Western Pacific Open

I played in my first USCF-rated tournament this weekend and it was everything I had hoped it would be. I met some nice people, played some good games and actually won a bit of money. I showed up Friday night at the LAX Radisson for my first game, took the elevator up to the penthouse (no, really) and strolled into the tournament hall overlooking the LAX runway. I checked my board assignment (#19, my lucky number) and walked down the hall to meet my opponent. I walked past IMs and GMs setting up classical Staunton pieces on their wooden boards and Expert players fixing the time controls on their Chronos clocks. As I neared the end of the hall and mingled among the other amateur players, disaster struck. My nightmare became reality. I was going to be playing a little kid. And not just any kid. A glasses-wearing, fedora-sporting nine-year-old named Gatlin Scott Black. No matter the result, I knew there was no pride to be gained from this game. I win and I just beat a nine-year-old in a game of chess. Props to me. I lose and I just got whooped by a nine-year-old.

The tournament director comes in and announces that we can start our games. Gatlin’s mom wraps him in a blanket, hands him a baggie of snacks and gives him a good luck kiss. The game starts and proceeds in a surprisingly normal fashion. Standard opening, standard development, but the whole time I’m just thinking to myself “I’m playing a nine-year-old in a tournament-rated game of chess. I’m essentially playing against my baby sister.” Around move 20 (that’s a lie, it was move 12), I notice Gatlin eyeing my king and mouthing something to himself. It took me a moment, but I realized he was calculating something. I look at my king and then at his queen, his knight, his bishop. And then I see it. Bishop sacrifice...shit. He reaches his tiny little hand out and plants his bishop right next to my king. Check. Almost as if on cue, the whole tournament hall seems to migrate towards our game. One by one, the other players in the hall look at the board, look at me and smile that all-knowing smile. I’m getting beaten by a nine-year-old, they know it, and they want me to know that they know it. Well, I’d had enough. I played the only move available to me and took a walk. I strongly considered disappearing, never to be heard of in the chess world again.But instead I consoled myself with the fact that even though I was losing our chess game, I could still kick Gatlin’s ass in a fight. His pint-sized fists were no match for me.

When I got back to the board, I defended for ten moves or so and somehow managed to equalize the position. Around this time, Gatlin got into time trouble. He spent about 30 minutes thinking about a move, and only had 8 minutes to make 16 moves. He became visibly nervous, blundered a piece and I started to win. Another ten moves and he resigned. But here’s the really awful part. He offered me a draw while the position was still equal and I declined. I looked at his clock, saw how little time he had, and consciously decided that I could probably beat him just because he didn’t have enough time to properly think. And I was right. Both about the game and the absolute lack of pride that I would feel by winning it. But I did learn a couple things from that game. First, I’m a terrible person. And second, age doesn’t have too much to do with skill in chess. Just because my opponent is young, I shouldn’t go easy on him because he’ll just end up surprising me with a nice combination and wiping the board with me. That latter point really came in handy during my final game of the tournament...against a six-year-old.

Trifecta

Hello, World!

Chess is war, plain and simple. There’s no such thing as peaceful coexistence, no treaties, no ceasefires, no mercy. One army is going to be annihilated, better make sure it’s not yours. Don’t want to fight? Then step the fuck away from the board. Woah! Okay, maybe that’s a little too intense. It is just a game, after all. It’s supposed to be fun! But unlike most other games, “chance” and “luck” don’t apply. It’s a game of pure information. You can see every possible move and every possible plan that your opponent has available to him, and he can see everything available to you. There are no tricks, there are no lies. As Emanuel Lasker, one of the greatest to ever play put it, “On the chessboard lies and hypocrisy do not survive long.” You put your best idea down on the board and your opponent tries his best to refute it with an idea of his own. The person with the better idea wins. Every time.

So what am I going to talk about for 16 weeks? Well, I’m certainly not going to explain the rules of chess. I’m not going to talk about the theory behind certain openings or review any famous games. I’m not going to fill this blog with notation of games I’ve played (although it is a tempting way to fulfill word count requirements). I’m not going to bore you with in-depth analyses of some of my better games. Instead I just want to talk about chess. Anything and everything chess-related. The game has been around for 1500 years, so there’s plenty to talk about. I want to cover a little bit of its (d)evolution from a gentleman’s game into a “nerd sport”. You’ll see how the game was, for a short  time, another front of the Cold War, with the United States and the Soviets battling it out to demonstrate their superiority. I’ll probably touch on the influence that technology and constantly calculating computers have had on the Royal Game and how they’re shaping its future, for better or worse. We’ll cover one of my absolute favorite topics in chess, cheating, and we can see some of the more interesting (and peculiar) instances that have occurred.  I’ll show you some of the giant egos that chess has created, and we can all laugh sadistically when we watch those egos get crushed.  We’ll certainly take a look at the life of Bobby Fischer, one of the craziest (and greatest, in that order) players who ever graced the board. But most of all, I want to try to figure out what it is about the game that polarizes so strongly. What it is that captivates so many and causes so many more to absolutely despise the game. Love chess? Stick around. Hate it? Maybe I can change your mind. Either way, I’ll try to keep it interesting. Oh, and I might accidentally cover some of the things I promised not to talk about, but as Fischer so eloquently put it, “those rules are for the Communist cheaters, not for me.”

Dana’s Blog

Dana Mackenzie is a chess player (a National Master, to be specific). His blog screams chess, but not in the way that most chess blogs do. Yes, he blogs about major professional tournaments and speculates about the results. Yes, he analyzes individual games and explains them move by move. And yes, chess notation runs rampant throughout his blog. But Dana has a sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude when it comes to chess. The sidebar of his blog reads, “there will be mess-ups; that’s part of the game,” a sentiment with which anyone who has played chess at all is well acquainted. He takes chess seriously, that’s for sure. Anyone who has achieved the ranking of a National Master has to be serious about the game. But Dana’s love for the game comes through in his blogging more than any serious aspirations about chess improvement. Posts like “You’ve got Rybka, I’ve got Max” (http://www.danamackenzie.com/blog/?p=2050), in which he details his cat’s ability to play novel openings (complete with a picture of his cat and the caption “Foolish human! You cannot match wits with the Chess Cat!”) show his light-hearted, goofball nature. This is a chess blog that I actually enjoy reading. His wit and self-deprecating humor, combined with his expertise and insightful analysis make for a thoroughly rewarding read.

Dana has been blogging about chess nonstop for nearly six years. He manages to post incredibly regularly, averaging 6 or 7 posts a month, and frequently breaking into double digits. Granted, not all posts are strictly chess related (see: “Cute Kitten Videos 2” (http://www.danamackenzie.com/blog/?p=1977) and “Opportunity to Help Frogs” (http://www.danamackenzie.com/blog/?p=1235)), but for the most part he sticks to chess.  For a chess blog, Dana’s received a respectable following. After five years, he got his 100,000th visitor about a year ago in May 2012. Always self-deprecating, he was quick to point out that his wife’s blog, which started around the same time, received its 700,000th visitor right before he broke into six figures. But hey, 100,000 visitors to a chess blog is pretty darn impressive. Dana’s done pretty well getting his blog out there, too. Type in “chess blog” to Google and he’s the fourth blog in the search results. Alexa.com shows that 118 other websites link to his blog. He could probably throw some ads on the site and make a modest little sum of money. Buy some dinners, pay for a tournament or two, at least pay for the cost of hosting the site; but no, Dana refuses to put ads on his blog. Most chess bloggers line their sites with ads for the latest chess books, software, DVDs, training courses...anything that’ll put some change in their pockets (I’m looking at you, Polgar sisters), but Dana doesn’t blog for money, he blogs because he clearly just loves chess, and loves talking about chess.

And that’s what I want to do with my blog. I want to talk about everything I love about chess, from the style of the pieces, to the funny way the knight moves, to the thrill of realizing you’ve trapped someone’s queen. I want to complain about the parts of chess that I hate: quick draws, blunders, and opening preparation (especially the Ruy Lopez). But I also want to offer readers something to learn from my blog. I was afraid to even consider analyzing games before, due to the typically dry nature of such a post. But Dana has shown me that it’s possible to make an analysis something that’s actually fun to read. He turns the analysis into a narrative, delving into the psyche of the players and making humorous comparisons with pop culture in posts like “Chess Meets Zombie Apocalypse” (http://www.danamackenzie.com/blog/?p=2019). Dana’s a great blogger, and a pretty darn good chess player, too. His blog is consistently engaging and definitely worth following.

Dana’s Voice

Even in the short personal profile on his blog (http://www.danamackenzie.com/blog/?page_id=2), Dana’s voice jumps off the page. He’s a humble man with a goofy sense of humor. He lists his accomplishments and qualifications related to chess (National Master, two-time state champion, chess lecturer) and then immediately grounds himself, saying,

Don’t let all of that stuff impress you, though. Deep down inside, I’m just an ordinary player. I don’t play chess for money or glory, just for the love of the game.

Dana realizes he’s very accomplished in chess, and knows that that NM-title next to his name can be intimidating. So he goes out of his way to humble himself and make the reader feel comfortable. Right in his profile page, Dana sets up the blog to be almost conversation-like, just a chat between friends about the game of chess.

He continues his profile by talking about his “real life” career. He puts “real life” in quotation marks almost as a joke for other chess players. Any serious chess player (as Dana certainly is) knows the depths that a passion (read: addiction) for chess can reach. Chess seeps into your brain and takes hold. You think about positions in the shower, staring off and trying to figure out combinations and variations. You find yourself trailing off in conversations as an idea about a game you just played pops into your head. You have dreams (and nightmares) about chess. Chess is never far from the front of your mind, and Dana acknowledges this reality when he refers to “real life”.

Dana’s excitement for chess is uncontainable, and his blog certainly reflects it. In a tournament in October of 2012, Dana won a particularly hard-fought game with a beautiful combination, and his excitement is abundantly clear in his post about the victory, entitled “Parting With the Lady” (http://www.danamackenzie.com/blog/?p=1799). Dana starts the post with “What a crazy day at the Western States Open!” That opening hook immediately gives you a sense of his excitement, as if he couldn’t wait to write about the events of that day. Always humble, he explains that in his game, “[his opponent] played a beautiful piece sacrifice against me and had me crushed in probably twenty possible ways.” He goes on to set up the critical position of the game, in which he spots a particularly lethal queen sacrifice that ends up winning him the game. “I was higher than a kite after playing this combination!” I found this expression to be particularly well-suited to Dana’s personality. It does a great job of expressing his excitement while at the same time being just corny enough to match the delightfully nerdy picture of himself that he has on his blog. It shows his love for the game, and the satisfaction that he gets from it. His pride is nearly overflowing as he says that, “this game will absolutely, for sure, be a Chess Lecture.” That repetition of “absolutely, for sure” shows the extreme pride towards the game he played. He just played a fantastic combination, and he knows it. He’s so proud, in fact, that he titles the post “Parting with the Lady”, in reference to his brilliant queen sacrifice. But Dana doesn’t let his pride overwhelm him. He reminds himself that he probably shouldn’t have won by referring to the game as a “sensational swindle.” In that one beautifully alliterated phrase, Dana acknowledges his excellent combination and his extraordinary luck of being able to stay in the game long enough to find it. Dana is able to create a very friendly, humble voice in his blog that just makes you want to keep reading, to keep the conversation going.

The Draw

The Draw. It’s an infamous topic in chess. Two players battle it out for hours, maneuvering their armies around the chessboard, attacking and defending, but neither player can crack the other’s fortress so they agree to a draw. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. But often, games that reach seemingly lively positions end prematurely with the two players agreeing to a tie. Clearly, there’s got to be something else going on. For one reason or another, the players don’t want to play the game out. Sure, maybe each player feels that they’d have to take a serious risk in order to break their opponent’s defense. But sometimes, the two combatants just don’t feel like expending the mental energy necessary to fight any more.

A classical chess game (the type of game that International Masters and Grandmasters usually play) can last forever. Well, it can actually only last seven hours, but when you’re constantly calculating variations and thinking of lines that go five, six, seven moves deep it can certainly feel like forever. Every time your opponent moves, you have to reevaluate the position. Look for weaknesses, identify imbalances, formulate plans of attack and try to figure out your opponent’s plan of attack. Double, triple, quadruple check your move before you play it. It is exhausting. Now imagine you’re playing in a tournament. You’re doing that day in and day out for weeks, so yea, it certainly would seem tempting to agree to an early draw and save yourself from another couple hours of mental anguish, even if only for one day. Hell, I know I’d consider it. But to a chess fan, the draw, usually, is just plain boring. All it says to me is that two masters of the game reached a position that, according to modern day theory, is drawn, and neither of them wanted to challenge that theory. Neither of them had the guts or the energy to try something new. 

I remember reading about a tournament recently where the arbiters tried to prevent early draws by not allowing any of the players to agree to a draw before their fortieth move. In one of the games, two Grandmasters played their first twenty-four moves and reached a well-analyzed position that was a theoretical draw. With sixteen moves left in the game, you’d expect to see some exciting chess. New ideas and new attacks being formulated. Modern chess theory being put to the test. But no. These two masters simply moved a piece back and forth for sixteen moves before shaking hands and calling it a tie. While a ridiculous example, this sort of short draw based on modern theory is not uncommon. In fact, even Bobby Fischer, one of the most outspoken proponents of banning short draws, was guilty of agreeing to draws early on. But Fischer would at least have the decency to make it entertaining when he did so. In one game, he reached a theoretically drawn position after nineteen moves. At the time, FIDE, the world’s preeminent chess federation, had banned any draws shorter than thirty moves. This was a rule that Fischer himself had lobbied strongly for, because he suspected the Russians were agreeing to short draws with each other in order to save their mental energy for their battles with him. When the arbiter told Bobby that he couldn’t agree to a draw for another eleven moves, Fischer simply pointed that “that rule is for the Communist cheaters, not for me.” And that was that. Fischer got his draw.

But most of the time, draws are just making chess boring. In the most recent World Championship match between Vishy Anand and Boris Gelfand, thirteen of the sixteen games ended in a draw. Thirteen. Out of sixteen. That’s pathetic. In the three weeks that this match lasted, only three games had a decisive result. Either the two contenders were so evenly matched that they allowed the other absolutely no opportunity for an advantage in those thirteen games, or they just weren’t willing to take risks with the stakes so high. Either way, the result was boring chess and a World Championship that became known as the “match forgotten around the world”.

I’m hopeful, though. There are top players out there that still play fighting chess. Carlsen, Kramnik, Aronian. These are guys who are always going for a win. A draw is a disappointment for them, and it’s what has made them the top players in the world. But mostly, I’m hopeful because the chess world recognizes the shadow that short draws have cast on the game. Fans are speaking out. Tournament directors are taking measures to prevent short draws, and sometimes eliminate them altogether. New scoring systems reward those willing to take risks and fight for a win, while resigning the complacent to obscurity. The chess world sees the draw as a weakness of the game, and we’ve begun to attack it.

Online Chess Heroes

Mthr fkr, a55hle, dum fkin american. I’ve been called many creatively-spelled names on Chess.com. One person told me they had fun with my mother the other night, and to tell her thanks. I highly doubt they’ve ever even met my mother. You’d think the idiotic trash talk that plagues the world of Xbox Live wouldn’t have infected the online chess community, but it certainly has. As anyone with an internet connection is well aware, anonymity seems to bring out the worst in people. I guess when you’re not sitting across from the person you’re playing, not looking at their face, when all you know about them is their screen name, it’s much easier to act like a complete asshat.

Now, I love online chess. Maybe love isn’t a strong enough word. I’m a bit obsessed with online chess. Chess.com is the first site I visit when I wake up, and the last site I’m on before I go to sleep. But I don’t really like the people on the site too much. I’ve come to find that most of them fit into one of a few categories. First, there are the outright hostile folks. The ones that make sure to tell you before the game what a terrible player you are. The ones that remind you during the game what an absolute idiot you are, and express their disbelief at your ability to even play the game. The ones that type out endless laughter and insults at the end of the game, despite the result, and tell you to have a good night, mthr fkr. These are the true scum of the online chess world.

Then there are the inconsiderate players. These folks usually don’t type anything during the game at all. They don’t respond to anything you say, they just play the game. Until they don’t. Drop a piece, stumble into a forced mate sequence, or just plain don’t like the way the game is going, and they’re off. Disappeared into the abyss of the internet. But not without leaving the game open in another tab so that you have to sit and wait, watching their time tick down. This isn’t too bad, I guess, but it does get on your nerves when you run into a string of these players. Suddenly you’ve been online for an hour but you’ve only really gotten to play for twenty minutes.

But there are those few, those select few, that actively go out of their way to make the online chess community a better place. When you’re playing one of these heroes, you usually realize it early on. They start the game with a simple “Hi :)” or a “Gl!” (Good luck!) and invariably end it with a “GG!”, regardless of their personal satisfaction with the game. With these players, online chess is no longer an anonymous, impersonal experience. You start to realize that you’re playing a game with another human. You’re both sitting down, often thousands of miles apart, and playing chess together. Testing each other’s ideas and plans. Helping each other get just a little bit better at the game you both love. It’s a strangely intimate experience.

I ran into one of these players recently while playing blitz chess on Chess.com. In these racing, often messy, 10 minute games, you can’t expect much forgiveness from your opponent. I’ve lost many games on nothing more than a mouse slip, accidentally clicking the square next to the one I meant to click. This match seemed like just another one of those games. I had tried to trade queens with my opponent, but ended up clicking the square directly in front of his queen. So rather than capturing his queen, my queen just sat there stupidly in the middle of the board, just waiting to be picked off. As far as I was concerned, the game was over. I had lost my queen with no compensation and my king would likely be lost, too. But then I noticed the chat box next to the game. My opponent asked me if I had misclicked. This was unprecedented. I’ve misclicked literally hundreds of times in my online chess career, often to my immediate demise, and this was the only time that someone had questioned it. I quickly explained that I had indeed misclicked, and that my intention was to trade queens. He then harmlessly moved his knight, allowing me to follow through with my plan on the next move. Clearly, I was playing a hero of the online chess community.

Chess: A Gentleman's Game?

In the golden age, Chess was widely accepted as a gentleman’s game. A game of honor and dignity for the noblemen of society. But for a gentleman’s game, chess competition can sure get ugly. In LA recently, two tournament players got into an argument over their game. Rather than doing the gentlemanly game and asking the tournament director to mediate their dispute, they took a different approach. They started jabbing each other with pens. Not a very respectable way of resolving their differences, but satisfying nonetheless. Ungentlemanly behavior is not a recent development, either. Sixteenth-century Ruy Lopez (of the famous Ruy Lopez opening) took a decidedly ungentlemanly approach to give himself the advantage in his games. As much as possible, he’d insist on playing outside with his opponents, where he’d position the board so that the sun was to his back, and directly in his opponent’s eyes. Gentlemanlike? No. Effective? Certainly.

The chess giants of the late 19th and early 20th century, too, had their fair share of erratic behavior. Alekhine (of the famous Alekhine’s gun setup, in which the queen is positioned behind two rooks so as to form a “gun” and shatter the enemy's defenses) once found himself in a losing position. After accepting his defeat, the noble Alekhine chose not to resign. Instead, he simply hurled his king across the room and walked out of the tournament hall. Nimzovich, the prodigious author of My System, too, found himself losing his tournament game. Nimzovich at least had the honor to resign his game like a true gentleman. But then he got up on the table, dropped to his knees and shouted “Must I lose against these idiots!”.

Modern day International Master Jeremy Silman has found himself playing against quite the gentlemen in his years playing chess. One of his opponents brought a coke bottle full of tequila to the board with him. When the game went south, he simply drank the bottle and moved his pieces around like a blubbering fool until he was checkmated. In a London tournament, Silman’s opponent found himself on the precipice of defeat. Did he resign? Well, sort of. He slowly pushed all the pieces off of the board and onto Silman’s lap and then, without saying a word, sauntered out of the tournament hall.

So, is chess a gentleman’s game? Well, it may have been played by noblemen and gentlemen for much of its history, but their behavior while playing was often anything but. Chess is a fierce, stressful fight, and often your opponent will snap after losing such a battle. I’ve never experienced such extreme ungentlemanly behavior first hand before, but I’m terribly excited for my first run in with it.

Hello, World

Chess is war, plain and simple. There’s no such thing as peaceful coexistence, no treaties, no ceasefires, no mercy. One army is going to be annihilated, better make sure it’s not yours. Don’t want to fight? Then step the fuck away from the board. Okay, maybe that’s a little too intense. It is just a game, after all. It’s supposed to be fun! But unlike most other games, “chance” and “luck” don’t apply. It’s a game of pure information. You can see every possible move and every possible plan that your opponent has available to him, and he can see everything available to you. There are no tricks, there are no lies. As one of the greats put it, “On the chessboard lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culmination in checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.” You put your best idea down on the board and your opponent tries his best to refute it with an idea of his own. The person with the better idea wins. Every time.

So what am I going to talk about for 16 weeks? Well, I’m certainly not going to explain the rules of chess. I’m not going to talk about the theory behind certain openings or review any famous games. I’m not going to fill this blog with notation of games I’ve played (although it is a tempting way to fulfill word count requirements). Instead I just want to talk about chess. The game has been around for 1500 years, so there’s plenty to talk about. I want to cover a little bit of its history and (d)evolution from a gentleman’s game into a “nerd sport”. You’ll see how the game was, for a short time, another front of the Cold War, with the United States and the Soviets battling to demonstrate their superiority. I’ll touch on the influence that technology and endlessly calculating computers have had on the Royal Game and how they’re shaping its future. We’ll cover one of my favorite topics in chess, cheating, and we can go over some of the more interesting (and peculiar) instances that have occurred. I’ll show you some of the giant egos that chess has helped create, and we can all laugh sadistically when we watch those egos get crushed. We’ll certainly take a look at the life of Bobby Fischer, one of the craziest (and greatest) players who ever lived. But most of all, I want to try to figure out what it is about the game that polarizes so strongly. What it is that captivates so many and causes so many more to absolutely despise the game. Love chess? Stick around. Hate it? Maybe I can change your mind (probably not). Either way, I’ll keep it interesting. I might accidentally talk about some of the things I promised not to talk about, but as Fischer so eloquently put it, “those rules are for the Communist cheaters, not for me.”