Winawer Wager

This is just a lucky win, though significant because my British opponent is the highest rated player I have played so far (rated 1533) when we started a week ago. I played the French defense, aiming to at least delay a likely defeat. However, just when I managed a very slight advantage by move 12, White made a major blooper, and a larger gap in material ensued. And at move 18, White's 2nd blunder handed me the game in sudden death fashion! Name of the game is "Angels and Demons", which I have titled before the game started. Strange that the bad guy this time is a traitor bishop. Call me uninspired or cheesy, but it is truly a fascinating name that intrigues and sells! The author is surely quite creative at packaging and selling.

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Notable Nakamura

Just last week, at the 2009 US Chess Championship, Japanese chess prodigy Hikaru Nakamura made a highly anticipated comeback as national champion. I find it interesting for a Japanese to top the US Championship.

The 21 year old chess celebrity had, as a junior, broke every age-group record set by Bobby Fischer, other than that of being the youngest U.S. Champion (which the latter attained at fourteen.) Hikaru Nakamura had actually won the national championship once at the age of 16. In the picture posted, he has this killer look, doesn't he? But someone once said, u have to be ready to kill to win. Was it Nigel Short? Anyway it's a nice candid shot.

His contemporaries describe him as an aggressive player with a relentless will to win; after all, he had once said during an interview that there is no point in drawing games. This is surely an admirable attitude and to many sponsors, Nakamura has to be a dream come true for them.

One thing which Nakamura had conveyed in his interviews that I totally admire, is that he is not fixated with ratings. FIDE (pronouced fee-day and the french acronym for the supreme body responsible for the organization of chess and its championships at global and continental levels, as recognised by the International Olympic Committee,) updates and maintain ELO ratings for semi- and full time professional chess players. Just like handicap rating for golfers, the ELO rating represents an achievement, and a good idea of the sportsman strength, but not something to be over glorified or prided with.

Besides his uncommon enthusiasm for chess, he is known to be surprisingly approachable for a chess player of his level. Quoting from an article "Nakamura is one of the few Grandmasters who will watch a game on the Internet Chess Club and interact intimately with players well below his strength."

Hikaru Nakamura's well chronicled rise, with elements of phenomenal prodigy, an attractive style of play, and also the heartfelt (for many) sibling rivalry that marked his early chess development, makes his an intriguing story, and him a star to watch.

Borodinskaya Bitva

Borodinskaya Bitva refers to the Battle of Borodino fought on 7 September 1812, between the invading French and the Russians. There is a so-inspired piece of overture known as the 1812 Overture, by Tchaikovsky. My opponent is a music composer and teacher from America, and played with calculated aggressiveness from the first move. The game saw some pretty fierce exchanges during the middle game, and like the battle of Borodino, it ended in disengagement, after both sides sustained considerable losses. The loss of minor pieces is nothing compared to the real casualties; It's just that even with the major pieces still on the board, I saw the lack of complexity in the position. After some thoughts, I offered a draw, and he accepted promptly. He's by far the highest rated opponent on GameKnot I played and a draw is satisfactory gua.

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Creepy Crawly

Last week I played a game with a higher rated player on GameKnot. It was one of the strangest opening I have faced with so far, because my American opponent used the creepy crawly approach. I was expecting a very forth coming kinda play, out of respect for his rating. Only a few steps into the game, I was feeling a little irritated and frustrated. I was getting the feeling that my opponent is still observing me, and feeling me out without asserting himself at all. This situation reminded me of wusses who like to sit back and observe people or things, and then assert/make a superior stand later, assuming an a-rung-higher kinda position. By the middle game, the creepy crawly frontline was pushing tightly forward, and ensued a fierce struggle in the middle of the board by move 19. The twist of how my knight escapes his death to come around to help checkmate in the last stage of the battle was baffling. Perhaps black did not want to get into a pin complication. Besides feeling lucky, I thought it was a nice sequence of slow one-square steps by the powerful queen, before she stabbed the black King back against the wall.

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D.S. al coda

Today I was told a very special encounter. It brought a melting warmth to the heart and moisture to the eyes. It has to do with a lady who helped us fifteen years ago. She should be a stranger. She should have forgotten us. I have a big face, but I was just another face in the crowd. We were like Fontaine, and she was like Valjean, except that Jo owed us nothing. I cannot think of anything more apt than D.S. al coda. All thanks be to God for this heaven-made episode.

Monochrome Magic

Came across this picture and thought it was beautiful. I did not have any idea who the model is, but it caught my attention. It reminds me of how captivating Black and White photography can be. To me, it is a niche branch of photography that demands an artistic resolute to do well in.



Some artists feel that the lack of colours draws the eye towards attending to the details and texture of the subject matter, which therefore renders the image a richer experience. And a few months back, I was researching into the filters for black and white photography... apparently you use different filters for different subjects and different kind of settings. For example, the filter you use to capture a sunset, is different from one you would use on a portrait. You get very different black and white results from the use of different filters.

One important thing to know for producing black and white images, it is better to take RAW formats than JPEG, as the proprietary format RAW captures the colours information even while it takes a black and white image, and this aids greatly and critically in the post-shoot processing. Do not want to get too technical until I learn more. Until then, I hope to produce nice black and whites like this one.

O'Kelly Ordeal

Encountered a Sicilian variation called the O'Kelly in a correspondence game on GameKnot, and I lost terribly, but more so because of positional weaknesses than anything else. The black lost a knight easily in the early part of the game, and I was up on material, but the disparity in our pace proved critical in the middle game as I struggled to defend against an overwhelming black position. Quite a few valuable lessons to pick up along the way. It is a commendable or even spectacular finish for black, as his queen was unmoved through the whole game, and the moment she moved, my game was over.

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Fischer's Falter

This is the famous 1960 game between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer at Mar de Plata, Argentina (a Latin America destination with recreational beaches, countless hotels, restaurants, casinos, theatres and other tourists' attractions. Yep, exactly the kinda setting for some James Bond movie... Haha) In any case, bearing in mind that the Russian GM would become world champion after winning Tigran Petrossian in 1969, and the American genius was to succeed him in the monumental showdown in 1972, this is an early match between the two national hopes of symbolic supremacy. Included as one of the three losses chronicled in Bobby Fischer's "My 60 Memorable Games", I have posted it here as an introductory opening lesson on the KGA C39... King's Gambit Accepted line of opening.

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The result of the game sparked the invention of the Fischer Defense (3. Nf3 d6) with which Fischer claimed to be the decisive refutation of the King's Gambit! Although 3...d6 was previously known, it did not become a major variation until in 1961, Fischer advocated it in the famous article in the first issue of Larry Evans' American Chess Quarterly.

Fischer brashly claimed, "In my opinion the King's Gambit is busted. It loses by force." and he concluded the article with the notoriously arrogant line, "Of course White can always play differently, in which case he merely loses differently.

The point is that after 4. d4 g5 5. h4 g4 White can't continue with 6. Ne5, as in the Kieseritzky Gambit, and 6. Ng5 is not recommended either. This leaves the move 6. Ng1 as the only option, when after six moves neither side has developed a piece! The main alternative to 4. d4 is 4. Bc4, but it is considered inferior.

After Fischer's article was published, the King's Gambit was seen even less frequently in master-level games, although Fischer took up the White side of it in three games (preferring the Bishop's Gambit), winning them all.

Georgian Giantess

This is the story of Maia Chiburdanidze.

A few days ago, I chanced upon a ranking of some of the leading women chess players of the day, and decided to do a cover article on one who deserves to be read about a little. With a FIDE Elo rating of 2506 at the time of writing, Maia Chiburdanidze is one of the top women chess player in the world. According to this month's FIDE ratings, she is ranked 12 in the world.

Born in 1961, and grew up in Kutaisi, Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR, she started playing chess at eight. She was one of the first women chess prodigies, becoming the youngest WIM in the history of the game (in 1974 at the age of 13). Her best results were first at Brasov 1974, first at Tbilisi 1975 and most impressive of all, second in the 1976 Tbilisi Women's Interzonal and thus qualifying for the 1977 Candidates, wherein, she defeated Alla Kushnir in the final.

The then reigning women's world champion, Nona Gaprindashvili (another national heroine of Georgia), had reigned from 1962 to 1978. In the 1978 games Chiburdanidze won against Gaprindashvili, the former demonstrated alertness and depth of play coupled with simple tactics, while the latter in my opinion seems to suffer from a slight blunted focus. And with the 17-years-old Maia Chiburdanidze scoring of 8½-6½, the world saw the ascension of a new young queen. As the new reigning women chess Champion, Maia Chiburdanidze went on to be the second woman after Gaprindashvili to be awarded the title of GM in 1984.

Maia Chiburdanidze proved to be a formidable champion at such a young age as she successfully defended her championship title on four different occasions. In Borjomi/Tbilisi 1981 she drew 8-8 against Nana Alexandria, but kept the title as Champion. Three years later she played Irina Levitina in Volgograd, Russia where she won convincingly by 8-5. The next challenge came from Elena Akhmilovskaya in 1986 and Chiburdanidze won the match in Sofia by 8½-5½. In 1988 she retained her title yet again by narrowly winning a match in Telavi, Georgia against Nana Ioseliani by 8½-7½.

By the 1990s a new threat to Maia Chiburdanidze's title emerged from the Far East. Xie Jun of China won the right to challenge the world champion in February 1991 and, against all expectation, Chiburdanidze lost her crown to the young Chinese player in Manila by 8½-6½. Her reign was the third longest at 14 years, only behind that of the first women's champion, Vera Menchik, who reigned for 18 years from 1927 until her death in 1944 and that of Gaprindashvili's 16 years.

She has attempted to win back the world title but, with the rise of the Chinese women and the formidable Polgár sisters, this has proved difficult and her best performance since 1991 has been 1st in the Tilburg Candidates tournament of 1994. However she lost the playoff to Zsuzsa Polgár by 5½-1½. Subsequently, despite not approving of the knockout format, she has entered the world championships of recent years. She reached the semi-finals in 2001, only to be knocked out by Zhu Chen of China who went on to win the title. In 2004 she again reached the semi-finals where she lost to Antoaneta Stefanova who went on to win the title.

Chiburdanidze still participates in landmark women competitions. And, like many of the top women players, Chiburdanidze was not too impressed with 'women's chess' in general and she does not limit her games and challenges to her own gender.

Together with the legendary Gaprindashvili, her legacy of having led her country and excelled at the highest levels of chess, will remain like the great Caucasus Mountains... tall and beyond ordinary mortals.

References: Much facts and details have been researched from Wikipedia and reconsolidated here in pursuit of leisure interest in the history of international chess. All rights reserved.

Texan Tango 2

The second of the two games with this Texan unexpectedly ended quite early and also offers another simple lesson about the queen. The winning move was my 6th: Bxf7+. Black did not play the b pawn gambit as in the Immortal Game, which I had always thought as being silly, but in this it appears that the gambit (which is known as the Bryan's Counter Gambit) does have valid justification. To recall the Bryan's Counter Gambit again have a quick look at one of my earlier post on The Immortal Game.

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Texan Tango 1

Was waiting for a friend to come back from work, so had two short games with a similarly ranked player on Yahoo, from Texas, where Houston is located. This game was interesting as I somehow lost one piece after another... even though i kept making favorable exchanges... and my major pieces were slashed and lost. The black queen makes the same mistake as the female lead in the Immortal Game. In this game, I am most delighted by move 19... because it was a small step for pawn-kind, but a giant step for the game in retrospect.

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