Chess

[GhostofKinski]

They exist.

The ones I meant weren’t unbeatable like Kramer is describing, but very very good.
It’s humbling and a serious ego-check to get beaten by someone who has feces stained clothes.

 

[Corpsey]

football is strictly for morons

chess is where the fans of CAN converge

 

[Corpsey]

In typical corpsey fashion I'm now beginning to worry about this chess addiction I've developed

Yes it's very interesting and enjoyable but it's seriously eating into my proust appreciation time

I begin to think it's just a big waste of time and brains, especially when I watch some of the top players streaming and they seem to be quite blank boring people

That said this is just part of the eternal cycle of corpsey, it wasn't long ago that i was worried that reading proust was just a big waste of time, too

 

[luka]

Try playing ghost of tsushima instead

 

[luka]

 

[luka]

 

[Mr. Tea]

Love the game! Only get to play on my phone these days. Which is insane, if I move the difficulty bar a fraction of a micrometer to the right. I get smashed. The exact same way left, it’s too easy. I miss playing regularly with people.
My kid was in the school chess club for 2 years (? I think) she finished 1st 2x, 2nd once & third 2x, which was thrilling for me because we’d play at least one game every night.
Alas, all her friends that were in the club quit, so she didn’t want to play anymore. They all went to band & now I have to sit through their
Excruciating concerts, lol.
I played a lot with the inmates. It was a great way to pass time. Jail chess is like park hustler chess, all trick moves, pathetic attempts to exert dominance. Real easy to beat them. The exception being in the mental observation houses. Some of those crazies were savants.
I had the privilege of knowing befriending IGM William Lombardy. Bobby Fisher’s lone 2nd. When Spassky had a team including Tal (one of my favorite players). We were quite close for a few years. He was a retired Catholic priest. He was older, lonely. We had him over for thanksgiving Xmas etc.
Taught me some good stuff to work on.
We kind of lost touch when I started working for city & had practically zero leisure time.
I did get to visit him in hospital before he passed & brought him a coffee cup full of his favorite drink, dry gin martini. We had a lot of laughs and I treasure his memory.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by a "trick move"? Does that mean intentionally making an illegal move in the hope your opponent doesn't notice, or what?

 

[GhostofKinski]

Can you elaborate on what you mean by a "trick move"? Does that mean intentionally making an illegal move in the hope your opponent doesn't notice, or what?

I think it was just a lazy way of saying essentially trying the scholars mate and similar sucker moves. Also, they had a habit of slamming the pieces down (like people playing dominoes) while capturing. But yes.
I was beating a chess hustler in Washington Swuare Park and he purposely kept fumbling the pieces during moves by trying to appear clumsy but I’d watched him previously and he doesn’t have any type of condition that would account for it. He would knock your rook off the board and then accuse me replacing it on the wrong square/place it himself with a ‘my bad’ type dismissal adjust by actually moving the pieces where it wasn’t.
I’ve never been rated. Lombardy told me from watching my games in his estimation I was a strong B.

 

[Corpsey]

I watched this live last night. Had no idea what was going on but I understood this was a massive blunder by a chess genius. (And the other guy who is the biggest chess genius of all made a blunder or two too.)

 

[Corpsey]

I think it was just a lazy way of saying essentially trying the scholars mate and similar sucker moves. Also, they had a habit of slamming the pieces down (like people playing dominoes) while capturing. But yes.
I was beating a chess hustler in Washington Swuare Park and he purposely kept fumbling the pieces during moves by trying to appear clumsy but I’d watched him previously and he doesn’t have any type of condition that would account for it. He would knock your rook off the board and then accuse me replacing it on the wrong square/place it himself with a ‘my bad’ type dismissal adjust by actually moving the pieces where it wasn’t.
I’ve never been rated. Lombardy told me from watching my games in his estimation I was a strong B.

Martin Amis wrote a really good article about Bobby Fischer and the scurrilous/seedy side of chess

Winners who are losers

A review by Martin Amis of Searching for Bobby Fischer: The adventures of a father and his brilliantly gifted son in the obsessional world of international chess by Fred Waitzkin, published in the TLS of June 30, 1989

www.the-tls.co.uk

It's behind this paywall which I can't figure out how to remove. But as a chess master you can probably sort it in 10 seconds.

 

[GhostofKinski]

Martin Amis wrote a really good article about Bobby Fischer and the scurrilous/seedy side of chess

Winners who are losers

A review by Martin Amis of Searching for Bobby Fischer: The adventures of a father and his brilliantly gifted son in the obsessional world of international chess by Fred Waitzkin, published in the TLS of June 30, 1989

www.the-tls.co.uk

It's behind this paywall which I can't figure out how to remove. But as a chess master you can probably sort it in 10 seconds.

I don't think a B player is any sort of master, & he told me that @18-20 years ago, i think I might have improved my game initially, but its definitely regressed since back then

 

[william_kent]

you can probably sort it in 10 seconds

longer than 10 seconds - part 1

Earlier this summer I played Nigel Short, the world number three, at what chessers call a charity "simul", or simultaneous display. And I lost. The game was one-sided, and the defeat severe; but I suppose my humiliation was quieter than it might have been against other world number threes--quieter than if, say, I had dared Boris Becker to present himself at the Paddington Sports Club, on Castellain Road, there to face the fury of my rising back-hand slice. Two other grandmasters were in the hall that day and I appealed to them for advice, which they gave freely, and at high speed. This was no help. It was like listening to the road directions of some hypermanic yokel: by the end of the third paragraph you just want to ask whether it's right or left at the end of the street. Young Nigel (he was born in 1965) had about thirty other games to attend to, and at first his visits to my board were relaxingly infrequent; later on, though, as positions simplified, and opponents resigned, he seemed to be constantly presenting me with his round, bespectacled, full-lipped face. This face was not so much ageless as entirely unformed: you felt that it would still light up at the sight of a new chemistry set, or a choc-ice. But somehow his hands bestowed terrible powers on the white pieces. Those linked central pawns of his--oh, what they could do to me. They weren't pawns in the normal sense; they had grown, fattened; they were more like bishops, or rooks. No, they were like queens, I thought, as they worked their way into the very crux of my defence.
Subtitled The adventures of a father and his brilliantly gifted son in the obsessional world of international chess, Searching for Bobby Fischer is a vivid, passionate and disquietening book. Throughout, it runs a light fever of anxious pride and anxious love. As a "chess parent", a journalist, and a sane man, Fred Waitzkin is articulately aware of what he is doing. And what he is doing isn't always pretty. Full of bafflement, doubt, persistent self-reproach and comically vulgar ambition, he continues to preside over his son's distorted boyhood. His wife Bonnie, a moderating influence, "frequently reminded us that there is life after chess"; but Fred Waitzkin never quite admits that, so far as little Josh Waitzkin is concerned, there has been no life before it. In every sport, in every exceptional endeavour, the coaching, caddying parent must gamble a compromised present against an uncertain future. But in no other activity is the gamble so discrepant and extreme. Every player in America is "searching for Bobby Fischer" or his reincarnation, in a millennial quest for a Messiah, a deliverer, another world champ. But where is the old redeemer now, and what is he up to? He is, as Waitzkin will eventually reveal, a corny megalomaniac and flophouse miser, curled up on a bed somewhere in Los Angeles with The Myth of Six Million Dead and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The book hinges on this kind of contrast: the purity and otherworldliness of the game, and the human mess and wreckage that almost always surround it. The contrast happens to be at its wildest in the Waitzkins' home town: "With its dense architecture and crafty manipulations, its subtle attacks, intensity and unexpected explosiveness, chess is like the city" and that city is New York. Little Josh discovered chess in Washington Square Park when he was six years old; he pestered his mother to take him there; "he said he liked the way the chess pieces looked". But did he like the players, and the way they looked? Israel Zilber, an International Master "who reeked of urine and raged at the voices in his head"; Jerry, "a strong A player", also an alcoholic who has gunfights with his wife; or the more typical Vinnie, a master-level player who is "often short of change for a subway token"? They are addicts, hustlers, inveterates, recidivists--geniuses, idiots. This is Hoffmann, who dropped out of Columbia twenty years ago:
The chess-hustling business is bad. It's down
with the economy, and O.T.B. [off-track betting]
and Lotto have hurt. It's not a good game for a
gambler, because chess players are too rational
and conservative. You have to find a true compulsive
who happens to play chess--someone
who's essentially masochistic and enjoys being
humiliated. One of my best customers was a
rabbi.... While I beat him, he cursed and
screamed, begging me to have mercy on him. I'd
tell him, "What a fish you are. I'm gonna crush
you." I took a lot of money from him. Unfortunately,
he's dead now.

 

[william_kent]

part 2

Even when you begin to move up the professional scale, the contrast remains sharp. Josh's chess tutor, Bruce Pandolfini, is manager of the Manhattan Chess Club, which sounds quite grand until you glimpse him scrubbing its one toilet. Major congregations of chess talent take place in sorrowful front rooms over pizza parlours, with stained walls, torn rugs and "electrical wires dangling from holes in the ceiling". Even at the best tournaments "the players are a ragtag group, sweaty, gloomy, badly dressed, gulping down fast food, defeated in some fundamental way". And there is no companionship; there is no human curiosity. The chess freaks will occasionally mutter a few words about giving up the game and doing something different with their lives, "which is reasonable, considering that even the most brilliant are impoverished". Apart from that, it's just the wooden pieces, and the sixty-four squares.
This is the American way: chess on the free market, with the genius as bum. Early on in the book Fred takes Josh to Moscow for the Karpov/Kasparov World Championship. Before they go, Waitzkin talks to a Soviet defector who is keen to locate the dissident chess champion Boris Gulko:
You'll need to contact a man I know who is a
well-known grandmaster, an expert in the endgame.
He is also a KGB agent, but don't worry,
he is totally corrupt. The first day you meet him,
give him a present worth fifteen or twenty dollars--a
digital watch, maybe.... He will suggest dinner.
During this meal present him with pornographic
books and magazines: then the chances
are he will arrange for you to meet Gulko.

And we duly experience the Soviet version: politicking, match-fixing, drug-taking and institutionalized antisemitism--chess on steroids, with a gun at the player's temple. In the United States, a former national champion may be jobless and sleeping rough; in the Soviet Union you can watch him being singled out in the street and beaten up by the police. Normally one's instinct would be to blame the society for these characteristic injustices. After Searching for Bobby Fischer, though, one is more inclined to blame the game. Why is it that nearly every major chess event is a chaos of scandal, venality and hysteria? As David Spanier pointed out in Total Chess, only outsiders are surprised by such tawdriness. Real players know that this is the way chess is.
Dutifully, without the least hope of success, Waitzkin finally undertakes a literal search for Bobby Fischer, the man who brought chess to America and then, it seemed, "took it away". He doesn't find him, but he brings back a haunting silhouette of the "strongest" player who ever lived. For a while Fischer looks like the classic idiot savant. This is from Brad Darrach's biography:
When he loses interest in a line of thought, his
legs may simply give out, and he will shuffle off
to bed like an old man. Once, when I asked him
a question while he was eating, his circuits got so
befuddled that he jabbed his fork into his cheek.

In a variety of disguises Fischer moves through LA's Skid Row, "from one grungy hotel to the next", usually registering as "Mr James". He gets a discount at the local antisemitic bookstore, so valued is his custom there. Not long ago he had all his fillings removed; he didn't want anything artificial in his head, in case he picked up radio transmissions. We only need a figure like Mick Jagger in here to complete the miserable pentagram of modern paranoia, with its fantasy electronics, media flotsam and sniggering blood libels.
It is quite a road that young Josh is walking; and Josh is the book's hero, a humorous, endearing and honourable little boy. When he plays, his face "becomes serene" and "he doesn't look like a seven year old". He calls out chess moves in his sleep, and plucks at his hair, making a small bald patch. He conducts himself with certainty among the ragged putzes and patzers, the blitzers and kibitzers. When Josh loses, Fred confesses that he finds it difficult to embrace his son, and notices an extra distance between them as they walk down the street. And yet their shared intensity is in some way enviable. You feel the poeticism is earned when Waitzkin recalls his fishing trips with his brother and father:
While we pulled in our fish, he stood behind us
and rooted like any little league father, as if we
were accomplishing life's great deeds. Sometimes
I fell as if I were reeling in his love.

The matter of antisemitism runs through the hook like a recurrent illness. As I read Searching for Bobby Fischer my own little boys were, as usual, marching or creeping round the house, both armed to the teeth. It has often occurred to me that I could very easily turn them into antisemites, into stout little Nazis. Of course, I have little heart for the project. Certainly it would be far more time-consuming to turn them into chess prodigies. One's reluctance, in the latter case, is not equivalent but it is comparable. Chess genius lives, or windmills its arms, on the outer run of sanity, as Nabokov knew; but Luzhin's confusions in The Defence (1929) already seem romantically antique. In More Die of Heartbreak, another book about a "pure" scientist, Saul Bellow writes: "Crazies are always contemporary, as sandpipers always run ahead of the foam line on beaches". This is one chess combination mental imbalance, in the contemporary setting--that can only become more and more unlovely. It has taken an exceptionally candid book to remind us that chess is beautiful, and to confirm the hidden or buried suspicion that it is also, somehow, unclean.
A review by Martin Amis of Searching for Bobby Fischer: The adventures of a father and his brilliantly gifted son in the obsessional world of international chess by Fred Waitzkin, published in the TLS of June 30, 1989.

 

[GhostofKinski]

Pandolfini was a perennial at the Marshall chess club, but it is in Manhattan.

 

[Corpsey]

Thanks @william_kent

This is the bit that sprung to mind

"Little Josh discovered chess in Washington Square Park when he was six years old; he pestered his mother to take him there; "he said he liked the way the chess pieces looked". But did he like the players, and the way they looked? Israel Zilber, an International Master "who reeked of urine and raged at the voices in his head"; Jerry, "a strong A player", also an alcoholic who has gunfights with his wife; or the more typical Vinnie, a master-level player who is "often short of change for a subway token"? They are addicts, hustlers, inveterates, recidivists--geniuses, idiots."

He then wrote that piece later about Kasparov in which he observes chess becoming more respectable

Not sure what it's like nowadays but you look at Magnus Carlsen he seems totally down-to-earth (if arrogant), I'm not sure if it has the same sense of mystery and aura that it used to. Perhaps another example of the internet sheening up and blanding out everything it touches.

 

[GhostofKinski]

Thanks @william_kent

This is the bit that sprung to mind

"Little Josh discovered chess in Washington Square Park when he was six years old; he pestered his mother to take him there; "he said he liked the way the chess pieces looked". But did he like the players, and the way they looked? Israel Zilber, an International Master "who reeked of urine and raged at the voices in his head"; Jerry, "a strong A player", also an alcoholic who has gunfights with his wife; or the more typical Vinnie, a master-level player who is "often short of change for a subway token"? They are addicts, hustlers, inveterates, recidivists--geniuses, idiots."

He then wrote that piece later about Kasparov in which he observes chess becoming more respectable

Not sure what it's like nowadays but you look at Magnus Carlsen he seems totally down-to-earth (if arrogant), I'm not sure if it has the same sense of mystery and aura that it used to. Perhaps another example of the internet sheening up and blanding out everything it touches.

Alexander Alekhine reportedly played/won multiple high-level match's against world class players so drunk he would piss his pants during games.

 

[Corpsey]

this is too much

i liked the one where he just killed about 3 guys

itt would be a really bad game but i often think red dead redemption you should only kill about maximum 20 people throughout the whole thing

 

[Corpsey]

 

[Corpsey]

 

[Murphy]

141? Enjoy the ride!

Nah, you could pick easy wins with 4-5 move queen/bishop checkmates, have a run at those. Also people unintentionally boxing their own in castled king in behind a few pawns - keep a rook back “just minding my own business nothing going on here” etc and then when a flank opens = bang