Granny. Eggs. Who’s won this tournament, anyway? And I’m shockingly out of practice. 
Yeah but you cheated. You had Maleldil’s help, I know it!
That doesn’t count as cheating for an oyarsa, but you know we’re not meant to witness in the Game Room.
IMO maserschmidt made a rod for his own back by taking on c4 too early. In the Queen’s Gambit it generally pays to wait until White’s light bishop has moved, so that it will have to move again, and in the meantime there were other moves that needed to be made sooner or later, such as …a6. Changing the move order would have given Black an extra turn to get himself sorted out. But given that it took me 67 moves and several pounds of sweat to beat maser, I’m not saying I’m necessarily fit to correct his exercises for him. 
It’s been fun, and I look forward to watching the last few results come in.
Anyone hear from/know fubbleskag? He timed out in our game, and I hope everything is OK with him.
If he’s around, is there a way to set up a game starting where we left off rather than starting from the beginning again? We were playing on gameknot.
Easiest would be a gentleman’s agreement to play the same moves - and you can enter conditional moves to make the process easier, since a conditional chain can be many moves long.
But as to where he is, I can’t help you there.
oredigger and i are having a barn burner.
and if fubs doesn’t show up, i’ll track him down.
Aren’t you just, though. You look like you’re winning this one, but we know what Yogi Berra said 
that even he could fuck up a wet dream? 
ok, serious question for the good players (this would be the subset that includes everyone but me).
how do you maintain any type of consistency when only a move or two is made every couple of days? seriously, i have trouble remembering what i was trying to accomplish after a couple of minutes (no smart aleck comments, please) much less a day or so.
in a typical head to head match how much time do the players typically have? and can you just wear 'em down by taking max time so that they go to sleep or need a potty break or something.
or maybe they just get bored and go bowling.
- Consistency - I generally have an aim in mind and am working towards it, so the gap of a day or two is no particular problem. It’s dropped out of view on chess.com, but in my friendly for-honour’s-sake game against Hamlet I had a tactical idea that lasted about eight moves, or a good two weeks or more playing time, and I kept focussed because I knew what I was trying to achieve. That said, Hamlet’s defensive effort was superb and I kept having to refine the plan as I went along, because the decisive mating attack just didn’t materialise and I had to settle instead for a decisive ending with a pair of pawns charging arm in arm for the eighth rank oblivious to the fact I was still down by Rook for Bishop.
Similarly in my Round Four barney with Maserschmidt I wound up in a ferociously difficult Knight and Pawn ending where I was in no real danger of losing as long as I didn’t hand it to him on a plate, but had plenty of chances to not win. That was hard work because Knight endings are just plain difficult and I had to keep analysing and re-analysing day after day.
- When I played club chess there was a time limit of, IIRC, 36 moves in the first hour and a quarter and then half an hour more to finish the whole thing. You know about chess clocks, or if you don’t you can JFGI, but time limits like this were introduced into chess in the 19th century to put paid to the “bore them to death” stratagem, or as they call it in German, siztfleisch. Potty breaks are allowed anyway, but there isn’t a max time per move - you have an allowance that you need to ration out as you see fit. It’s different with the kind of games we’re playing on gameknot or chess.com where you have a fresh allowance of two or three days every time you move, and where I have had someone carry on when more than a queen down in the apparent hope I’d catch measles or fall down a well. :rolleyes:
You learn patterns and those help guide you. There are a dozen or so patterns that I have memorized that will lead to queening a pawn, for instance. And I know that (usually) if I queen, I’ll win somehow. So every time I sit down at the board, I see the same pattern and know what my goal is.
There’s also something to be said about memory. You know how it’d be hard to memorize a 24-word list, but easy to remember it if it’s a sentence like this one? Well the chess board is the same way. I can easily play a game in my head because to me, it looks like a sentence. Everything flows together. In other words, I have a highly developed chessic sense. Hell, I still have games memorized move-for-move for weeks afterward.
Usually, if you don’t remember what your plan was, you never had one to begin with. A plan isn’t something like “I go there, he goes here, then I go there.” It’s “trade the bishops, center my king, queen the pawn, mate him.” That’s what a plan is like.
In an over-the-board match, you have a time control for the entire game. If you just sit there and wait, you’ll lose on time. A disciplined player knows that when it’s his opponent’s turn to move, he should still be looking at the board. He should be analyzing the sentence, so to speak. Then when it’s his turn again, he can just “check his spelling” and make a move. If you take too much time, then you’re just letting your opponent “think on your time”, which gives them the advantage.
well i guess that must be my fundamental problem, then (or at least one of them). i keep making moves based on what my opponent does and really have no other objective than killing the durn king at some point.
thanks to the both of you for insight.
ok, another serious question for the stronger players.
i sersiously had not played chess for 30+ years until you guys started this. so i did the chess web page sign up and got flattened by mal.
but then it kind of renewed my interest. so i started playing 5 minute blitz chess. that was way to quick for me and what is left of my grey cells so i moved to 10 minute blitz which is fun. i win about as many as i lose.
now the question: does that type of chess hinder or hurt you if you really want to be serious? i mean i play golf so a 5 hour activity wouldn’t kill me but i like the speed.
input, please.
Ten-minute chess can be fun, but if you spend a lot of time playing badly against someone else who also plays badly then it’s unlikely that you’ll improve even if you are winning half the time. Slower-paced play with as much thinking put into it as you can manage will be more productive, I’d say. It’s the difference between just wandering around the golf course and giving the ball a whack with whatever you have in hand when you get there, versus thinking about how you’re going to approach the hole, club selection, address, swing and so on - plus time spent hitting buckets of balls on the driving range and so on.
Chess.com and gameknot both have daily puzzles which may be worth having a crack at, too. Chess problems aren’t usually much help in practical play, but positions that look like they could have arisen in a real game (“studies”) are another matter - they often use common tactical patterns to win material or mate, and you can use that in a game.
Plus, you know, you can open a thread to link to some of your completed games and ask for comments, and either Chessic or I will likely reply with hints and tips (at least, I will as long as I don’t have someone following me round with a computer to catch any errors I make).
hey, guys i sincerely appreciate the input. it’s a fun fracking game and i am just nominally better than horrible but still enjoy it.
would you be willing to set up a challenge somewhere and then kind of offer comments move by move and what in the world is trying to be accomplished?
other than killing the king, of course.
The most important thing in teaching people chess is hearing their thoughts. In football, if I’m teaching you to be a wide receiver, I can video you running routes. Then I can point at it and say “See this here? This is wrong.”
In chess, I can’t do that. I can’t “see” what you’re thinking, most of the time. So what I (and Malacandra) need from you is an accurate description of your thoughts on the game.
I’m thinking we can start a thread like glee used to do. You can, at any time, ask me what my plan is or what my thoughts are. On each move, you HAVE TO write down your thoughts on the current position. I, of course, won’t read those until the game is over. Malacandra can, of course, read those and help you whenever you ask for it.
Honestly, with my schedule these days, I’d rather be the advice-giver than the opponent. Mal, you up for something like that?
sorry about that, my RL has been hectic lately and I lost track of the email reminder somehow in my inbox. I honestly think you were on track to win anyway, so let’s call it yours.
Am I up for being peeker’s opponent for a training game? Sure, but two weeks from now I’ll be off for the remainder of August so there’ll be a hiatus. If that’s not a problem then we can do it via moves posted in a thread, with a control thread which I’ll be on my honour not to peek at until the game is over.
where do you want to play?
this could be highly instructional.
and i have no problem working around your schedules. shoot you are the ones doing the nice thing.
but chessic i have a tendency to potty mouth. i’ll try to keep it under control but if i drop and f bomb or two i don’t want you to be unprepared or overly offended.