Working On Our Knight Moves

The GF Stopped By Saturday While I Was Crashed 

Sleeping in the ordinary people's daytime, after 12 hours in the Salt Mines. I got up to say hello.

During the time when I was talking, I was apparently babbling something about even more chess games starting, and that I had won some, and also lost some. At that time I had got the 23 games down to only 19 more games to go in the Match with two Wins and two Losses.

My opponent had previously beat me 9 out of 10. But not anymore. Right now it seems to be running more like 50-50 and we are playing an odd number of games, so it cannot be tied. In the end, someone must win More than the other one. At least One More.


The Tournament Adds Nine More Games on Top of the 23 Games From the Match

Unfortunately I had forgotten that 25 days earlier I had signed up for a Tournament against other people around the world, and had notification that it would start on Monday.

That means nine more games, against nine other people, and of the ten of us in the Tournament--I am the lowest-rated player allowed in. 



Ain't It Funny How The Knight Moves
 

The Knights in Chess are the ones usually depicted as a Horse's head, or it could be the whole horse. They have a strange L-shaped move, The game looks complicated to those who don't understand it, and it probably is more complex than checkers or draughts, but there are only six different pieces, and five of them have straightforward enough moves. There are six-year-olds who can do it.



Here is some wisdom you can use in your own life:

If You Ever Want To Get Something Done--Give It To A Busy Person. They will just add it on to the stack of other things they are doing, and they'll have it all done before the lazy person even would get started. Try it and see for yourself.

Now yesterday, there's yet another guy who wants a match against me, this one is just one game so far, and I went ahead and started that one too. I protested a couple times that I was overwhelmed already, etc, but on third thought, okay, there's surely some reason why.

This one means 19 ongoing match versus the first guy, then the nine of the tournament versus the other nine, and then this one on one makes 11 opponents and would be Twenty-Nine games all at the same time, and every last one of them against higher-rated players and even almost Double the ratings for a few of them. They average 300 points better, but all the more glory if I can beat them.

One of the Tournament games against a guy 300 points better has ended in a win for me because the opponent ran out of time--he has three full days to move, but hadn't moved for four, so an automatic win. He is also in ten games in this Tournament, so the other guys are bit by bit winning, too, although he can still jump back on, and then the advantage goes to those like me who were quicker. Everyone's three days are not up yet.

 This opponent is an Asgari of Mohammad, or soldier of Mohammad. Askari is the same word carried over from the Arabic into Swahili. Maybe his connection went down, or he's too busy for all the games he is in. Whatever it was, it gives me a win in a tournament where I am occupying the bottom of the chart, so I lucked out on that one. Too bad the game was too short to count for points, because with his strength 300 more than mine, I would get about 100 points to beat him in a legitimate battle. As it was, no points.
                                                      


 Het Laatste Nieuws
--the latest news

Since then one more match game against the first guy ended in a win for him, so now just against him the record is 3 wins for him, 2 wins for me. But--!

But there are two other games, game 3 and game 13, in which he will lose as soon as he moves, no matter what move he makes, and then when it's my turn, he will be Checkmated and lose. He knows that, and that that means I am for all intents and purposes, on top. By One More Win--for all intents and purposes that is.

Not quite in reality just yet--because first he has to move anything anywhere, before I can finish him off.

But the thing is, knowing that, and that he has three full days to make that fatal move in each of those two games, he said I will have to wait two days, 23 hours and 59 minutes before he makes those moves.

                                                        That's a moral victory in itself.


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Blog News Announcement
In blog news, I will have to change some arrangements for the sponsors, due to some misguided legislating having been done by the legislature the 9,000 people in my state have all got fired, from our program. Immediately when the governor signed the papers, on the 59th of 60 days he had to think about it, all nine thousand of us got fired. Our governor is brilliant.

That means I have to either move to another more business-friendly state, or change the program, or both. The links are good from now until April 15, and then they have to be changed. On the bright side, most of the readers are not in the US anyway, and the new deal may take the international readership into better account, maybe, we shall see.
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March Madness Chess: Intense Battle Continues

I had previously mentioned that I became engaged in 23 simultaneous games of Chess and that that may have been too many games to have at one time. That was correct, it is too many to properly keep track of, but once engaged, whoever drops off will have to lose. And that loss will be recorded in the permanent record.

Therefore there will be no dropping off on my end, but an intense and unrelenting hammering, with the right hand, and metaphorical  gouges with the left, with stomping and kicking by alternate metaphorical feet in between, plus liberal use of elbows and what not. In Chess all this is possible while sipping at green tea and laughing.

We have made at least over 400 moves, as near as I can calculate, and it may take over an entire month to finish this monstrous undertaking.

My opponent is a Follower of this Blog, but had been ignoring my articles for months as they were too long and too involved for his attention span with not enough pictures and colors, and cartoon things jumping around, making silly noises. If I had the 'feed the fish' widget, he would go for that, repeatedly, and might even bookmark the site just for that.



Another Faustina Bordoni Picture Suitable For Framing

He does like the Faustina Bordoni picture by Rosalba Carrera, as a young lady from New Years' Eve, but so do many others in lots of countries. At least three different countries had people looking at it today alone, without needing me to mention it.

It is a great picture and well worth having. I should put up some examples of her songs. Even though she passed on long before recording technology came along, there are cover versions by modern-day singers, which are more or less good indications of almost what she sounded like doing the same arias, usually by Handel or else her husband Hasse, a well-known composer himself.

Today you can hear the same song by Pavarotti, Carreras, or Andrea Bocelli, and then have a fairly decent idea of what Mario Lanza would have sounded like in person versus his older technology recordings, with some imagination still being necessary, but it is better than 100 percent imagination.

There is another picture, at a later time in her life,  available from Amazon in a format suitable for framing. This one is by Bartolommeo Nazari.

The books and articles I linked to in the two posts about her at New Years explain that she was quite lively at that age, as reported by an eyewitness, who came to visit her and her husband and have some dinner together.











Operational Security or OPSEC in Chess

 As luck would have it, he DID read that last article in which I had revealed some of my plans to use against him, in the confidence that he would never read the article. He did read it that very night, right in front of me, on his laptop.

That means that for reasons of Operational Security the postings must be far more circumspect. He did say 'Op Sec' when I brought that issue up, so he knows what I mean.

He was not able to comment because he did not sign in, even though he has an account. He would have said LOL.

It's partly the attention span thing. I am taking a gamble now, that due to the short attention span, it might actually be safe now to discuss specific tactics openly, since he has stopped looking. I think.

The results so far have been one game lost by me by a Checkmate at 50 moves. That is the one where he had forked my Queen early on, so I was expecting to have to lose that one all along.  That game made such rapid progress only because it was his favorite game due to his favorable position in it, so he kept the moves current more than the many other games in which his position is not so rosy.

Since then there has been another one like that, with a forked Queen against me, and one where I put the Queen right in the path of his Knight for a catastrophic casualty for no apparent reason other than that I moved hurriedly and half asleep, suffering from malnutrition from GMO foods, and working overtime at the salt mines.

So there are a few like that, and a few where he pulled off the same Knight fork or Double Attack, which is his favorite tactic, to score a free Rook, which is the next best thing to getting the Queen. Those games are not necessarily automatic wins for him, just a more difficult obstacle to be overcome.

But only one game has reached a complete stop, Game 19 ending in a Checkmate in 50 so he has one win, I have one loss, and we have 22 games underway and a heated and intense battle even right now.

If only I could keep track of all these games somehow I could predict how many I will probably win, with some number such as 18 or 19, out of the 23, maybe 20, but it really is too hard to keep a handle on which game is which and what are all the pluses and minuses from game to game.

It should be slightly easier now that we are down to 22 games, but not much. Of course he is counting on the one easy win to have a Psychological Warfare effect on me but in fact I kept up the fifty moves just as fast to have a Reverse Psychological effect on him, which actually is working, and caused him to have overconfidence.

It's too late for him to do anything about the numerous games in which he is at the distinct disadvantage, so we will soon see the record reflect a lot more wins for me.

The Record
Older Matches

hultgreen 8 wins
 mekelnborg 1 win

Current Matches
hultgreen 1 win
mekelnborg 0 wins

22 games still underway.

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Chess Madness

We Might Be Overdoing It

I've been playing chess off and on for many years, and recently off. That's because my opponent beat me repeatedly one night in 2007 while chain-smoking Camels, sams filtre, the worst kind, in a small room, when I figured to beat him over half the time. He said he quit smoking after that, and I said I quit playing chess altogether.

Too bad, too, since other than that blow to the ego, I loved the game, but I steered clear of it pretty much from that day to this month. Oh, I might have thought about it from time to time, but steered clear of it. It has been four long and lonely years away from the chessboard. And now I am back in battle, with my nemesis himself in person. This time it'll be different.

Now he's talked me into joining up at chess.com and we played online, where he again beat me repeatedly, so my record this month is 1 win and 8 losses. I did crush him that one time, so it's not all bad. But one of the losses was the famous Fool's Mate, done in four moves to a checkmate. I don't usually fall for that one. Must be getting rusty.

In a few others I had good winning chances but made some blunder or other ruining it, from not being quite careful enough. For sure in Game 9 I should have had him, but we took a break and broke the concentration.

This guy has already been playing online games including chess but also other types for some time, and has a habit of joining 50 and more games at a time, with a 3-day time limit for moves. And he's gone and talked me into playing 23 simultaneous games like that with him, which are all underway now. Why 23--because then he can see on his profile that he has 100 games in all simultaneously in progress, and needed 23 from me to reach that magic number. The rest are against other people around the world.

But for me, I think this way lies madness. We played at the same time for a couple hours at the speed of bullet or blitz chess, with just a quick read of the screen, move, and on to look at the next screen. There's no time to focus on any one game that way, or even remember next time around what the strategy was going to be, because meanwhile 22 other situations have gone by. I think I could keep track of maybe four games like this at a time, and still remember what I'm trying to do in each one. But 23?

Already there are two games where I am almost guaranteed to lose, considering the heavy casualties, but it isn't over yet. There are still 21 where the issue is more in doubt, and my plan now is to go a little bit slower. We do have three days to move after all, and if I keep up at bullet rate and he doesn't, then he will have a huge advantage.

I've seen enough to believe that if I am a little more careful and not overlook things, I can win the most games, in spite of the lopsided record so far not backing up that assertion at all. All right, with that in mind, I am heading back to the arena for more mental combat.

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