Bulletin Guy

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

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

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

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

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

Hanging with Nate and going over his games.

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

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

Goofin' with Grant.

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

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

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

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

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

Fantasy and Nightmare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quagmire

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


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

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


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

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

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


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



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

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

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

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

Lost Among The Trees

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chess For Tigers

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

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

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

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

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

Reno Blogosphere

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

Canterbury Tale

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury

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

Centurini 1856. White to play and win.

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

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

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

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

Centurini 1856. White to play and win.

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



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



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


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



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



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