Tuirgin

Out of boredom and, well, obsessive annoyance with events that fall outside the domain of this post, I was catching up on Penny Arcade when I came across a jab at Roger Ebert in “Again With The Art Stuff”. Ebert has stated in his blog that “video games can never be art”. Gamers tend to think this is “reeking ejaculate”. It is a month since Ebert’s post and he’s still collecting comments. At the time I’m writing this, the count is up to 4154. 4-1-5-4. 4154 comments not counting the presumably countless number of YouTube-esque brainless screeds that are probably submitted and mercifully rejected by him. A lot of people are interested in games and art and whether or not games are or can be art, but what the comments—and even Ebert’s post—make clear is how foggy people’s thoughts on art are. (continue reading…)

My daughter, Anastasia, has been wanting to learn how to play chess for well over a year now. She has just turned 8 and we’ve made a few fairly abortive attempts at it. Most recently I settled on letting her run my king around the board with a queen and a couple rooks. She eventually got the idea of how to perform a mate with those pieces, but it was very clear to me that if we were going to have success we needed some help. Thankfully, I believe I’ve found the answer.

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This is a Fischer Random game I just finished. At the point in which I blundered (20. h5 I had worked out a plan of action. But I made the move in the wee hours of the morning and had failed to keep notes. Shame on me. As of today, I'm starting to keep notes on my evaluation of the position. If I can track what's in my head when I make a move, then review it when the game is finished, I hope to better see where my weaknesses are.

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Before reading anything, I glance over tables of contents, indices, and section headings to get an idea of the main points an author is trying to make. As much as I like The Search for Chess Perfection II, I find it’s organization to be somewhat oblique, and the table of contents to be rather anorexic. There is an index of the included articles in the back of the book, but well… I want a proper table of contents, and I’d like it to contain not just the titles of each article, but the sections, as well. I’ve gone through all the articles and put together a working table of contents. For the most part I’ve merely copied out the section headings verbatim, though I’ve made a few changes to suit my whim. The italicized theme for each article varies from useful keywords or topic summary to a mere verbatim duplication of article titles. Essentially what was lacking in the production of the book was a good copy editor, which is by no means surprising for a small niche publisher. The material stands on it’s own merits, and I’m certainly thankful for the work that was done to bring these articles to a lesser obscurity.

The linked PDF contains page numbers and can be printed and put inside your copy of the book—I printed mine 2-up and folded them in half.

PDF: Table of Contents for The Search for Chess Perfection II

The version below does not contain page numbers and is provided to give those without the book an idea of what you’ll find within it.

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Making notes/outlines of any text is a good way to help stuff it inside my brain. I figure I might as well make my notes public. Here is my outline for CJS Purdy’s article, “The Dual Soul of Chess”, as reprinted in The Search For Chess Perfection II.

PDF: Outline for The Dual Soul of Chess, CJS Purdy

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I woke up this morning with a crushing headache. It felt like some Satanic co-mingling of a hang-over, caffeine withdrawals, and the worst sinus and tension headache you could ever dream of. Possibly related, possibly not, I was also nauseous. And the itching, burning eyes, and extreme congestion continued from the 2 days previous.

I had Jodi take Madelyn (21 months) to the baby-sitter today so that I could die in quiet, undistracted peace. I ate a breakfast of Malt-O-Meal and breakfast tea while I watched Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness. Shortly after finishing my food I turned off the movie and slept on the couch for another two and a half hours.

Once I awoke, I took some more ibuprofen, grabbed some food to see how my stomach would handle it—okay, as it turns out—and finished the movie. I was bleary eyed, aching, and mentally fuzzy. There was no way I would be working on my CCNA studies, so I opted to do some chess study.

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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 picked up a book on Go on Friday, Go! More Than a Game. I’d looked at another series of Go books, Learn to Play Go, and while the first volume looked like a good introduction to the rules and concepts of Go, it looked rather theoretical. Go! More Than a Game teaches the beginner to play Go largely through demonstration games, from start to finish. This is very much like learning from the annotated chess games that I like so much. (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!