, partially out of laziness against producing more work for myself. But I mainly feel as if I do the players a disservice by leaking their opening secrets or their middlegame and endgame tendencies to their opponents. One of my friends is dismissive that this is just crazy talk and nobody but titled payers have the discipline to study stuff like this, but I suspect this same person utilizes the club games database for reconnaissance. My main concern is that the Las Vegas team could be getting the upper hand in our yearly matches because of an advantage in information.

One response is to change up your game. I'm trying to embrace this idea in my own game with mixed results. I had spent a dozen years relying on English, Sicilian, and King's Indian before I dropped the latter two for the Modern/Robatsch/Rat with improved results at first. But my game lacked the tactical flourishes that my strong peers were seeing, so I began to go toward open tactical games, switching out the English for irregular King-pawn systems and abandoning the Modern in favor of the Scandinavian and Budapest. I even flirted with the 1.f4 Polar Bear in one game with unsatisfactory results. More recently, I've been trying to learn more main line stuff, but almost all my games leave book early.

I'm annoyed at Chess Publisher for going defunct and taking most of my blogged games off the information superhighway and into the Hotel California. But on the plus side, I'm sheltered from reconnaissance for a while. I haven't heard any clamor for me to fix those past broken posts, so it will go to the bottom of my to do list for now.

Note: I started this post on May 11, but didn't get around to polishing and publishing until June 7.

Bulletin Guy

2009-04-15T13:55:00.000-07:00

At the Far West Open, I was neither player nor TD. I occasionally helped out my friends on the demo boards and I helped with some of the computer support for the organizer. But I had purposefully avoided most responsibility, preferring volunteerism and getting paid in "Thank you"'s. My most official duty was getting scoresheets and translating them into PGN for preparing the games bulletin. Our club had about twenty members playing, eight in the open section alone, so there were plenty of vicarious thrills of enjoying other people's wins while distancing myself from their losses. For the long periods of silence and inactivity, I had Asimov's "Prelude To Foundation" with me.

When I look back on the weekend, it seemed enjoyable if long and it had its moments. Don't get me wrong. I'm still living in the hermetically sealed comfort zone that is typical of self-absorbed nerds. Conversations are still stilted and brief. But a few times, when I looked up from my scoresheets and my Pocket PC, I almost had the semblance of a social life.

Jerry: Why aren't you playing?
Me: Can't stand the stress of losing.
Jerry: Well, take byes.
Me: Ha ha. If only I could anticipate my losses and always replace them with byes.
Jerry: I know what you mean. The pain of the losses seems to be bigger than the pleasure of the wins.

Tim: Are you playing?
Me: No, just watching this time.
Tim: Why not?
Me: Stomachaches.
Tim smiles knowingly. (Tim and I had almost exactly the same conversation vice versa a couple years ago when he pointed out the correlation between stomachaches and chess.).
Tim (looking over at drunknknite losing to fpawn): I bet he's going to have a big stomachache.

Mike(kibitzing during blitz): "Yes. Yes, I did it. I killed Yvette. I hated her SO...much. It-it-the-ff-it. Flames-flames. Flames...on the side of my face. Breathing. Breath. Breathing breath."
Me: History of the World? Or Young Frankenstein?
Mike: Clue.
Me: Ah, Madeline, you left us too soon.

Hanging with Nate and going over his games.

Eating prime rib with Nate and Chris at the Grand Sierra's Lodge Buffet between rounds 1 and 2.

Listening to John Donaldson and Vik Pupols swap a bookful of old chess stories.

Goofin' with Grant.

Watching Antal and Sevillano destroy other masters in style while filling in on demo boards.

Getting the inside scoop from Dana regarding his scalp of an IM.

Talking to Craig about Asimov and getting shushed by a GM.

Talking to fpawn about wheelchairs, Supernationals, and Foxwoods, and then listening in while he gave strategic advice to Danya about how to approach his next opponent.

I could get used to this. No worries. Just enjoying chess from the peanut gallery.

Fantasy and Nightmare

2009-04-14T00:47:00.000-07:00

In my last Reno Club Championship Qualifier game, I was playing against friend and upstart Class A player Grant Fleming. I had anticipated his playing a Scandinavian against my intended 1.e4 since he seemed to be having some success with this opening lately, so I tried to book up. I decided to play a positional line with Nc3 and Nf3 while delaying d4, hoping to catch him in a trap involving an early Nd4. The game quickly left my book as he played an early Bg4, which I had missed in my preparations. Still, I uncorked a thematic b4 pawn offer hitting his queen at a5. He didn't bite, but a few moves later, I loosened my position with d3 and the b4 pawn became more appetizing. I became dissatisfied with my compensation, but a few moves later, I mixed things up with d4, with complicated sequences of central exchanges in front of his uncastled king. We reached the following position:

My bishop on c5 prevents Black from castling kingside and my queen prevents queenside castling. Where to move my queen? In order to keep the Black King in the center, I would like to stay on the d-file, so Qd4, Qd3, and Qd1 are possibilities. Qd4 and Qd3 look like naturally centralizing moves for the queen, but Qd1 caught my eye. I saw that it scores some initiative points on the Bh5 with variations such as Qd1 Bxe2 Qxe2+ Kd8 or Qd1 Bg6 Re1 threatening a devastating discovery. But if Qd1, then what about Rd8, forfeiting the right to castle queenside? Then Qe1 would again threaten a devastating discovery. But then Black has Bd2 taking care of the checking piece in the discovery and also forking the undefended knight on c3 to boot. Qd1 is no good because of Bxc3 Qc1 Bxe2. The queen is very bad trapped against the first rank. How strong is the discovery? If from Qd1 Rd8 Qe1 Bd2 Bxh5+ Bxe1 Rxe1+ Kd7, I didn't think that two bishops for the queen was enough.

Suddenly, an inspiration occurred. A vision of a queen sacrifice and crisscrossing bishop diagonals from Adolf Anderssen's famous Evergreen Game came into my head. What about Qd1 Rd8 Bd2 Bg4+!!? The bishop stopping haltingly on g4 covers the d7 flight square. The Black King is trapped in a well and my heavy pieces are pouring hot oil down on his head. After Bg4+! Bxe1 Rbxe1+ Black gets to sacrifice his pieces in vain to delay a forced mate in 4, e.g. Ne4 Rxe4+ Qe7 Rxe7+ Kf8 Re8++! Kxe8 Re1#. I played Qd1 and to my barely suppressed delight, the moves Rd8 Qe1 Bd2 followed. It's tough to maintain a poker face when you're anticipating the pleasure of being the cat that ate the canary. With triumph and authority, I banged out Bg4+!! and smugly watched for my opponent to go through the five stages of chess grief: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. This correlated with the following nonverbal signals: his head snapped back in surprise, his eyes searched the board in vain, he frowned and searched harder while biting his lip, shook his head slowly for thirty seconds, and then laid his king down. As we shook hands, my opponent said, "Congratulations on a brilliant victory and in only 20 moves!" I tried to suppress my pride and joy, but couldn't help mentioning that the ghost of Adolf Anderssen helped me. I went home early in the evening, satisfied with my chess ability and comfortable in my standing for the Qualifier. Heck I could probably even lose the final three games and still qualify. Fritz told me that while my opening and early middlegame play was uneven, my decision to open the center was good. I was a little annoyed that the play after Qd1 was not inevitably winning because of the move Nd7! hitting the Bc5 that was preventing him from castling. But my spirits were undampened. I even had enough time to catch up on a small backlog of TV shows that I had recorded before I went to bed.

As I dreamed, a nagging doubt crept in. What if my opponent had found Nd7!? Then my brilliancy would have been thwarted. So what? Some people have poked holes in Anderssen's games, too. But then my dream took a turn toward nightmare...

I was back at the club and instead of playing the provocative Qd1, I played Qd3, which was probably even a little worse than Qd4 because it allowed Bg6 and I had to move my queen again, this time to Qc4, allowing him to castle queenside if he so dared. Then came b6 and Ba3 to keep kingside castling off the table. If c5, I was planning to invade on b5 with queen, knight, or bishop. But instead of c5, Black played Bd6 in a bid to castle kingside again. By now, I had five minutes left to make ten moves. The time pressure raised my anxiety and I found my mind sluggish and starting to panic. Rash thoughts interrupted my analysis. What about Nb5? It forks Qc7 and Bd6 and its main defect seems to be cxb5, but after Qxb5+ Nd7 I can regain the piece with Bxd6 Qxd6 Rbd1 Qc7 Qd5 Rd8 Bb5 O-O Bxd7 and unpinning shouldn't be all too hard. So I rushed in with Nb5 cxb5 Qxb5+ Kf8! My head snapped back in surprise. I began to search for any way to get enough compensation for losing a knight. Seeing none, I bit my lower lip while I mentally kicked myself for making an incompletely analyzed piece sacrifice. I went through some motions in tiny hopes of swindling chances, but the position didn't seem to have any. My mood steadily sank as Black consolidated everything and even put his extra knight on the fabulous d5 square. I reached over and offered my handshake in resignation. In the postmortem, we both talked of the Qd1 creeping move and how it was "refuted" by Rd8 Qe1 Bd2. My exact words at that point were, "Don't I have a mate here somewhere?" I didn't see double discovered check, so I quickly gave up looking.

Near midnight, a beaten chessplayer, I drove home and ran my game through Fritz. In the analysis of the 18th move, Fritz showed me how Qd1 could plausibly lead to the brilliant checkmate with Bg4+. For the next three hours of tossing and turning, my mind kept returning to the same thoughts: "Dang. That rare beautiful victory and the pride that came with it could have been mine. Instead I only have this pathetic loss. Why do I waste my time with this stupid game when it brings me such misery? My tactical ability is already fading with age, so my attempts to improve are just futile." I finally fell asleep, but awoke four hours later to the same negative thoughts. I don't think I shook the funk until the second day after this loss. This loss seemed to hurt more than others because I was so close to a brilliant miniature and failed.

I showed Mr. Anderssen my game. When I showed him the shoulda/coulda parts, he chuckled, "Sorry, kid. You just don't have what it takes."

Poetic license was taken in the italicized portions of this post.

Quagmire

2009-03-16T10:43:00.000-07:00

In "Chess For Tigers", Simon Webb delineates a small food chain with tigers near the top predator, rabbits below, and heffalumps/elephants above. Since I'm into Scrabble these days, I'm a little more into word origins. As far as I can tell, "heffalump" originates from A.A. Milne's use of it in Winnie the Pooh stories as a kind of kids' corrupted pronunciation of elephant like "pasgetti" is to "spaghetti".

Perhaps this rabbit-tiger-heffalump food chain is standard knowledge in the UK as I previously was only familiar with the more boring shark/fish terminology. A few weeks ago, I blogged about a game in which I cast myself as the tiger and my class B opponent as the rabbit. In this game, I'm going to recast myself as the heffalump and my class B opponent as the tiger.

The opening was a rehash of a treatment of the Accelerated Dragon that my opponent and I discussed three months ago. In that game, he played a slow attack on the queenside and I decided to directly clash with him in that sector. Eventually, I won a pawn and then wore him down. In this game, he played the book moves a little longer and again we clashed on the queenside. In the middlegame complications, I believe I obtained an advantage and went for a combination that should have won material, but I overlooked several zwischenzugs in the main line and in the many side variations. What do you get when you throw a bunch of zwischenzugs into a conflict? Quagmire. My current judgment is that the tactical execution of the combination was only enough for equality and that I should have built up the pressure a bit longer in my usual boring positional style. Here is the position in question:

My last move was Qd3-e3 threatening Bb6 forking or at least cramping Black. Black just moved Nf6-d7 to defend b6. I immediately noticed that this blocks the escape of the bishop on c6 which I have the opportunity to take advantage of with b3-b4-b5. However, after 17.b4, Black has 17...Ra3!? pinning my knight, which doesn't necessarily stop b5 from being effective. But then I noticed that my bishop on d4 has its own mobility problems because Qe3 blocked its retreat. Black can take advantage of this in the line 17.b4 e5! 18.bxa5? exd4 Qe2 dxc3 and now White is losing. So I eventually decided that Bxg7 was necessary, but after Kxg7, Black has an additional resource of Qb6 and if the queens exchange, the knight arrives at b6 attacking my c4 bishop which became loose after Qe3 and b4. With the king on g7, I thought I could get a tempo in any combination by playing Qd4+ getting out of a pin from Ra3, but then the annoying e5 comes again and I have to move my queen. In this combination, if my queen abandons the g1-a7 diagonal, Black's queen can enter with Qb6+ and perhaps win the b pawn. So any line with Qd4+ e5 Qxd6 Qb6+ began to look unattractive. At this point I couldn't hold everything in my mind any more and decided to play 17.Bxg7 Kxg7 18.b4 and deal with the position at that point.

After the game, a spectator suggested that after 17.Bxg7 Kxg7 18.b4 Ra8?! 19.b5 Qb6, I should have played 20.Nd1 to rehabilitate my combination. If 20...Qxe3, 21.Nxe3 defends the loose bishop on c4 so that 21.Nb6 bxc6 is winning. It sounded good, but Fritz tells me that 20...Ra3 would have forced a similar outcome to the actual game.

At the end of my combination, I had this position:

It was pretty clear to me that 22.cxb7 Ra7 23.Rfb1 Rb8 was darn near equal, so I thought long about 22.c7 and the question, is it weak or strong? My analysis was polluted with fantasy variations here as I tried to work in the series Nd5 e6 Nb6 forking two rooks on a8 and c8. Ultimately, I decided that c7 Rfc8 Nb5 would be my variation and if the c7 pawn became untenable, I would try really hard to win the b7 pawn in return. Well, as you can see in the replay, c7 was a mistake that just left me down a pawn in a double rook endgame. My opponent played fairly well in the early endgame, maintaining an active king and an active rook. I think my opponent really did have winning chances for most of the first half of the endgame. But he began to meander and then blundered horribly. In the following position, my opponent played Rc4?? which gave away all of his advantage and then some. My endgame experience told me immediately that my passed a-pawn was an advantage. I spent the rest of the game counting and recounting the steps to the win.

Incidentally, Fritz seemed to fail me at two junctures in analyzing this game afterward. In the first diagram, Fritz never seems to let go that the b4-b5 line isn't that good. And in the pawns endgame, the move horizon is too far for it to see that the win is inevitable.

Chess For Tigers is a cute book with practical advice and some games, but the advice almost falls into the Duh! category of advice. In chapter 5 on "How to catch Rabbits", the main points are 1. Keep it simple, 2. Don't take unnecessary risks, 3. Don't overpress, 4. Have patience that your opponent will compound his mistakes. One quote that struck me is "It is always possible that he [opponent] will know a good line against your favorite sharp opening, or that you will end up by bamboozling yourself in the cut-and-thrust of a wild position."

In chapter 6 on "How to trap Heffalumps", the main points are 1. Head for a complicated position and hope that he makes a serious mistake before you do, 2. Play actively, 3. Randomize, 4. Complicate, and 5. Be brave. Chapter 7 is entitled, "Fortune favors the lucky: Being an initiation into the Secrets of Swindling". And Chapter 8 is "How to win won positions".

Perhaps through the unfortunate layout of the thicket of variations, I stepped into the quagmire and became trapped. Fortunately, my tiger opponent let his tail fall too close to my groping trunk and I dragged him into the muck. Using him as a stepping stone, I escaped the trap with the win and preserved my chances of qualifying for the club championship.

Lost Among The Trees

2009-02-22T23:46:00.000-08:00

I've been taking some time off of chess, partly since I've had two consecutive bye weeks in the Club Championship Qualifier. My Pocket PC lacks a Scrabble anagrammer so I've been trying to write one of my own. The one I wrote in SQL Compact Edition is ok, but it chokes on the wildcard searches, taking about 150 seconds to return the anagrams. I ran across a neat data structure called a DAWG - Directed Acyclic Word Graph which seems to be an optimization of searching the dictionary. A guy named Sam Allen wrote a blazing fast anagrammer that I wished to emulate, so I've been building and scrapping data structures, testing and debugging algorithms. The DAWG is a bit like Kotov's tree of analysis in that there is a starting position with branches for every possible node and branches from there outward to an exponentially increasing number of nodes. What's interesting about the DAWG is that it is almost within the human brain's ability to grasp the magnitude. Words in Scrabble range from 2 to 15 letters and can only end on one of 26 letters, so the DAWG converges on itself like a gigantic geodesic lemon, tapered at two ends. The analogous structures in chess are that the opening diverges and the tablebases converge upon checkmate.

I started reading "Word Freak". In one chapter, the author quotes Joe Edley, many-times Scrabble champion, basically saying that winning takes concentration on winning; everything else is extraneous. I probably quoted this once before, but in "Stand and Deliver", Edward James Olmos tells the kids in his math class that "You got to have the ganas." Perhaps I'm getting old. Perhaps sitting on my rating floor is getting to be too comfortable. But I'm finding that my priority is shifting to having a good time rather than winning. Do I really want to win the club championship? It should be a rhetorical question answered with an emphatic yes, but somehow it's not. Continental Chess Association is running the new Western Chess Congress tournament in the East Bay within a couple weeks of the Far West Open. Chess is coming to my doorstep, yet I don't think I'll play in either tournament, not because of a lack of funds or time, but I just can't psych up for the battle.

On Facebook, my brother-in-law got me hooked on a silly pseudo-adventure game called Dragon Wars. There is the gaming aspect of beating up AI monsters and taking their treasure, but there is also an aspect where you match up with other Dragon Wars players and battle for glory and treasure. I enjoyed seeing the new monster quests, but when other players beat up my character, I only got slightly annoyed. There is a small voice that wants to be vindictive as the game seems to engender, but so far I haven't succumbed to the dark side of the force.

I've been helping direct some scholastic tournaments. It's funny watching children struggle to manage board, pieces, clock, scoresheet and rules. Sometimes, kids forget to punch the clock and end up taking two turns in a row because they think that the clock button being up means it's their turn again and nobody is paying attention to what's actually moving on the board. Many mates in 1 are missed. Kids' technique often requires an extra queen and rook for mating material. It's only been two tournaments and I've seen kids come back from being down a rook and a knight, queening a pawn because the opponent got careless, and winning the game. I've seen kids stalemate with two extra queens, a rook, and a knight against a bare king. The players barely know how to call touch move let alone illegal moves. 50-move draws and three-time repetitions are never claimed, but they could be useful because I've seen players just keep checking with their queens, leaving their extra pieces at home. We have an extra rule that checkmate and stalemate must be verified. One team had the match in the bag until one player proposed a draw with an extra queen because he was afraid he'd screw up. They ended up losing the playoff. One child burst into tears for the last ten minutes of the game and just let his time run out. I thought of Tom Hanks yelling "There's no crying in baseball!" in "A League Of Their Own". All in all an entertaining new dimension to chess.

Lest you get the wrong idea, it's not that my main reason for directing kids' tournaments is seeing all the errors. It's refreshing to see children in their naive states before the years of frustrating plateaus squeeze all the ganas out of them. The parents have been surprisingly free of any craziness so far.

Well, back to my DAWG. If I could just figure out the algorithm for an iterative node depth counter...

Chess For Tigers

2009-02-06T20:07:00.000-08:00

Last night I played a Class C player in the club championship qualifier. I had a few jitters about an upset, especially because the week before, just such an upset had occurred. Alekhine said "During a chess competition, a chess master should be a combination of a beast of prey and a monk." The late Simon Webb devoted a chapter in "Chess For Tigers" to "How to catch Rabbits".

"Do you know how Tigers catch Rabbits? Do they rush after them and tear them limb from limb? Or do they stalk them through the bush before finally creeping up on them when their resistance is low? The trouble with the first method is that even Rabbits have sharp teeth and when cornered can be surprisingly ferocious. So a sensible Tiger takes no chances - he patiently stalks his Rabbit, and when the poor thing makes a bolt for freedom, he pounces and kills it swiftly and easily."

Webb goes on to basically recommend the Keep It Simple Stupid method of chess plus waiting for your weaker opponent to make a couple mistakes. For the most part it worked for me in this game, but there were still several good moves that I missed.

Plus, I struggled with several of Blue Devil Knight's coach's rules, namely #1, #2, #4, and #5. But it was fun to watch the woodpile imbalance grow. As a contrast, Drunknknite sought complications by violating #3. I wish I could play like a swashbuckler.

I'm afraid I have come to the admission that my style is quite boring and tame. I'm a mostly toothless tiger these days. But I'm trying to play sharper openings to get the Eye of the Tiger back.

Reno Blogosphere

2009-02-02T16:52:00.000-08:00

Nathaniel has joined the blogosphere in Reno. You can check out his site at http://64squaresofmymind.blogspot.com/. Eric Shoemaker has revived his blog again at The Wizard's Castle. I'm experimenting with the possibility of linking to ChessBase-generated games like Drunknknite has already done. Here's Nate's game in a simul with GM Kudrin.

Canterbury Tale

2009-02-01T14:25:00.000-08:00

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury

On Blue Devil Knight's resurrected blog, he posted Part 6 of his review of Rowson's Chess For Zebras. Because of BDK's discussion, I bought Chess For Zebras, mostly from the good things I was reading, but partly because I own Chess For Tigers by the late Simon Webb and I can't resist collecting a set of books on an animal theme. I also own The Hippopotamus Rises, but it's not quite in the "Chess for (animal name here)" format. The discussion turned to Rowson's opinion of how we think about a chess position and that Rowson doubted the utility of the natural language narrative. His point was that NARRATIVES correlate more with weaker amateurs while IMAGES about how the position is resolved and evaluated correlate better with how strong professional players process the position. Not that I wish to contradict Rowson or even BDK, but I found it useful to understand the following endgame position in terms of language. Otherwise it didn't make sense to me. Plus, my memory requires all kinds of verbal and nonverbal underpinnings these days.

Centurini 1856. White to play and win.

This position was first shown to me by a friend at the club. He whispered a couple sentences to a low-rated kid to defend the position. I floundered about for a while gaining nothing except that I noticed that the kid kept returning to attack the d6 square. Only by inference did I begin to suspect there was something crucial about d6. My friend showed me the solution, but it didn't sink in why the d6 square was so important until four years later (a month ago) when I could verbalize what was going on.

We begin with White's winning plan, Plan A: to evict the Black bishop from the h2-b8 diagonal by placing his own bishop on that diagonal. Since c7 is guarded twice and the Black bishop can mark time on the diagonal, then the route to victory has to go partly through...

Plan B: to maneuver the bishop through the g1-a7 diagonal to a7 and then to b8. Will Plan B work? The only way for Black to hang on once the White bishop gets to b8 is to move his own bishop to the g1-a7 diagonal, wait for the enemy bishop to move out on the diagonal h2-c7 diagonal so that the pawn can advance, and then post his own bishop on a7 to kill the newly born Queen. But, assuming White retreated his bishop to e5, f4, g3, or h2 can then put his own bishop en prise on the g1-a7 diagonal to distract the Black bishop at a7. The pawn can then queen by force.

So Plan B works if Black simply allows it. In a sense, this endgame helps support the endgame Theory of Two Weaknesses. If there are two weaknesses to spread the defense enough, the stronger side can win by quickly switching targets. But Black has a defensive resource in that his king at c6 can move to a6 whenever the White bishop gets close to the g1-a7 diagonal.

Centurini 1856. White to play and win.

From the diagram position, 1.Bh4 Kb6 2.Bf2+ (2.Bd8+ Kc6 simply repeats the position.) Ka6 and the a7 square is defended. If the White bishop tries to tack back to d8, the Black king comes back to c6 to prevent Bc7: e.g. 3.Bd4? Bd6 4.Bf6 Kb6 5.Bd8+ Kc6 and now the position only differs in that the Black bishop is at d6 instead of h2.

This opens a new possibility that is not quite enough. 6.Be7 tries to distract the bishop from its guardianship of the b8 square, but 6...Bh2 Black wants none of it and returns to a square where it cannot be chased.

Now notice that the White bishop at e7 could get to a7 in two moves if only the Black king at c6 wasn't covering the pivot square on c5. This provides the winning idea and is the key to understanding why d6 is so crucial to this endgame. So White can take another crack at it. 7.Bh4 Kb6 8.Bf2+ Ka6 9.Bc5! preventing Bd6.

9...Be5 10.Be7 Kb6 11.Bd8+ Kc6 12.Bf6 Bh2

Notice that this diagram after move 12 is different from the diagram after move 6 in that the bishop can now pivot through d4 to get to a7 instead of c5. The Black king is now caught with his pants down. 13.Bd4! Kb5 14.Ba7 Ka6 15.Bb8 Bg1 16.Bg3 Ba7 17.Bf2 and the pilgrims finally get to Canterbury.

My tale of this endgame is that White must maneuver his bishop through d6 on his way to e7 and d8 in order to prevent the Black bishop from being in the optimum square at d6. When the White bishop pops back out from d8, it can quickly pivot over to a7 without running into the Black king. Whether this information is "better" stored in my brain as an image or as a narrative surrounding the d6 square, I'm not sure. But now that I can say it aloud, I feel that I understand it or grasp it, which is better than feeling like it is a memory that will run away as soon as my hippocampus turns its back.

Divergence

2009-01-30T09:55:00.000-08:00

This is the third part of my series of -ergence-themed posts. I was going to call this one "Two-Timing" but realized "Divergence" ties my ideas and past posts all together.

I mentioned in my last post that "The Big Bang Theory" is currently my favorite show. This is mainly because of the brilliance of Jim Parsons who seems cast as a supporting actor, but who usually steals the show. He's a young gangly actor who seems to have studied the comic stylings of both David Hyde Pierce and Rowan Atkinson. Again, the pilot begins with the two main characters discussing the mysterious properties of the dual slit experiment. The weirdness of quantum physics comes into play in that electromagnetic radiation seems to behave differently when you're looking at it directly versus not looking at it.

A while back I recorded a Nova episode about Hugh Everett's son Mark's quest to learn about his late father's work. Everett's theory was that whenever a quantum event happens, such as a physicist deciding to look at a dual slit experiment, the universe splits amoeba-like into two universes and both universes go on their happy way. This is very hard for us mere mortals to understand because we have both intuition and third grade science class telling us that matter has mass and takes up space. Where do you hide a whole second universe of matter where it won't interfere with traffic in this universe? Anyway, Mark Everett talked of two selves: one which took a hiatus from his music career to revisit some painful memories of his father and one who just stayed home on his front porch and smoked. One more footnote: I watched the mediocre movie "The One" where Jet Li plays a monomaniacal universe hopping serial killer who gets stronger every time he kills his parallel self.

Whew! No wonder I don't have readership. Get to the point already! Last June, I visited my brother in the bay area. As I was leaving, my sister-in-law gave me my brother's old Palm Tungsten computer. At first, I tried to put chess software on it, but finding it was only capable of playing about 1600 chess or so left me wanting more. Eventually, I found a program for playing Scrabble. It was great: no tiles to clean up or keep track of around the kids, no scoresheets to tally. It even looked up obscure words for you.

My wife and I really got into playing Scrabble; so much so that we both signed up to play our first Scrabble tournament this past Martin Luther King weekend at the Sparks Nugget. The Scrabble tournament was actually three tournaments in one: an early bird special on Friday, the main event from Saturday through Monday, and night Scrabble on Saturday and Sunday evening. My wife and I only signed up for the early bird, which was a 10-hour, 8-round round robin with the other 7 people in your rating group with a rematch in round 8 versus whoever is closest to your performance.

Scrabble ratings have some resemblance to those in chess with the range of almost all players between 500 and 2000. Since I've always been above average in chess, I went in kinda cocky thinking that I should at least make about a 1200 provisional rating. It was a miserable, humbling experience. Basically, I lost to everyone except that my wife and I split our fourth-round game and the rematch of doormats in round 8. My provisional Scrabble rating is 500 which is comparable to 150 in chess. My wife won one more game than I did and is rated 551.

So yeah, I've been unfaithful to chess. ChessLoser wrote a nice awkward conversation a year ago that sums up our twisted relationship with chess. Chess is still a much greater game than Scrabble. There's the luck factor of drawing the right tiles that offends the meritocracy of chess. But it's interesting that there is a much more even gender balance for Scrabble including in my own household. There might even be more women. I wouldn't recommend a Scrabble tournament for picking up hot chicks, though. My round 2 opponent who ended up second in our 10-person division has about a 2000 Canadian chess rating, but he had chosen to emphasize tournament Scrabble. There's a small bluffing factor in Scrabble for playing legitimate-looking phony words. Time control was G/25 with 10 points per minute penalty for overstepping on the clock.

A strange thing has been happening to me lately. I've been staying up nights playing Scrabble against my handheld computer. It's a junkie drive that I remember having with chess a long time ago. Partly it's because my handheld computer is annoying and deserves to be put into its place, yet it keeps on beating me. Another dysfunctional relationship with a board game, this time 15x15. There is a crazy aspect to tournament Scrabble that is virtually identical to chess. I've heard so many good things about Word Freak that I'm going to have to read it soon. Perhaps I'll read it back to back with King's Gambit to compare the crazy.

Scrabble has reams of words, extensions, and hooks with bingo stems to memorize. There are also rack management and board management strategies which are sort of like the balance of offense and defense in chess. Don't paint yourself into a losing corner. My fifth round opponent had been tracking all the tiles that were played and at the end of the game, he knew that I had four I's and a couple U's, so he milked his plays in the endgame to maximize his winning spread. His 300-point spread against me became the decisive tiebreaker in winning our section.

I think I'm going to straddle both universes for a while. Sometimes I'll be a particle. Sometimes a wave.

Convergence

2008-12-30T10:17:00.000-08:00

I originally wrote this a month ago near New Year's Eve.
Today I realize I've been living under a rock. Well, not so much realize, but had highlighted once again. My brother-in-law has been recommending for some time that I check out Firefly since I made the declaration that "the new Battlestar Galactica is the FINEST science fiction series ever aired on network television". I especially appreciate the contrast of man-made life form searching for the meaning of life partly through monotheistic litany and partly through tormenting its former creators, who have their own polytheistic mythology and search for meaning following the Judgement Day wrought by their own version of Skynet. I rented the first disc of the Firefly DVD series and then promptly purchased the whole boxed set. Listening to writer/director/songwriter Joss Whedon talk about his various arts simply provokes awe. For example, he described two of his main characters as coming from different genres, western and noir, so he consulted his professor who promptly recommended some examples of noir westerns to study. I didn't even know there were different brands of western. Because I fancy myself a purist of sorts, I had resisted looking into Firefly's mish-mash of dystopian sci-fi western, but I found it incredibly refreshing to the point that I joined the legion of fans who treated the cancellation like the accidental death of a family member: sudden and painful to accept.

At its heart, Malcolm Reynolds is the unconventional hero who doesn't so much triumph over unspeakable fears with bravado and resourcefulness, but has to summon the strength to overcome a universe that has killed his faith and hope as well.

Take my love.
Take my land.
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care, I'm still free.
You can't take the sky from me.

Take me out to the black.
Tell 'em I ain't comin' back.
Burn the land, boil the sea.
You can't take the sky from me.

There's no place I can be
since I've found serenity.
But you can't take the sky from me.

While I was catching up on Firefly, Law and Order had Katie Sackhoff (Starbuck on Battlestar) on one week and then two weeks later, it had a judge named Malcolm Reynolds.

A day after finishing Firefly, I had the chance to finally watch Children of Men which my sister had raved about. Amidst the backdrop of Bush bashing, the main character played a similar existential hero, one who by all rights should have lost all motivation, hope, and faith, but who soldiers on despite. However, I failed to appreciate Alfonso Cuaron's brilliance, even in the technically difficult, long single takes of cinema verite similar to Saving Private Ryan. I found a reviewer who eloquently expressed much of my own feeling, which is a little analogous to Wahrheit's reaction to my expressed affection for Starship Troopers. "Some piece of Eurotrash director took a work of serious ideas (agree with them or not) and deliberately twisted and distorted them in order to trash the very concepts that the original work embodied, THEN was allowed to use the original title and draw people to the theater in the belief they were seeing a movie that was actually 'based on' the book."

Besides the criss-crossing linkages with Law and Order, the main converging theme seems to be the existential noir character, the one living in quiet desperation. Even in a time of increased need for escapism, it's people's story of misery and how they deal with it that both entertains me and provokes me to think. In my pathetic way, I try to relate my own "suffering" to the movie. "Oh, woe is me. I can't figure out how to memorize the Najdorf/calculate open positions/maintain positional dynamism of my pieces."

I even had a two-week period where I began to watch all kinds of "Married...with Children" reruns. My friend ragged on my viewing choices for a while, but it was all in good fun because he admitted that he was not wholly unfamiliar with the Bundys. He steered me toward "The Big Bang Theory" which is my new favorite show. It's kinda like Frasier meets Bosom Buddies, only instead of two elitist psychiatrist brothers there are two geeky physicists. The opening of the pilot has the two roommates discussing the mysterious behavior of light in the double-slit experiment while they're going to a sperm bank. Before "Big Bang" he recommended "Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog" which is yet another example of Whedon's brilliance. I think Whedon not only wrote the story and characters, but also the music that the characters sing, sometimes in interlacing melodies.

Seeing Whedon' brilliance, I have the same reaction that I had when I was about 11 and listened to 8-year old Tammy Huang play virtuoso piano. I want to give up writing since I really got nothin' to say. The noir character would have soldiered on through the crushing oppression of it all. At least I'll have a little more time for chess.

Flash

2008-11-20T00:04:00.001-08:00

Flash Gordon was a very mediocre movie blending bad 70s with bad 80s. This title prompted my memory of the sound of Queen singing in high falsetto chorus "Flash! Fla-ash!"

A while back, I tried to emulate Rolf Wetzell's Chess Master At Any Age. I discussed it in this post. I even wrote a computer program in C# to help me make nice flashcards.

I've spent a couple days back at Chess Tempo. Since I've missed 20 of the last 50 problems (and my rating has plummeted), I decided to try to solidify the learning by making a flashcard of each missed problem.

Here is a pdf file of my efforts to date, generated by my chess flashcard program. Going over some of the older flashcards, I remembered a Python-inspired title that could lead to another Python-themed post. See if you can spot it.

Activation Energy

2008-11-19T08:10:00.001-08:00

There's a perfectionist self-disciplinarian that has been slowing down my rate of posting even though the ideas are starting to crop up. I have two master games, four endings, and a TPS report to blog about, but I have to psych myself up for the task of writing. Perhaps I'm making too big a deal about topical sentences, unifying themes, witty references, and kernels of utility for the reader. I've never been particularly prolific; this blog is the only writing I do. My recollection of essay tests in high school were that I would write as many words as other students. But I'd be unhappy with half the things I wrote, so that my pithy essays were covered in scratchouts. Thank goodness for today's backspace key.

One of my favorite books in senior English was James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. I hardly remember why, so I guess I'd better go back and read it. The nice thing about getting old is that stuff you enjoyed before can be novel again thanks to the wonders of memory loss. I think that what stood out about Portrait at the time was the free form. It was probably my introduction to stream of consciousness. Before that, my reading tastes were almost entirely Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators, a formulaic mystery series.

So in order to produce more quantity, I'm going to try for less quality (or what I thought was quality). Apologies in advance if it takes a while to find the right balance.

The Legendary Black Beast Of Aargh

2008-11-16T00:03:00.000-08:00

Many openings are named invoking animistic spirits: dragon, hippopotamus, elephant, polar bear, rat, etc. My second tournament game back from my six-month break was against ChargingKing. I decided to try to revive parts of my Sicilian repertoire and went for the Dragon despite knowing that his book knowledge might be as great as mine. Because of my opponent's theme of Python's knights, I decided to channel the Legendary Black Beast of Aaargh who shares many features of a dragon.

Unfortunately, my assessment of our book knowledge was about right. Fortunately, I was able to eke out a victory by swindling him out of a favorable middlegame and putting together an ending that wasn't really winning in all lines, but tricky enough to snooker the win.

So the game started off as a Classical Dragon but with White castling queenside. 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 g6 6.Be3 Bg7 7.Be2 O-O 8.Qd2 Nc6 9.O-O-O

Here endeth my book and probably his too. I began by considering Ng4 trying to win the two bishops which is in my style and what my opponent expected from some blitz games we had played. But I decided against that here since my Nf6 is one of my best defenders, while Be2 is often a nonparticipatory piece for White. I knew that one of the lines in the 9.O-O-O Dragon with 7.f3 instead of 7.Be2 was 9...d5, but I didn't know and couldn't figure out if Be2 made it worse or better. Finally, I settled on a seemingly innocuous plan to exchange on d4 and put my bishop on e6.

9...Nxd4 The ill-tempered Killer Rabbit takes out the first of Arthur's knights at the entrance to the Cave of Caerbannog. 10.Bxd4 The knights avenge their comrades with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. Afterwards, my coach recommended 9...d5 10.exd5 Nxd5 11.Nxc6 bxc6 12.Nxd5 cxd5 13.Qxd5 Qc7, a standard idea in the regular 7.f3 dragon. 10...Be6 11.Kb1.

Here began some major floundering which demonstrates my ignorance of the Way of the Dragon. I came up with the lamo 11...a6. Hardly a pawn storm, more like a drifting fog. Without a weakness in White's king position, I had very little idea how to attack. My coach afterward recommended the plan of Qc7-Rfc8-Qa5. 12.h4 b5 13.f3 A moral victory in that I got my opponent to play this move after all. 13...b4 14.Nd5 Bxd5 15.exd5 a5.

I began to notice that my attack was going to fizzle. My main hope shifted toward confusing my opponent in his kingside attack. 16.g4 Having dispatched the Rabbit, the knights cautiously enter the Cave where they argue over the carved words of Joseph of Arimathea.

16...Nd7? Better was 16...a4 17.h5 b3 18.hxg6 bxa2+ 19.Kxa2 hxg6 +/-. Suddenly, the Legendary Black Beast of Aaargh appears 17.Bxg7 Kxg7 and eats Brother Maynard.

Some confused chasing around ensues.

18.Qd4+?! (Best was direct and effective 18.h5! Rh8 19.hxg6 hxg6 20.Qd4+ f6 21.Qe3!+- with a winning attack.) 18...f6?! 19.f4 Qb6 I sought refuge in the endgame. 20.Qe4

20...Rfe8 (I never considered 20...Nc5!? 21.Qxe7+ Kg8 22.Qe3 Rfe8 23.Qf2 b3! 24.cxb3 a4! 25.bxa4 Rxa4 +=) 21.h5 Nc5 More chasing around.

22.h6+? I told my opponent afterward that you never want to close lines of your attack. Here the Rh1 is now blocked out of the attack. He said he thought he could muster some kind of a checkmate with the pawn on h6. 22...Kf8 23.Qd4 Na5 Finally, I conjured up the transparent threat of Nc3+, so my opponent finally agreed to the trade of queens. 24.Qxb6 Nxb6

25.f5?! I mainly feared a quick Bb5-Bc6 cramping my pieces. Instead, my opponent obliged by making his bishop even worse and isolating his advanced h-pawn, soon to become a tasty snack for the Beast. 25...g5 26.Rhe1 Rec8 27.Rd4?! (last chance for Bb5) 27...Rc5! 28.Bf3= Now White's bishop is simply awful.

My plan was to post my knight on e5 and try to take control of c4 to exchange both rooks and win the good knight versus bad bishop endgame. By no means was my plan as inexorable as I had hoped. 28...Rac8 29.Re2 Nd7 30.Red2 Ne5

31.Bc1?! 31.Be2 stymies Black's plans. 31...Rc4 32.Be2 Rxd4 33.Rxd4 Nf7 White can't protect h6.

34.Rc4? Rxc4 35.Bxc4 Nxh6 36.Be2

I think I'll stop for now and discuss the endgame under a separate post. Stay tuned.

Once More Unto The Breach

2008-11-02T10:07:00.000-08:00

It's been 171 days since my last tournament game and 52 days since my last post. Suddenly the Reno chess blogosphere has become a ghost town. Chess Boozer and Wahrheit have left town. Man of the West has deleted his blog and has also talked of riding into the sunset. Charging King and DrunknKnite have been rather inactive lately.

I spent mid-October weekend watching others do battle in the 26th Western States Open while keeping a safe distance. I bumped into and compared notes with another expert who pretty much retired from tournament chess because chess gives him a “stomachache”. I have been keeping busy with StarCraft, Facebook’s Word Twist, Sudoku, Scrabble, Fantasy Football, swimming, and piano. Yet, as I watched some games and saw many more in scoresheet form, I was yet again drawn by the sirens’ song from the 64-square island. The courage of stalwart warriors, the delicate plans dreamed and discarded, and the many plot twists before games get distilled into the three results reminded me of the good in chess.

On the plus side, Blue Devil Knight seems to have returned in limited fashion. And Dana Mackenzie highlighted this blog when he wrote of an endgame miracle in the Western States Open. Endgame Obsessions might actually be useful.

The title originates from a soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Henry the V in which the titular character rallies the English army to keep up its siege of the city of Hafleur. With trite sayings, I try to rally my war-weary bones to rejoin the endless siege in conquering chess.

Conflict and Being Conflicted

2008-09-11T11:10:00.000-07:00

I wandered around the chess blogosphere this morning and found myself at Liquid Egg Product’s post entitled “The demise of chess blogging”. Blue Devil Knight gave a Brief History of Chess Blogging in a brilliant distillation. He added an afterthought that brought on a brainstorm in my conflicted mind:

“On what generates the most interest: controversy, always controversy. Almost without exception, those posts with the most comments involve someone getting pissed off at someone.”

I had aspired to inspire mucho comments on my blog’s own merits like chessloser does rather than serve as a flaming forum like lizzie’s very active blog does. But perhaps my nature of avoiding conflict leads me to say things that are too bland to be interesting, just as BDK’s comment would predict. Proof of the antithesis that a gutless, risk-free blog is also insubstantial and uninspiring.

It occurs to me that perhaps I have an unhealthy understanding of conflict. Sure, I’ll recite Nietzsche’s “That which does not kill me makes me stronger” but do I really understand it? In certain ways, conflict is essential to life. If there is only one resource, I’d better damn well get it ahead of that other guy. Survival of the fittest, right? I guess it’s inevitable that Creationism evolved into Intelligent Design while Darwinism evolved into Evolution.

There is no good story without conflict. My favorite authors of late, Roger Zelazny, William Gibson, and Philip K. Dick almost always write of a distinct warrior or assassin class of character whose sole job it seems is to rub out problems in old fashioned mob style. Once on the series, Fox Mulder came across a genie who perversely answered his wish for "Peace on Earth" by giving him an uninhabited Earth, implying that war and its lesser shades are unavoidable portions of life.

Today is the seventh anniversary of 9/11, that day when Americans’ peace was shattered an the Global War on Terrorism started. The factions of Team McCain and Team Obama are deep in the middlegame vying for the trophy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Even the USCF is fighting for its own survival as a house divided against itself these days with the lawyer/vultures circling its carcass.

Yet, when I encounter conflict in real life, I cannot help but think there are less wasteful ways of spending time on earth, so I avoid it. If I were to run for political office, my touchy feely platform would be “Peace, participation, and poetry.”

Today also happens to be the annual meeting of our chess club in which we exercise our democratic principles and elect members to govern. I have served as secretary, webmaster, and most frequent TD for five years, but this year really took a toll on me. Besides the usual getting in between players as TD for individual games, the conflicts between players about how the club and its tournaments should be run really grated on me. I believe the negatives began to creep into my chess playing. Who needs it? I've been a Peacemaker, where is my inheritance? In this respect, my reaction has become rejection of my own platform: Not finding peace, I shy away from participation and feel like I’m giving up on the poetry that is to be found on the 8x8 board.