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.

Saving Private Ryan

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

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

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

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

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

Ernie The Great

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

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

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

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

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

Anatomy of a Miniature

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

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

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


The mean is about 42 and the mode is 45.

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

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

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

Sliding Doors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iceman Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

Labyrinth

From the Encyclopedia Mythica:

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

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

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

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

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

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