Thursday, October 27, 2016

When to quit.

You know it's time to quit when: you get the TD certification and then no one at your club can attach you to the affiliate, and then you're planning on playing in your first tournament in months and you end up having to spend hundreds of dollars on car repairs and can't afford to go, and then you go to the club and no one shows up, and then you get on Chess.com and get the following position as White in a 15|10 game with over ten minutes left on the clock ...

...and lose horribly.

I get it, I'm not supposed to play chess anymore. I quit.

It's always dangerous.

One can never be too careful. Peter Doggers tweeted the following yesterday.

So Black played a solid set-up, nothing ambitious about it at all. But White's position doesn't look good, and the king's position looks awful. In fact, Black is winning tactically. Can you find the move?

The main sequence can be found here. I have left out the details, but put in the most essential moves.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

FICS is dead.

At any given moment now there are maybe five real, live, honest human players on FICS. The rest are a collection of open computers, people that intentionally lag up to ten minutes for ONE MOVE, and cyborgs that play five moves of crap and then turn it over to their computer programs until they get a huge plus in the evaluation and then finish the games themselves, usually badly.

It was a good run, but FICS is dead.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Botvinnik's Rifle

One of the "Hansen Effects" on the Central Florida Chess community is a dramatic shift in opening play on the part of amateur players- to which I was not immune.

In particular, both Lars and Jen Hansen encouraged me to set aside the "safety blanket" of "system openings" and to play "the best moves", which the are the main lines of chess theory.  The idea is that the main lines are what they are because the best players try to play good moves and avoid inferior ones- that's part of why they are the best (players AND moves, that is)!

In my case, it meant moving beyond fianchetto structures to other ideas, and since I have several friends who are French Defense players, so I decided to give it a fling.

In the course of learning the French Defense, I came across a very nice idea in a game by GM Alexander Morozevich, involving the use of his g-pawn.  I was not completely surprised by the idea -GM Hansen has a chapter on "The g4 Revolution" in his book How Chess Games are Won and Lost (which I highly recommend- it's like 5 books crammed into one, where in many cases he uses lessons from his own games [some losses- he is objective to a fault] to illustrate his points.  It is a book to be studied, not just read), but this particular application shocked me a little. It reminded me of "Alekhine's Gun" in that it was like the g-pawn was shot out of a "d8 queen/e7 bishop" rifle barrel right at white's king.

But enough text- let me show you what I mean:

Click here to see GM Morozevich fling his g-pawn at GM Michael Adams

As it turns out, this idea is a main line in the French Tarrasch.  Here is a much "cleaner" example from a game between GM David Howell and GM Hikaru Nakamura, annotated by GM Sergey Erenburg in the Chess Mega Database from Chessbase:

Click here to see Nakamura's application of the idea

It was only several months later, studying a very different opening -from the other side of the board, for that matter- that I recognized the same idea had already been played.  It prompted some further research on my part, and what I learned is what Hansen and Kramnik and other great players say all the time:  study the classics.  It turns out that the idea applied by Morozevich and Nakamura had been played by GM Botvinnik way back in 1934. 

As it turns out, the game in question, Botvinnik-Alatortsev, 1934, is in the Chessbase Mega Database 2014, and annotated by "Kasparov".  Unfortunately, I can't tell if it's Garry or Sergey Kasparov, but the notes are excellent.  Consider this a review of the Mega Database, as Kasparov introduces us to the idea that I now refer to as "Botvinnik's Rifle":

Click here for the first shot from Botvinnik's Rifle

Some further investigation showed that Botvinnik's idea (as we have already seen), can occur in a variety of opening ideas, from the French to the Queen's Gambit, and also the Nimzo- Indian.  Almost 20 years later after his initial debut, we see Botvinnik hunting different game in the form of GM Mark Taimanov and his pet idea in the Nimzo-Indian:

Click here to see Botvinnik aim his rifle at Taimanov's Nimzo

The beauty of Botvinnik's Rifle is that is it more than just a tactic.  It is really a strategic theme with tactical implications, and the kind of maneuver that stands the test of time.  My final example from Botvinnik's praxis is a game from the winter of his career, after he had finished his run as World Champion.  In the game he catches a strong player off-guard right in the opening, and then never lets him recover:

Botvinnik's Rifle, "once more unto the breach"

I learned two lessons from this journey.  One is the idea of Botvinnik's Rifle itself, as an idea that can be applied in my own games.  The second lesson?  A familiar one:  Study the classics, as there is treasure in the attic!

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

E62: King's Indian Defense: Fianchetto, Karlsbad, Uhlmann-Szabo System

Learn it. Know it. Live it.

...

The opening moves are

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.Nf3 d6 5.g3 O-O 6.Bg2 Nc6 7.O-O e5

which takes 63 characters to write out. But

 E62: King's Indian Defense: Fianchetto, Karlsbad, Uhlmann-Szabo System

takes 66 characters to write out, and that's not including the five key strokes for the "E62: ". A full 71 key strokes! That's just wacky, and I don't mean the Japanese stand-up comedian.

Here's an online speed chess PROTIP: Playing 8. dxe5 followed up by 9. Bg5 with the idea for White of trading his dark-square bishop for a knight and then playing to make Black's dark-square bishop look stupid works quite well. White's play is easy, and Black usually has to start thinking a bit about how to arrange his remaining minor pieces  so that they don't trip over each other. It shouldn't be that hard, and this must be an old system (look at the names involved), but the Black players I face online (typically 1700-1900 on Chess.com) don't seem to know them, and consequently they burn lots of time. Plus, as often as not the opening of the center takes KID devotees out of their comfort zone. This plan has worked pretty well for me at much slower time controls, too. My favorite game I played this year came out of this opening system in a game in 120.

Disclaimer: Past results do not guarantee future performance.(cont.)

Friday, October 14, 2016

One crappy feature of Chess.com

I started playing internet chess over 20 years ago. At that time, FICS and ICC were the big places for serious players, with places like YAHOO's game site merely places for creating ridiculous ratings because of the ill-thought out features.

These days we have many more options, notably ChessBase's PlayChess server, Chess24.com's site, and Chess.com's site. Recently I have found myself playing mostly at Chess.com for a couple of reasons. First, I'm poor, so I can't afford the premium sites like I used to. (Thank you George W. Bush and Barack Obama for creating the worst economy in almost a century.) Secondly, the other free sites have problems of their own. For some reason I just don't do well, visually, with the interface at Chess24 when playing, and these days FICS is a rather depressingly empty place to play. So the look of the interface and the number of players means, as well as the cost, leave me at Chess.com.

There is one HUGE drawback, however. In the early days of internet chess, the big problem was LAG. Lag was what happened when there was a slowdown between your location, the chess server's location, and your opponent's location. It could me you were making insta-moves and still see three minutes disappear off your clock. (The time control of 2 minutes with a 12 second increment wasn't the early favorite on the internet without reason!) This problem was solved with the creation of time stamp/time seal programs, that took note of when one received a move, and let the server know how much time one actually used making the move, thus removing lag as a cause of losing on time. Lag was still annoying to deal with, but at least one didn't lose on time on move two any more.

Well, the problems that were solved on USENET in the way back, are still problems for the web-based servers. Today I've lost two games on time when I made a move, and then watched helplessly as dozens of seconds ticked by before the server told be to commit anatomically impossible acts upon myself - and oh-by-the-way-you-lost-on-time, sucker.

It's bad enough being in slump without having to deal with this nonsense. I guess it's back to FICS and the other two dozen people that haven't left yet. Yay!

Saturday, October 8, 2016

Low energy. Sad.

Ever since hitting 1900 on Chess.com, I have completely forgotten how to play a decent game of chess. Therefore I have nothing to report, chess-blogging-wise. Hopefully I will remember how to play a decent game of chess again sometime soon. I did finally remember my brother-in-law's best friend's name today, so there may be hope for me yet. Maybe.

Sunday, October 2, 2016

1900

My blitz rating on Chess.com hit 1900 Friday night - and then it cratered. I lost 106 ELO at one point in time, about 20 minutes ago. Then I managed to win a game when an opponent walked into this:
Truly, chess is a cruel game.