Pounding a Pirate

I Win More as Black Than as White

Actually I lose more than I win by about seven percent but those are left over from several crazy-risky Danish Gambits I had the nerve to try against the Nemesis, and I am still trying to make up the difference against the good players of the world. He put me below .500 as mentioned in February or March, and since he is hiding, I am having a hard time making up for it.


It's not easy, because I give myself a disadvantage almost every time by using one Gambit or another.
 
The reason for that is because most players use the e4 move to start, that is to advance the King's Pawn two steps, the classic way. I think the late great Bobby Fischer did it all but one game famously. Some go first with the Queen's Pawn, and  some hate when they do as it slows the game and makes it more intricate generally.

I do that usually if I have White, leading off with a Queen's Gambit most times, unless they show fianchetto immediately. It's as much from familiarity as anything else.

 And  Here is Why--the Icelandic Gambit--it throws them off

But the reason I win more with Black, bucking the statistical trend of maybe 5 to 8 percent better results for White from that first-move advantage, is because when I have Black, and they do the King Pawn first, which is most of the time, I go into an Icelandic Gambit and many opponents are surprised and cannot cope with it.

It doesn't always work. There are ways to screw it up from both sides, and for it to really be an Icelandic Gambit, the other side would have to follow a natural script for four whole moves, and they often don't, so it doesn't always even occur because they can do whatever they want. All openings end up that way eventually, some fall off script quickly and others  follow one a long time. If you don't want or like that, then you avoid it.


You can't always get an Icelandic Gambit, since only so many guys will follow the steps laid out for as many as four moves, so it may just be a Scandinavian Gambit if they only follow the script part way. But if they take all four steps as desired, it is the Icelandic Gambit.

A Gambit is a Gamble, a Gambiteer is a Gambler

All Gambits are risky, what it is is you let the guy take a piece or two hoping you can turn that to your advantage somehow, either off the little time it gives while he's busy cutting off your leg, or else the space opening behind his sword arm while he's whacking at you elsewhere.

But it is a way even a nerd can demonstrate King Kong Cojones.

Figuratively it is a little bit like when Beowulf was fighting the Monster's Mother, and the little opening let him get at her heart, but he took a lot of damage in order to get there.   I mean in the Neil Gaiman version of Beowulf.

  You give him your pawn or piece or even two pawns like here and try to beat him anyway. It only appeals to a certain kind of player, and the majority frown on it and think you're crazy, and so it is taught that if you find yourself playing a gambiteer, just take it, and chances are he cannot pull it off anyway.

That Danish Gambit I mentioned is really crazy because you give up three and maybe even four pawns, it is the Gambiteer's craziest gambit of all and often doesn't work.

I haven't got time to figure out how to put up chessboard diagrams although there is bound to be some way to do it that I haven't seen.

If I just nicked the one off the site, that'd probably be copyrighted to them, but the moves are mine. There must be someone who could read the algebraic notation, this is almost international language but not quite, because the letters are based on English piece names. There are ways to do this notation understood in all countries, but this is easier for me and pretty well-known anyway.

So I'll put the moves of my 41st win here, as it is an almost perfect result and has really ticked off a pirate type player more than 250 rating points above me and utterly crushed his ego, humiliating him tremendously and I will bet he even considered breaking his computer or quitting--it happened five hours ago. This guy beat me in the previous game just when I thought I had him.


Ego Destruction Worse Than Regular Sports

Chess is uniquely able to affect the person's ego more than other games, because it is seen as intellectual, so to lose is to be proven a stupid dolt, unless they have better emotional preparation than most actually do. This can result in temper tantrums, and I remember I mentioned how I quit for four years after the Nemesis beat me four and a half years ago.

Excuses Always Are Great to Hear Because of the Ego Thing and the Cover-Ups

By the way, the Nemesis quit in July and says it was 'distracting him from his work too much.'

Tuerckenkriege on Two Fronts
I've been in a tournament that started in August with ten games, and then another one started on schedule the first of September with as many more, plus I already had a few private ones going, and I have been pretty busy fighting it out.

There are three days per move allowed, but you can move immediately if the other guy is online, wherever he or she may be in the world, so I have been fighting two simultaneous Tuerckenkriege at all hours of the day and night, among others, as there is one Turkish guy in each of my two tournaments. One of them is a fast mover, so we are almost done already with that set.

Normally in the tournament there are a certain number of players in a group, it could be four, six, ten, or whatever, who play each other one game as White, one game as Black, as statistics show whoever has White has a first-move advantage. So you do one each as Black and White.

But this September tournament has both games at the same time, instead of back-to-back, so it is a lot of games.

Luckily a week into it I see there are a bunch of fast guys here, so it'll be over probably before the first one is.

In that August one I have moved up to fourth place out of ten for the time being, above several guys better rated.


Break Out Your Chess Sets and Follow Along

This shows a bloody pirate getting humiliated in a bare fourteen moves. He falls from 1705 to 1658 rating, and I move up from 1443 to 1473. He is furious about this, believe me.  The first four moves define the Icelandic Gambit because each one he did what I hoped for, and then in just ten more moves he resigned this afternoon while I was sleeping.

Pirate 1705-1658   v. mekelnborg 1443-1473

1. e4          d5
2. exd5      Nf6
3.c4           e6
4.dxe6       Bxe6              there is the Icelandic Gambit, the rest will vary
5.Nc3        Nc6
6.d3           Bb4
7. Nf3        Qe7
8. d4          0-0-0
9. Bd2        Nxd4
10. Be2      Bxc4
11. Be3      Nxf3+
12. Bxf3     Rxd1+
13. Rxd1    Rxd8+       ouch that was the Queen!
14. b3        Bxe3+
White (pirate) resigned. Kicks dog repeatedly, falls 50 rating points.

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Running Neck and Neck, He's Breaking

Within 2 Bare Rating Points of Mr. Nemesis

The online site where we are playing these chess battles uses a rating system like the famous official federations, who themselves do not like to recognize one another, so likewise unless one pays money to them and jumps through hoops such as to commit to one or the other, these ratings do not count to them. There is FIDE, the PCA, and whatever happened to Bobby Fischer, and who knows what else. Khrgystan probably has other ideas, too. None of them would recognize the online ratings I am talking about.

It would be a fairly easy step to give them the money, if one were so inclined. It buys the right to be official.

But what counts to my Nemesis and I is that we can fight each other.

Four years ago, he beat me 10 out of 10 games in one night and I quit chess altogether. This phase lasted four years, with no chess whatsoever. When sometimes people would bring up the subject, I would at first show complete understanding of every detail and phase of the game, and then when they proposed we play a game, then I would look down at the ground and mumble that, oh, well, I quit. Because my nemesis beat me. Every game. Then I would endure their laughing, but dug in my heels. No.I...I can't...I quit. Sorry.

One month ago he persuaded me to join up to an online chess site, and there he beat me 9 out of 10. I was encouraged by that result. They start you off as an 1100 rating and then it goes up for wins and down for losses according to a certain mathematical formula. You get more for beating someone stronger, less for someone around the same or lower than you. There's a certain online Pool game that uses the same sort of rating system. So losing nine out of ten, my rating quickly fell below 1000, and then drooped as low as 917.

The minimum to be allowed to play in a tournament I had signed up for was 1000, but we were waiting for the tournament places to fill up, so it had not started yet. I began to win more games, and when I did the formula worked more in my favor as when such a low-rated 917 beats a 1463 (my nemesis) the 917 gets more points than the 1463 would, since he would be expected to win most of the time.

I got up to 1159 in time for the tournament start, so I was allowed in. In the first game I very nearly beat the top dog, a Dutch player, who was then a 1716 but now is an 1814. I had a Rook and Pawn advantage in material and was grinding him down, but he was able to trick me and win. I was quite exhausted at the time, and should have seen and prevented what he did.

The next best player is from Scotland and a very cautious player, and in that game I have a Knight advantage over him. It's not over yet because he plays slowly and cautiously. I could tell he made some desperate moves this past week, so I think he is starting to go for broke, still at a material disadvantage.

Then last week going berserk I threw away as many as three of the 23 games against my nemesis just to clear up the docket. It was too much to have 30 games going on at once, and I just wanted them over with, so I moved too fast and blew three of them, ending up losing the 23-game series 13-10 I think, although it is still too difficult to figure out if that is the correct exact final score. Too much else going on.

I threw away my queen in a tournament game after last week's article about not doing that, but had moved when I was tired. Luckily that is against the next weakest player and I may actually be able to survive the tremendous blunder in that one. Maybe.

But the most important development is that last night my surprise system defeated my nemesis in just 12 moves, when he saw I would get his Queen he resigned in just 12 moves.

His spirits are crumbling as I am now down to only ten active games, and he still has about fifty. It was his original idea to have one hundred simultaneous games, so he certainly deserves the strain. He got me into it.
After the defeat last night, I see our ratings are now like this:

Mr. Nemesis:  1395
me:                  1393

He said that if my rating goes above his, he's done.

That means he will quit chess, or so he says. We've come a long way to reach this position.

The game we are now playing is plus or minus 13 points, since our ratings are now almost the same based on dozens of games of results against other rated players. These numbers put us in the 71st percentile of the near 300, 000 players we are compared with. The 1800's in the tournament are not quite good enough to be masters, but they are in the top 7 or so percent of the compared group.

So the one game we are now playing could be enough to break him. Unfortunately I miscalculated an attack on his Queen, so that he was able to get my Light-Square Bishop, which I have just converted to a Knight advantage for him.. so he is ahead in this one. Still, I think I have almost got him ready to break down.

Haaaaaaaa


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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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