I’m playing this beautiful girl from France in correspondence. Life is great.
After watching Chess.com’s excellent Speed Chess Championship, it was painfully obvious that FIDE’s World Blitz Championship is an inferior product in need of updating. (By contrast, their Fischer Random World Chess Championship had excellent production and structure, so we know they can do it.)
Setting aside the inherent sloppiness of playing Very Fast Chess™ over the board with manual clocks, versus SCC’s more precise digital format, the tournament structure itself was unfair in its randomness without a proper finals bracket. Bobby Fischer would surely have thrown a fit if a team of Soviets got to manipulate the round robin results. Additionally, the video coverage itself was terrible. Aside from having too many games to follow at once, with less indication of which one is the most important, the digital board overlays were always out of sync with the game board. An overhead camera, as pinball streaming setups use, would go a long way towards making that irrelevant, if indeed an automated overlay system couldn’t be reasonably implemented. I considered this event so unwatchable that I gave up.
Anyway, ranting aside, I think the juxtaposition of the excellent production value in the Speed Chess Championship against the shoddy production of the FIDE Blitz Championship highlighted that prestige is no longer consolidated in FIDE’s tournaments. Magnus’s move away from the traditional world championship already planted the seed, and I think he’s ahead of the curve here. If anything, Hikaru is having a stronger year, having collected both the Fischer Random World Chess Championship and Speed Chess Championship, which are the new sexy. Magnus will of course retain the crown for old school chess even without the formal title next year, but that only further dilutes that tournament’s prestige.
And yes, I’m thinking it too! :LaughCryEmoji:
I think I’m in love with this girl. The way we play chess is so similar. I just freaking hung my Knight I can’t believe it… down by 3 now… listen, I’m a positional player. This is positional. “Très bien joué à toi !” she says.
Fun puzzle. Can Black reach this position after 9 moves?
I want to say no? I don’t see how black’s e pawn could have ended up on the f file.
I assume the trick is the queen sacrifices on the f file then the pawn marches down to promote.
Ohhhh. That hadn’t even occurred to me.
What a weird game
That’s the famous immortal pawn move game. The white player is one of the inventors behind the Blackmar-Diemer-Gambit.
I’m using this game in my coaching sessions quite regularly. It’s always great fun for the kids.
Someone I used to play occasionally here was a BDG lover. That was annoying the first couple times. I managed match theory for a fair number of moves figuring it out at the board, but in later games IIRC I just opted to go into a Caro-Kann game and avoid all of his memorization of BDG lines, because I wasn’t going to waste time learning them. :) I rarely studied openings as it was.
I never play kings pawn openings for the same reason. Too much theory. My lazy openings are the caro and London.
I just had a couple wild games on Lichess (15 | 10)
Checkmate as black.
Dude rechallenges me with some Scandinavian bs. My man, have I told you about my ancestors?
Black resigns. That’s right, go home, do your homework. See me after class tomorrow.
That’s all the chest thumping I get for one week :D
In sincerity, I am amazed at the spectrum of Chess abilities out there. The skill ceiling on this is beyond the cathedral, and I’m at the very beginning.
Yeah, it is pretty much the ultimate when it comes to a skill ceiling for a game. When I was playing over the board about 14-15 years ago now (geesh that passed by fast), I ended up class C USCF, getting just over 1500. I mostly played at some clubs that a NM ran here in town, and they always played G/30 which was painful at the beginning. I was terrible at managing that time. So the first time between being the first time doing it, and playing at G/30 I got schooled. :) I think my first provisional rating from that was like 500 or something lol. Shot up over that next year to 1500, but also got married and a dog at the same time, and my wife travelled for work doing sports television at the time, plus the next year our first daughter was born. So I wasn’t able to focus on it nearly as much, and on the rare occasion I did go to play, being rusty I was just gifting away rating points, which shouldn’t matter and I know its not important, but I’m sure it still played a part in not being back to uscf chess now for 13 years. I’ve done stuff online, and spent hundreds of hours on various tactics servers over the years. My chess book collection continued to grow over that time as well, thinking one day I would get back to it. I’ve curbed that a bit the past few years, but still like to pick up anything Aagaard puts out.
I really should get back to it after getting diagnosed with ADHD last year, besides helping with the chaos in my head when analyzing, I think it is easier now to just look at it as a game and having fun, and not as some exam to determine whether you are a genius. I definitely have found it easier to play other multiplayer games since then anyways. It would be interesting to see where I would fall after a year of playing again. At the very least I should play on lichess for fun.
So true.
You guys have probably all seen this already, but I just saw it for the first time. Scary.
What’s scary about it?
That an AI could play such a bizarre opening against the best human player in the world and win quite easily. Scary because it makes me think we’ll never see it coming when Skynet takes over. :)
We’ll see it. We will just be like “there is no way that is going to work, stupid ai,” and then boom.