The Obligatory post for the New Year

In which I outline my chesstastic goals for 2008.

I hereby declare 2008 to be my Year of Chess. (Oooo… sounds official, don’t it?)

What this means is that I plan to make chess a priority when it comes to my spare time. I often think that I have too many interests for my own good, and the result is that I am fairly average in many things, instead of really getting good at one or two. For 2008, I’m going to put chess in the forefront, in the spotlight, in the front row seats. I’m really gonna give this chess thing the ol’ college try.

More specifically, I have the following goals for my chess in 2008:

Play in some rated games OTB against real live humans – my current USCF rating is 1178. I played my last rated game in 1992. 19-friggin-92! San Diego has an excellent chess club that meets every week, and has Saturday tournaments every month. I’d like to start getting down to the club on a semi-regular basis.

Play in a weekend tournament – in addition to playing rated games OTB at the local chess club, I’d like to play in a multi-round weekend tournament. The excitement, the cutthroat competition, the sheer pageantry of it all!

Improve my level of play – duh. Obviously, I’d like to improve my game. I’m going to measure my improvement via my USCF rating and my ICC ratings. How will I improve? Well, I will continue to work through my large stack of unread chess books, but to really improve, I’d like to…

Learn how to analyze my games, and the games of others – After I play a game, I may play back the moves, but I really don’t know how to analyze a game to determine which moves were good, which ones were bad, etc. I’d like to learn how to analyze a game both with and without the assistance of a chess computer.

These are the goals that I can think of at this point. I’d love to be able to meet all of them in 2008.

Here’s to a great year of chess!

I love looking at Red Hot Pawn on the Internet

I think it’s important to support good software. If there is a program or utility that I use and enjoy, and that is distributed as shareware or freeware with a donation link, I usually send the developers some money. Since I hope to one day have my own small software company, I like to support the little guys when I can.

Even though I’ve already subscribed to ICC and WCL, I subscribed to Red Hot Pawn yesterday. Even though they offer most of their services for free (you occasionally have to look at an advertisement), I think that their site is excellent and I like to encourage and support excellence.

I haven’t had as much time in the evenings lately, so I haven’t been on ICC too much. But I currently have several games going on RHP. I usually get in several moves per game each day, and I enjoy the lack of time controls. If there is a sticky position, I can stare at it for ten minutes and really analyze the position before I make a move. This seems to cut down on the number of blunders I make.

I also like that I can access my games from my iPhone. So if I’m waiting for my wife to try on shoes or something equally dull, I can whip out the phone and play some chess.

If anyone out there is on RHP, look me up and challenge me to a game or three. My username is PeteyD.

Gonna climb back on that horse

I haven’t played in the last two days. Part of this is due to the fact that I am bummed about my performance (or severe lack of) thus far on ICC. But I will get back up on that horse soon – probably tonight.

Probably the main reason I haven’t played in the last two days is because we got a Wii. Man, that thing is just totally cool. Tough to put down the controller. I think I have Wii Tennis elbow though, so I’ll probably take a break from it today.

In other news, a smiley Amazon box brought me My System by Aron Nimzowitsch. I’m only about 9 pages in, but I’m enjoying it so far. I like some of the analogies that he draws between situations in chess and other life situations (such as how a loss of tempo is like a farmer losing a sucking pig to illness). I will offer a full review when I’ve finished it.

So that’s the update from here: Too much Wii. Gonna get back on the horse.

It’s tough to find a chunk of time

The reason that I’ve been on a book reviewing craze here on the blog lately is that I’m finding it hard to set aside a block of time to play a game that’s not blitz. Since I’ve gotten my journal all ready to go, I’ve been eager to break it in, but alas, I’ve not yet had the time. So instead of writing about my experiences over the board (virtual or otherwise), I’m writing about my chess library.

Not very exciting I’ll grant you, but I did want to get the book information into the blog at some point, and now’s as good a time as any.

The only chess that I’ve been playing for the last week or so has been on RedHotPawn. I’ve just drawn a game with my opponent from the Netherlands, which was a victory of sorts, since I salvaged a game in which I was down a fair amount of material halfway through. Perhaps I will use that as my first analysis game. The game that I am playing against my buddy at work has stalled – he hasn’t moved in two or three days now. I’ll have to bug him about it tomorrow.

I enjoy playing on RHP, but I’d like to be able to sit down and play an entire game with decent time controls – at least 30 0. It’s tough to do that though. Once the kids are in bed, I’ll jump on the computer and try to get a game going, but on WorldChessLive it seems like everyone wants to play blitz. While I wait for a game, I’ll usually end up getting distracted by blogs or email or something, and then the wife will want me to come hang out with her.

Now I love my wife, but we definitely do not share the same interests or hobbies. She doesn’t believe that playing chess with someone I don’t know over the internet is at all interesting. Actually, she just doesn’t believe that chess is at all interesting. She gets her fix from knitting. Holy crap, does she love knitting. You would not believe how much friggin yarn is in my house. Maybe if I got her to knit me a chess set or something she would start to like chess.

I think I need to be disciplined enough to take advantage of the small opportunities I’m granted. If I have an idle hour, I need to turn off the email, ignore the call of the blogosphere, and get into a game. And I need to join a community where getting a game with standard time controls is easy. I need to join ICC. I’m gonna do that this weekend, I think.

Chess on the iPhone

So, I thought I’d catch you up on how exactly my re-entry to chess was orchestrated. As I said in the previous post, I have been playing a few games of correspondence chess on RedHotPawn.com (you have GOT to love the name of that site). Since that site was blocked at work, I could only make my moves at home. This lead to pretty slow games, averaging about a move a day.

Enter the iPhone (cue fanfare). My iPod was dying after several faithful years of service, so I was looking to buy a new one. When good ole Steve Jobs announced the $200 price drop in the iPhone though, I felt it was my duty to go get one right away. It was only slightly more expensive than the iPod I was looking at, and it had all that extra stuff, like a camera, wireless internet, and email. Oh yeah, and a phone too.

So I strode into the Apple Store and I bought my iPhone (cue fife and drums). I set it up that night and started to play. One of the first websites that I checked out was RedHotPawn. It looks pretty decent on the iPhone, especially when you zoom in and let the board fill nearly the entire screen. As I was playing, I realized that my iPhone would not be blocked at work (since it would be using the EDGE network and not the company’s).  Woo hoo!  Chess at work! (cue mighty fanfare and fireworks).

Since that time, I have been flying through correspondence games, sometimes making as many as 5-10 moves a day. This generally means that a game takes a week or two to play, instead of months.

If you have an iPhone, I suggest you check out RedHotPawn. If you don’t have an iPhone, I suggest you check out RedHotPawn and then go purchase an iPhone.

A Brief History

I was introduced to the game of Chess back in the olden days of the early 80s, when swatch watches and jelly bracelets were “in”. When I was in 1st grade, I went to an after-school program once a week to learn the basics of chess. The instructor was Sunil Weeramantry, who went on to become one of the premier scholastic chess coaches in the country. He’s been responsible for countless champion chess teams, and is the stepfather of GM Hikaru Nakamura.

So one would think that learning to play chess from him would set me squarely on the path to greatness. Yeah. Well, he did teach me how to play chess, and I certainly enjoyed my exposure to the game. But when school was out for the summer, chess flew right out of my brain (along with math and cursive writing).

At some point, my grandfather bought me a chess set and encouraged me to play. He loved the game, and tried to impart some of his enthusiam to me. I played occasionally, but there wasn’t any passion for the game in me.

Fast forward to high school. I don’t really remember why I did it, but I joined the chess club. Yes, that’s right – I was a chess club dork in high school. Hey – at least I wasn’t a band geek. They had to wear stupid-looking hats! With feathers!

My good friend at the time was also a chess player, and so we joined the club together. There must have been some passion for the game in me at that point, because I ended up becoming co-president with my friend. Everyone joined the USCF, and we played rated matches against several other schools, and within our own club. Ah, the days of my provisional rating! The sky was the limit! The future was bright!

I came out of the provisional rating process with a rating slightly above 1200. Whoa. Staggeringly average!

In addition to attending the weekly chess fests with the high school chess club, my buddy and I also went to several meetings of the Westchester County Chess Club. We played several rated tournaments and got slapped around by the skillful players that frequented the club. I came outta there with my current rating: 1181. My last rated game was played in March of 1992.

I have a rather amusing memory of my rebellious days as a high school chess maverick. After an evening at the WCC, I was standing outside the club, waiting to be picked up by my mom (wasn’t I the coolest?). I had my travel chess set with me, which consisted of a roll-up board, pieces, scoresheets, etc. All this was in my travel case, which was a long, thin, black bag with handles. It looked like this one, except mine was all black:

While I was waiting with my bag, a police car drove by. As it passed me, it slowed down and pulled over a little distance away. The officer got out of the car and approached me. WTF? I just watched him walk up to me.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Uh, just waiting for my ride.” Again, WTF?
“What’s in the bag?”
Then it hit me. He obviously thought that I was carrying an AK-47 or some other vicious assault weapon in this suspicious black bag. I laughed, which probably wasn’t the smartest thing. I stopped laughing.
“It’s just my chess set,” I said, showing him the picture of the Knight sewn on the side.
“Can you open the bag?”
So I opened up the bag, revealing my wicked vinyl board and evil plastic chess pieces. Chess pieces may be like weapons in some people’s hands, but I was pretty harmless. Satisfied, the police officer walked back to his car and drove off.

Ha, I was like a chess hoodlum or something.

OK, so that’s my sordid chess past. Maybe my brief history wasn’t really so brief. Thanks to the three of you that actually read this far. You have far more stamina (or perhaps a greater threshold for pain) than the average Joe or Mary.

Next time, I’ll recount my glorious return to the game after 15 years. Once we get all this personal crap outta the way, we’ll knuckle down and begin the journey on the road to improvement.