Chiv Chat

This and that for your attention this Friday morning.

• We learn from the ECF that Bob Wade's funeral will take place on Tuesday next week (the 16th); 10.15am at Eltham Crematorium, Crown Woods Way, Eltham London SE9 2AZ, with a gathering to follow afterwards nearby at The Jolly Fenman, 64-68 Blackfen Road, Sidcup. All are welcome and more details are here, where there's also an email address to send condolences. I imagine more than a few of our readers will try to attend Bob's funeral to pay their respects.

• I've played two juniors these last couple of weeks - and each game they (with white) played a positional system based on d4 and a kingside fianchetto. Is it just a coincidence, or are kids nowadays trying to play like Kramnik? Certainly my approach to the opening two decades ago was very different: wait for your opponent to castle and go the other side; knights can only move forward, that kind of thing. Just like Kasparov, Tal, Morphy, I supposed, whom I somehow contrived to idolize as heroes of hacking. Which probably explains why said two juniors are commonly refered to as promising, a word never banded around while Chivers was in shorts.

• When a game plunges headlong into some hair-raising theory, the kind Grandmasters have analyzed out to move 30 and Rybka plays at 4100 Elo, I too feel young again - but not in a good way. The best analogy I can think of is that I feel like a toddler playing around with nuclear weapons. And so it was last night when in a nasty Najdorf I stumbled into a line "known to be bad for black from a Fischer game in the 70s", my opponent told me afterwards. Here's the position after 11.Bd5! with myself to move with black: 
• What would you do? My reasoning went as follows. 11... exd5 is clearly bad, and white threatens to play b4. If I stop that with 11...b4 then 12.Bxb7 Nxb7 13.Nd5 (or even just 13.Na4) looks great for white. So I should protect the b7 bishop with my queen. How . . . ? Ah! 11...Qb6 looks like the best bet, because then the slight looseness of the knight on d4 might make it psychologically uncomfortable for white to play the immediately crushing 12.Bxf6 followed by 13.Qh5 (or some version thereof.) And guess what? It worked. My opponent instead played the slightly-less-than-immediately crushing 12.Bxf6 gxf6 13.b4 Nd7 14.Bxe6 and I eventually scrabbled to a draw. He said after that he'd intended Qh5 at some point but forgot about it. I'm pleased - but still, a very talented three year old could probably have done better than me, except they're all playing like Kramnik nowadays.

• TV fans who enjoy watching chess players stereotyped and insulted may, it seems, have an ideal opportunity tonight on the BBC via the Jack Dee comedy Lead Balloon - at least according to John Saunders at the English Chess Forum. That public-service inclusivity we've dared to dream of, at last?

• Finally, we've had nerd points, we've had Nostradamus points, we've had disco points, we've had couch potato points, and today we have Nice Person Points on offer for anyone who can think of a better name for these kinds of posts - the kind where the current writer witters on about whatever's been cluttering up his bricabrac of a consciousness of late. Surely you can beat 'Chiv Chat'? No points for 'Posts no-one reads to the end', which I hope I've just ruled out.