Grob It While You Kann
Labels: caveman
A frequently updated blog for the Kenilworth Chess Club
Labels: caveman
Labels: NJ Knockouts, US Chess League, uscl
Labels: chessplayers turned academics
I thought it was a good time to take a rest and go back to chess. It was like waking up from a coma after 20 years—not knowing at all what had taken place in theory or practice for the last 20 years or what was going on now. It's difficult to explain all the surprises. I decided to go back to square one. I think Emanuel Lasker did this at one point in his life. I study everyday using almost everything that has developed over the last 20 years. I started about a year ago, asking basic questions: What's the best first move for White? What is intrinsically and fundamentally the best reply to 1.d4, 1.Nf3, 1.c4, etc. These are the most difficult questions to answer. I'm building a repertoire for White and Black. So to answer the question: 'Do you have any interest in chess anymore?' the answer is: You bet.I think it will only be a few months now and "the Panther" will return. No doubt we will see him at the NJ Open next year. And I hope we will see him at the club before then. Maybe now we will get to see more interesting games with that intriguing line of his.
Labels: bill freeman
Labels: NJ Knockouts, US Chess League, uscl
Labels: opening analysis, petroff, urusov gambit
Labels: NJ Knockouts, US Chess League, uscl
Labels: nj open
Labels: NJ Knockouts, US Chess League, uscl
What Americans understand by "war games" is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers' pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.As Spengler writes elsewhere:
America's idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a "moderate Muslim" government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.
Chess players think in terms of interaction of pieces: everything on the periphery combines to control the center of the board and prepare an eventual attack against the opponent's king. The Russians simply cannot absorb the fact that America has no strategic intentions: it simply adds up the value of the individual pieces on the board. It is as stupid as that.
A deadly miscommunication arises from this asymmetry. The Russians cannot believe that the Americans are as stupid as they look, and conclude that Washington wants to destroy them.As Business New Europe's "Moscow Blog" suggested, expanding on Spengler's metaphor:
Washington may genuinely see the Czech/Poland-based anti-missile system... as simply another hotel and really has no aggressive intentions towards Russia. However, for the chess-playing Russians it was an incredibly aggressive move on the US's part, as it points directly at the king.Whether or not chess thinking governs Russia's moves in the conflict, there is no question that the invasion of Georgia has impacted the world of chess. As Dylan Loeb McClain reports in The New Yorks Times:
Nine of the 64 women who qualified for the women’s world championship, being held in the Russian city of Nalchik in the Caucasus, did not appear at the start of the tournament on Thursday in protest of the war. The nine, including six from Georgia, were disqualified.
Labels: chess and language, chess and politics