Place: IVAM (Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno) • Artist: Juan García Ripollés • More: Juan Ripollés from Google Images.
Picasso chess
© Flickr user boolker under
Creative Commons.
There's a post about the set on susanpolgar.blogspot.com -- Biggest Chess of Murano in the World -- although the text reads like a machine translation, probably from the Spanish.
A few months ago, in a post titled Spraggett on Smirnov, I wondered about some obvious differences in opinion between those two GMs, one a former World Championship candidate, the other a purveyor of chess courses using online marketing. Curious about the chess courses, I followed the link from the video that was the source of the disagreement, found Smirnov's home page at Chess-Teacher.com, and signed up for the 'FREE video course'.
Since then, I've received about 15 email messages from GM Smirnov. The first few were about the promised free video course, the rest were a mixture of links to new videos and promotions for the not-so-free courses, e.g. 'The Grandmaster's Opening Laboratory'. While I'm not willing to sign up for any of the not-so-free courses, the free videos I watched were all of a reasonable quality, comparable to the one that first caught my attention. Smirnov knows what he's talking about and although his English is far from perfect, it's good enough to get his points across.
One problem I had while working on this post was to understand exactly what was being offered and by whom. Emails link to pages that link to other pages that offer discounts on products that don't seem relevant to the original email. The original video that got my attention appears to be part of an affiliate program. Would I run those affiliate links on this blog or on my own site? No, not yet, but I'll keep it in mind.
***
As I once explained in a post titled Apples to Apples, I use Google AdSense as a cheap source of statistics. Lately I've been seeing a proliferation of ads on my pages like this:-
Hottest Brazilian Girls
Connect with 100s Brazil Beauties Find your Perfect Match & be happy!
[domain name]
Are these services legitimate? To find out, I signed up for membership on three of these sites. I know, it's a thankless job, but someone has to do it (and, no, I didn't tell my wife). I never heard again from one of the services, while the other two were obviously part of a network of related sites, probably run by the same promoter.
For those two sites I was immediately bombarded by several email messages every day. The emails were links to the sites where I could read messages from the 'ladies', send them virtual gifts, etc. etc. Of course, none of this was free. I was expected to buy credits that could be tapped for each message I read or each gift I sent. After a few weeks, I got tired of these emails and tried to remove my pseudonym from the sites. The unsubscribe options led to dead ends -- one of them was a captcha that displayed no garbled text to copy -- so I was eventually forced to enter a bogus email address that wouldn't come anywhere near me.
Google AdSense has a function to 'Allow & Block Ads' and lists these sites, collectively known as 'Dating' sites, under 'Sensitive Categories' along with 'Cosmetic Procedures & Body Modification' and 'Ringtones & Downloadables'. Should I turn them off? No, not yet, but I'll keep it in mind.
One of the quirks of blogging is that you don't have to follow an idea from start to finish, in chronological order, whether as writer or reader. Earlier this year I started a series on Levenfish's Rook Endings, the well known endgame book by Levenfish and Smyslov. After a few related posts using tablebases I dropped the topic to move onto other subjects, but recently returned to it for a deeper insight into a couple of Rook & Pawn endings I'm currently playing.
At the end of that initial post I listed the general conclusions from the last chapter of Rook Endings and am just now starting to appreciate how helpful they can be in a practical context. One of the conclusions, however, baffled me...
11. With two disconnected Pawns against one passed Pawn important roles are played by the bridge and diversion.
...because I didn't take the time to study the text of the book:-
In no.11, I'm not sure what is meant by 'bridge and diversion', so I'll come back to this and other points in a future post.
Ten months later, I'm coming back to it. As you would expect, both terms are illustrated in the position accompanying that 11th point.
Levenfish & Smyslov no.314
After 2.e6-e7
The 'bridge' is illustrated in the continuation: 2...Re6 3.Rf7 (bridge) 3...Kb4 4.g4 a3 5.Rf4+ Kb5 6.Rf3 a2 7.Ra3. White uses his own Rook to shield his King from checks by the opponent's Rook. The maneuver is best known in the 'Lucena position', a technical procedure for winning with Rook & Pawn vs. Rook.
The 'diversion' is illustrated in the continuation 2...Rf6+ 3.Ke3 Re6+ 4.Kd3 Rd6+ 5.Kc3 Re6 6.Rg5+ Kb6 7.Rg6 (diversion). White's Rook pins the opponent's Rook against its King, eliminating the attack on the White Pawn and allowing it to promote.
Black avoids both of these attacks by playing 2...Rc8! 3.Rg5+ Kb4 4.Re5 Re8 5.g4 a3. When behind in material, a passed Pawn rushing to promote is the weak side's best defense in Rook endgames. I don't know if this concept also has a term to describe it, but it should.
***
Later: This post appeared in Happy Birthday, Carnival!, the last of the blog carnivals organized by Confessions of a Chess Novice [chessconfessions.blogspot.com].
Continuing with Been There, Done That, I added Steinitz on the 'Relative Value of the Pieces' to the 'Advanced Beginner' section of Learn to Play Chess. That Steinitz page is an introduction to a much longer excerpt from Steinitz's Modern Chess Instructor : Relative Value of Pieces and Principles of Play.
Here's another candidate for the 'Not Everyone Likes Chess' department (*):-
Chess is a quite repulsive game. ♪
Fills me with such frustration. ♪
And in the end my patience runs out. ♪
Life's too short for chess. ♪
Cold and calculating, such a boring mating. ♪
So give me a game of chance and there's romance.
That's Life! N°10 Stephanie De-Sykes (2:58) • 'That's Life! (1974) "World Chess Championship"'
Near the end, I don't get it at all:-
Some girls try to stay cool and play it by the rulebook. ♪
They just wind up in the end a talemate, stalemate.
Or maybe it's 'a tail made, stale maid'. ♫ La di da di da... ♫
***
(*) Last seen in Not Everyone Likes Chess.
In the previous edition of Top eBay Chess Items by Price, I featured a Barleycorn Chess Set and mentioned,
The set received 41 bids from 15 bidders, and the winning bid was GBP 2527.00 ('approximately US $4000.49' according to eBay). In the year and a half that I've been tracking Top eBay Chess Items by Price, I don't recall another chess set selling for so much.
By some sort of a blogger's application of Murphy's Law, along the lines of 'An unequivocal statement in writing is always proven wrong', I could have featured a 'Pulpit set' in this post. The very attractive set ('could have been made by a French prisoner of war') received 15 bids from six bidders and sold for GBP 6,100.00 (approximately US $9,742.92). That's more than double the barleycorn set. Featuring the pulpit set would have meant three chess sets in a row -- the first was Tweezer Chess -- so I chose instead an item from my favorite category, chess art.
The painting shown below, titled 'Original Irving Amen Large Oil on Canvas Pensive Girl', sold for US $1697. The auction didn't have any bidding information, so I guess it went to the best offer.
The description said,
Title: Next Move (untitled on canvass) • Date: 1970s • Medium: oil on canvas • Dimension: image (76 x 101 cm or 30 x 40 inch), frame (84 x 109 cm or 33 x 43 inch) • Credit: Irving Amen (original artist) • Special Attributes: artist signed (bottom right corner)
This original painting was done by Irving Amen (1917 ---, an influential and well-respected American artist and printmaker) around 1970s. Amen was particularly known for his distinctive artworks via woodcut, etching, lithograph, and many other media depicting various human subjects/activities in the 40s - 70s. Very prolific and active even in the late 1990s, his artworks are widely collected by individuals and institutions in the United States.
Popular Amen subjects are girl or young woman in pensive mood, music activities, and chess scenes. Highly decorative yet sensitively treated, the current painting had combined all these elements together and depicted a young woman contemplating her next move (in chess or life) with a balalaika or a book as her opponent (she might have made a wrong move as she was touching the pawn, hence, forgoing the opportunity of a draw, though the board and chessmen depicted were irregular as usual). A rare and original Amen item indeed.
For more of Amen, see Google Images chess Irving Amen.
At the same time I looked at Chessnc.com in my post No Nose for FIDE News, I took screenshots of three of my favorite chess news sites with the same software used for the images in The Longest Sidebar. I did this because, unlike my other favorite news sites TWIC & Chessbase, all three of these sites have new designs (Whychess is completely new since some time before this past summer), that I really don't like very much. The screenshots are shown below, side by side.
| Chessdom.com | Chessvibes.com | Whychess.org |
|
||
The two sites that have been with us for a few years both announced redesigns within a few of weeks of each other.
As for Whychess, Google digs up a few odd posts from April & May,
but the floodgates opened some time in June.
I congratulate everybody on launching a website WhyChess.org! Starting from this week we’re going to record regularly the best novelties of the week at the same time remembering not very successful ones. • Top-10 Theoretical Novelties. TWIC 867 [18 June 2011; author unknown]
So why don't I like the designs of these sites? Because I don't know how to navigate them efficiently. I'm the type of person who reads a newspaper (remember those?) from front to back.
It's well known that most people scan a newspaper the same way they read -- for English that's top to bottom, left to right -- which is why newspaper layouts have the most important story in the upper left corner of the page. I start on the front page, scan the headlines, then start reading the stories that interest me most. Then I turn to the second page, using the same technique, third page, etc., stopping for a bit longer on the editorial page, the finance page, the sports page, and the comics. On these chess news pages, I haven't yet found a comfortable way to read them. I didn't have this problem with the old layouts of Chessdom and ChessVibes, and I'm really not sure why it changed with the redesigns.
One problem might be the column sizes that change arbitrarily. The Chessdom page starts with two columns (plus a column for the ads; I have no problem with that) then shifts to four columns, where the four columns vary in size. Looking at the page as a whole, like I've captured it in the image, it seems obvious where to jump to the top of the next column, but when I'm scrolling down a screen at a time (the Chessdom page is about four screens long on my laptop), I don't have that complete overview to guide me. On top of that, I often find that the same story is linked multiple times from the same page. Can you imagine a newspaper doing that -- 'Please turn to page two for the full story' -- printed in different places on the front page for the same story? I find it all very disconcerting.
Maybe the problem will disappear as I use these sites more, but it's already been a few months and I just can't shake the feeling that I'm not getting as much from these sites as I should.
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