Not 'For All Ages'!
I Just Played Chess (I Just Had Sex Parody) (2:49) • 'G-Fam Clan ft. Bryan Sapp -- TNG Produce'
Here's another one: I Just Played Chess, Lonely Island Parody; 'This is a parody of "I Just Had Sex" by Akon and Lonely Island', with a link to the original 'I Just Had Sex' on YouTube (more than 123 million views since December 2010!).
Continuing with Top eBay Chess Items by Price, the object pictured below was not the most expensive chess item sold on eBay over the past two weeks, but it was certainly the most unusual. The title was 'OLYMPIC GAMES PARIS 1924 CHESS INTERNATIONAL MACH MEDAL' (I'm sure that should be 'MATCH' instead of 'MACH') and it sold for US $565.55 after receiving eight bids from four bidders.
The description said,
INTERNATIONAL CHESS TOURNAMENT IN THE OCCASIONS OF THE VIII OLYMPICS GAMES HELD IN PARIS, FRANCE, 1924 • NAMED TO THE CHESS MASTER KAREL SKALICKA
Karel Skalicka (Carlos Skalicka) (1 November 1896 – 1979) was a Czech–Argentine chess master. In 1924, he won a team gold medal for Czechoslovakia (Hromádka, Schulz, Vanek, Skalicka) in the 1st unofficial Chess Olympiad in Paris. He took 3rd in group eliminations (Anatol Tshepurnoff won), and tied for 21-31st in the major tournament (Karesl Hromádka won). The final tournament (Amateur World Championship) was won by Hermanis Matisons.
That second paragraph, taken from Wikipedia's entry on Karel Skalicka. was followed by a list of Skalicka's chess exploits, also from Wikipedia. A further description of the medal said,
Real nice artistic medal plaque signed by the Scuptor Jean-Marie Delpech. • At EDGE: "CUIVRE" and Hallmark. • Golden Copper - 67mm. X 45mm. - 74.14grams. • VISIBLE CONDITION • REAL RARE MEDAL PRIZE
For more about the 1924 Olympiad, see Chess Olympiad: Paris 1924, on Olimpbase.org.
Now that I've worked my way through all of the clips linked from Improve Your Chess with the Master Game, I would like to discuss some of the things I've learned, as in Restraint & Overprotection. The easiest way to do this is to work from existing digital game scores. I gathered all of the 'Master Game' PGN files I could find, added a few games that were missing, and consolidated them into a single file:-
The PGN files could still use some work -- ordering the games in the sequence they were played, standardizing names -- that sort of thing, but I'll leave the cleaning for another time or for someone else. The files are certainly usable in their current state.
Last week I converted 2005 World Championship. This week it's Games from the 2006 Unification Match. Next week it will be the 2007 Mexico City title tournament. After that I'll finish the two remaining items on my Where to Go From Here checklist, then move on to something else.
The latest converted page is linked from Chess History, but perhaps it should be added to a second index page. It is, after all, more about chess instruction than about chess history.
It's probably just me, but I see a lot of similarities between this image and the previous image on Flickr Friday, Meditation on the Bishop Pair.
Ajedrez, Escultura © Flickr user Jose Betancur under Creative Commons.
Unlike the other photo, which provided no hint where it was taken, this photo had a good clue in the tag 'cartagena'. The tag group had one other photo, of a cathedral, which Google locates in Cartagena, Spain. By deduction, this is a chess sculpture in the same town of Cartagena.
***
Later:A few years after posting this, I found a photo of the same sculpture on another Flickr.com page: Chess players. The photo's tags indicated Cartagena, Colombia. This post's original Flickr link returns 'Page Not Found', although the user is still there. An image search on 'chess cartagena colombia' returns more photos of the same sculpture. As for my remark 'one other photo, of a cathedral, which Google locates in Cartagena, Spain', this was obviously incorrect.
In my latest post, A Slippery Opening, I commented on the opening from one of my recent games; in this post I'll give one of my recent chess960 endgames. I had Black in the diagram shown below.
When I first reached the position in my analysis I quickly concluded that, with two extra Pawns, Black wins easily. Black forces White to sacrifice the Bishop for one of the Pawns and wins with the other Pawn. After I played into the variation and received my opponent's reply, I looked at the position a second time and realized the position was not as straightforward as I had initially thought. If White can sacrifice the Bishop for the d-Pawn, the promotion square for the h-Pawn is not the color of Black's Bishop, so Black can't win.
Black to move
After 1.Bf6
After a more rigorous analysis I determined that the position is nevertheless won for Black. The d-Pawn must pass through two squares controlled by White's Bishop -- d2 and d4 -- where Black uses simple maneuvers of his own Bishop to shoo the enemy Bishop off the diagonal.
When we reached the diagram I played 1...Bb4, and the game continued 2.Kf5 Bc3 (first Bishop opposition) 3.Bg5 d4 4.Ke4 d3 5.Ke3 Be1 6.Kf3 Kc3 7.Kg4 Kc2 8.Bf4 Bd2 (second Bishop opposition). White resigned here because of 9.Bd6 Bc1 10.Bb4 Bb2, and with 11...Bc3, Black clears a diagonal for the last time. During the game I was more concerned with 2.Kh6, picking up the second Pawn. Here I calculated a maneuver resembling what happened in the game: 2...Bc3 3.Bg5 d4 4.Kxh7 d3 (I'll come back to this position in a moment) 5.Bf4 Kb3 6.Kg6 Kc2 7.Kf5 Bd2 8.Bd6 Bc1 9.Bb4 Bb2 10.Be1 Bc3.
After the game, I started to wonder how far my opponent was from achieving a draw. After 4.Kxh7 d3, the d-Pawn has only one Black square to cross and the King on h7 is too far from the action. On what squares would the White King have to stand in order to draw?
Since there are only five pieces on the board, a tablebase can answer that question. It turns out that if the White King is on g6 instead of h7, White to move draws, while Black to move wins the same way as in the game. Ditto for King on f7. The sequence to achieve the draw from g6 is 1.Kf5 Kb3 2.Ke4 Kc2 3.Kd5 (only move) 3...Bd2 4.Be7 Bh6 5.Bb4 (only move) 5...Bg7 6.Kc4. The White King arrives on c4 just in time to prevent the Black Bishop from moving to c3. This raised another question.
Since the White King started on g6, which is four moves from c4, why does the same result hold for the King starting on f7, which is only three moves from c4? Even with Black to move, White should have enough time to reach c4. The reason is that Black has a different winning sequence: 1...Kd5 (or 1...Kd4; other moves only draw) 2.Ke7 Ke4 3.Kd7 (not 3.Kd6; do you see why?) 3...Kf3 4.Kd6 Bd4 5.Bd2 Ke2 6.Bb4 Bf2 7.Ke5 Be1. Black had just enough time to oppose Bishops on the other side of the Pawn, where the White King can't help.
Sometimes the simplest positions contain the prettiest geometries.
Posts
All Comments
