Queenmagic

Perhaps twenty years ago, I picked up a copy of Isaac Asimov's Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine because it had a cover story named "Queenmagic, Pawnmagic" by Ian Watson. The story was fairly good, about a boy named Pedino who comes of age in the medieval setting of Bellogard, a city of light locked in war with an antithetical city of dark named Chorny. Ordinary citizens live their lives ignorant of the conflict which is fought magically between the lords and squires of the realm. During a practical joke gone horribly wrong, Pedino is found to have a soul and overnight goes from the son of a tradesman to Pawn/Squire.

Recently, I was delighted to find out that the story from that magazine was part of a larger book, "Queenmagic, Kingmagic". However, my enthusiasm was tempered when I read the story to the end. I think Act I and Act II are strong with insight into the human experience transplanted to a chess-themed one. I suppose the main constant throughout is that the main character has a preoccupation with a series of women in his life. But I'm disappointed as usual with Act III, which almost discards the groundwork of the previous two-thirds. The story goes through palace intrigue and star-crossed romance, but then there is a left turn into action-packed multiverse theory before returning home to a meandering wrap-up. The story goes through a succession of discarded quests - victory, survival, home, family, love - none of which seem resolved satisfactorily.

Perhaps Mr. Watson didn't want to write for a chessically educated audience, since there seemed to be strange liberties such as a pawn being lost during castling. There were perhaps three main battles but treatment of the strategy and tactics were disappointingly superficial. One problem the author seemed to have is that in his description of Pedino's life, the pawn had agency and soul, but when the larger kingdom came into focus, there was an element of Destiny that stole the agency from the Pieces acting as players within this life-sized game.

My twenty-something self was struck back then by this passage relevant to our current discussion of dead and wounded pieces:

Queen Alyitsa was dead – murdered by Prince Feryava of Chorny. Bishop Slon was dead, killed by Bishop Zorn. Squire Iris was dead, protecting Bishop Veck.

The survivors were: the king, Bishop Veck, Sir Brant, Prince Ruk, and five of us squires. Henchy was injured; his wrist had been broken. It would stay that way for the rest of his life. Magical injuries did not heal unless you killed the person who inflicted them.

Despite its shortcomings, it was fun to see perspective shift to life among the pieces. It reminded me of this poem which I posted back during the death of Bobby Fischer:

‘Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
-- Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Spectator Sport

I was reminded today about this funny Geico commercial. My favorite moment had been that the player on move finishes capturing Nxg4 and then turns his dagger-like gaze on his opponent as if to say, "In your face!" I was curious about Andres Cantor's words, so I found this translation at Chess.com:

Ha sido una partida intensa hoy- (It’s been an intense match today)
Ya veremos qué está pensando- (Now we’ll see what he’s thinking)
Está pensando- (He’s thinking)
Veamos qué va a hacer- (Let’s see what he’s going to do)
¿Moverá a la reina o moverá al caballo?- (Will he move the queen or the knight?)
Qué tensión- (What stress)
Viene - (Here he comes)
Viene Viene Viene (Here he comes Here he comes Here he comes)
GOL! (Goal!)

Commentators at Chess.com observed that:
(1) the board was set up with the correct light square on the right. But...
(2) White has two light-squared bishops.

It's hard to tell where Black's Queen Rook is (if it's even present), but from examining the video, it seems to be hiding at a8 behind the Bb7. That allows the material to be even in the position which is likely a Najdorf or Scheveningen Sicilian opening. So the initial position seems to be:



Utilizing the guesswork of retrograde analysis that I learned from The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, I can devise a plausible (but not realistic) path in which White's f-pawn captures Black's g-pawn and then underpromotes to a Bishop on g8 and then winds its way back to e2 via h7, g6, and h5, after which White plays pawn to g4.

The move ...Nxg4 is regarded as a mistake, but it's not entirely without merit. The idea is Bxg4 h5 (bishop moves) Bh6 pinning the White queen to the King. Unfortunately, White gets a lot of desperado moves such as Nxe6, Ndxb5, leading to a game that is close to equal.

Back to the initial position, the line b4 Nb1 Bxe4 seems preferable, winning a pawn in the center and gaining time. Fritz made up a funny line here: Rh3 d5 g5 Bd6!? gxf6 Qxf6 Re3 Bf4 (pin resurfaces!) with -/+ advantage to Black.



A retrograde problem and a tactical lesson inside a humorous commercial. Fake chess at its finest!

Two Scents

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.

Serenity Prayer

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.

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.

Reno Blogosphere

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.

Unrated Again

This post originally started under a racy title, but after thinking about it, there was a distinct "ew" factor, so I recycled it under a new title.

I just found out that I'm unrated again. As drunknknite pointed out after he learned from Getting to 2000, getting a FIDE rating is not as easy as just playing in a FIDE rated tournament. I've had a couple opportunities, but nothing came together until this last 2008 Far West Open.

Today, out of curiosity, I looked and actually found my name and brand new FIDE ID number at the FIDE website. It was weird seeing my name there, as if I had traveled back in time and watched myself play in my first chess tournament and get my first provisional rating. There's no rating number attached yet. Apparently there are a few more games I have to get under my belt with possibly some complicated rules about how much I can lose to previously FIDE rated players.

There is a fellow expert in my club who at FWO2008 seemed surprised to find out his FIDE rating is in the 2300's, 200 points higher than his USCF rating. A player nearby told him he could claim the FIDE Master title outright. He's a master and he didn't even know it. I wish getting to FM was so easy as to be just some paperwork. No scratch that; if I didn't remember earning the title, then it would never be real. The fellow expert had a USCF 2474 performance rating against 6 FIDE rated opponents in FWO2004 and a USCF 2395 performance rating against 4 FIDE rated opponents in FWO2006. Ten great games, about 400 excellent chess moves. That's all it takes to be a master.

Right now, the only light at the end of the tunnel is that I'm climbing back to 2200 on Chess Tempo. But there certainly isn't any strong correlation between what I'm doing there and what I'm doing on my USCF rating. Currently I'm #1 on the standard list, but only because all the higher players have let their ratings lapse from inactivity.

But I'm taking up the challenge and casting about for some coaching help. It's just so hard to remain optimistic about improvement when I'm a pessimist by nature and my empiricist side sees all the stagnation in myself and my fellow adult chess players. I'll keep you updated on my experience being coached.

**UPDATE 4/22**
I didn't notice it before, but there are now some calculations from FWO2008 that show I scored 1.5/3 against three opponents with FIDE average 2167, which I guess would be my provisional FIDE rating. drunknknite scored an impressive 3.0/5 against 2151 average with a performance of 2164. Take that, drunknknite! I'm still ahead by 3 points, but just barely.

Butterflies

Call it what you will: performance anxiety, nerves, stress. Around about one week prior to most major swisses, I begin to regret sending in for the discounted entry. I imagine how much work the competition has been doing and I match up what little I’ve done and shudder.

Sometimes the fear and loathing goad me into action which usually manifests in me looking at my shoddy opening repertoire. A few minutes later I’m contemplating the futility of cramming a month’s worth of preparation into a couple of days and then I give up.

Then the rationalization begins. Since I’m playing in the Open section, losing to a couple of masters plus a couple of experts will be okay, as long as I don’t lose to a bunch of A players or that one C player playing up. I’ll play for dignity, although I’m pretty sure Reno Chess Club’s newest Expert is going to outscore me. I’ll play to have fun. I’ll play to learn something. This will just be a stepping stone for my next big success at the 2008 Western States Open. It’s really “nolo contendere” to try to snow the competitive part of me that will be disappointed when I find myself at the bottom tables again this year.

My classic performance anxiety dream comes from my violin-playing days. I’m usually in my underwear, wandering around a school campus, trying to find my orchestra uniform, but primarily concerned about how I’m going to lead the orchestra and get through my solo having not practiced a single note of our concert songs.

Rarely, I’ve had chess performance anxiety dreams about not being able to read the pairings or not being able to find the right board. Sometimes I arrive and my opponent doesn’t and I spend the next long moments of dream time hoping that my opponent doesn’t show so that I can get an easy forfeit point. Often I myself forfeit games from not adhering to the round schedule. Last night, I had a dream of being paired against an expert I played in the Western States Open and having to run an errand after I made my eighth move as Black. When I came back after an hour, my opponent demonstrated how on the ninth move, he made a killer queen sac that was sound in all variations, so I justly lost.

One more rationalization: if I play badly, perhaps it will serve as a wakeup call for me to get back to a more disciplined chess regime.

White Rabbit

My Tivo has a thirty second skip forward which is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I hardly ever see commercials any more, which is probably mutually beneficial for both advertisers and me since I’m no longer in the coveted 18-34 age advertising demographic. The other day, I caught the promo for the Xbox360 game called Lost Odyssey. What caught my attention were the lyrics of Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 song “White Rabbit”. Now I have been into chess since 1991, but I was never aware of this song until now.

A while back I mentioned that certain songs get stuck in my head while I play in a chess tournament even though I don’t listen to any kind of music player. The haunting melody and the bizarre lyrics of "White Rabbit" are a trip and I think they’d be perfect for rounds 5 and 6 when my brain is fried anyway. Apparently "White Rabbit" is some kind of drug culture hit veiled in Lewis Carroll imagery. I don’t do drugs and I hardly even drink, preferring the high of adrenalin, insomniac endorphins, and the fumes of electrical fire coming from my overheated mental circuits during a long weekend chess tournament.

Of course much of the imagery is from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and its sequel “Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There”.



I’m going to try to add my own psychedelic spin by illustrating the lyrics of “White Rabbit” with some images from Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp.


One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
Recall Alice
When she was just small

When men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know


When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said:
"FEED YOUR HEAD
FEED YOUR HEAD”

Chess in 2373

I was channel surfing today and happened to catch an amusing episode of Star Trek: Voyager. The episode was Season 3, Episode 14, “Alter Ego” which according to the Timeline of Star Trek happens in the year 2373.

ENSIGN KIM: That’s Kal-toh isn’t it? Vulcan chess?
LIEUTENANT TUVOK: Kal-toh is to chess as chess is to tic-tac-toe.

LIEUTENANT TUVOK: A common error among novice players. By placing the t'han on opposite sides of the kal-toh, you are attempting to introduce a spatial balance, a strategy that will almost certainly fail.
MARAYNA: Why?
LIEUTENANT TUVOK: Kal-toh is not about striving for balance. It is about finding the seeds of order, even in the midst of profound chaos. May I?
MARAYNA: Please...How beautiful.
LIEUTENANT TUVOK: Kal-toh is not about beauty.
MARAYNA: I understand, but it’s still beautiful.

Closing shot: Ensign Kim and Lieutenant Tuvok starting a rousing game of kal-toh. A bikini-clad Hawaiian beauty (a hologram) walks up and asks, “May I join you?” In unison, the two male chessplayers say, “NO!”

So the Vulcans will help us take chess to more sophisticated, nerdier, misogynistic, and stereotypical places than any man has gone before.

Oh, what fun!

I know the holidays are gone, but here's a tune to prolong the season.

(to the tune of Jingle Bells)
Hashing through the moves
On a dual-core Intel chip
O'er the lines we go
At a heady clip.

Tablebases on.
Evaluation's right.
What fun it is to analyze
A GM game tonight.

Oh! Analyze, analyze.
Learn an endgame tip.
Oh what fun to analyze
On a dual-core Intel chip.

In Round 3 of Wijk aan Zee, Van Wely pressed Radjabov from the Black side of a RP v. BP ending. The ChessBase article was authored by GM Mihail Marin. His comments were very interesting as he talks about "human lines" versus "computer lines". He also discusses "fun" in going over such lines. I know I have fun going through lines where an ocean of variations compresses down to a narrow canal of winning lines. But to most, it's probably like watching paint dry.

GM Kasparov was watching the game in progress and he was able to speak from experience in a couple of his games where he had the same material advantage. Marin describes Kasparov getting very enthusiastic when the theoretical ending came up, even citing a Rubinstein game.

The analysis is very detailed and instructive with hidden kernels of truth comparable to "To defend, keep your king close...but not too close." All the while, I was thinking that the ending could transpose into the Rook and rook Pawn versus Bishop ending that I have already studied in some depth.

Now all I need is to put the Radjabov-Van Wely position into Fritz and train myself to see it through to checkmate. Fun!

Crossroads In The Opening

I’ve generally been a maverick minimalist on openings. From my first tournament game until last year, my standby with White has been the staid, stodgy, and stale English Opening, most properly played with upper lip in full contraction (scoring percentage 69%). Generally, the English seems to avoid a lot of theory, but I hardly feel like I’m ahead of Black because we’re both blundering toward the middlegame. I spent a lot of time (and book money) trying to understand the King’s Indian Defense and now my f-pawns advance at the slightest provocation. My main deference to the theoretical battle was to try and book up on the Sicilian Dragon. After keeping track of my opening successes and failures, the stats told me that even though the English is in some ways a Sicilian attack, I was doing much worse with the Sicilian (scoring percentage 49%) than my King’s Indian Defense (scoring percentage 61%). I especially hated trying to outplay young people who knew both sides of the Dragon to the 25th move.

So in 2004, I switched to the Modern Defense. One advantage of the Modern is that you play it twice as much, against 1.e4 and 1.d4. But in a way, Black is giving away his birthright by deferring to White how the game is going to develop. My scoring percentage with Black started matching my percentage with White (both around 68%), so I was happy. A couple years ago, GM Tiger Hillarp Persson came out with a book on his experiences in top level chess with Tiger’s Modern. I thought, “Yeah! Legitimacy AND creativity!” I think some teachers advocate trying to dictate the terms of the struggle in a way that emphasizes your strengths. A while back I bought The Hippopotamus Rises. I've heard of a certain player in D.C. who plays this as White as well as Black such that in that area, it's known as the Dupont Circle Opening. Now there's a maverick minimalist after my own heart.

My openings worked for me, but about two years ago came a slump where I couldn’t see anything tactically and so I began to think that my openings weren’t keeping me sharp and/or my middlegame experience wasn’t broad enough. So armed with my 2000 floor, I began to take riskless risks with the Scandinavian, the Budapest, and 1.e4, but still with weird side lines like the Grand Prix. I admire the super grandmasters and the club players that emulate their sharp systems. But I shudder at the thought of booking up the Dragon, Najdorf, Scheviningen, Sveshnikov, Kalashnikov, Paulsen, Pelikan, Taimanov Sicilians. Most likely I’d choose Alapin or Closed or Grand Prix or even Morra to avoid all that theory and then I’d be a maverick again. Then what about French/Scandinavian/Alekhine/Philidor/Pirc? And which way to go on double king pawns: King’s Gambit, Ruy Lopez, Scotch, Italian? How many lifetimes do I have to learn this game?

The powers of the grandmasters and the strong memory types remind me of two movies. In Song of the South, after duping Brer Fox into throwing him into the Briar Patch, Brer Rabbit says, “I was born and bred in the briar patch.” And in The Princess Bride, after defeating Vizzini the Sicilian in a battle of wits, Westley says, “I’ve spent the past few years building up an immunity to iocaine powder.” A while back I quoted Nietzsche’s “That which does not kill us makes us strong.” And Druknknite quotes Muhammad Ali in the banner of his blog, “I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’” Incidentally, Drunknknite is a strong memory type and one I foresee blowing past me and making it at least to 2100 if not 2200.

What's the risk in studying new openings? I'm afraid that the briar patch will swallow me up and other areas of my game will atrophy. Perhaps a balanced diet of Chess Tempo and guess-the-master's-move is the remedy.

Some say that grandmasters such as Kramnik and the late Wojtkiewicz have narrow opening repertoires. It would be an attractive compromise to emulate such strong players in their legitimate but “narrow” repertoires. I have made databases of their games, but this remains another thing in my round tuit bin.

Should I boldly follow the masters into the depths of the abyss? Or should I continue down the path less traveled by in search of creativity? Should I play within myself and perhaps stagnate in my chess knowledge? Or should I tax my aging brain in the hopes that chess mastery lies beyond the briar patch of variations? I should point out that these questions are mostly rhetorical. Some people at the club are fond of pointing out that my openings are weak, but I think the pots in their glass houses are as black as my kettles. I’m just stubborn enough not to listen to even well-reasoned arguments from authoritative sources. Perhaps if Mark Dvoretsky wrote in and pragmatically appealed for me to switch to the Ruy Lopez…but of course I have slipped back into Zip-a-dee-doo-dah Land.

One thing that is perhaps pushing me to the tipping point: I just recently discovered Castling Queen Side. The author shows the true grit that I find so inspiring about lower rated players. She had 270 LOSSES this year alone, compared with my total 371 GAMES in my 16-year tournament chess career. Puts to shame my whining ways. Among some of her listed New Year’s “non-resolutions” is “Learn new openings.” I’ve spent years avoiding learning. Perhaps it’s time to try to grow as a chess player and try something new.

Superstition

Two games back, my lucky sweater stopped working. It’s a grey fleece pullover that I bought in Carmel a few years back. After castling short 0-0 in the first two rounds of the Western States Open, I brought out the Carmel fleece and finished 1-½-1-½. Adding the two games won after WSO, it worked for six games in a row. But the Golden Fleece stopped working in the last tournament where I again castled short 0-0.

For a while during my pre-WSO slump, I had been blaming my Chronos clock for my bad luck. But the clock was a neutral factor in WSO, being present for both wins and losses.

Before that, in my 40-game no-loss streak between June 2004 and February 2005, I had a lucky Baja Fresh cup that not only helped hydrate me, but also gave me a supernatural ability to get out of bad situations on the chess board. Of course it makes sense that the cup is a lucky chess cup because it has this 45-degree chessboard motif on the back. Unfortunately one day, probably while I was annotating the 40th game of the no-loss streak, it rolled under my recliner and when I pushed the leg rest down, the recliner put a hole into my lucky cup. My very next game was a crushing loss against a Class B player. I tried to buy another Baja Fresh cup to replace it, but there was only one Holy Grail and now it’s lost forever.

I wish I could say that our Royal Game is not fraught with a certain randomness that borders on luck, but I’ve seen my share of wacky results.

Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” ends with the following verse.
When you believe in things that you don’t understand,
Then you suffer,
Superstition ain’t the way, no, no, no.

Why should I believe in the supremacy of inanimate objects over my fate? It doesn’t really seem to match up with my scientific approach. Cursed objects come back into good graces when I win with them and blessed objects lose their charm when I lose with them. Logic dictates that I should concentrate on my mental processes so that I play strong moves and avoid errors. In the final analysis, I don’t really believe in the supernatural powers of my sweater/clock/cup/(insert chess-related object here). But I’m keeping in reserve a couple of lucky pens.

Squirrely Dream

I had a dream (not really) last night that a man in a purple top hat showed me to a room with about a hundred tables. It was full of oversized squirrels - not human-sized, but about toy poodle sized, very much like the trained nutcracking crew in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who threw Veruca Salt down the nut hopper. The squirrels were all paired up at the tables and they were playing chess. When I looked more closely, the squirrels all had a faraway look in their eyes as if they were blind. And the pieces were not pieces, but they were various-sized acorns. So they were playing blind, announcing the moves to each other, creating a general murmur. When one of them made a capture, they would say the move in a voice loud enough to rise above the murmur so that the nearby tables could hear. "Knight takes pawn on e5!" Everyone would shout in unison, "Ole!". And the squirrel who made the capture would eat the acorn that they took off the board.

Perpetual Class D/Class E player Norm Wyatt has been enjoying some remarkable success in the latest tournament at the chess club. I've lost count of how many times I've seen Norm snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. But in this tournament, he's 3.0/3 against a 1640, a 1551, and a 1648, giving him a performance rating of a whopping 2013(!) and a ratings boost of +192 points (!!), from 1295 to 1487. The win expectancy calculates that he should have only managed 0.423 points so far, less than one draw. The regular rating adjustment was +106 points, but the bonus calculation went wild at +86. Even if he loses his final round 4 game, he should stay above 1400. I think this is the first time Norm has been in Class C since 1995 when he was provisionally rated.

I hope everyone agrees that chess is ludicrously difficult enough to humble maybe all but the most egomaniacal grandmasters. When it comes to chess, we're all a bunch of blind squirrels. When one of us finds an acorn, we all should rejoice. Ole, Norm!

Favorite Movie Lines About Chess

Here are some lines from two of my favorite movies, Searching for Bobby Fischer and The Shawshank Redemption.
***SPOILER ALERT***

Bruce Pandolfini: What is chess do you think? Those who play for fun or not at all, dismiss it as a game. The ones who devote their lives to it, for the most part, insist it’s a science. It’s neither. Bobby Fischer got underneath it like no one before him and found at its center…art.
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Bruce Pandolfini: I want back what Bobby Fischer took with him when he disappeared.
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Fred Waitzkin: You wanna know how good he is? I’ll tell you how good he is. He is better at this than I have ever been at anything in my life. He is better at this than you’ll ever be at anything. My son has a gift. He has a gift. And once you acknowledge that then maybe we’ll have something to talk about.
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Josh Waitzkin: If I win, everybody will say, “Well, of course he won. He’s the top ranked player.” But if I lose…
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Josh Waitzkin: Maybe it’s better not to be the best. Then you can lose, and it’s okay.
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Vinnie: Your teacher, huh? Well, forget it. Play like you used to, from the gut. Get your pawns rolling on the queenside. Come and get me. 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!
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Josh Waitzkin: You’ve lost. You just don’t know it. Take…the…draw.
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Asa Hoffman: Look at that. I got him thinking. I got him thinking. Maybe I can win a pawn.
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Jonathan Poe: Trick or treat.

--Searching For Bobby Fischer

Red: (playing checkers) King me.
Andy: Chess, now there’s a game of kings. Civilized, strategic…
Red: …and a total f**kin’ mystery. I hate it.
Andy: Well, maybe you’ll let me teach you someday.
Red: Heh. Sure.
Andy: I’ve been thinking of getting a board together.
Red: Well, hey you’re talking to the right man. I’m the guy who can get things, right?
Andy: We might do business on a board, but I want to carve the pieces myself. One side in alabaster, the opposing side in soapstone. What do you think?
Red: I think it’ll take years.
Andy: Well, years I’ve got. What I don’t have are the rocks. Pickings are pretty slim in the yard. Pebbles mostly.

Later…
Red: The man likes to play chess. Let’s get him some rocks.
--The Shawshank Redemption

I've started to mentally compile a list of movies that contain a reference to Mark Antony's speech in Julius Caesar where he says, "Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war!" So far I have:

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - spoken by King Theodred.
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country - spoken by General Chang
Evil Dead III: The Army Of Darkness - spoken by the Deadite Captain

Obsession for Patzers

As a follow-up to my Smoke article and in the spirit of chessloser’s new shirt venture, I’m going to launch a new perfume called Obsession for Patzers. The scent will be a mixture of cigarette smoke and stale sweat collected from fellow chess players in the heat of the battle of the weekend swiss tournament. Anybody know where I can buy a brick of whale puke? Ebay seems to be all out of raw ambergris.

My father always tried to get me interested in golf. I could outdrive him by far, but my short game really, really sucked. I’m talking next to the green in regulation and then four or five chips and putts to get in the hole. I would occasionally play with him, but I never really got the bug. He often told me that the way to get good was to really go crazy about golf. But I guess I never did, so my golf game never improved.

Chris Harrington wrote about the endgame being the neighborhood mutt of chess. This was a reaction to a lower rated player’s seeming indifference to the endgame. Alekhine boasted, “To win against me, you must beat me three times: in the opening, the middlegame and the endgame.” To be a complete chess player, you have to know the endgame. For various reasons such as fear, laziness, and indifference, the endgame really is neglected. Neglecting the endgame in chess is like neglecting the short game in golf.

The endgame is where the truth of chess is revealed. In the opening, the endpoint of opening analysis is usually whether a variation is favorable or equal. Blunders and traps occasionally lead to middlegame positions that are winning or losing, but players still need the technique to make the 20-40 more moves that lead to checkmate. Opening fashions come and go, but the endgame is a timeless classic. Nowadays, the endgame tablebases tell you how many moves to checkmate with best play from both sides. If that isn’t blinding truth in chess, then I don’t know what is. Wouldn’t it be the ultimate chess taunt to say to your opponent, “Mate in 35 moves” and really mean it? The truth of the endgame is laid bare in whether one side can promote a pawn or not.

I used to be fearful and lazy and inept at the ending. Early in my chess career, I became obsessed with understanding how bishop and knight mate the king. But more than a decade passed until I got serious about studying endings in an orderly fashion. The triggering event was a couple years ago when I turned a win into a draw. While going over this particular endgame, I found so many twists and turns, I was hooked. This move draws, but this move wins. And the moves were so crazy yet so beautiful in the economy of things they accomplished. Zugzwang, opposition, corresponding squares, key squares, waiting moves, only moves, good-looking moves that were bad, bad-looking moves that were good, moves that seemed to accomplish nothing but were absolutely necessary. I became obsessed with understanding these beautifully bizarre moves. I’m here to preach that the endgame is NOT boring or useless.

I can still blunder badly in endgames, but as a result of the obsession sessions, I don’t think I’m lazy or fearful about them any more (except for knight endings). At some point, I had an idea to publish my own endgame book full of the esoteric stuff I’ve researched. Stay tuned for some excepts of it here. Maybe I’ll try to get ChessBase to come visit and see if they’d back an eBook.

If you’re anxious for a taste of the bizarre, often in endings, one of my favorite sites to visit is Tim Krabbe’s Chess Curiosities.