Checkmate Nitpick

I fell for the trap of thinking that a chess movie starring Danny Glover and Sean Astin on Netflix couldn't be that bad. I probably fast forwarded through the last 30 minutes, but I still regretted the time I lost on it. No need to warn you of spoilers because I'm really doing you a service if you never watch this turkey. Mash up a bank robbery plot, a family disintegrating in the midst of a health crisis, and a high stakes chess game, and you'd probably do better than what director Timothy Woodward Jr put together. I should have read the reviews before I hit play because it's basically a string of the lowest ratings you could give.

I found myself shouting at the television screen because for a movie with a chess-themed title, they sure didn't know chess. Here are a couple of screenshots to play at home:

1. Vinnie Jones is sitting behind the black pieces awaiting his opponent. What's wrong with this picture?

2. Danny Glover arrives at the opposite side of the board and sets a case down. There are two things wrong here.

Answers

1. The black king is on Vinnie's right and the black queen is on his left. Standard setup should always have it opposite.

2. The player of the white pieces brought his own half-set which happens to match the style of the black pieces; this never happens because no one breaks up sets. The right lower corner nearest to Danny Glover should be a light square.

1 star for spending money on named cast members, 0 for skimping on writers who could put together plot, characters, or dialog. I still don't know why the chess game had any relation to the rest of the movie, but you know what? I just don't care.

Declination

The three-peat is already out of the cards as I declined to defend my club championship title this year. After playing my last game at the end of September 2015, I really haven't come to the board with any feeling besides indifference with a touch of loathing. A couple of strong 2100+ players are currently contending and I would put my money on either of them, but they have at least 19 games on the road to the championship.

I tried to use the title of this post as a double meaning, but astronomical declination seems hard for me completely grasp: the angle from the celestial equator, analogous to the latitude on the globe. Practical astronomy always seemed too tedious. I once had a telescope to look at the neon lights downtown, but even trying to follow the moon through the sky involved constant readjustments.

Tinkering on my computer is my main hobby these days with a touch of writing and standard consumption of movies and books. I discovered recently that the film "Butterfly Effect" starring Ashton Kutcher has two endings: a theatrical release with mostly happily ever after, and a director's cut with the main character suffering a tragic end. I hadn't seen the happy ending, but maybe it will leave me with a better impression of the film. I mourned the death of Alan Rickman who played the love-to-hate-him slick Hans Gruber in "Die Hard", the loathsome but ultimately sympathetic Severus Snape of "Harry Potter", and the funny self-parodying Alexander Dane in "Galaxy Quest".

"The Force Awakens" fed into my confirmation bias that J.J. Abrams is a rather derivative re-booter of franchises, recycling entire scenes and plots. I don't think that I am so much a fan that I need to see the same movie made over and over again. A decent helping of originality would be appreciated. Perhaps this is just my hostility showing through toward Lucas for Episodes 1-3 and toward Abrams for the Lost disappointment and Star Trek's Vulcan and Khan heresies.

On the brighter side, I am looking forward to the "WarCraft" movie and the "Zoolander" sequel and perhaps trying to "publish" something in 2016. I use the term "publish" loosely here as if publicizing things on social media such as Twitter tweets or Facebook wall posts or even Blogger blog posts are "publishing".

Science versus Art

"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." - Searching for Bobby Fischer (movie)

I alluded to a debate that sprung up after I had won my most recent game. I was proud that I had produced a near-flawless game with an interesting pawn sac and exchange sac. The problem? I had memorized the first 17 moves in home preparation including the moves for the pawn sac and the exchange sac. At home I had delighted in how the evaluations given by Stockfish continued to tilt in White's favor and I had studiously tried to understand the many, many side variations that a potential opponent could try to complicate with. In my game, I still had to find 16 good moves after my 17 memorized moves. I had studied hard, played the right moves, used my brain to create technically sound moves over the board, and had gotten the win.

A friend who is also an expert seemed muted in his praise, basically stating that computer analysis distorts chess and that at least for him, playing chess with so much emphasis on preparation and results instead of creativity was likely not fun. Partly out of annoyance that my win was not being celebrated as the pure and good thing that I felt it deserved, I launched into a screed about how chess has a rich culture of named strategies (Minority Attack, Marshall Attack, Yugoslav Attack, Greek Bishop Sacrifice), and now openings deeply analyzed with computers, but this is the game we have chosen. To deprecate opening study is to stunt your own growth in a discipline that requires it of you. I attribute, perhaps wrongly, my recent ascent from a floored expert now to a middling expert as a result of my opening study system. At the very least, it serves as an enthusiasm engine so that I don't get into a weird love-hate cycle where I want to quit chess.

As part of his argument, my friend showed a game where he came up with several interesting moves over the board. Agreed, they were interesting concepts backed up by tactical bon mots, but I wanted to push back. To further my argument, I said, "But you can only create that move once. After the first time, it is knowledge, not creation." I went over the moves of Caruana-Carlsen from the Norway Chess supertournament. I'm certain that Caruana is a theoretician and his win in an endgame arising from the Ruy Lopez Berlin Defense was pleasing to replay. When a grandmaster catches another in a prepared opening variation, should we reject that as "not chess"?

Admittedly, I am also in it for the art. Why else would I adopt Gufeld's Search for the Mona Lisa as shorthand for one of my chess quests? But I include the science and knowledge and computer tools of chess as integral parts of my pursuit. I'm trying to be a Renaissance Man like Leonardo Da Vinci. It's not science versus art, but science AND art.

Retreat

Retreat can be the verb to run away from a battle or the noun of the act of running away, or a regrouping from the usual cares of the world, usually in a remote location.

By most measures, last year was a very successful year for me chesswise. Here are the highlights:

• Played more rated regular games (54) than I had the previous 5 years combined (51)
• Had fun
• Strengthened some chess friendships
• Broke the 2100 barrier and reached my highest rating ever at 2132 (now 2098)
• Won the club championship for the first time
• Contended for the state championship for the first time (semifinalist)
• Won a total of $189 in prize money
• Won outright first place in a tournament ahead of 5 other 2000+ players
• Earned the fifth and final USCF Candidate Master norm
• Won 2 trophies, doubling my chess trophy collection (Well, okay I bought one for myself after winning the club championship)
• Finished a year with a plus score against experts for the first time 11W-4D-8L
• Made progress in my openings study method thanks to Chess Position Trainer
• Caught three strong players in my opening traps

But there were a few lowlights:

• A good friend - young, only 2/3rds my age, my chess mentor - passed away near the beginning of 2014.
• Castled long (0-0-0) to start a tournament for the first time
• Withdrew from a regional swiss tournament for the first time
• Got caught up in two bad disputes as a tournament director

On balance, it was a good year, but - and I know this is whining - I fear a return to the bad old days of loving/hating chess. I won my last game of 2014 before Thanksgiving and I haven't thought much more about chess since analyzing the few blunders of the Carlsen-Anand match. Club championship season starts in 11 days and I don't know how to get mentally ready for my title defense. Over the holidays, I played some tabletop games including Gloom, Dixit, Tsuro, Munchkin, and Australian Rails. Chess is still grander by far because of its deep strategic, geometric beauty and the shifting of rewards toward the meritorious and away from the merely lucky. But in the last 50 days, chess has been a stranger. Chess has given me much to be thankful for, including this opportunity to braggingly list my accomplishments. I'll try to regroup for chess in 2015.

Recurse

Two weeks ago, I went to watch some games in the fourth round of the Western States Open. I watched the games unfold on the top boards. The openings seemed vaguely familiar, but they also looked strange. Between the motion and the act had fallen a shadow that obscured the idea. I felt I was seeing, but not grasping.

I laid eyes on a tiny Asian girl in the Class A section. After checking the wall chart, I found out it was Joanna Liu, or should I say National U-8 Girls Champion Joanna Liu. Seeing her reminded me of The Joy Luck Club's story of Waverly Jong.

I transcribed the dialog near the end of the clip because the words seemed rather apropos to my relationship with chess of late.

WAVERLY: Guess what? I've decided to play chess again.

MOM: You think it's so easy. One day quit, next day play. Everything for you is this way. So smart, so easy, so fast. Not so easy any more.

[Back in chess tournament. Waverly is losing in front of an audience including her family.]

NARRATOR WAVERLY: What she said, it was like a curse. This power that I had, this belief in myself. I could actually feel it draining away. I could feel myself feeling so ordinary. All the secrets I once saw, I couldn't see them any more. All I could see was were my mistakes, my weaknesses. The best part of me just... disappeared. But I can't put it all on my mother. I did it to myself. I never played chess again.

One of Amy Tan's big breaks was a short story called Endgame. I was somewhat keen on trying to find a copy, but then I realized that it's likely that the best parts of Endgame were cannibalized for The Joy Luck Club.

I showed up at the club Thursday ostensibly to collect on a few debts, but also to see how the Holiday Swiss began. Round 1 produced the usual 500-point mismatches, but there were quite a few upset draws and one upset win. Again, I simply spectated. I didn't feel an urge to play, but after I left, I could almost envision myself among the players, returning to the world of silent cerebral intensity.

Throughout my life, computers and chess have exchanged positions as my favored hobby. The past three years, computers have dominated, drowning out Caissa's siren call. But the season is turning again. Recursion. Reversion. I feel my interest turning back to chess. Waverly's words haunt me: curse, powerlessness, blindness, mistakes and weaknesses. Confident and powerful or drained and ordinary? Perhaps it's time to test myself again.

Quiescence

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."

Noir

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.

Timecop

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

“'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.

Ernie The Great

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.

Creativity

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.

Chess Is Hard

"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.

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.

Lost Among The Trees

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...

Convergence

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.

Activation Energy

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.

Once More Unto The Breach

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

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.

Ennui

Let's start with the title. I was going to call this energy crisis, but then I decided to take it pedantic and introduce some SAT vocabulary. The other day someone even used this word, but I can't remember where. I think the proper pronunciation comes out sounding like "on-we". It sums up my feelings lately about chess. Listlessness, like the River Lethe overflowed its banks and filled up my house, including this small pocket of the universe that encloses my brain. I suppose this will go down as yet another conceit that I'm essentially writing about writer's block.

While watching such revered personae as Blue Devil Knight and Temposchlucker make their untimely exits, I watched only half forlornly, as these forefathers I never knew left without really imprinting upon me the dearthy future I would now face in their absence. I only knew that there were chess muses inside me that strained against my typing fingers for an expression. But it's time for me to face it. There was little here that hadn't seen the sun before. See, I just did it again with my penchant to cite and plagiarize without a personality of my own. I'm like Shang Tsung, the absorber of souls, ultimately without my own voice. And now the internal voices are suddenly hushed as if their owners were silently appraising a new predator in the jungle. Seeing other people's freeway accidents is a kind of visceral vicarious thrill until it's your own crumpled wreck that you're gazing dazedly out of.

It's rather ironic that I have been afflicted so. Apologies to those who I've left hanging with my nonresponsivenes. This goes especially for J.C. Hallman, whose work I panned in my last post, some forty-odd days and nights ago. I guess I came with some preconceived notions about how a book entitled The Chess Artist should go and cried false advertising when my expectations missed the mark. It's true that my feelings about the book were of disappointment. But the author seems to hint that he intended for us to feel the disillusionment that a chess player feels when he realizes that his performance will inevitably betray his lofty dreams. I am reminded of the moment in Ratatouille when Anton Ego reviews the restaurant run by the rat chef and realizes he's been wrong about the world for much of his life. And now I'm living proof of Mr. Hallman's thesis. Well played, sir.

When I was in grad school, my friends got to talking among themselves. There was one guy who I always thought was a blowhard. The question came up whether I would ever get tired of chess. Well, the B.S.er said emphatically that no I would never get tired of chess, as if he had peered into my soul and seen the hole that would ever remain chess dependent. I guess I resented being so predictable, but I continued feeding the monster nevertheless. Then in 1998, for a four and a half year period, I proved him wrong, but at the end of 2002, I fell off the wagon.

I have been strong in my chess enthusiasm for about five years now with a few sine waves along the way, but this feels like a flatline that may last a bit longer. It took the leap toward chess lessons for me to see it more clearly: how much I suck at this game and how faulty my memory seems to get with the passage of years. Opening lines and problem concepts fade so fast on this dull tablet, as if written in distilled water on the cement driveway under a blazing sun. And me and my TD hat always had a tense relationship. I hope my hankering for chess playing returns, but I doubt I'll ever miss chess TDing.

I met ChargingKing yesterday. I had thought about his ideals of the Cobra Kai dojo with respect to chess and found my own cyberphilic paragon. A usual, my homages went haywire and I went for a conglomerate of major screenplay themes. The ruthless efficiency of machines relative to we frail and imperfect humans seems to get lots of traction in cinema. With regard to this particular post, their tirelessness is the antithesis. The arc I'm thinking of begins with HAL9000, continues with Cyberdyne Systems T-850, and on through Data and Six. At least in science FICTION, a machine's logic is impeccable, its memory banks perfect, and its battery life unflagging.

HAL 9000: I'm sorry Frank, I think you missed it. Queen to bishop three, bishop takes queen, knight takes bishop, mate.

Kyle Reese: Listen. And understand. 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.

Data: I am an android, I do not require rest.

Six: All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. (Another way to say "There is nothing new under the sun.")

Speaking of new, I recently read Neuromancer by William Gibson. Wow, I am in awe of this man's writing ability and clairvoyance. While there's perhaps only one chess sentence in the whole thing, I wholeheartedly recommend it. It was an education in one of the seminal works of cyberpunk, which I recently learned is the combination of high tech and low life. As far as I'm concerned, the Wachowski brothers owe Gibson some royalties for The Matrix. Someone told me that Neuromancer was the birth of the word "cyberspace" in 1984. If the father of the internet is ever up for a popular vote, I nominate Gibson.

When ChargingKing asked of my preparations for the Western States, my enthusiasm buzzed slightly above baseline noise. It's still a possibility I'll get back into the game, but the drought seems to have a momentum that I am unwilling to check. Chess Karma once remarked that chess might be a little narrow to spend an eternity on. Like Phil Connors, I'm going to try a few new things, perhaps even piano lessons. Caissa is going to have to content herself with forgotten concubine for a while. I should be back; I just can't say when.

I'm going to close with two more quotes.

Alfred Lanning: When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter mote of a soul?

Terminator: Hasta la vista, baby.

Blogotype Revisited

Now that I’m about six months into it, I wanted to look back and see what kind of blogotype I am. When I first started I believe my self-categorization was #5 workaday and #24 actuary with #9 outsider tendencies. In the opening days, I’m pretty sure I pulled a #4 newbie by heartily recommending Dan Heisman. I’ve worked hard to try to let my personal thoughts permeate my writings, so methinks I’m no longer an outsider. Someone recently accused me of vanity and I would normally take umbrage at such a suggestion, but I try to maintain open-mindedness and hear what people say. Perhaps I should just get it over with and admit elements of narcissism with tendencies toward #2 scholar, and #16 pedant.

To go along with pedantry, some days I feel like #26 neglected baby. Comments hardly ever break 2 for one post and I sometimes envy the attention that others get. Casually, I think about returning to obscurity as have several of my fellow clubmember bloggers, but I’ll hang on for another twelve months at least. I think that partly this is my own fault in that I don’t religiously reply to all commentators. Why should my audience give me feedback if I don’t return the favor? However, someday, when a hater with a flamethrower finds me and calls me a narcissistic twit who publishes useless actuarial drivel that no one bothers to read, I won’t have the counterargument that my large and wide readership invalidate his assertion.

It occurs to me now that the threat to quit is the main weapon my #21 passive aggressive side has to protest being negatively labeled as a narcissistic whiney baby.

I suppose that chess blogging has its elements of fad and passing fancy. It seems that every other week, another of the First Ones, announces his retirement from the blogosphere. The bloggers of my club seem to be flagging, too.

Oh well. I mainly remind myself that the perception of writing for the public pushes me to try to be more creative and disciplined in my content and that in most ways, the blog is for my own benefit, pushing my writing and my chess to new horizons, and preserving the mementos of my journey.