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“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
- Albert Camus, who is apparently very intent on thrusting me into an existentialist meta-crisis. Rough times, what with a part of my life flying back across the Pacific for good. I guess I’ll find out firsthand whether focus or intoxication is a better coping mechanism. 
I’ve told more disgusting insensitive holocaust jokes than there are survivors left on this planet. (Source: hawlaitsjordan, via thedirtycooperative)
Basic black repertoire
If you actually feel like following the lines, but don’t read algebraic notation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_notation_(chess) Against 1. e4, I’ve started playing the Accelerated Dragon variation of the Sicilian defense (1 …c5 2 …g6 3 …Bg7) instead of the shy Caro-Kann that I had been playing earlier. So far I’m satisfied with the switch, the dragon is giving me quite a few queenside attacking chances. Still haven’t developed a solid aggressive system against 1. d4 besides the Budapest gambit, which goes A simple analysis of the resulting position would, in my opinion, favor black for a couple reasons. First, black WILL recapture the gambit pawn even if white defends with the queen by castling and then moving Rfe8. Furthermore, after something like Reading Sandman by Neil Gaiman has made me realize that it’s a truly wonderful thing to have jewels of story to consider in the quiet in-between moments of both day and night. Once this chapter of my life concludes in several weeks, I imagine I’ll have more in-between moments than ever that will need to filled with dreams dark and unique enough to distract me. Fiction and creation.
Placed 8th in a Chesscube Warzone!
160 player tournament, half an hour of continuous 2 minute games. Super juiced right now because I placed due to a seven game in a row win streak, half of which were over players higher rated than me. Watching bullet chess experts such as Kingscrusher and Shahade has just given me an affinity for delectably sacrificial mating attacks. But I mean, this result isn’t immensely impressive since my rating is just 1500-1600 right now. 1800 by the end of the summer!
And tied for first place
My two favorite states of mind. Happy intoxication and furious sobriety.
Last day of break
Learning age of empires hotkeys, doing engine analysis on a chess game I shouldn’t have won, and getting back into fitocracy. Nerding the fuck out can make any day feel productive.
Serious study begins.
Finally I’ve taken my exploration of chess beyond puzzles and duels floating through cyberspace. Bought Silman’s Complete Endgame Course and Reinfeld’s 1001 Winning Chess Sacrifices and Combinations, and I’ve started to make my way through both of them. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to make team meetings in almost a month due to midterms, but that will absolutely change after spring break. I’ve become increasingly interested in attending my first tournament. The Mechanics Club in San Francisco is having one this Saturday, but I have my doubts about going. I think I may have to be USCF registered as a prerequisite to attending. More importantly, I think that despite having completed one and a half thousand tactics puzzles and over 250 full games in the last several months, I have several glaring weaknesses that would prevent success at a tournament right around the corner. My disproportionate focus on tactics has rapidly dropped the rate at which I make game-losing blunders, but it’s come at the expense of further positional understanding. When playing black in closed d4 systems such as virtually all resulting variations of the Queen’s Gambit, I have little to no idea as to how I should play (besides attempting some sort of pawn break). More importantly, I have almost no endgame experience, which I fear could lead to me blundering away a potential victory or draw even if I secure it through a tactical middle game. Ah well. If the administrators of the tournament get back to me favorably within the next day about my request to play without being USCF registered, perhaps I will compete this weekend. If not, I have 3 weeks to try and at least become a more effective endgame player.
brownwitty Asked:
Can every chess post be a double entendre for something extremely sexual? All I know is you're going to want to be careful where you put that rook. Challenge accepted.
An actual purpose for this blog.
I’ve decided to turn this into a pure chess blog. What I write doesn’t actually elicit responses from my followers, which I quite like because without the expectation or desire to satisfy some illusory reader base I can just write what I enjoy. So; Ben Chang and Eric Brown - hopefully you’ll continue reading and can provide feedback or questions. If anyone else is interested at all, that would be very cool. Like all chess writing, I’m going to be using algebraic notation; conceiving of the chess board as an 8 x 8 grid, with letters a through h on the horizontal axis and 1 through 8 on the vertical axis. HOWEVER, this post has lead to an incredibly anti-climactic conclusion. I don’t actually have a post about a chess topic ready yet, but I’m researching the Homo Erectus variation of the Caro-Kann defense and will be writing on that over the weekend. These links are just for my own reference.
http://www.danamackenzie.com/caro2.htm http://www.danamackenzie.com/caro3.htm http://www.kenilworthchessclub.org/games/java/2007/caro-adv-h4.htm
Quiet end to the school week.
Learning the basics of the Caro-Kann defense ( 1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5) and working on a problem set for one of my three econ classes. Feeling a very relaxing rhythm to life that hopefully will continue for the next several months.
I’m blown away. This is so horrible. (via loveyourchaos) |
