chess

 

NY Times : In a Bitter Lawsuit, Chess Combatants Agree to a Draw: An American grandmaster sued Magnus Carlsen, the world’s top player, and two other parties after Carlsen accused him of cheating. A settlement has been announced. Queer chess night is popular in Manhattan. ( Guardian )

 

“ We have detected that one or more of your recent opponents has violated our Fair Play Policy. As compensation for potentially unfair rating losses, we adjusted your following ratings: Blitz: 709 + 9 => 718” I found an old post I wrote about Bong Cloud .

"Think of chess," in his early days around the capital, looking for a comparison that Russians might take to, chess, "an extravagant game of chess." Going on to show, if his audience was receptive (he had salesman reflexes, knew to steer automatically along lines of least indifference) how each molecule had so many possibilities open to it, possibilities for bonding, bonds of different strengths, from carbon the most versatile, the queen, "the Great Catherine of the periodic table," down to the little hydrogens numerous and single-moving as pawns . . . . and the brute opposition of the chessboard yielding, in this chemical game, to dance-figures in three dimensions, "four, if you like," and a radically different idea of what winning and losing meant. . . . Schwärmerei, his colleagues back home had muttered, finding excuses to drift away into other conversations. But Tchitcherine would have stayed. Foolish and romantic, he would have kept listenin...

I play 5 minute blitz games mostly, on my phone. I play the occasional 10 minutes rapid game on my computer. Just to change it up. I've been doing the daily puzzle more often, and I've been playing 7 day games, to think more about my moves. I'm trying to challenge myself. I lose more when I get out of my comfort zone.  I realized that I play to push off complications onto my opponent, and that doesn’t work with longer games. I like the lack of contemplation in speed games. There are too much complexity in the middle game. It did lead me to new openings and new awards. Some awards are participation awards.

There's that pause when my opponent realizes I took their queen. It really is a good strategy not to get the queen out early, least of all that if you make a mistake the, the cost is less. You put the least valuable players out first. You put pawns to try and get bishops and knights. Development is an important idea, getting locked in is really dangerous. I've had a lot of good checkmates, against me, where I was bottled in out of defensiveness.  There's also balance between being defensive and offensive. I've had some spectacular fun wins being really aggressive. That's a fun game, but a good player can defend themselves well enough to take advantage of aggressive play. Same with defense. Just clearing the back line so you can castle isn't a bad goal, but there's a hierarchy of goals. Sometimes there is no good move, so you make the least bad one. Notice when you're in a loop. You have to value every move, the more efficient player usually wins.   If yo...