Greed

"The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much."

- Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), Wall Street (1987)

"There are seven deadly sins, Captain. Gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, pride, lust, and envy."

- Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), Se7en (1995)

When the subject of the Seven Deadly sins comes up, I can remember them without too much difficulty because of the movie Se7en starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. I can picture the scene for Greed of a lawyer having died in his office trying to excise and place a pound of his flesh onto a scale.

On Saturday, Mark Madoff was found dead in his home of apparent suicide on the two-year anniversary of his father's conviction. Mark was the 46-year old eldest son of Bernard Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence for committing perhaps the largest fraud in history via a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Romans 6:23 says "For the wages of sin are death..."

Greed seemed to be the theme of the last two games I played in the Holiday Swiss. In the first, I was the beneficiary of my opponent's excess greed. For you readers, I'm giving away some of my opening secrets as this is my gambit variation of the 2...Nf6 Scandinavian when I let White hold the extra pawn and offer a second one on move 8.

It was fun being a gambiteer since I could foresee the negative consequences for my opponent giving into greed. To demonstrate that this glass-house dweller is not here just to cast stones, here is the more recent game where I was summarily punished for my own greed mixed with a little sloth for not calculating thoroughly.

So the wages of greed in chess are checkmate.

In Jonathan Rowson's book, The Seven Deadly Chess Sins, he spends some time in the Extended Preface discussing sin and theology and its relevance to chess. It's quite a good read that makes me sorry I haven't made more time for more of Rowson's writings. He enumerates the deadly chess sins as thinking, blinking, wanting, materialism, egoism, perfectionism, and looseness. Specifically, he tries to equate materialism with gluttony, to which I cried foul because I thought materialism was squarely equal to greed.

It doesn't seem fair that for the most part, avaricious computers can do well with greed and materialism because any negative repercussions are usually within their brute force calculating horizons.

"What shall it profit a man if he gains material but loses the game?"

- Caissa 16:26

Moria and Lucena

From Wikipedia:
In the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, Moria (Sindarin for "Black Chasm") was the name given by the Eldar to an enormous underground complex in north-western Middle-earth, comprising a vast network of tunnels, chambers, mines and huge halls or 'mansions', that ran under and ultimately through the Misty Mountains. There, for many thousands of years, lived the Dwarf clan known as the Longbeards.

From Baby-Names-Meanings.net:
Lucena - Illumination. Light. Mythological Roman Goddess of Childbirth and Giver of First Light to Newborns. Also Refers to Mary As Lady of the Light.

Speak, friend, and enter. The magic word to open the door into rook endgames is Lucena, which is actually a class of positions with material of King, Rook, and Pawn against King and Rook.

The Pawn must be a non-rook pawn advanced to its seventh rank. The attacking king stands on the queening square of its own pawn. The attacking rook cuts off the defending king from the pawn by one file (e.g. pawn-file-king). The defending rook hinders the escape of the attacking king from the queening square.



The winning maneuver begins with a check from the attacking rook to create some breathing room for both the king and the pawn.
1.Re1+
If 1...Kf6, then 2.Kf8 and g8=Q on the next move. Note that if Black tries to checkmate with 2...Ra2 3.g8=Q Ra8+, 4.Re8 is conveniently available. If 1...Kd6, White may have to deal with a counterattacking king after 2.Re4 Kd5, but 3.Rg4 should win. So the generic case is
1...Kd7



Now comes the key move of the Lucena position.
2.Re4

The purpose of the move is to provide cover for the White King who must dodge a series of checks from the Black Rook. The White Rook will block the check just as the White King disconnects itself from defense of the pawn on g7. Hooper and Whyld's Oxford Companion to Chess (1992) attributed the phrase "building a bridge" to Aron Nimzowitsch.

Now, a typical sequence of moves would be:
2...Rh1
3.Kf7 Rf1+
4.Kg6 Rg1+
5.Kf6 Rf1+
6.Kg5 Rg1+
7.Rg4



As the attacking rook intercedes in this bridge-building maneuver, my mind drifts to the Lord of the Rings scene where the Fellowship of the Ring is running from the Balrog found in Moria. His fellows having safely crossed the Bridge of Khazad-Dum, Gandalf in the middle of the bridge turns to face the Balrog and shouts:

You cannot pass! I am the servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor. The dark fire will not avail you, Flame of Udun! Go back to the shadow!

You shall not pass!

Then Gandalf sunders the Bridge and the Balrog falls, but pulls Gandalf down with his whip. To the Fellowship, Gandalf's last words are, "Fly, you fools!"

It is not until the return of Gandalf the White in the Two Towers are we told what happened.

"[We fell] through fire and water. From the lowest dungeon to the highest peak I fought him, the Balrog of Morgoth. Until at last, I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin upon the mountainside. Darkness took me and I strayed out of thought and time. Stars wheeled overhead and every day was as long as a life-age of the earth. But it was not the end. I felt life in me again. I've been sent back until my task is done."

You can watch the epic battle here.

If Black chose to exchange rooks
7...Rxg4+
8.Kxg4
it would look as if Gandalf (the White Rook) and the Balrog (the Black Rook) fell into the abyss and disappeared, leaving the diminuitive Ringbearer to reach the queening square and win the battle for Middle Earth. Note that because of the first check in the variation, the Black King is separated enough from g8 that he cannot prevent queening.
8...Ke7
9.g8=Q

As useful as Lucena would seem, I have not actually used it in a tournament game. Of 425 tournament games I have played since 1991, zero have ended in a Lucena position. Three have ended in Philidor type draws. My other heavily Tolkeinized post parallels the Battle of Helm's Deep.

Snowbirds and Cold Turkeys

For the third year in a row, my chess activity has gone into a seasonal lull. Except for occasionally skimming Dana Mackenzie's blog, I almost quit chess cold turkey. No blitz servers, no tactical servers, no books, no games, no engines. Hardly even any visits to the club since about late March. I think I played two skittles games in August. Period. There's a pattern developing: I played no tournament games in the months of June through October in both 2009 and 2008.

I had been doing a lot more computer programming primarily because of a career change. Information technology is mostly the transformation of one type of data into another. When I was young I used to try to dam up the gutter water with rocks or twigs or sand, perhaps to control the flow of water. Information is like a creek that keeps flowing and changing course. It's essence remains information, yet its pattern morphs in and out of recognition. Logic governs the 64-bit world as it does the 64-square world. IT problems seem less bounded and more amenable to creativity and sheer improvisational hacking, but there is still the search for the ideal solution, the best move. Programming ideals include speed, effectiveness, efficiency, scalability, object orientation, reusability, readability, abstraction, portability, maintainability, reliability, accuracy and freedom from bugs. The passion for chess that I used to feel seems to have translated directly into a passion for information technology.

Back in sixth grade, I tied for second in the individual state chess championship. But in seventh grade, I discovered the Atari 800 computer and BASIC and when the Computer Chess beat me handily on level 3, I pretty much gave up chess for eight years until junior year in college when I found out that one could study books about chess. My adult tournament career began in 1991 and went strong until career and family brought tournament chess to a halt between 1998 and 2002. There were short stints in 1999 and 2001 when I was crazy deep in programming, but chess came back strong from 2003 to 2006. The last four years have been a struggle against plateaus and valleys of strength and enthusiasm.

I was a professional programmer for 4.5 months. I would say that being laid off was a novel experience to add to my sheltered life. My logical brain hibernated for the past six weeks, but it's starting to throw off pangs again. I'm going to try to stay away from theory and books and the search for perfection and try to concentrate on remembering the fun of chess.

Two Scents

A musty-sweet decadent odor exhaled
From piles of sodden leaves sloshing beneath my feet
Rose to meet the comforting scent of wood smoke
Drifting on a chill breeze from a nearby hearth
And formed an elixir of molecular keys
That swirled within my nostrils
And unlocked a forsaken memory
Of chess battles won and lost
Within the safety of my warm den.

Chessays

Back in the mid-1980s, I was preparing for college entrance examinations and/or the Advanced Placement examination in English. I read lots and lots of essays that either tested reading comprehension or served as models of good writing. Reading those essays was the single most helpful thing that improved my own writing. One essay that remained stuck in my mind was one that compared and contrasted chess and fencing. As I recalled, the writer's main point was that the dominance of chess masters over chess beginners was much greater than the dominance of fencing masters over fencing beginnners.

Over the last few years as I wrote about chess, I occasionally thought of that essay from over twenty years ago and wanted to know exactly what the writer said and how he said it. I tried in vain to find the essay on the internet. My main method of searching was to plug the terms "chess fencing SAT" into Google. My efforts were fruitless, so I decided to write my own essay partly in hopes that a reader could help me find the original. But I was handicapped because I really knew nothing about fencing other than what I read at Wikipedia. Google did help me find two good quotes about fencing:

"I consider fencing to be a great art which raises men to Knights in their thoughts and behavior. Fencing is a school of humility and develops speed, perfect control of the body, balance, beauty, and strong grace. It should be recommended to all men wanting to master their feelings and actions during their lifetime. Through this art they will think clearly and act always with style in their decisions." - Marcel Marceau in the forward to Julius Palffy-Alpar's book Sword and Masque

"Using a sword is like sex. You can't get good by practicing by yourself or with your relatives." - Jack Sparrow

Here's my effort:

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Essay Test Question: Compare and contrast chess and fencing.

Chess and fencing in their purest forms are one-to-one contests where the combatants employ a repertoire of discrete offenses and defenses in an attempt to outmaneuver their opponents. Both disciplines share some warlike features, but they differ in complexity and the degree to which they can be mastered.

Both chess and fencing owe their heritage to war and are some of the best examples of warlike abstractions. More than most other games, winning and losing are metaphors of life and death. Because both are played in the physical world, health and physique play their parts in the outcome, but each has a panoply of maneuvers and strategems that to a large degree push the contests into mental realms.

Fencing is played with one weapon per side, chess with thirty-two pieces per side, but fencing ultimately seems to have the greater number of variables. It has been estimated that the total number of possible moves in chess is on the order of 10^120 which is more than the number of protons (10^80) in the known universe. Even though chess has a very large space of possibilities, in a given position, the variables are largely within the chess master's ability to understand and control. Ultimately there are only 64 squares on the chessboard with quantifiable elements of space, force, and time. Also, the rules of chess are quite rigid as to what is a legal and illegal move. However, the fencing master has many real-world variables which are out of his control. Fencing includes the interplay of hundreds of unknown muscles, reflexes, angles, and material strengths. Additionally, wielders of the sword who don't fight by the "rules" conspire to reduce the fencing master's ability to control the situation. While players at tournament chess can spend an average of three minutes per move, the fencing master has only split seconds to parry and thrust.

A chess master can see an amateur coming from a mile away and can prepare. The Elo rating system predicts that Garry Kasparov, at his peak rating of 2800, has a win expectancy over an expert rated 2000 of 99%; against an adult beginner of about 1200 rating, the win expectancy increases to 99.9%. Chess thought involves a scientific process of collecting data, testing hypotheses mentally, and then acting. Preparation in chess beats improvisation and the role of luck is minimized. In Romeo and Juliet, Tybalt is usually represented as a skilled swordsman, significantly better than Romeo. But the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt illustrate that Romeo's restraint of the former and Romeo's rage against the latter were pivotal to the outcome of the duels. Third parties who hold one's arms down or players who play in blind rage do not turn the tides of chess games very often.

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As I looked back at this fourth paragraph, I noticed that I'd made the mistake of using a fictional example about sword fighting instead of fencing. This prompted me to consider that perhaps all these years I should have been searching for an essay on chess and swordsmanship, not chess and fencing. Using Google with "chess swordsman essay," I finally came across this:

White, Edward M., Assigning, Responding, Evaluating: A Writing Teacher’s Guide

"The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do; and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot." --Samuel Clemens

Write an essay that explains what Clemens means by his description of the "best swordsman" and the "ignorant antagonist." Relate Clemens' concept to an area about which you are well informed.

Further down on this webpage is one sentence referring to a student's essay mentioning chess that triggered my ancient recognition. I bought White's book for $6.50 + $3.99 shipping from an Amazon partner. It came in the mail today. Here is the student's chessay which scored the highest rating of 6 out of 6:

The Expert Is Always on Guard Against Checkmate

When Clemens speaks of the "best swordsman," he brings up the trained expert, the professional who has mastered the rules of the game. This expert is ready for antagonists who play by the rules. The "ignorant antagonist" stands for the untrained or rebellious outsider who reserves the right to make up his own rules. The opposition between these two ways of fighting, playing, or living applies in many different ways.

When revolutionaries break diplomatic rules by engaging in acts of terrorism, the governments affected are often "caught out" and government leaders sometimes "ended on the spot." In today's world, the superpowers ready their defense for major confrontations with other superpowers or "second best" powers, but not for isolated and unpredictable acts of terrorism such as the taking of hostages, the assassination of political figures, or the hijacking of a plane - often for personal or even crazy reasons.

On the other hand, unconventional chess players don't have the slightest chance against an expert unless these outsiders are well beyond the novice stage. The brilliant innovations in chess have nothing to do with ignorance. No expert can lose to the novice opening with rook pawns or carelessly throwing his queen into opening positions. A brilliant amateur can win at chess, where nothing can by this time be entirely new, but the innovator cannot be ignorant. However, chess is here, as elsewhere, atypical. What Clemens says does not apply in this tight, square world, so unlike the disorderly real one.

Any proverb has a basic truth but needs to be applied with care. Maybe the very best experts are those most alert to the ways unconventional moves can work. Our swordsmen in foreign relations need to be ready for mobs, terrorists, and others who will refuse to acknowledge our rules. If the ignorant antagonist can do in the duelist, the swordsman has more to learn.

Serenity Prayer

Serenity Prayer for players of chess endings:

God,
Grant me the Serenity to sacrifice the pawns I cannot salvage,
The Courage to save the pawns I should,
And the Wisdom to know the difference.

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.