Chess match(es)

[hoytedow]

It should be played with the pieces labeled Captain, First mate, Chaplain, Sonarist, Turret and Bilge rat.

[Boston]

so I've been practicing up and I pretty much suck after so long out of the game.
I'm playing my old computer game 2 or 3 times a night and its humiliating me at any of the higher settings

oh well time to head out on the town
the bar I occasionally bounce at sold and they are opening up a new one in a few months, In the mean time just after the holidays I'm scheduled to remodel a kitchen and bath for the owner. Means I have all the time in the world to get my but kicked
cheers
B

ps
yes
I went from you guys are pathetic to holly chess crap bat man did I really forget how to play this game, pretty fast now didn't I.

[gunship]

Reality catches up fast

Well, I just finger-slipped my second choice move which will drag this out and make it more dangerous for me. ("finger-slip", in a game where "touch-move" is the rule, is the oldest excuse on the books for screwing up!) I sat here and thought about possible outcomes for an hour...then made the move I didn't want to make! Well, here we are now! (If I suffix with an exclamation mark, doesn't it make chess exciting!)



!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just read somewhere that there is now a new punctuation mark, the "sarcmark". I'm thinking of changinging my online names to SarcMark but I refuse to pay $2 or whatever to some guy in Michigan for the priveledge of using a Hebrew letter (Just me, but I'd pay $50 for a Hebrew cursive keyboard before I do that). Afterall, this thing will likely be everywhere once it escapes and who would pay money for something they can have for free? Umm...pardon me, I'm going to the fridge to get a bottle of Evian...Anyway, what an INCREDIBLE idea! <sarcasm>

[troy2000]

Don't let him fool you, folks. He's doing fine....

What he has in mind is swapping out one rook, then using his other one to break up my pawn formation and harass my king. His ultimate goal, if he can't nail me with the rook and pawns, is to get a pawn to the finish line and queened.

Of course, I'd rather he didn't do that. So I have countermeasures in place...

Sounds to me like he's cheating, though. He's actually using the time between moves to think.

See - Chess is not slow!



You have no idea how much time I have devoted to making sure I don't drop this one. I swear I have actually plotted out hundreds of possible combinations. It has got me interested in learning to be a better player (I havn't studied in decades and certainly not with the resources available now). I recently discovered a chess computer that I cannot beat - ever. It is called Shredder. There is another I read that recently beat the number two player in the world. There are sites that have every published GM game for the last 100 years or more programmed so one can follow their moves as fast as he can visualize and click the mouse. Amazing. My goal is to, when I get back to Mexico, have learned a few tricks, gambits, and sneak a win with my GM friend.
Check this out. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/cr...s/28chess.html
First, a loss to the first Indian Grandmaster, விசுவநாதன் ஆனந்த், in April and the former champion, Topalov's, publicist making excuses for this loss to Polgar last week... I should have been there for this but didn't know it was happening. They played where I play on some Wednesdays and Saturdays at the Casa Del Lago, El Bosque del Chapultepec.

This is getting exciting again.



If I can get one more square before he...

He's thinking!.. He's thinking!.. Está Pensando!.. Está Pensando!..


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fXsfAeqimY



(Your king sat there so long I thought he was calcified. ****, now I have another piece to deal with - fresh off the bench.)

Potential turning points, every move.

[hoytedow]

Hair-raising cliff-hanger this is!

Maybe for those bad at math or didn't count the moves of the various scenarios, Hoyt. When down to kings and pawns, the guy with the pawn on a far-isolated file wins. When Troy traded down the second rook, it was decided (as long as he didn't have a passed pawn). Problem for Troy was that he didn't get out a board and play the various outcomes and assumed he could overwhealm my king and c pawn with his c and d pawns. I thought maybe at first, too. But I got out a board and played it out and avoided the trap of moving ke4 which would have stymied me. The thing is, the logical thing to do is keep your king between the racing pawns and the opposing endzone and Troy was gambling that I would jump that way... I think I mentioned that even GMs make mistakes - I was looking at old Fischer matches this morning and found two glaring ones that he made - only he was so good that he could overcome them.
When a player of 1800 or better makes a "mistake" and you capitalize, assume you are about to get your butt handed to you - I saw two different sacrifices where Fischer "gave" the lady away and didn't realize benefit for more than five moves. He was on as much of a different level than all other champions as all other champions are to 1400 scrubs like Troy and I...and still made mistakes. What a great game. (A GM has a rating of 2600. Bobby Fischer had a rating of something like 2800. The way they calculate the ratings, the higher one goes, the harder it is to go further because you are having to beat all of the very best in every tournament to climb. A great player was quoted as saying "when playing against Fischer, one feels that he is playing against chess, itself.")

Good Game, Troy - There were several times I thought you had me.

[hoytedow]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

[hoytedow]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet

[troy2000]

Don't try to bluff a guy who has time to think it over...

I got bored, and figured I could worry Mark into protecting his isolated pawn after trading out rooks, then use my four pawns against his three on the other side. It didn't work. As he says, the rest is simple arithmetic now.

I'm getting my butt kicked in this series, folks....

Well done, Mark. I went ahead and took the pawn anyway just for the halibut, then resigned and put up another pair of games. I'm off work for a week; let's see how I do from home.

[troy2000]

OK, another pair of games started. Interestingly enough, we both started with d4 (Queen's pawn two squares).

I'm almost home.... I stopped at our other house to give some moral support to the dogs. They're the only things keeping the place from walking off one piece at a time. I'm working out of town; the wife is at the house we inherited from her mother (to take care of it while the court battle rages with her sisters); number one son is there with her; and number two son is in boot camp.

So I had a bachelor's dinner tonight: sirloin steak, baked potato, bagged salad with ranch dressing, mint julep.

Dessert was another mint julep, of course. Then I cut down on the calorie intake, by switching to straight bourbon and water over the used mint leaves....

For the steak I covered the bottom of a cast-iron pan with kosher salt, and set it over a gas burner turned to high. When it was smoking hot I tossed in a 1-inch thick, room temperature, top sirloin steak. I let it sizzle three or four minutes, until the juices started coming through the top. Then I flipped it, turned the burner off, and walked away for ten minutes. Perfect medium-rare hunk of meat, and I didn't even bother with any other seasonings.

And of course I did a real oven-baked potato, instead of nuking it or wrapping it in tin foil to steam instead of bake. It came out with a crispy skin, and a just-soft-enough insides. I buried it in melted butter, sour cream, chives, salt and pepper, and a bit of garlic powder.

And did I mention I had a mint julep for dessert?

Put a spoonful of sugar in a Tom Collins glass, along with three or four mint leaves. Mash the leaves around in the sugar with the back of a spoon for a minute or two, then add two fingers of good bourbon. Stir until the sugar is dissolved, then fill the glass with ice and branch water.

That recipe dates back to the days when I was working on Tony Duquette's plays and movie sets, his rental homes, and his ranch in the hills above Malibu. I was renting a place on his ranch that looked out across a valley to the Coastal Range, with a view of the sea and the Channel Islands behind it, and I commented one day at lunch, "you know Tony, when I'm sitting there after work, I feel like I should be sipping on a mint julep while I watch the sun go down."

His sister snapped her fingers and said, "you know, I have a recipe for mint juleps somewhere. Clark gave it to me, back when he was working on that movie...." She went into the kitchen, and started digging around in a drawer. Eventually she came up with a scrap of paper in Clark Gable's handwriting, dating back to his 'Gone With the Wind' days.