Tribute act

Jonathan was talking about Walter Browne on Monday. Ray's written about him a few times recently, including a Times column two weeks ago today.

It includes notes "based on", to use Ray's phrase, notes by Browne himself.

"Based on", they certainly are.

Especially if "based on" means "borrowing somebody else's text and changing round a few words here and there".

Fighting to the end

Black to play

Ljubojevic - Browne, Amsterdam 1972

My first encounter with Browne came in 1983 at the players’ meeting before a televised tournament in Bath. The organisers explained that due to the strict time limit (2 hours for all moves), players were expected to act as gentlemen and and not try to win dead equal positions on time. “Can you define gentleman?” shot back Walter, peeved that his desire to win from any position might be curbed. 

Ian Rogers: Painting the Town Browne

By the time you read this I’ll be about halfway through the tournament in Sitges. To put mildly, I do not expect to be amongst the leaders by this point.

There’s a lot written about how the differences between the sort of people who do end up leading the field in European Opens and people like me who do not. They are better of chess, of course, but how are they better?

One of the things to which amateur chessers could pay much more attention should we genuinely wish to improve, is that the strongest players simply try harder. I’m sure we can all think of an exception to the rule, but by an large the higher the elo, the harder they are to beat and the longer they try to win.

As Jacob Aagaard put it in his essay Danes Eat Fish for Breakfast - part of Quality Chess’s Grandmaster versus Amateur collection,

Probably the most important attribute for a grandmaster is his tenacity. If he wants to win a game, he will fight until there are only kings left on the board, Even if he has a bad day and spoils the advantage in the opening and fails to make progress from his slight advantage in the middlegame, he will press on until there is no hope left. This is partly because grandmasters are stubborn, a quality which is invaluable in the hunt for the title, and partly because they know that this attitude brings result more often than their amateur opponents expect.

Danny Gormally has something similar to say in Play Like the Pros.

Black to play and win

Walter Browne was famous - or do I mean notorious - for his will to win. He might have wanted to  secure a full point from any position, as Rogers put it, but today’s is one that got away. Clearly Browne would have found the solution had he been looking for it. He must have already mentally given up the game as drawn. It’s not, though. Not even for a gentleman.

Anyhoo, whether I’m successful or not in playing and playing until I get a Sitges king and pawn endgame I’ll let you know next week.

King and pawn Index

Daddendum 3

Couldn't resist running with this. 

Last Tuesday, in his comment on Daddendum 2 (which was a postscript to Daddendum the Friday before - itself a late addition to the Asylum series), Matt Fletcher wondered whether The Child in Dadd's painting looked like Russian Ukrainian (oops; my unfortunate error; sorry - see comments) GM Ruslan Ponomariov. 

Uncanny. 

That was after Mr Hogg reckoned that The Governess (for want of a better moniker) had something of the Karpov about him/her. 

 The Governess in 1857                           The Karpov in 1974

And who am I to disagree.

Just Barely Got Something to do with chess XIII

"Abu Taubah took pictures of his cat and of the food he liked"

But why had Taubah (Arabic for "repentance") chosen the path of jihad as a response to injustice? And weren't Isis committing injustices too? Soon I would question him about this. But first, I wanted to know about his past. 

Half in jest, I probed him based on what I knew about the profiles of some jihadis: "Let me guess… in your pre-Islam life, you were in a gang of some sort, took drugs and went to jail?" He replied with "no comment". 

He was only prepared to reveal that his past was "bad" and that he looked on the bright side now: "When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade." 

Taubah gradually began to open up more, telling me he went to university in the UK, enjoyed Muay Thai, playing chess and once had a dog. He said his family didn't understand him, but he loved them and missed them - the Nigerian side (he never knew the Irish side). 

In Syria, he cooked meals with his friends, adopted a cat and liked the "halal partying" on Eid, which meant "eating food and having fun with the ikhwan [brothers]". Taubah even learned to speak Arabic by mixing with the other fighters. He told me there were many foreign fighters living with their families in Raqqa, where it was "easier not to sin". 

Despite his online persona, I wasn't sure if Taubah actually engaged in combat. When I asked what job he did for Isis, he vaguely told me: "We work for Allah in the day and rest at night." He said he couldn't reveal details for security reasons, nor did he want to jeopardise his family in any way. But I wondered if his withholding information might also have been because he planned to return home. 

As well as bombarding me with jihadi literature, Taubah also asked questions like "how many countries have you travelled to?" and "what's the most horrific thing you've seen?" 

... to do with chess Index 

Just Barely Got Something to do with chess XII

Recon Marines will proudly tell you that if you look up their official Military Occupational Speciality in a Marine Corp manual, their job title is listed as "Reconnaissance Man." Theirs is one of the few remaining fields in the military closed to women. For many, becoming a Recon Marine represents one of the last all-male adventures left in America. Among them, few virtues are celebrated more than being hard - having stronger muscles, being a better fighter, being more able to withstand pain and privation. They refer to extra comforts - foam sleeping pads, sweaters, even cold medicine as "snivel gear," and relentlessly mock those who bring it as pussies.

Nor do the men have any CD or DVD players, Game Boys or any similar entertainment devices. They were forbidden to bring such distracting items to the Middle East. They are young Americans unplugged. Their only entertainment is talking, reading and playing cards or chess. There’s a chess board set up in the centre of the tent, where a company tournament has been going on for six weeks now.

At night they fight constantly. They judo-flip each other headfirst into the plywood floor of the tent. They strong-arm their buddies not headlocks and punch bruises not each other’s ribs. They lie in wait for one another in the shadows and leap out swinging Ka-Bar knives, flecking their buddies’ rib cages with little nicks from the knife tips, or dragging their blades lightly across a victim’s throat, playfully simulating a clean kill. They do it to keep each other in shape; they do it for fun; they do it to establish dominance.

... to do with chess Index

Daddendum 2

Just a quick postscript to Daddendum.

Regular S&B Chess Blog reader and fellow chess-art iconographer David Roberts has just been in touch. Using his skills in digital picture recovery (something he does in the course of his professional work), David has built on the traces of colour in the Tate's reproduction of The Child's Problem and re-created for us how it may have looked originally.

Before, and...

...after David's manipulation 

As Dadd expert Nick Tromans (see Daddendum), to whom we showed the enhancement, aptly remarked: "Sad to see what we are missing."

Stunning. Thanks David.

In view of the comments below, please see Daddendum 3

Asylum Index    

Build Up Your King and Pawn Endings

White to play

Position 4.8 from Artur Yusupov’s Build Up Your Chess: The Fundamentals

Hooray for me. Last week I was able to pick up a book aimed at sub-1500 chessers and solve at a glance every puzzle the author set in a chapter on king and pawn endings. Yes I am genuinely chuffed about that.

The book in questions was Yusupov’s Build Up Your Chess: The Fundamentals. The first in a 9-volume course, it is - according to our friend Artur - aimed at people with elos several hundred points less than mine. To which I can only say, "Bloody hell, are you having a laugh, Art?" Easy it is not.

If I’d have started out with this book and course when I was a beginner I’d be master standard by now at least. Or I would have quit chess forever after a couple of weeks. One or the other.

The truth is, I didn’t even actually get all the puzzles straightaway either There was one - you can find it at the head of today's blog - that took me a few minutes.

I did get there in the end, but this is the first of three books aimed at people I’m supposed to be much better than already. What are the last three aimed at people with much higher elos than mine going to be like? Maybe one day I’ll find out. For now, I’m happy enough to have nailed all the puzzles in chapter 4 of book one. 

King and pawn Index

Daddendum

A few years ago, back in 2011, the Blog belatedly stumbled on a rather unusual chess painting that was to become the launching pad for a series investigating chess and chess players in Bedlam, and the later Broadmoor (as it became), Asylums. It was Richard Dadd's The Child's Problem, then on view in an exhibition on the art of watercolour painting at Tate Britain. 

Now the painting may be seen again, in an exhibition devoted solely to Dadd's art, at the excellent Watts Gallery near Guildford in Surrey until November. As it is not on everybody's doorstep (though Surrey chessers have no excuse...) it is reproduced below. Its reappearance gives us the opportunity to investigate anew this rather odd piece of work, and add a few more comments to extend our analysis of 2011 (for which, see the Dadd series listed in our Asylum Index).    

Seeing it again at the Watts, in rather better conditions than at the Tate, is a real pleasure. Here you can really appreciate the painting's miniscule and puzzling detail - at 17 cms by 25 or so, it is about half-way between A5 and A4.        

The Child's Problem (1857) Richard Dadd (1817-1886)
Watercolour and Graphite on paper (171 x 254 mm)
The Tate Gallery
(Click on to enlarge)

I was fortunate enough, a few weeks ago, to catch a talk by the Watts Gallery's Director, Nicholas Tromans, on Dadd's art - he has written an authoritative work on the artist. He was joined by Victoria Northwood, Curator of the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, in Beckenham - also worth a visit - who talked rather more about the history of the asylum itself. I subsequently took the opportunity to swap emails with Nick Tromans, and the results are discussed below. But first a recap.

Forbidden Planet

Ever come across Forbidden Planet?

No, not that one. This one.

Calculation Simplification

White to play and win

Prokes 1937

Last week (Readers’ Hour) I mentioned that I was looking at pawn endings as a way to practice calculation. I thought - and still think - that it’s a good way to polish your skills in this area of the game. You do have to understand why you’re doing it, though.

Past imperfect III

In the last posting we were discussing the impact of the building of the Berlin Wall on various international chess tournaments that were due to take place that year and the next: mainly the Women's Olympiad, which was cancelled, but also making reference to the Interzonal, which took place not in Amsterdam, as planned, in 1961, but in Stockholm the next year.

Not everything was cancelled, though. Of three major events that were expected, as late as August, to take place¹

BCM August 1961, page 225

one did survive.

When I noticed that this event had, in fact, taken place my first assumption was that maybe it didn't include any East German competitors, since I'd seen the crosstable from a previous tournament, the one held in 1957, and it hadn't been enormous. But this was not the case: if we look at the results

Kažić, BM, International Championship Chess: a complete record of FIDE events. Batsford, 1974, pages 275-6

we can see that there was, in fact, a competitor from the GDR.

How curious.

Past imperfect II

So where were we? We'd been trying to reconcile Brigitta Sinka's memory of a boycotted Women's Olympiad in 1960, with the apparent fact that no such Olympiad had ever taken place, and discovered that an Olympiad had been planned for 1961, but apparently called off at the last minute since East German players were not granted visas. This in turn seemed to be connected to the creation of the Berlin Wall, which began in August of that year.

The idea was to try and get some contemporary account of the cancellation, for the purposes, as much as anything else, of clarifying the whys and wherefores: trying to establish, as my inner history graduate would like, what exactly happened and when.

Last week a commentor offered us this:

Now here's the British Chess Magazine from October 1961. (Thanks to Richard James for images.)

Readers’ Hour

Black to play

Sigfusson - Polgar, J. Reykjavik 1988

Not long until Sitges. In fact on this day in two weeks’ time I’ll be in Spain. Assuming, that is, I do in fact make it out of Stansted which is not exactly a given.

To be honest, I don’t feel prepared for this tournament. Not unprepared in a 'don’t know what openings to play' kind of a way. More, not ready in the same sense that you might not be entirely confident of finishing a marathon if your training programme had been six months of sitting on the sofa eating mini-cheddars.

Zero sum game

Poor old Georg Meier.

Having lost a winning position against Caruana on Tuesday afternoon, he'd been holding reasonably firm against Kramnik on Wednesday when in the position above he played 50. Ke2?? (50. Ne3, safeguarding c2, seems to be correct) possibly under the impression that after 50...Rc2+ Black wouldn't have time to pick up the a2 pawn, since his f6 knight would now be hanging.

Regrettably this was not so and after 51. Ke3 Rxa2, since 52. Qxf6 runs into 52...Qf4+ or Qc1+, he tried to cover both squares with 52. Qc4 - but then 52...Qb7 threatened to put the liberated knight on d5, where it duly arrived with a bang and a terminal check. Exit Georg to spend the rest day pondering on the point and a half, against world-class players, that he'd managed to turn into none.

But what about that Vladmir Kramnik, eh? Nobody in the world more dangerous when the computer says 0.00. Nobody. Not even Magnus Carlsen.

Past imperfect

It looks like Brigitta Sinka did it: topped, last weekend, Capablanca's total number of games played in simultaneous exhibitions. Congratulations to her.

Meanwhile, in less important news, we were asking last week about the Women's Olympiad of 1960, for which Ms Sinka remembered having been selected, but in vain due to Hungary joining a boycott. This was confusing because no record could be found, on the internet, of a Women's Olympiad in that year, or indeed of any Eastern Bloc boycott around that time

However, a commentor provided us with information suggesting that Ms Sinka's memory was not as fallible as it first seemed, there had been an Olympiad planned, albeit for 1961 rather than 1960, but it hadn't taken place. The precise reasons for that appeared to involve the East German team being denied visas, rather than being disqualified as such, but that's a fine distinction. Other details remain to be established.

Here's what we got so far, much of it supplied by Matt Fletcher on Twitter. (There's also a Forum thread here from which I reproduce some material.)

"A strong chess player"

Thomas Powers, writing in the London Review of Books, last issue but one:

I was in Mitchell’s apartment once or twice – something to do with Christmas – but just about all our conversations took place in the street or in the lobby of 44, where I often came and went around drink time on a visit to one of Barbara’s friends, Ruth Tremain, who had taught maths to Army Air Corps pilots at Yale during the war. She was a strong chess player and we played often while I was writing a piece about Bobby Fischer. Because I had married Candace, on whom Ruth doted, she let me win a few games, but that didn’t last long.

Prior to reading Powers' article I knew nothing of any Ruth Tremain, but given that a Google search for "ruth tremain" chess returns only a link to the piece referred to above, is it likely that she was in fact "a strong chess player"?

Sousse

White to play

Larsen - Reshevsky, Sousse Interzonal 1967

Some places have stopped being just places to me. That is to say, there are towns and cities with names that are no longer just names. They come with numbers attached.

Say "Reykjavik" to me - like most if not all readers of this blog, I suspect - and it rings the Pavlovian bell marked "1972". The same is true of many World Championship matches (Baguio 1978; Buenos Aires 1927), Olympiads (Lugano 1968; Thessaloniki 1988), Candidates' Matches (Denver 1971; Belgrade 1977/78) and tournaments (Hastings 1895, New York 1924), those quoted being but a handful of dozens which spring to mind. Some are famous (Zurich 1953), some I don't have the faintest clue what went on  (Ostend 1907), but I know that something did.

Places aren’t just places for me any more.  They’re locations of chess events.

13 a3

Fischer - Myagmarsuren, Sousse Interzonal 1967

Sousse is a bit different. It comes with a number and another word: Interzonal. I can’t hear or read "Sousse" any more without mentally adding "Interzonal 1967" at the end.

Fischer dropping out, going back and then quitting for good - but playing that game in the King’s Indian Attack against Myagmarsuren before he legged. The tournament may have taken place a year before I was born, but these are the things that come to mind when I hear or read of Sousse. Not that I did hear about the town very often before Friday.

White to play

It seems there was only one king and pawn ending at the Sousse Interzonal. It lasted precisely one and a half moves.

It's not tremendously difficult to evaluate the consequences of trading down. Not even for an average club chesser. I assume, therefore, that the pawn ending only happened at all because Reshevsky was in zeitnot as usual and that it was only on reaching the control after

59 Bxc4 bxc4, 60 Kxc4 Kc6, 61 Kd4

that he found he had time enough to resign.

Sousse? No.

Sousse Interzonal 1967. That’s how it’s been and - some twat with a rifle or otherwise - that’s how it’s going to stay.

King and pawn Index

With thanks to Angus

Consecutive simultaneous

Brigitta Sinka isn't the only person giving a simultaneous this weekend. Just as he did last year, Jonathan Rowson is doing the same, in Fulham, and S&B blog readers are invited to turn up and play.

It's to raise funds for Brandlehow Primary School, which Jonathan's son attends, and it runs from 11 am to 2 pm. First come first served, though even if all boards are filled Jonathan expects (or hopes) to beat some juniors quickly enough to free some up.

It's five quid a throw for adults, three for kids and "further donations encouraged from those who can afford it". Cupcakes will be available at four for a pound.

Nearest Tube East Putney (District Line) and nearest overground Putney. If you're in London tomorrow, why not give it a go?

Gone missing

Who's Brigitta Sinka? I confess I'd never heard of her until, on my way home from holiday on Tuesday, I picked up a copy of MARCA, Spain's best-selling sports daily. To my surprise, the back page was full of chess, headed by a photo of the aforementioned Brigitta Sinka.

It transpires that Ms Sinka is hoping very shortly to overhaul the world record of 13545 games played in simultaneous displays, a record held by Capablanca, of whom I had previously heard.

This impresses the hellout of me, not leat because the one time I've given a simul, at which time I was approximately half the age Ms Sinka is now, I nearly died of backache.

So, best of luck to Ms Sinka in overhauling Capa's record. There was one odd thing, though, about the story, that puzzled me. What's this about?

Lack of practice makes imperfect

I'm actually playing a tournament next month. First time I've played proper chess since last year's British Championships. That's just a week shy of a full year between serious games.

I stopped playing regular chess a few years ago, for a variety of reasons which I won't bother going through here, but while I'm reasonably sure that playing less chess is good for you, it's not quite so good for the standard of your chess. Maybe less so when you're younger - I had a six-year break from serious OTB after 1983, and didn't play noticeably worse when I picked up the thread in 1989 - but when you're fifty it doesn't work like that. Bits go missing. Bits would probably go missing anyway, I know, but without regular practice they go missing all the faster.

I should have spotted this as a problem when [WARNING: A LOT OF BAD CHESS AHEAD] I played Chris Duncan in Penarth in 2012 and the game kicked off like so: 1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6 4. Nc3 dxc4 5. a4 Bf5 6. Nh4 e6 7. Nxf5 exf5 8. e3 Bb4 9. Bxc4. Now, without thinking too much about it, or perhaps without thinking at all, I played 9...Nbd7

which is the kind of error that makes you wonder why you bothered turning up at the board in the first place.

Magnus Carlsen vs Wili Schlage

White to play

Schlage - Ahues, Berlin 1921

So he’s on the way back. Carlsen’s win over Grischuk yesterday wasn’t the most convincing game he's played but I’m sure he’ll give not the slightest of shits about that. This was a case of any win will do. The =1 -3 he’d achieved after four games, with even the draw against Giri feeling more like a half-point lost than a half-point gained, causing uppity bloggers everywhere to ask, "Is this the worst start to a tournament from a World Champion in living memory?"

It’s harsh to have everybody talking about your failures when you’ve achieved so much, but them’s the breaks, I suppose. Still, if there’s a chessical afterlife I suspect there’s a guy who pegged it 75 years ago looking down on events in Norway and sympathising with the Champ.

Chess in Art Postscript: Flirty Glancing, Another Peep

This is the second post of two analysing that chess-in-art which employs a telling look passing between a lady and a gentleman. Last time we inspected A Game of Chess and A Hopeless Case by George Goodwin Kilburne (1839-1924), and pondered the relationship between the two players depicted, and the two paintings themselves. Here is an amusing, if anonymous and undated, pendant.

Playing Chess
European School

Cast your mind back to last time, and compare and contrast.

Probably Got Nothing to do with chess XIII

Professor Hayden Zalapek is long-dead to the world, a name forgotten by all who know him. Only as his daughter is dying is he summoned back from his half-life, and brought face-to-face with the grandson he doesn't know.

Or so it says here.

... to do with chess Index

Oops

White to play and obtain a lost king and pawn ending

Anand - Carlsen, Norway blitz, June 2015

I know he’s a good general, but is he lucky?

Napoleon, apparently

King and pawn Index

Fifty

Kotov, A, Alexander Alekhine, Batsford, 1975, page 187. (Translation Ken Neat.)

Maybe. For what it's worth my computer doesn't consider the energetic 13...f5 as any better than the move Capablanca played: White just runs the h-pawn forward and then rolls over Black wherever he tries to hide his king.

The player of the White pieces, as you'll have gathered from the clipping, was Alexander Alekhine. The game was played at AVRO 1938 and was the last occasion on which the players were opponents. Capablanca was badly out of sorts over the board: the game was only the second that he ever lost on time. It didn't help that he was quite badly out of sorts physically during the second half of the tournament. Nor did it help that, as Kotov observes, he played this game on the day of his fiftieth birthday.

Chess in Art Postscript: Flirty Glancing

Thanks go to Jonathan B for alerting me some weeks ago to this nice bit of Chess in Art then doing the rounds on Twitter. It is also viewable on this excellent Chess in Art site, which tells us who created it - George Goodwin Kilburne (1839-1924)...

...though not precisely when, nor its size; and, although it must have been painted in the late 19th or early 20th Centuries, the scene depicted is earlier, probably around the 1820s (thanks go to my Every Picture Tells A Story colleague Richard Tillett for this assessment).

My curiosity, like that of the young lady, now aroused (and perhaps the young gentleman, in some part too, as we may see below), a couple of Chess in Art Postscripts ensue. They explore that small sample of chess-in-art wherein someone isn't looking where they ought. One other self-imposed criterion for this selection is that there must be two figures in the picture, one male and one female, and two figures only. If you were to go with the thematic classification of chess art set out by Yves Marek in his magisterial Art Échecs et Mat (2008) (discussed here, et seq), you might file them under Érotisme. And on that note, a warning for readers of a nervous disposition: this post contains adult material.

Embarrassment

Obviously it has been overshadowed by the recent and entertaining arrests among the upper echelons of FIFA, but if you follow chess news you'll know by now that there are very serious allegations being made about the Bulgarian Chess Federation. There's a lot of detail, but to cut a longish story shortish I can't really do better than refer you to the summary in Peter Doggers' chess.com report: basically that excessive sums have been claimed under false pretences and then paid into an account in Slovenia which is unknown to the European Chess Union - but which is controlled by a similarly-named entity registered in Delaware.

These allegations represent (to use Chessdom's phrase) "deep trouble" for the president of the Bulgarian Chess Federation and for the president of the European Chess Union in the period to which the allegations relate. Both presidents are the same individual, one Silvio Danailov.

Of course these allegations, although being investigated by Bulgarian prosecutors, remain unproven in any court and the current leadership of the European Chess Union, which is pursuing the allegations, is in the hands of Mr Danailov's enemies.* Nevertheless they represent a serious embarrassment for Mr Danailov.

They also represent a serious embarrassment for the English Chess Federation, which voted heavily to support Mr Danailov when he stood for a second term as President in 2014.

History lesson

From ejh, 7 June 2015:

Dear EdExcel

I am a history graduate who writes for a British chess blog and I was naturally interested in the prominence of chess on your GCSE specification. In particular this passage* caught my eye:

Chess has been played throughout the world for over 1,500 years. It was played by many of the famous characters in our History specification including William the Conqueror, King John, Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I.

I wondered: what is your reason in each case for stating confidently that these four monarchs all played chess?

Yours

Chess Today

White to play

Houska - Berry, 4NCL 2015

I like Chess Today. In fact I like it enough to more or less forgive it for having become Chess a Few Weeks Ago, some time back.

It’s certainly no fun reading news of Carlsen’s World Championship win after the kind of delay that you would consider a bit poor even for a print magazine. On the upside, there’s plenty of material that’s not time-sensitive and CT chief Alex Baburin seems to be catching up a bit now. The puzzle at the head of today’s blog arrived in my inbox last Friday in what was nominally CT's 11th of May edition. Hopefully we’ll be level pegging in the not too distant future.

Anyhoo, today’s position. White to play. Houska went 32 a4, ended up here five moves later

White to play

at which point she is, according to Chess Today, absolutely lost.

That White is going down seems entirely plausible. Outside Passed Pawns and all that. What’s less obvious - at least to me - is that White has a win in our starting position.

King and pawn Index

Going on a bit too long

Jaws is 40 years old this month. It’s a film that is - according to Mark Kermode - "One of the truly great and lasting classics of American cinema."  It’s a film that is - according to me - too long. It’s a great film, sure, but I’ve got a thing about the length of films.

Most movies - as the younger folk apparently now say - should be about 1 hour 40 minutes long. 1 hour 50 minutes at a push. Two hours is testing my patience. More than two hours is, in nearly every case, a director not doing his or her job.

Jaws lasts a touch over 120 minutes. Spielberg should have binned around 15 of them. Not 15 in a row, but shave a bit off here, lose a scene there and end up cutting around a quarter of an hour from the running time before the Orca leaves out of the harbour taking Quint, Hooper and Brody to their appointment with the Toothy One.

Before you start thinking this is a Probably Got Nothing … post, I’d better explain what going on too long has … to do with chess.

My chess season finished last Monday at 4:30pm. A strange time for a league game to conclude, but that is how it was. It was an unfinished game from a week and a half before. My opponent emailed me at 9:30 on the morning that the resumption was due offering a draw. I didn't pick up the message until late in the afternoon, though.

An adjournment that didn’t even happen and yet still went on too long. That isn’t the point of this post per se although as I come to write it, it kind of feels appropriate that the game, and my season, should end that way.

The chess was not particularly remarkable in itself. It could have been pretty much any of the league games that I’ve played since I began this particular form of entertainment in the late 80s.

What was unusual was that during the game - not before on the way there or afterwards on the way home, but right in the middle of the game - I found myself wondering whether I wouldn’t rather be practicing the piano rather than playing chess. For a good five minute spell I wasn’t thinking about  how to play the White side of a Maroczy Bind,  but was instead wondering whether nigh on thirty years of rushing from work, snatching something to eat and then trying to stay awake long enough to get to the time control might be more than enough.

I’ve thought about quitting loads of times, of course. Before, though, it was always after a bad loss and/or a more than usually extreme bout of chessboard incompetence on my part.

This time it was different. This time it wasn’t about a poor result or mediocre chess, it was simply wanting to be doing something else. This time it wasn’t about quitting the game entirely, it was about not playing league chess any more.

What it was, when all is said and done, was the thought that three decades of playing chess on work day evenings might be a hobby that has gone on a little bit too long.

Taxi for Sepp

The view has been expressed that Jack Warner is a cad and a bounder. The FIFA Executive Committee did not notice. I think that demonstrates ... oh this is obviously a preposterous line of defence. I’ll just get me coat.

NB: the photo of Sepp doing one is all over the internets but apparently originates with AFP

BORP? XXXV: Taxi for Stewart Reuben?

The view has been expressed that most of the nominated players are white. The committee did not notice this. I think that demonstrates we are not biased. 

Stewart Reuben, ECF Forum 28th May

The view has been expressed that I have not written a king and pawn ending post today. I did not notice this. I think that demonstrates I am not obtuse and overflowing with self-regard.

Anyhoo, let us imagine for a moment that you, dear reader, are unhappy with this state of affairs. What would happen then? One thing you could do would be to take your chess blog reading custom elsewhere. Decide never to return, perhaps. After all, other chess-themed websites are available.

You would have a choice. You might even - though heaven knows why - decide to read the rest of this post. A post in which it’s the democratic deficit at the heart of the ECF that turns out to be important and Stewart Reuben himself is entirely insignificant.