Tuirgin

One of my bigger game problems is that I have lacked any consistent method for analyzing and playing my games. I might eyeball a game from my cell phone and make a move if one is obvious—if it isn’t I’ll wait until I can get to a computer. At the computer I’ll work positions out on the analysis board. If I’m really invested in the game I’ll get it into SCID, Aquarium, or Chess Assistant so that I can utilize my databases of games and opening references. Occasionally I’ll make private notes of general ideas, but my analysis of the board is really rather arbitrary and unorganized, and I rarely bother to make notes.

This, of course, is a mistake. (continue reading…)

I may start making some time to play real-time games a couple times per week. Ideally what I’d like to find is something like what I experienced last night at KGS—I played an unrated 13×13 board with someone in the Beginner’s Room, and when the game was complete we were able to see the comments the various kibitzers left, and were able to review the game and continue commenting on it with each other and with the kibitzers. Which real-time chess servers are most geared towards this type of community interaction? Any of them? ICS, FICS, Chess.com’s live chess beta? I prefer to stay away from servers that don’t have a Mac or Linux client, but if, for example, Playchess.com wins hands down I might give in (after some sulking and swearing).

Thanks in advance.

I have not been able to keep up with blogging over the last couple weeks—too many sick kids and minor emergencies in daily life. I have been able to scale myself back as my tournament games finish. Now I’m just playing a few games with friends I’ve met through this blog and the chess sites, and that’s just about the right fit for me right now.

There has, however, been an addition to my gaming interests—a friend of mine got me interested in go (igo, weiki, or baduk—whichever you prefer). I’ve created an account over at the Online Go Server (OGS). As usual, my name there is “Tuirgin”. Feel free to challenge me to a 13×13 game if you like, though let me warn you, I read the rules for the first time 2 evenings ago and I am the rawest of beginners. It’s an interesting game. It requires the thoughtfulness of chess but requires a different mentality. Rather than annihilating your opponent, you seek to build territories and when the game is over it is not necessarily obvious who has won—you still have to agree upon dead units, and count your controlled territory. Similar to chess, it appears to have a robust community, and a long tradition of play. As much as I enjoy my XBOX 360, there is something very gratifying about these two traditional games.

For those unfamiliar with go—wouldn’t it be better to refer to it by one of it’s source language names since “go” is such a ubiquitous word in English?—I’ll leave off with a few links to important sites.

• Sensei’s Library: a Go wiki
• GoBase.org: Go Games, Go Information, and Go Study Tools
• GoProblems.com
• Annotated Go Bibliography
• KGS: real-time go server with a multi-platform Java client
• IGS Pandanet: probably the most well-known real-time go server with a variety of clients
• OGS: the turn-based go server I play on

Enjoy!

I am not dead. Though I might play better chess if I were. It’s just a thought.

I think I’ve gotten myself into too many games. I’ve got about 20 of them going right now. 10 of them—well 9 now that I’ve resigned one—are from a round-robin tournament on SchemingMind. My brain is chess tired, and I’m really looking forward to the end of the tournament. I need to pull back on the number of games I’m playing and focus more and the kind of practice that C.J.S. Purdy is so fond of prescribing: playing through annotated games. I really enjoy doing this, and when the game is over I don’t feel like a complete idiot, which is a good thing. (continue reading…)

I HATE ADVERTISEMENTS. And I am not ashamed. I won’t browse the web without my trusty AdBlock Plus (for Firefox) or GlimmerBlocker (for Safari). The quickest way to turn me off of a web browser is to lack a decent advert blocker. And the quickest way to turn me off of a website is to try to guilt me into getting rid of my ad blockers.

A couple weeks ago I signed up for a free account at GameKnot so that I could evaluate the site. It didn’t take me very long to settle on Chess.com and SchemingMind, but I’ve been playing through my first game over at GameKnot. I don’t want to abandon the game—it’s just a matter of courtesy. I started the game, it hasn’t been dull or boring, and I owe it to my opponent to finish it. If I’m allowed to finish it, that is. (continue reading…)

The Chunky Rook had a good idea. He is creating animated chess diagrams using the new UCI/Winboard interface, Aquarium. ChessOK sells the Aquarium interface bundled with various versions of Rybka—if you opt for the freeware version of Rybka, your price for Aquarium is only $25. That’s pretty affordable for the range of analysis and documentation tools it provides. In the remainder of this post, I’m going to show you my workflow for producing diagrams and animations using Aquarium and—for fancy stuff—an image editor.

Let’s get started! (continue reading…)

I came across this problem tonight in Paul Littlewood’s Chess Tactics:

Black to Pin White's Rook

1. Black has two possible ways to pin White’s rook—what are they?
2. Which one would you choose and why? (Hint—one of them is an outright blunder.)

I stared at this one for a while. Obviously the only two moves that are going to create a pin against the rook are 1…Qe4 or 1…Qe5. But which one is a blunder? I started trying to work it out in my head and I was flummoxed. I saw the same problems with either option: 2. Be2. But where was the blunder???

(continue reading…)

I have to admit browsing the selection of chess improvement blogs populating the web can often be intimidating. Chess bloggers from relative beginners to experienced pros have theories and ideas on learning strategies, many of them quite in depth, technical, mathematical and seemingly requiring the selling of one’s soul to the devil out of a pure demand for form. (Hrm. Maybe that’s why so many religious leaders reviled it before the Enlightenment.)

If I got carried away with all these training ideas, I could probably drive myself nutty. But in the midst of all this hot sizzling brain spasmodificationism there’s a voice that rings true to me. C. J. S. Purdy’s constant advice on how to improve is… practice. (continue reading…)

Wow. Why are ChessCafe’s feeds so, well, missing? Subscribing to their RSS feed gave me a whopping 4 items, and none of them the item I was interested in. I simply cannot be expected to keep up with a website by visiting it regularly. I wait for notification from my feed aggregator and then visit the site if the content promises to be interesting. I simply don’t have hours every day to browse around the web revisiting all my favorite sites to check for updates. But I’m also not going to sit back and complain without trying to do anything about it. Thanks to Feed43 anyone can feed their favorite malnourished website.

Today I’m feeding Dan Heisman. Let’s get all the novices that read Novice Nook fat and happy.

XML: Dan Heisman’s ChessCafe column, Novice Nook

ChessOK has a long-running sales special where they offer an additional training software package (≤$25) if you buy 2 other training titles. They let me substitute ChessOK Aquarium Basic for the free training title. Aquarium has some great features for diagrams and documentation, as well as their new analysis features. I recently received my copy of Chess Tactics for Beginners from ChessOK. It runs just fine on native windows installs (including Vista x64 if you disable UAC—and please don’t comment about the dangers of disabling UAC: I don’t use Windows for its <sarcasm>magnificent</sarcasm> security features) and virtualized windows, but I want to run it in Wine since my primary operating system is OS X. The problem is that most users find that when they install it in Wine they get a 501 error with the explanation Cannot change Visible in OnShow or OnHide. This is a result of the title’s copy protection. It requires that the CD from which the program was installed be in the same drive from which it was installed. If you are actually using a CD, you’re fine, but if you purchase the download version and just mount the ISO you’re directed to make rather than burning it, you can run into some problems. It seems by default Wine treats a mounted ISO image as just another folder on the file system. But remember that Chess Tactics for Beginners is looking for an optical drive with the installer disc, and not only that, it’s looking for the disc to be in the same optical drive from which it was originally installed. Luckily there is a simple solution. (continue reading…)