Former Chess Champion Transitions Skills to Politics

In a recent interview, former chess champion Garry Kasparov says that transitioning his chess skills to politics has been easy.

"In politics, body language is everything. In chess, I found that by strategically placing my hands on my face, I could influence the mind of my opponent."

The chess legend went on to explain the various messages he could send with body language.

"If I put a half-clenched fist under my chin it meant, 'oh, that was a good move, but really quite silly.' Usually this move will cause my opponent to squirm a little."

He further explains, "If I want my opponent to piss his pants, then I put my whole hand over my mouth and give him the stare of death. Then I wait for him to resign."

Rocky Decisions Overturned

PHILADELPHIA—In the wake of last month's shocking revelation that actor
Sylvester Stallone had been caught with the illegal human growth hormone Jintropin at an Australian airport, the World Boxing Association, in a joint decision with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Screen Actors Guild, has overturned the uplifting, feel-good endings of Rocky II, III, and IV, sources said Monday.

... read the rest of the article.

Chess Titles and Classes

Just so you understand where I'm coming from ... I've not played chess all my life and have never been a member of the USCF. I've always been curious about what the different titles and classes mean. So I finally took the time this morning to find an explanation of these terms.

A special thanks to Duif for her explanation which is found here.

Grandmaster (GM) title awarded by FIDE for GM norms
International Master (IM) title awarded by FIDE for IM norms
FIDE Master (FM) minimum FIDE rating of 2300 after 24 games
National Senior Master (SM) e.g., USCF Senior Master--USCF 2400+
National Master (Master or NM) e.g., USCF Master--USCF 2200+
National Expert or Candidate Master (E or CM) e.g., USCF Expert--USCF 2000+

National US Amateur Classes
National Class A (USCF 1800- 1999) top amateur class
National Class B (USCF 1600-1799) above average tournament player
National Class C (USCF 1400-1599) average tournament player
National Class D (USCF 1200-1399) a strong social player
National Class E (USCF 1000-1199) social/scholastic players
National Class F (USCF 800-999) novice/scholastic players
National Class G (USCF 600-799) beginner II/scholastic players
National Class H (USCF 400-599) beginner I/scholastic players
National Class I (USCF 200-399) early beginner/scholastic players
National Class J (USCF 100-199) minimum rating

Mobius Chess

Somehow I missed this Neatorama post back in March.

White to move and mate in two. Here's the solution (seriously!)

'CBS Cancels Plans for Series on Chess Playing Beaver'

Here's the link ... hil-lair-ee-us!

The Anti-Resigner Goes Down with a Fight

A few weeks ago, The Boylston Chess Club blog brought to our attention an Ohio prison inmate who "murdured his cellmate because he kept surrendering during chess games."

Well, as of today at 11:53am local time, Christopher Newton, 37, was pronounced dead after being excuted by lethal injection. But true to his philosophy, he did not resign. The execution team had a hard time finding a vein that would work because Mr. Newton weighed over 300 pounds. Nearly two hours after his scheduled excution, Mr. Newton was finally "mated."

News links here, here, here & here.

Topalov Held Hostage

Elbonian terrorists held Veselin Topalov hostage for several hours. They demanded money from the grandmaster after blind-folding him. The terrorists were unsuccessful in their questioning as Topalov only recited chess moves. They later released the chess master and he continued play in the tournament the next day. Local police forces are searching for the terrorists.

Baseball and Chess

Last fall during the MLB playoffs, it seemed that every report filed on a game had some reference to chess in it.

I ran across a Mariners site today that delves into pattern recognition in baseball stats and chess.

This post says,

Human masters — chess, or baseball — are better than AI programs because they know which factor in a position matters.In chess, all strong players are aware of the dozen or so important factors that are in play in a given position. The player who wins, is the player who knows which is the most important factor.

It is not knowledge that makes the difference between two experts. It is judgment.

The post continues,

It is not data-gathering that separates the boys from the men in 2005. It is the use of good judgment to sift the important data from the noise!
Chessmasters know that this good judgment is rooted in pattern recognition — knowing about similar cases in the past, and knowing in which ways the present case differs from those similar cases.

This latest post refers back to the post mentioned above.

Unfortunately, in chess you have to take this massive amount of data and experience (pattern recognition) and jam it into your head somehow (The Circles). You can't just retrieve the data (via computer database) during a game. In this regard, chess and baseball are not alike. But once you do mange to upload the data into your head, you can then begin focusing on which positions matter most (which I think is the point of the author over at the Mariners blog).

Chess Around the Net

In this article, the author discusses the beginning of on-line addictions ... namely chess and web surfing. With regard to playing chess he says,

If I was on a roll then I couldn’t stop. And if I was losing, I’d have to keep playing until I started winning again. I’d have intermittent breaks for “meet­ings” with people who thought they were my co-workers. I’d keep playing until midnight, 1am, 2am, all night sometimes, and stumble home just to change clothes. It was ugly and I was scared.

Scared because the truth finally hit me. It was never going away. It’s not as if this internet chess club was a temporary thing. This was here for ever and it was only going to get worse.

Finally, a friend of mine helped wean me off the online chess server. He showed me a piece of software called Mosaic, which could download and format images and text off the internet. Also audio, but only if you wanted to wait two hours for a download. The worldwide web was just starting and there were maybe a few hundred websites at the time.

He continues,

During this period, I would take the occasional bathroom break from my
chess games and I’d see another guy wandering the halls around midnight or so. He told me he was working on something that could read text and catalogue it and he was testing it out by retrieving pages from the few websites there were. He was hoping for government funding so he could work on his little hobby during the day.

“Yeah, right,” I thought to myself as I locked my office door behind me for another session of one-minute chess. “Good luck with that.”

He went back to his computer, which was named lycos.cs.cmu.edu and eventually became the computer for the search engine he created, Lycos. It helped his net worth top 9 figures by 1997.

He eventually relates his story to being "one click away from internet fortune."

This is quite a cool chess picture ... it's literally cool.

A landscaping idea for my backyard.

Clash of the Knights

I hadn't played chess for almost two weeks, so after working on CT-ART last night I logged on to FICS to play a few rapid 15 1 games.

I won my first game and then decided to play another one. My second game was against none other than our Troubled Knight ... Blunder Prone.

He soundly clobbered me.

Here's where my house of cards came tumbling down.

Thanks BP for the comment on the other blog. I know I greatly lack in openings, but maybe one day I can focus on them. Your advice will help in the mean time.

Another thing I learned is that I need to play more. I've been so focused on working on tactics that I havn't been giving myself time to play and practice on the board. It shouldn't be too hard to fix that though.

"Chess Goes to School" Article

ChessNinja.com's Daily Dirt Chess blog featured an article about chess over at Slate.

There were a couple of parts that I found interesting. The first one has to do with tactics and The Circles.

The more patterns a player internalizes, the more intricate a system of
combinations that player can access. At lower levels, that allows a stronger player to run through more possibilities than a weaker one would; at the top, there's a quantitative to qualitative shift, with grandmasters zeroing in on the best possibilities, rather than reviewing more possibilities faster than an expert would. But if you ask a top player to remember random positions of pieces on a chessboard, rather than situations that might actually arise in master-level play, his powers of recall don't correlate nearly as well with his skill. In other words, a studiously honed memory for chess combinations doesn't necessarily transfer to better retention of other material.

The other quote describes chess as such:

Ruthless standards and dizzying freedom, all in one package: That is a rarity. And it is a recipe for what experts call "effortful study," or the process of indefatigably tackling ever harder challenges, which many believe is the secret to successfully pursuing excellence in anything.

The author goes on to point out that chess can be an "all-consuming distraction" and cites an example of a boy named Shawn on the Murrow team who is so addicted to chess that he skips school to play blitz games in the park! Horror of horrors! As if chess were the only cause of a boy skipping class.

Playing chess is like any other sport or hobby or carrer in life. You can take it to an extreme and let it consume you or you can be the master of your domain and control your obsessions. I also think that chess can not only provide a person enjoyment and fulfillment, but it can teach one a lot about choices and life and problem-solving.

Overall, the Slate article was a good read.

Web(non)sense

For the last few years I've been going to chessgames.com to solve the daily chess puzzle ... I usually do this from my desk at work. Well today that fine tradition has ended ... either Websense or the group in my company that runs Websense has added chessgames.com to the filter.

What is the world coming to?

Revolution

In light of a few other chloggers waxing political, I thought I'd post this link. When I read the following headline "I Am Plotting a New Russian Revolution", the first person I thought of was Kasparov. But after reading the article, it wasn't about Kasparov - but Kasparov and Berezovsky may be working together.

Chess Around the Net

Intense Focus

When I'm in a chess game, I can usually block out everything else that is going on. My wife or kids might call me, but most of the time I don't hear them. My wife can carry on a whole conversation while I'm playing chess and then ask me a question ... the answer she will get is the deer-in-the-headlights-look on my face. But when I'm done with a game, my attention to family matters and otherwise returns.

Apparently this blogger forgot to return to reality after playing a blindfold game.

Years ago I played a relatively good blindfold game on the computer, then
got in my car to go somewhere and immediately ran a red light. Mentally I
was still busy analyzing the game instead of watching the road…

Most Expensive Chess Set

I'm sure many have seen this, but I thought I'd include it ... here's an article on a chess set worth $9.8 million.

The Blog Bet

I enjoyed the events of The Bet ... see here and here. Because of that bet, I found some new, interesting blogs! Thanks DG and Mark!

Pictures

I wonder if this man's heart is racing.

Here's a totally scripted chess-shot. Wrong set up. And there's NO WAY the bishop arrived at that position. Plus, it's NOT checkmate.

This shot could be the icon for the Knights Errant ... if these knights aren't errant, then I don't know what is.

Paper Chess

We've seen an edible chess set, now here is a (rather cool-looking) paper chess set. You can click here to read more about it.

Missed Tactic in 15 1 Game

I won this game, but I knew there was a tatic I missed. Here's the position: Black to move and win.


It was pretty obvious once I went back to analyze the game.

Chess: A Workout for the Heart?

Does it happen to you? Do you ever find yourself in the middle of a game and notice that your heart is racing and your palms are sweaty? It happens to me every now and then ... especially in games that are really important to me.

I've noticed that the last couple of games I've played, that when I spot a tactic, my heart rate jumps up considerably. I find myself having to control my breathing. Only recently have I began to concentrate on my breathing during chess games ... whenever I begin to feel nervous or feel my heart rate increase, I take several controlled deep breaths until my heart rate is back to normal. Although I appreciate the workout my heart is getting, I find that unless I get it under control, I am more prone to blunder. Therefore, I take my time to calm down and cooly assess the situation before moving.

There have been plenty of times where I did not try to calm my nerves down (or couldn't because it was a blitz game) and I blundered horribly.

Interestingly enough, I found an article about a research that was performed on chess players with regard to heart rate. The summary simply states, "Hopelessness is associated with decreased heart rate variability during championship chess games." You can read the entire article here.

Tactic Spotted

I don't know if it was the best move, but it made all the difference in the game.

What I was impressed with was the potential mate in 7 (the key word being "potential" because it was not forced.) The fact that I saw it was what suprised me a little. Normally I would not have considered the move, but I kept going down the line to see where it would lead. My opponent saw the danger of being greedy and did not take the bait.

Anyway, here's the position:


He had just moved f5 threatening to capture my queen when I moved Ng6. If 21. ... fxe4, then 22. Nxe7+ Kh7 23. Rxf8 Qc7 24. Bxe4+ g6 25. Bxg6+ Kg7 26. Rf7+ Kh8 27. Rh7#

But my opponent failed to move his rook at f8 and I captured it with my knight and I went on to win.

"Young chess prodigy runs away, lives with stripper"

Here's an amazing story of 15-year-old international master Emilio Cordova from Peru who after being crowned South American chess champion travelled to Brazil and "became caught up in Sao Paulo's pulsating and sleazy nightlife."

To fund his Brazilian sojourn, he told his family he had fallen ill and needed
them to wire out money to pay for medical expenses. He even sold his laptop computer, which contained all his chess notes and training programs.

Wow! The story says he "returned home to a hero's welcome."

I ran accross the article from a news search. I also found chessgames.com has his games and some info about him in their database. A few kibitzers posted a few links to the same story.

Rough Weekend

I lost my latest game in the OCL. My excuse this time was that I was tired and un-focused. My dear wife was very ill over the weekend and so while she was resting, I was taking care of everything else around the house. Thankfully she is feeling better today, but still not 100%. Anyway, my mind wasn't exactly focused on chess by the time the match started.

I really didn't want to play a 60 15 game late at night. I ended up blundering twice and then resigned.

I've been thinking that I just might be better off finding long games on my own rather than finding them via the OCL. It is much easier to focus on a game when I want to play (as opposed to having to play). A boss of mine once said of meetings, "Someone is not going to like what time the meetings start and it's not going to be me." Scheduling these games with people in Russia or Austrilia or even in the US is difficult. I usually have small windows of time to play a long chess game.

As for the tactics ... I'll get back on track tonight. It's been 4 days since I worked on CT-ART. I can't afford to lay off on CT-ART for very many days.

Lastly ... thanks for the shout-out Takchess! God bless you too! Thanks for the encouragement!