Wednesday, March 16, 2011

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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6 comments:

  1. I don't know why,it must be your own Sec op, but I read that at 100 miles an hour, your plan to confuse him is sure to work, as I don't know what's going on myself. It sounds as though your having fun or does it?? What you should do is anonymously send him beer parcels and one of them Homer Simpson beer hats, the one with the beer on top and the 2 straws, also pay some random kid you meet in the street to phone him 10 times in the middle of the night to tire him out. These and other things like them should be taken into consideration. Black ops work, but don't tell anyone else... I won't!

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  2. Those are some good ideas; we are trying to psych each other out, and it is working pretty well.

    The rest is very simple:
    He just transferred three domain names and a completed website over to me, the governor has got 9,000 of us bloggers kicked out of my only sponsoring program a month from now in a misguided attempt to raise revenue for his state, I have painted nigh on to five hundred Imex and Airfix figures, most of the way through,I am reading about ten books at the same time, had not done a blog post in 12 days, got guys from Italy, Spain and the Netherlands checking out my Faustina Bordoni pictures, plus an American now too, on a daily basis, without commenting pro nor con,Canadians, Danes and different Italians are reading the General Staff books, the lady at the salt mines quit, causing extra overtime just before the Seven Years War Convention, when we were already working overtime, meanwhile I have got twenty-two chess games coming out my ears and trying to see what color facings to put on the French and Hessians, and even more importantly how many to have in a regiment, and I still haven't posted any Faustina Bordoni songs yet.

    Also trying to keep it to 4-5 paragraphs at a time, at least per subject, and I still didn't get a camera yet with a macro lens, and someone was searching the blog for info on the 2mm, which I set aside to work on the 1/72 two or three weeks ago. And my flesh paint is all sticky.

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  3. Just like most other blogs you should put up pictures of modern women up with the fallen boobies and that should have him transfixed so he won't read the text then, psy-ops at work.

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  4. I thought I tried something sort of like that, but maybe it was too subtle.

    I need the kind that I take the picture myself so I don't have to deal with copyrights, or else that are offered with permission, or both of those at the same time.

    I do have some of Maria Theresien of the Austrian Succession like that, too, although she's not modern.

    Meanwhile now somebody from Poland is looking at Faustina, too, but now it doesn't count the same because I did post internal links to it.

    I don't mind if they look, if they say wadna piershi or something at least. I mean 'nice young lady,' is that a Yevchenka, or dziewczynka, I forgot. Duwa wodka, duwa piwo. Jak ludzie.

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  5. That is just insane, following all those games at the same time.

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  6. Yeah and especially because I'm trying to write down all the moves in algebraic notation on both sides of three sheets of paper which I then forget to carry around.

    It's far worse for hultgreen, the owl pic on the follower list, because he has 76 games going while I have only 22.

    The idea was he wanted to be in 100 games at once, and at first he was, but now 24 of his have ended one way or the other.

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