hardcore pawnography

adios 2007, you were a screwed up year.

bret michaels of poison didn’t find love, tiffany “new york” pollard didn’t find love, even flavor flav is still looking.

kurt vonnegut, evil knievel, and  brett somers died.

marcel lost to ilan on top chef.

and i started a blog and embarked on an insane quest to become a rated chess master.

but some great things happened as well.  i moved to fruita, co and can ride my mountain bike every damn day on the best trails in the usa.  i met some awesome kick ass people and made some great freinds thanks to my crappy ass blog.

i hope in 2008 to play in a few tournaments, gain a few hundred rating points.  i hope my blog is funnier, more entertaining, and extra hardcore.  that’s my goals.  lets see how that works out for me.

and so, with only a few hours left until the new year, i wish anyone reading this (why would you be reading this? you should be at a party right now, having a good time) a happy healthy kick ass new year.
ok, time to get drunk and end up falling asleep before midnight.

2008 is gonna kick ass

when the student is ready, the master appears….

that is an old buddhist proverb.   i was thinking about the last post, thinking about the times in my life when i could have studied chess and didn’t.  there were many times in my life when i had nothing but time and nothing to fill it with.  sitting here now, i think “damn, i could have used that time to study chess, and if i did, i would be a really strong player now!”

but i don’t think i was ready then, or i would have sat down and learned chess.  sometimes i feel like i wasted my life pursuing other things that don’t matter, but they only don’t matter now.  back then, they did matter, and chess didn’t matter to me at all.    if karpov lived next to me and said “hey, you wanna learn to play chess?” i would have probably said “thanks, but not really.”   now i will talk to anyone who knows the littlest bit in hopes of learning some little thing (i still think about how the pawn affects the files next to it, thanks to a comment on one of my posts).

there was a question in the forum over at chess.com, some 21 year old kid asked if he was “too old.”  i had to laugh, he is so worried that at 21 he is too old.  damn, at 21, if you study and play for 10 years, which seems like an eternity, you could be quite formidable and still only 31, which is young.  these young-uns, they don’t realize the potential for excellence they have.  makes me wonder if in some cases, the student is not ready yet.

i’ve been studying morphy, alekhine, the old guys.   i think they had it easier, even though they didn’t’ have chessbase, fritz,  chessmaster, ct-art, and the entire everyman chess and gambit library on their shelves.    back then, i don’t’ think most people were as serious.  they could make “mistakes” and try “crazy” new things out and get away with things an 1100 rated player would catch and destroy on.  i wonder how a morphy would fare against a blunderprone? i bet there would be more draws than morphy had ever seen.

how awesome would i be right now if i started chess 20 years ago?  i bet lots of players think back to a time when they were not playing, and think “damn, why didn’t i start playing then?”  no sense wasting time about that, there is the future to look forward to.  perhaps, if i study seriously now that i am ready to, when i am 50, i will be a kick ass 1900 rated player.

i have that to look forward to….

i met her when i was in the 5th grade, we played together a bit, but i was more into riding my bmx bike or playing with my legos and army men, so i generally ignored her.  years went by, i had mostly forgotten about her, but she still lingered in the back of my mind, a faint shadow.  random things would remind me of her, but thoughts of her went as quickly as they came.  if i thought of her at all, i thought of her as a distant friend, a minor acquaintance, nothing more.

at 19, on my own, she would come in and out of my life, but only in passing.  i would see her in town, smile, move on.  i’d see her in a book store, spend a few moments with her, have a brief fleeting fantasy about her then i’d leave and not think of her at all for months.  of course i had flights of fancy, imagining a relationship with her, but i figured she preferred more erudite men, more serious men, men who would give her their undivided attention and time. i had too many distracting hobbies, i liked having fun and raucous behavior, she seemed to demand a more mature personality. i lived by the notion of “you are only young once, but you can be immature forever.”

at 25 we had a brief fling, but i never got too serious with her, and it showed. she clearly favored other men, and how could i be jealous? we had an open relationship, more open than not. frankly, we made swingers vacationing at hedonism II (a swinger resort) look like chaste married couples. i wasn’t faithful to her at all, how and why would she be mine?

but then, one day, when i was 38, it happened. i don’t really remember when or how, but there i was, minding my own damn business, and she walked into the room.  for the first time in my life, i got a look, a real, honest to god good look at her. i think i saw her for who she truly is for the first time in my whole life, and she had me, then and there. perhaps it was all those years of her briefly in my life, little by little, like some kind of poisoning, but i fell completely and i fell hard. it was love, lust, complete concupiscence, passion, whatever. she walked into the room, and i was hers.

she is getting me back for all those years i ignored her, she is making me pay for those years of neglect, those years we could have been together, but i chose other things over her. she breaks my heart from time to time, she walks out on me, she hurts me, but i will never leave her. i know that, no matter what, no matter how rocky our relationship gets, no matter how many lover’s quarrels we have, and we have our share, we will be together until i die. i am hers completely, she is on my mind and in my heart all day long.

perhaps she is some lamia, succubus, here for my soul, a siren singing me into the rocks. i’m ok with that, frankly. the intense joy she brings allows me to temporarily forget the excruciating pain she occasionally causes me. sure, we have a fucked up relationship, but really, show me a couple who doesn’t have their ups and downs. the important thing is, i love her, and she at least loves me enough to string me along. what little i get from her gives me a glimpse at the potential she has to offer, and dammit, i am in thrall of the joy she promises.

maybe someday i will learn her secrets, see her true beauty, see her for as she truly is. until then, i will keep pursuing her, a madman in love.

damn i’m pathetic.

i’ve been trying to study and play chess, and i’ve been failing at it.  chess seems to be this intangible wraith that i can’t get a grasp on.  chess is a roadrunner and i’m this coyote who can’t get a grip on it, but instead gets hit by the mack truck of real life distractions.  now that the christmas rush is over, i should have more time, but just like amy winehouse said to rehab, no no no. still working way more than i want to be, and that’s gotta change. it’s gonna change, come january.

i got a chance to play a bit on ICC last night, lost all the games. but the first game, while it was a 5 minute blitz, i sat and thought, and i was up two knights and a rook. i had the dude, but he could make any stupid move he wanted to, and did, cause i ran out of time. i wonder if he considers that a victory? it’s not like he won, i just lost on time. if i had 2 more minutes, he would have been destroyed.

the other game, i saw the move that would result in mate. i made it. he move his knight, i saced my knight with check like i planned, he took it, and then, instead of mating him with my queen right there on h7, i for some reason decided my queen was in jeopardy, so i saced my other knight and played on and lost. that was weird. mate was there, we both saw it, but then, my brain misfired, i was distracted by shiny objects, and i became blind to it.

i desperately want to go to the liberty bell open during martian luther king’s very own personal weekend, but while time is on mic jagger’s side, it aint on mine, and niether is the money, so i can’t make it there to see polly and atomic patzer and anyone else who will be there having a kick ass time.

perhaps february i will play my first tournament of the new year. dammit, i wanna play in a tournament. for now though, i just have to make it through the rest of december, working and trying to squeeze in study and chess games against other humans. i can’t wait until january.

i hope everyone has a great happy merry chrismakwanzaka, a happy new year, a great time celebrating whatever holiday you’ll be celebrating.

i’ll be back on the 26th or so.

i leave you with a final holiday message to you all.

i was thinking about learning, and i’ve probably mentioned it, or i know someone has, nothing new, but i feel like typing it out here and now, and it’s my stupid ass blog, so i’m gonna.

chess is similar to a language. kids learn chess and language quite easily, adults do not, due to preconceived notions and other baggage. adults have experience, but sometimes that experience works against us. kids initially learn a language by listening and copying, they don’t’ care about noun verb agreement or subtle things like that, they just pick it up. i wonder about the merits of learning chess the same way. what if i don’t’ worry about how moving my pawn weakens the square next to it, what if i look at grandmaster games, see that they move their pawn to c5, so i will move my pawn to c5 in a similar situation. i wonder how far you can get with that? just a thought, no more.

i haven’t been playing as much chess as i would like, but i have been winning. i took advice and played slower games (15 minutes) and i also got the silman book reassess your chess workbook which is kinda what i’ve been looking for.

the last game i won, i had a plan, i played decisive, violent chess, i knew where i wanted to go and what i wanted to do, and the opponent just kind of went along with it. i don’t know why. i don’t know why it was so damn easy. he was internet rated 1566.  he tried to play the benoni on me.  ha!  if you care, here is the game, i’m white.

1. d4 c5 2. d5 d6 3. c4 g6 4. e4 Bg7 5. f4 Qc7
6. Nf3 Bg4 7. Be2 Nf6 8. h3 Bxf3 9. Bxf3 O-O 10. h4 h5
11. f5 Nbd7 12. g4 hxg4 13. Bxg4 Nxg4 14. Qxg4 Nf6 15. Qg2 Kh7
16. h5 Nxh5 17. Nd2 Qa5 18. Kf1 Bh6 19. Nf3 Bxc1 20. Rxc1 Qxa2
21. Ng5+ Kg7 22. Rxh5 gxh5 23. Ne6+
1-0
my new thing for now is pushing the f pawn if the guy is playing too cautious.  i want to smash his kingside like the hulk.  on move 16, he takes my pawn with his knight, but poor sucker, doesn’t realize he just pinned his knight, now that piece is useless.   i think i actually played well that game.

sometimes i actually think in a few years i will make it to 2000. of course, sometimes i actually think chicks dig me, so there is that.

oh, how cool is Kevin? WAY SUPER COOL, that’s how cool. i got an early christmas present from him, what a kick ass surprise. i shall put it to good use, thanks man.

i can’t wait until the holidays are over, i can work less and study and play chess more.  i’m looking at going to the big ass tournament in philly during MLK weekend, not sure if i can make it.  by end of february, i should have played in at least one tournament.  time and money are the factors.

chess kicks ass, and people who play chess kick ass, and people who blog about it and comment on my blog are the ass kickingest ass kickers ever.

yesterday was my kid’s 18th birthday, i took her snowboarding.  it was pretty freakin awesome.  the weather was great, the snow was good, and we had the whole mountain mostly to ourselves.  no lift lines, no one in the way, we weren’t in anyone else’s way, we just rode and had a great time.   it was an awesome day, except i didn’t play any chess at all.

tonight i have friends coming over for dinner,  i have to prepare.  i have to clean the house, get the food, cook the food.

but before all that, i am gonna study some chess and maybe get a game or two in on icc.

i will be looking at the games of morphy and capablanca, comparing them, what they did in similar positions, just like i did with alekhine and karpov.   i will also take a position, and see how many pawn structures i can make, isolated, symmetrical, backwards, passed, whatever, and evaluate each resulting position, if better for white or black.

i won’t do this all today, this will be my plan for the next week or so, each day.  go over games, compare, look at pawn structures.  i want to learn pawn structures, like i know my name, so when i see one, i understand what is going on.

i’ve been hitting the chess tactics server, raised my ratio up to a whopping 72.6 %correct.  in a few hundred more, i should be all the way up to 73% correct.

and that is the plan, so far.  we’ll see how far i get….

holy freakin crap, i feel like i just discovered that the mold from rotten oranges can be used to treat vd.

i was on chessgames.com, looking at games, trying to compare alekhine and karpov in similar positions. i was lamenting that there isn’t a program (or, at least, i don’t know of a program, there probably is, someone please tell me about it) where i can take a position and say “search games” and it will give me a list of games with that position in it. this is what i want, is there such a thing? does chessbase or fritz do this?

anyway, i was going through grandmaster games, and trying to compare my games on ICC, and i decided to use the ECO function on chessgames.com. so, i typed in the player, and the eco code, and BAM, i got a list of games alekhine played. then i switched to karpov and got a list of his games.

AND THEN THE CLOUDS PARTED, AND THE BOOMING VOICE OF GOD TOLD ME TO BUILD AN ARK. oh, wait, that wasn’t me. however….what the booming voice did tell me was “hey, dumbass, your ICC games have an ECO code, why don’t you look up games by code that you played?”

i saw i played a game with the ECO code A40 (the Queen’s pawn: Charlick (Englund) gambit, of course), and looked on chessgames, and, sure as parents fighting on christmas and easter and your birthday and mentally scarring you against all holidays for the rest of your life, i got a list of games alekhine and karpov played with that very exact same opening. the moves were identical. i then saw how alekhine played it, and how karpov played it, and noticed how on move 3 i played a move that was nowhere close to what they did.

but this means that now i can look up what moves the real chess players made, and next time, i can do the same. i can play exactly like karpov, or alekhine, at least for maybe the first 4 moves. i may be manhandled like the new meat in a maximum security prison and eventually lose the game, but for those first 4 or 5 moves, i will be playing like a fucking grandmaster!

and it took me almost a fucking year, almost 365 damn days, to figure this out. but now i know it, so i’m all excited now.

and in closing i’d just like to say….

if honey bees make honey, what kind of bees make milk? BOO BEES!!!!!!

ok, so i have my improvement plan, i will concentrate on four areas simultaneously and i should see improvement.

1: pawn structure - know them, know the ideas, know the goals

2: tactics - straight up tactics

3: practicality - play everyone, ICC, coffeehouse, bum on the street, merchant marine vessel, wherever

4: databasing - study the grandmaster games.

and i’m doing all that. on the chess tactics server, i’m up to 72.6 % correct. i understand rudimentary pawn stuff, like isolated pawns, passed pawns, hanging pawns, etc. i am studying games all the time, seeing how they move. fuckin alekhine makes the game look so easy. move a pawn here, move a pawn there, take, take, move a pawn, and i win. then comes the practicality of it all.

the practicality is like the hard parachute landing into cactus. you know how to land, you watch others land, you see how they do it and think “ok, i got it” and then you land hard in a field of cactus, naked, even though you thought you did everything “right,” you landed alive, but all fucked up.

frankly, i’m getting tired of sucking. what hurts the most is, i am actually trying, i am seriously studying, seeing how things work, putting effort into it. if i was all “whatever, i don’t’ care” about it all then i can accept me sucking. but i am really fucking trying, and when i play, it’s like i’ve never seen a fucking chess game in my life. seriously, this shit is getting old.

so i can choose one of two paths.

first, i can say fuck it, i’m gonna ride my bike, snowboard, get a new hobby, and enjoy life, and just take the huge chess investment of time and money as a big loss.

or i can try to beat this thing. i can knuckle down, put myself in overdrive, study study study, really understand the essence of chess, and fight this thing until i beat it into submission, put a huge armbar chokehold on chess, and make chess tap out.

i will give myself this next year. one year of no shit intense studying, and by the end of the year, if i don’t see some tangible improvement, then god is telling me to do something else with my life, and i will. i’ve already compromised one goal, i wanted to be a lot higher rated by now, it’s almost been one year of me playing chess. ok, maybe it will take longer than i expected, but if i don’t’ get it in the next year, i just ain’t gonna, and i don’t’ feel like wasting my time and feeling like shit all the damn time cause i’m losing to everything that moves.

*update* so after this ranting bit, i played some more games on ICC and lost, but then i won a few, and the ones i lost i felt like i knew what i was doing, i didn’t’ feel all impotent to affect my destiny.  i normally wouldn’t have updated, but i was reading pawn shaman’s blog, and there was this stupid “how addicted to blogging” quiz, and i hate quizzes, they are dumb, so i took it, and while i’m not that addicted to blogging, it mentioned updating, and i don’t usually, so i figured i would.

there, that was 2 minutes of your life you will never get back.

i’m tired.  drove out to denver yesterday, in the crappy snowy weather, to meet my daughter, who drove in from st louis.  she is staying with us over the christmas break, for a bout a month.  this morning, we woke up and drove back home, and here i am, unwashed, tired.

i fear my chess studies will  be even more interrupted, since the kid is visiting for a month.

i’m going over alekhine’s games, having a blast doing it, what fun games they are.    in all this time, i’ve managed to read This crazy world of chess, the reletively new book by GM Larry Evans.  i read the signed copy i got from him at reno a few months ago.

what a fun book!  there are 101 chapters, each about 2 pages long, with the longest chapter being, i think, chapter 28, at 16 pages.   the book is a bunch of essays, anecdotes, stories, memories.  a few games are in there, but only at the end of the chapters about something that had to do with the games played, for example, there is a chapter on ray charles’ interest in chess, and at the end is the game played between ray charles and larry evans.

the book is great for chess players and non-players alike.  it should almost be required reading for “serious” chess players, as it gives a good “modern history and mythology” about the chess world, and we should know where we’ve been.  it’s great for people who know nothing about chess, as it is just intersting how much craziness and weird crap surrounds the game.  scandals, the”mystery” of alekhine’s death, stuff about bobby fischer you probably don’t know, unless you are edwin “dutch defense” meyer, who knows all about fischer.

there will never be a “this crazy world of monopoly” or even “this crazy world of scrabble,” although the “professional” scrabble world has it’s share of weirdness.

a super interesting “insider’s” look into the chess world, all in bite sized pieces that you don’t even have to read in order.

i would recommend it to anyone.

it was a clear, cold morning back in 1995, the sun was barely coming over the horizion when the squad kicked in the door and raided the house of nathan mendelbaum, suspected chess terrorist and scourge of the 8th grade chess club.  boy were his parents upset with him.

during the raid, they found various propaganda and literature, which the CIA eventually released under the freedom of information act.  much of it was forgotton and lost, but one item is still out there, which i saw on ebay last night.  it was the biggest thing to come out of that historic raid, it was THE CHESS TERRORIST’S HANDBOOK,  by IGM LEONID SHAMKOVICH.  

in addition to the standard rhetoric found in other terrorist handbooks, the chess terrorist handbook delves into chemical and germ warfare, explaining how to successfully poison pawns, which to me is just plain evil.  when you poison a pawn, you don’t know or care who will pick it up, there isn’t a specific target, the object is sheer terror.  not surprisingly, the handbook also gives explicit instructions on the extensive use of c4, by clergy no less!  we are talking about c4, a military grade explosive.  there is even a chapter on suicide attacks, which they spin as “sacrifices,”  implying religious overtones and hardship for the better, to take out barricades and destroy da fences of others.  why you would want to destroy someone’s fence is beyond me, but they are crazy terrorists, not sane rational people, so what are you gonna do?*

what bothers me is that it is now on ebay, where anyone can buy it.   it’s not like the anarchist cookbook, which has been around forever and is filled with crap that won’t work.  we wonder about all the terrorism threats today, and now there is this book out there for anyone to buy.  with all the disaffected youth running around, all i can imagine is they get a copy of it and before you know it, chess terrorism will happen in schools.  groups of disaffected youth, like young nathan mendelbaum, with nothing to lose, will be terrorizing chess clubs across the country.

i understand freedom of press and historic documents and such, but allowing such a manual out in the open for public consumption just seems irresponsible to me.  they let this crap out and then people wonder why suddenly thier bishops are murdered.  i don’t believe in censorship at all, but things like this make me wonder where to draw the line.

* i have no idea what the book talks about, i’ve never read it, i just saw the title and made all this crap up.  there is no nathan mendelbaum that i know of.

drunknknight made a good point in the comments a few posts back, about karpov being super ahead of me and me not getting anything cause i just don’t realize what’s happening. which is true, but what he didn’t know is, i have someone who is helping me learn from karpov’s games.

for example, i went through a bunch of karpov’s games, learned that he rarely was the first person to take a piece, he let the other guy start the piece trading. there was one game where he took first, so it was interesting to me, and i learned what he was doing.

karpov - ivan morovic-fernandez, 1994

after 10 moves, they reached this position:

nothing special, pretty symmetrical, everything equal. what would you do next? rooks go on open files, so of course, karpov’s next move was Re1, no surprise. but what happens? on move 12, he puts his knight on e5, outpost. now black can’t have an outpost cause of the rook, so one small bit of superiority there, not so symmetrical now, is it?

at the huge grandmaster level, it’s a big deal. at my shitty chessplayer level, it may or may not be a big deal, but in 5 moves, i can parlay that little bit of edge into something greater (assuming i don’t fuck up and snatch defeat from teh jaws of victory, which is my specialty).

so for this week, i will look at alekhine’s games, which are a bit more tactical, and compare them to karpov’s games, more positional. i will see what they each did in similar situations, i will look at their pawn structure, when they trade, when they don’t, how and what they trade with.

so help me god, i will learn this damn game.

it’s my birthday today. while my wife did not get me reassembler’s the chess immersion unit, she did buy me this cool small table, unfinished, so i can paint it any damn color i want (matte black, fire engine red, and purple) and use it to study my chess on. it is my chess table. pretty sweet. gotta click on the pic for the whole thing, i don’t know how to post pics…

first off, i am tired of the holidays. and that’s probably only cause i now work in retail, and i seem to be working lots of hours for a “part time” job. and i’m working all those hours cause it’s the holidays, which completes the vicious circle of hell i’m currently in.

i dig my job, but i find myself with no time to do what i want, namely study the damn chess game. there is also the fact that i am easily distracted and fascinated by shiny things, so when i sit down to study chess, my attention gets pulled away. i need one of those rooms that reassembler talked about HERE.

i had planned on sitting in my room all day, going over chess games and learning and such, but it seems i am at work, going to or coming home from work, or taking care of other things. as soon as the holidays are over, i will be working less, and things should be ok.

a few posts ago, soapstone made a comment about chess programs. i have fritz (thanks wang) and chessbase light, but i don’t know how to use them to their full potential. i’m like an old guy with a mazzerati who only drives it, 35 miles an hour, from his home to the market 2 miles away and back. i don’t know how to use them.

i want to “take a position from a game” and “put it in fritz” and then fritz tell me what is the best move. i also want to take one of my games, and when, on move 3, the guy goes e6 instead of Nc6 like he is “supposed to do” i want the program to tell me what line he is playing and show me a list of games with that move in it. i don’t’ know how to do this.

not that it matters right now, i don’t seem to have the time to do this if i did know how, but i want to know how and i want to sit down and study uninterrupted. i don’t’ want to have to open the door for my cat to go out, then come back in, then answer the door, then have to do other crap. i want to sit down, look at chess, and have the chess knowledge imprint itself, tattoo itself in my brain.

so right now, instead of writing about it, i’m going to study some chess.

as soon as i finish commenting on other blogs. and as soon as i get back from the gym. and finish looking at porn. and get ready for work.

*EDITOR’s NOTE: i got an email saying there was a request to change my password. i didn’t request it. some motherfucker is trying to fuck with my shit. that’s not cool at all.

hardcore chess porn.

ostentatious displays of wealth do nothing but incur the wrath and enmity of others.

i am still going over karpovs games, the guy was good. i almost think i can see how he controls the pawns, how they affect the squares around them, it’s like seeing at night, out of the corner of your eye, when you can almost barely make something out then you lose it.

i want to be able to look at the board and see SEE what is truly going on. I want to be able to see the lines of influence the pieces have, see how moving the pawn a square will change everything.

look at this position. it’s pretty simple, i took it from some game somewhere (not one of mine)where white played f4, like he thought he should have. but do you know why white should not play f4, attacking the queen?

because exf4, Rxf4, Qx b5, that’s why! a simple pawn move can change the whole landscape.

i think i’m seeing that now, i hope and pray i will be able to see it all clearly, at least some day before i turn 50.

i did it, i joined a damn gym.   i’ve worked out for about 15 years, but i finally broke down and joined an actual gym.   i have lots of weights at home, but when i am home, it’s so easy to get distracted.  there is chess to look at, porn to look at, tv to watch, a grilled cheese sandwich to make and eat.   i need the routine, the process, of going to the gym, working out, then coming home to look at chess, look at porn, and eat grilled cheese sandwiches while i watch tv.

but this is a chess blog, what does this have to do with chess?  lots.   i think there is a direct connection to mental health and physical activity.

thing is, i haven’t worked out in about 4 months, since i moved from arizona.  over the last four months, i’ve slowly lost muscle, gained a few pounds of flab, and my chess game seems to have gone down.  i’m mentally slower and more tired.  other than those days where i’ve ridden my bicycle, i haven’t exercised at all, and it shows in my physical makeup as well as my mental makeup.
when i work out, i get the endorphins going, my blood moves around,  i’m generally happier.  when i am happy, i think better and i’m in a better mood, and the whole thing snowballs.  i work out, i feel better, i wanna do more, i want to study chess, i think clearer, so i pay more attention, i get all testosterone-y so i want to attack more and destroy on the chessboard, etc etc.

so tomorrow i start working out again.   and hopefully my mind will snap back into it as well as my well defined pectoral muscles.

for the mental chess part, for the next week or so, i will study the games of  karpov.  i will see how he deals with pawn structure and trades, how he wins his games afterward, by mate, by the other guy resinging, is it a draw.  i want to learn his general goals during his games.

i will also be looking over my system again.  a lot comes down to pawn structure, pawns, those little guys, are significant.  and of course, i will be looking at tactics, most likely in a book and on chess tactics server, which i haven’t done in a while.

but first, i have to actually get out of bed and go to the gym…..