Chess players are people, too

Huh. Who knew a post about making FICS friends would give me reason to introspect and reflect.

Tom popped by to share his FICS handle and since I didn't recognize him (I now recall seeing him over at LEP) I popped over to his blog to have a look. Rather than chess, I was surprised to see a Christian blog.

I've had a tendency to skirt most personal details except as they relate to chess, directly and indirectly, on my blog, and then here I was saying to myself, "Woah...he's a Christian, and pretty devout as well (a Deacon, even!)...wonder if I should add him or not?"

I'm an Atheist.

I'm not gonna be burning any Bibles (I have two, actually, not counting my daughter's from her Christening), removing kids from devout parents (although I do agree with the sentiment that Richard Dawkins expressed that indoctrination is a form of child abuse) nor will I be waging war on xmas (well...not much- it has roots in pagan traditions pre-dating Christianity and blends with them, but don't quote me- I'm not the expert) or saying things like Satan Bless You when you sneeze (okay...maybe once in awhile :P).

I consider myself very open-minded and considerate of others views, no matter what I think of the views and beliefs themselves. I will challenge them in the appropriate venue (one forum I frequent and play games at has had several recent invigorating discussions of religion and morality with advocates of many creeds and religions and a good sense of camraderie). It shocked me that I would hesitate to add someone to a friend list based on their religon. I'm the minority at my workplace, by gender, race and religon (I'm not out at work), and here I was getting all xenophobic!

I wondered if I'd add Tom to a non-chess section of my blogroll that I've been contemplating (despite saying in the past that I wouldn't have a non-chess section), and how I'd respond if he hit me up for a game on FICS.

And really, there's nothing I should do but add Tom to my lists. Some people like me, some people don't. I can't change that and don't expect them to change my opinions of them. But at no point should I exclude people because of our differences...I'll be awfully lonely in short order if I do, and I'll be missing these opportunities to challenge my spirit of acceptance and openness.

Who plays at FICS?

Reading a week old post at liquid egg product, I saw a number of bloggers dabbling at FICS. Doubting anyone would see a comment there, I'm advertising here.

I'm gorckat on FICS (and just about everywhere else online :P), so feel free to hit me up sometime. I'm gonna add anyone whose handle was in the comments at lep to my friends/notify lists. You'll be my very first ones...it's like first grade all over again!

Using the Examine options it'd be possible to get all jiggy with study sessions and stuff, as well.

First sighting of a chess dad

I went 0-4 last night. Clearly the lack of PCT practice has hurt my danger sense. I walked right into a basic knight fork of rook and king, among other silly errors, but still had a great time. I got there early enough to play couple blitz games against a guy who beat me last time, sort of meet the former club president and champion, who once beat Fischer in a simul, and enjoyed the all male commentary and critique of top chess woman with big boobs (sorry Polly!)

My round two opponent was the son of the soon to be mentioned chess dad. By name and accent, I'm guessing they are from Eastern Europe or Russia. The son is about 12 or so (I really suck at judging ages- if i were every a carnie at one of those age guessing games, the age window would have to +/- 10 years or I'd be out of prizes in an hour) and handled me. Even though it was G/15, he got up a few times and walked around the room to glance at everyone's games.

Round three was his father. I had a tight, cramped position as white with a Bishop bound up playing super pawn on the queenside to prevent a rook intrusion. He brought his king out, since his kingside pawns had advanced, the center was open and there'd been a tit-for-tat on the queenside, and I was able to exploit a pin on his pawn to manuever my previously hopeless knight in the center to the rim with a few threats to his bishops, and was able to take a Bishop and get a rook deep in the center.

Unfortunately, I wasted a minute deciding that he did indeed have one more defender of a central pawn than I had attackers and ended up losing to a bank rank mate with less than 10 seconds left. I was hesitant to trade down to a minor piece ending, but I think I should have.

At the end of the night, the son was playing the last game, got in time trouble and flagged, although his opponent missed a skewer to win the queen and win by force. then the fireworks happened. The father jumped up his kid's ass like nothing I'd seen. The tourney I took my daughter too had a few school teams and one or two lone parents, and it was all touchy feely, give it your best kind of stuff.

I don't recall the boy walking around that game, but he may have early, and they disagreed over how much time was left at some stage. Everyone was like, "Dude- chill. Its a game", but he was hung up on how his kid was a spoiled American brat and plays the game of chess, not the sport.

I hope to crush the father if we play again. I had him, but couldn't close the deal. Not that he'd go easier on the kid. He'd probably vent any frustration on him.

Local Chess Clubs

I added another link section dedicated to local clubs. Its a little rickety since the Fells Point Chess Club doesn't have a website and a fourth club's website (Loch Raven Chess Club) seems to always be down to bandwidth issues.

Both have additional info at the Maryland Chess Association's Club Directory. Fells Point is particularly active, with one or more events every weekend. I'm heading back to the Catonsville Club tonight for some G15 action. I figured out the delay settings on my clock, so no clocking out while up a knight :P

I kept the listings to clubs in the Baltimore Metro area since I consider myself a "local blogger". There's a half dozen or more clubs in neighboring counties, and their listings are also at the MCA site.

Tournament Etiquette

I did a quick google to answere a few lingering questions I had and learned a few things in the process:

-I had no idea its not required to say 'Check'. Seems to me the proper thing to do is say it, but I guess not. That'll be news to my best friend who about bit my head of a few years back in a casual game!
-It is the opponent's responsibility to point out a flag fall- I resigned the game my time ran out (I had thought this the case, but it seems to be in my interest ot not point it out in the future)

The one thing I didn't find a clear answer to is what to do when my opponent doesn't push the clock?

In the game I resigned on time, there were several times my opponent didn't push the clock. He was not a beginner, which I have seen it advised to remind the opponent to push their clock. In a couple cases, I hadn't realized he didn't push it until I went to hit the button and discovered a free move. (Too bad I didn't make better use of the time!)

But in two instances, iirc, I noticed, pondered a bit and made my move anyway. I didn't wan to sit there and stew over propriety.

What's the correct response?

Finally played real chess!

With real people! I played in the Catonsville Chess Club Friday Knight, a 5 round Swiss G/15 and went +1 -4.

One game, agaisnt the Danish Gambit Accepted I scrapped out to what could have been a win, but I haven't yet figured out how to program the delay on my clock, so instead of 12 minutes with a 3 second delay, I clocked out after 15 minutes.

My win cames against the Caro-Kan. c6 was abandoned by the black pawns, the center was blocked and I sent my c3 knight on a journey to get to the outpost, which would be created after a series of exchanges locked a pawn on d5 with c4 backup. I wish we'd recorded moves, because I think it was a really good idea. It was either really deep or really flaky.

I ended up dropping a knight on the kingside as my opponent mounted an offensive, and I ended up with a pinned Bishop and shaky foundations on the kingside. We traded rooks and each had about 3 minutes left. We both slowed down because I could feel things were on a tightrope for both of us. I got my chance and offered to take the Queens of the board, which would have left it possible to ecxhange down to a Bishop ending that I though I might be able to draw.

When he declined the Queen offer, I snatched his forgotten a8 rook with check and things spun rapidly. I think he lost his cool because pieces and pawns flew off the board until I was down to ~10 seconds (with delay, thankfully!), a Bishop and Rook and his king streaking (the naked kind) across the board.

I snatched a few pawns before month old stale tactics lessons took over and I made a half dozen moves on automatic and lined up my king, a pawn and the bishop and the rook slid over- checkmate on the h-file and adrenaline surging!

All in all, a great time. I have to go back with my camera because one guy has some awesome chess tatoots which would make a great post.

If thou must love chess

If thou must love me

IF thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
"I love her for her smile- her look- her way
Of speaking gently,- for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day"-
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee,- and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,-
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity.

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(From Sonnets from the Portuguese)

That's number 14, iirc. My wife and I chose it for our wedding invitation; I'd written her an awesome letter with this sonnet in it during our courtship. My comment on Chessaholic's latest post and his mention of recent chess burnouts made me think of it, just now.

Look at how our chess knowledge grows and changes over time...if at any point we become convicted that we know chess and that chess only exists as we see it right now...poof! Her smile changes, she makes us think something we didn't before and if you can't go with her, forget it- you get burned in the fiery hell that is Qxf7#. Which really sucks.

For those who are burned out, sometimes you have to let it go to get it back. Remember what drew you in, accept her changes and love her as she is now.

And as she will be.



(Goodness, I think I have a new mistress...my wife is gonna be pissed!)

David Bronstein

The December Chess Life has a really cool, previously unpublished, interview with David Bronstein in it. His Modern Chess Self-Tutor was the second chess book I bought as a teenager (the first was Burgess' Mammoth Book of Chess) and only after reading the interview did I realize he is very likely the source of my love for the game.

The way he talks about chess in the self-tutor is magical- its a war, a fairy tale, a battle of wills and intellect and imagination. I didn't realize, until I dug out the self-tutor a few days ago, that he influenced how I taught my daughter the game this past summer.

I described chess as a battlefield of soldiers and knights, of castles and archers, all marching and engaging at your, the king's, command. I told her she was responsible for the command to sacrifice pawns and pieces when its time to rip the other king out of his home, to smash that home down and leave it in ruins, or infiltrate it like an assassin and leave the queen weeping.

When I first started using the Polgar 5334 book for tactics, I was bemused by my own bemusement and wonder at the cleverness and beauty in some of the Mate in Ones. How can something found by process of elimination be beautiful, carry ingenuity and elegance within it? Now putting it to electrons, I Googled and found:

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.
Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) French mathematician.

And there it is- if chess weren't beautiful, it wouldn't be worth it.

Between the self-tutor and the interview, which was done in 1992 and held back for political and personal reasons, I have a hard time telling how he felt about the "science" of chess. In the interview he laments the explosion of technique and book knowledge extending into the middle game stifling creativity, but in the self-tutor he describes a systematic approach to marshal you army and unseat the opposing king.

Part of the confusion may be that the self-tutor was translated from Russian, even though he was fluent in English. There may have been translation missteps that don't convey what he truly meant, and he does celebrate creativity and inventiveness in his book; its just couched in method and formula.

Either way- his love was infectious and I'm now a carrier (hopefully contagious myself!). Thanks, Dave!

A Rockin' Xmas and a Horrible Nightmare

I got everything I wanted, chess-wise, for xmas!

-I got Chernev's Logical Chess, and the first two games got me fired up. Like chessloser, I love kingside violence.

-A review will go up at Chess Central later today for the bag, set and board combo I got.

-I also received my first clock. Until I can set it correctly and have used it, I won't be able to review it :P

My daughter really likes playing with a clock, so I'm hoping she and I get a lot of games in. She wants to play in the Maryland State Girls Championship and will probably play at least one warm-up before that.

My wife also thinks we'll be able to swing my entry in the Baltimore Open. Two days and five rounds of G120 will blow my mind. I'll have the chance to play out the endgames I'm getting in G30, and hopefully get to them in better shape!

Now the nightmare...

I was dreaming that I was playing in the Baltimore Open and my first opponent was at least a Master. He was trying to convince me to start off in some kind of symmetrical opening with the king bishops King's Bishop 3...very bizarre. After spending a few mintutes looking at the setup, I declined.

He got pissy and responded to 1.e4 with e6 and I got mated in like 5 moves! I woke up sweating, thinking, "Oh my god...I'm gonna be a lamb at slaughter there!"

And then it hit me...GPA! If I'm gonna go down, its gonna be like a Quentin Tarantino movie, dammit! Loads of action and plot twists :)

And lastly, here's a cool, IMHO, tip for handling vinyl boards in bags:

After sitting down and putting my initials on the bottom of all the pieces, contact info inside the bag and on the clock and putting my name on the bottom of my board (my wife thought I was cute doing so, like a kid getting his school gear ready at the end of the summer :D), I noticed that the velcro straps were 'biting' into the board and adding two unsightly creases down the board. A little ripple from rolling up ain't so bad, but these made it look like I kept the board crammed in my pocket.

And what do people probably have laying around in tatters right now? Empty and nearly empty rolls of wrapping paper! I grabbed a naked tube, measured it against the bag and cut it just a tad short, rolled the board, slid the board inside the tube, strapped it in and bam! No creasing action, and a sturdier package!

Maryland student wins his section in Houston

From Baltimore Chess:

Shin Uesugi came in first in the 10th grade section of the K-12 grade Championships held in Dallas, TX on December 7-9, 2007. This is the second year in a row that Shin has won his section at the K-12 Grade Championships! Shin, the 2005 Sweet 16 winner, was on first board for the entire tournament and finished with a score of 6 out of 7. His two draws were to the 2nd and 3rd place finishers.

Kid seems to be a prospect! The Sweet 16 is a Maryland Scholastic Championship, so that's 3 straight years of state and national championships.

One of my daughter's opponents from her first tournament also went to Houston. Hopefully they'll cross paths again. My girl seemed to like her.

Early Xmas Gift

Thought my daughter had gotten something from the USCF in the mail yesterday, so I tore the envelope open. It was the membership my wife had purchased for me. Oops :P

Awesomely, they were able to renew the membership I had that expired in 2003. When I emailed her my Xmas list a week or so ago, I hadn't been able to find my USCF ID# on the website. I never played in any events, so I figured it was lost forever.

There is no more to read here now. I haven't had time to decide how to handle the Read More link. Apparently, based on Firefox showing what is being loaded each time I hit the blog, even though I'm hiding stuff it still has to load (like diagrams at Chessup and the PGN reader at Chess Publisher) so I'm not making the page load faster, just look cleaner. I guess that has its own advantages.

Now that there's enough to have used the Read More link, I guess that's how I'll waste my time today, rather than fiddle with borders for images I post.

There's still nothing to read after the jump :P

Burning the midnight oil

Whew! Got the banner completed! Please pop over to the ZOtherOne's gallery and take a look at his work. I can't say enough how thrilled I am that he let me use his picture.

I spent a good while scouring Deviant Art for the perfect image. His captured the sense of journey, fear, excitement, hopes and dreams that most of are moved by when we play chess.

The board in the picture belonged to his grandfather. My grandfather is probably the reason I keep coming back to chess as I get older. As a kid, we played a game and I stuck a Knight on f6, a Bishop on g7 and castled short. He called it an Indian defense, said it was good and that he had to work to beat me.

I'm sure he handled me better than he let on, but his words have stuck with me.

I haven't seen my grandfather in about ten years. My grandparents divorced and the family as a whole split for a little while. Deep down, part of the reason I play is the hope that I'll run into him. He was always ahead of the curve with computers. He set me up with a couple of chess games over a modem when I was a kid, so maybe he's on FICS. Maybe he's gonna be at the Baltimore Open in January.

A few years ago my mother gave me his first edition copy of Rueben Fine's Chess the Easy Way. She'd had it in a box of things she took from his farm before it was sold after the divorce. I never really looked at it- its in descriptive, after all!- until recently when I started to miss him.

He taught me about a lot more than chess- computers, electricity, radio signals, weather, deer tracking, that you don't have to hold everything inside. I just want another game with him, to show him I've learned and gotten better. I hope he'd be proud of me.

Why?

Skimming around a few blogs this morning, I was reminded of the reason most people play chess: it evokes emotions.

I love attacking. I love the feeling before a game that I'm going to crush my opponent. I love when I'm on the ropes feeling that I'm not going to give in and that my comeback will break my opponent's spirit for weeks to come. I like the camraderie of looking at a position with others in the hopes of understanding it.

I hate the things I do that put me on the ropes. I hate losing.

The loves are the reason to play. The hates are the reason to get better.

I've always been a competitive person, sometimes to a fault. My wife won't play chess since I obliterated her during the games we played as I was teaching her ten years ago. I almost did the same thing to my daughter before my wife talked some sense into me and I eased up. We played a few games talking every move over and my daughter won a few: hooked.

Probably the biggest reason I play is the beauty and elegance that can come forth in a position. Working through Lazlo Polgar's Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games has given me a few "Wow!" moments where I just marvel at the solution.

Someday I'll make my own moment OTB.

Purpose

I've dabbled in several blogs that have gone nowhere, but lately the idea of a chess-centric one has taken root. I've enjoyed writing since high school where I 'became' a poet (aren't we all born that way?) but have not found the outlet I need to get creative and keep writing consistently since then.

Several things have spurred me to write about chess:

1) I taught my 8-year old to play over the summer
2) I started playing again after several years away
3) I haven't found any blogs about chess in Maryland

So here's what I've got on tap to get things going in the coming weeks and months:

-Last night my wife suggested a day-trip to the battlefields at Gettysburg or maybe Luray Caverns. Almost immediately I had the idea that whichever place we go, I should take my chess set and get a picture of me playing chess there...because that'd be kinda cool...I think :)
-I'm trying to consistently work an improvement plan and am looking to play in my first tournament December 8th and then the Baltimore Open in January (I'd estimate myself around 1100 USCF, perhaps? I'm about 1450 on FICS)
-My daughter played in her first tournament a couple weekends ago and wouldn't commit to playing another until I after I promised to help her get better

Welcome to my Chess Adventures!