Andy: We might do business on a board, but I want to carve the pieces myself. One side in alabaster, the opposing side in soapstone. What do you think?
Red: I think it’ll take years.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
An old adage goes, "Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it." In my last post, I wrote of the flawless victory and the pursuit of perfection. I suppose perfection in one game isn't really the same as pushing toward perfection in my overall chess game. Sheryl Crow sings, "It's not having what you want. It's wanting what you've got."
My game is hardly worth posting because it was too flawless. To protect the innocent, I'm just going to refer you to this game and say that I was on the black side of such a game.
I think this would go into the category of me being too spoiled to be happy with things that other people would be thrilled to have. An eight-move book checkmate. Eight moves for both sides. About five minutes total. No thinking. An early night with plenty of rest. Budapest players dream of luring unsuspecting players into the blunder axb4?? and then playing the fun mating move Nd3#. But my victory was tainted with disappointment and suspicion: disappointment that my chess skill was not really tested and suspicion that my opponent really knew the trap and threw the game.
I just need to count my blessings and be thankful.
Chess is the opposite of bloodsport. With a few notable exceptions, it is competition between minds.
Yet, it is intimately tied to war, like war's noncorporeal spirit.
In my opinion, chess will never be a spectator sport. The essential action during a game takes place within the players' minds in the setting up of hundreds of lines of analysis, arrayed like tin soldiers and knocked down with equal dispatch. Only one candidate move emerges from each line to do battle with your opponent's champion. In analysis, I have slain legions of pawns, knights, bishops, rooks, queens and kings. Reading through an unannotated game seems rather Hemingway-esque when you haven't seen and appreciated a representative sample of the blind alleys and parallel universes connected to the eighty or so positions that appear in an average forty-move game.
Last Thursday, I played one of the lower rated players in my championship qualifier group. Although the ratings predict a 98.2% win expectancy. I still feel challenge in making sure that the other 1.8% doesn't catch me. But I also challenge myself to try to win well. In the bloody Mortal Kombat video game as well as in the movie, a completely one-sided victory was announced: "Flawless Victory". I chase the equivalent of chess' flawless victory with better odds when my opponent is significantly more prone to mistakes.
While I was enjoying a middlegame advantage, I overheard a friend speak the word "bloodlust" at a neighboring board in skittles analysis. Amused, I asked what the context was. He explained that "bloodlust" was the craze that befalls you when you are trying to figure out which one of your pieces surrounding the enemy king can deliver the killing blow. I thought of Edward Lasker's book, Chess for Fun and Chess for Blood which I haven't read.
My game didn't end up flawless. In particular, I regretted my 21...Kh7!? as an inaccurate waste of time when I could have played Re6 right away.
I am but Mortal and therefore flawed, yet still I chase perfection.
