Holey Repertoire!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.