Review - Garry Kasparov's MasterClass

Garry Kasprov's MasterClass was made available on YouTube recently. This is merely the preview.

  Once I had finished my review of the “Revolutionize Your Chess” Master Method course by Ginger GM Simon Williams I went to You Tube and found myself watching videos of the best fight scenes of Steven Segal and Jason Staham. You Tube (a Google company) keeps track of what I watch and on the sidebar it offers up selections of movie fight scenes, a sampling the seemingly unending number of You Tubers that make a living reviewing the Walking Dead television shows and comics (including full releases of the comics), and chess videos. Once I had finished watching some of Statham’s incredible fights from his “Transporter” series I looked on the sidebar and saw that the seven hour Garry Kasparov chess course from the MasterClass series was available and recommended for me.

  MasterClass is a series of online learning courses that is distinguished by the quality of the presenters. You can learn comedy from Steve Martin, tennis from Serena Williams, writing from James Patterson, singing from Christina Aguilera, etc… There was an acting class by Kevin Spacey that I can no longer find but that is beside the point. A MasterClass course costs $90 for a lifetime viewing pass but for the price of two courses ($180) you can watch all the courses for an entire year.

  If MasterClass was going to have a chess course there would only be two possibilities for the presenter : Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen who in their time were both considered the greatest player of all time much like Bobby Fischer was in the 1970’s when he was world champion. Since Kasparov has been retired from competitive chess since 2005 and Carlsen is an active reigning world champion, Kasparov was the likely choice. Kasparov was not only the world champion for 15 years, he is a prolific chess writer, and occasionally tries to insert himself into the world of chess politics and the politics of the world. As an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin he has found himself in exile in the West where he has a foundation that supports chess around the world.

  I knew the Kasparov Masterclass course on YouTube was pirated and it didn’t include the workbook but since YouTube recommended it to me I decided to take a look. I’d hate for anyone to think too harshly of me for viewing copyrighted material so will note that You Tube is protected from copyright claims based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as long as the copyright infringement is not intentional. This means that You Tube must take down copyright violating videos when alerted but is not breaking any laws by allowing the videos on their site and more importantly I am not breaking any laws by viewing the videos. As best I can tell the video has been taken down in the last week.

  I ended up watching the entire seven hour course in over a week. The course has incredible production values. While the GingerGM Master Method course shows 15 hours of the presenter in his best t-shirt with a white backdrop, Kasparov looks like a million bucks in a suit and is seated in front of a chessboard in a couple of spacious rooms in a mansion. Kasparov starts the course by pointing out that his goal is to inspire the students to be as passionate about chess as he is which will inspire the student to further their chess studies.

  Kasparov then goes over many different tactical elements one at a time – pins, double attacks, skewers, etc. When Kasparov sets up the pieces on the board in front of him, the screen splits and a full length board appears on the right of the screen showing a 2-D version of the board and moves. I noticed no missteps between the 2-D and 3-D boards unlike the ichess.net offerings where the visual chess board are irritatingly overlaid by ChessBase popup windows with no editing to remove them. I expect that the MasterClass was done in multiple takes much like a movie or television show and likely scripted to some extent. Each section is prefaced by a simple graphic with some music which gave the production a classy look and feel..

  Each section follows a familiar theme. Kasparov explains a simple position to illustrate the tactic and then proceeds to more complex positions which includes examples from games in his career or other famous games. Each section concludes with a composed study that is meant as a “challenge” for the student to pause and examine before Kasparov explains the solution. The tactics section takes up the first three hours of the course and then Kasparov moves on to the endgame.

  Kasparov only spends about 45 minutes on the ending and tries to demonstrate how endings require precision by showing seemingly simple endgames that contain many twists and turns. He pays special attention to the concepts of king position and the king shouldering his opposite number aside to queen a pawn. Then Kasparov moves on to the opening. This section is mostly philosophical in nature with his examples showing more of the psychological thinking behind openings and his opening choice in his must win game against Karpov in his 1987 championship match and even mentions in passing that his failure to break Krammnik’s Berlin Defence cost him his championship but that he beat the famous Berlin Wall easily after the match.

  The openings section took 45 minutes and at this point it appears the Masterclass ran out of content. The next hour has Kasparov giving a simul against three players of varying strengths – an expert, a class player, and a player that is a level above beginner. We have 45 minutes of Kasparov walking between the three boards leaning, grimacing, and thinking while his opponents try to match wits with the ex-champ. Not only does the pace of the video slow to a crawl, the boards are hard to see from the overhead and side angles (no 2D board on the side). After the simul, Kasparov goes over the games with each of the players and then gives them some lessons in the opening and ending. Having the presenter engage with the participants is a feature of the MasterClass lessons but in the case of chess it seemed artificial and a time waster. The simul and group lesson took about an hour and 45 minutes and the MasterClass concludes with Kasparov talking about his chess carreer, post retirement activities, computers, and other subjects for about an hour.

  I think that any aspiring chess player will get more instruction value from the Simon Williams’ Master Method that I looked at last week than Kasparov's MasterClass. The video did give me a better appreciation of the geometry of the chessboard that is not explained elsewhere and the value of composed studies that seemed to be a staple of the Soviet Chess School. This piece attempts both instruction and a glimpse into the mindset of a champion chess player. Unless the workbook that comes with the course is the best workbook ever the lessons come off more as an introduction to chess which to be fair was part of Kasparov’s stated goal to whet the students appetite for chess instead of hardcore instruction. Since the piece attempts both instruction and a glimpse into the mindset of a champion chess player I would have liked to see more Kasparov interviews from the past mixed in to his reminiscences. All told the excellent production values make this more of an incomplete historical view of a great chess player than an instructional video.

Master Method Review - Revolutionize Your Chess by Simon Williams

The first chapter of Simon Williams Master Method 2 is available for free on the ichess.net You Tube channel...

  With some spare time on my hands as I decompress from a year of working 50+ hour weeks and begin the search for my next job I started watching Simon Williams’s the Ginger GM) Master Method 2 : Revolutionize your Chess offering from ichess.net. If you clicked the link you may have noticed that the price of this 15 hour chess course is listed at $149 and you may think that is a little pricey. I would agree with you but will also point out that if you are on the ichess.net mailing list you will not only receive free samples of the ichess.net offerings (in addition to the course samples on their YouTube page), you will also receive massive discounts on all their offerings if you exhibit a moderate amount of patience. I purchased the Ginger GM Method at a 70% discount in November which meant that the ‘$149’ course only cost me $43.50 which works out to be less than $3 an hour which is just a little more than renting a DVD from the nearby Family Video in Marshalltown, Iowa.

  Simon Williams is an English grandmaster with a popular You Tube channel and is known for his hyper aggressive style. I had watched his first Master Method course (purchased for 50% off in July) which was billed as containing ‘Chess Improvement Secrets for the Busy Player). The course was 16 hours and gave an hour on each subject that Williams deemed important to get a player up to speed quickly – openings that can be played for both white and black, the main endings a player should know by heart, defensive play, attacking play, etc.. The production values were similar to most of ichess.net lessons – the left side of the screen is taken up by the board and the right hand side of the screen is mostly a backdrop with a small inset of the instructor on video giving the lesson. The ‘Master Method’ lessons are generally prefaced by a few minutes of the instructor in some exotic locale like the view from a high rise office building, a garden, and in Williams’ case in front of some amazing architecture in Barcelona. Williams’ master method course was entertaining enough but with few exceptions boiled down to the boilerplate ichess.net lessons which are loosely themed topics explained by the presenter going over Grandmaster games. The main takeaway I got from Williams Master Method was that even the Secrets for a busy player take a lot of effort in order to get real improvement.

  In Williams second course the introduction takes place in the setting of an exotic rock garden but the location is not used to preface the rest of the lessons which has Williams in his ‘GingerGM’ t-shirt going over his material (although the last three lessons are prefaced with Williams in a dress shirt sitting at a desk. This course is subtitled ‘Revolutionize Your Chess’ and Williams is serious about this subject. He gives a tight opening repertoire that aims for isolated pawn positions with White and the French and English (e6 and d6) as Black. Williams then gives hours of examples of typical attacking plans with the isolated queen pawn and black positions but instead of going through entire games he breezes through the openings and doesn’t show the end of the game if the attack leads to a material or overwhelming positional advantage. This allows him to go through more examples than the 3 to 4 games typical to ichess.net lessons.

  The rest of the Ginger GM Master method 2 goes into getting into an attacking mindset. There are chapters on being aware to attacking possibilities, not attacking prematurely, and the nuts and bolts of attacking and calculating variations. The chapters on attacking are very practical and as tight as the opening repertoire and middle game plan section. The examples were clearly thought out to build on each other. One attacking example leads to another similar but slightly different pattern that allows Williams to challenge the view to determine whether the same attacking idea will work or not. All chess courses end up having some contradictory advices and this course is no exception. After spending four hours recommending an opening repertoire based on getting an isolated queens pawn and how to use the isolated pawn to generate an attack there a more than a few examples in the attacking and calculating section where Williams breezily claims one side is better because the opponent has an isolated queens pawn or some of the same positional defects that the isolated pawn brings like more pawn islands. It just goes to show that it in chess it all depends and I suppose by learning to play with the isolated queen pawn one will certainly learn the shortcomings of the setup whjich will come in handy when facing the isolated pawn.

  I think this course explains a philosophy of attack better than any of ichess.net’s other offerings. The material is well thought out and not sugar-coated in any way. Williams continually says the course is meant to be viewed more than once and insists that the viewer will reap better results from practicing his principles of attack in long time limit games. He asks the view to pause the lessons to determine a plan or calculate a line on multiple occasions and repeatedly points out that his course is only the signposts and the road to chess improvement is paved with hard work.

  The only quibble I have is that while the content was obviously carefully thought out the presentation seems to have been rushed to get to market. The videos are full of annoying interruptions of Chessbase popups or blank screens that could have been edited out or done in another take. The inset of Williams talking seems pixelated and blurry and there is even a part in the final chapter where Williams’ pet cat makes an appearance. Williams takes great pains to be seriously professional in the course and forgoes most of the ‘entertainment’ (singing, cursing, shouting, etc…) that is a staple of his YouTube channel but the presentation has a certain sloppiness that doesn’t match the sterling content. Again this is only a quibble and I think that Williams’ ‘Revolutionize Your Chess’ Master Method delivers a product that made it a bargain at $43 and probably worth the full price of $150 for the devoted student.

Book Review - Parcells : A Football Life

  With some free time on my hands after my work contract ended and the football playoffs under way I bought a copy of ‘Parcells: A Football Life’ for $6.99 at Books-A-Million and read it this past week. As a lifelong New York Giants fan, Bill Parcells has a fond place in my memories as the coach that established the Giants as a perennial playoff team with two Super Bowl Championships after years of losing and sometimes embarrassing football. The low point of my Giant memories was the ‘Pisarcik Bowl’ where instead of taking a knee with 30 seconds left and a 17-12 lead over the hated Philadelphia Eagles, the Giants called a handoff to Larry Czonka that was fumbled by quarterback Joe Pisarcik and returned for a touchdown by the Eagles to help the Giants once again steal defeat from the jaws of victory.

  The Giants turnaround started when Pay Perkins was hired as coach and led the Giants to their first playoff appearance in 18 years behind the amazing Lawrence Taylor but Perkins left one season after that playoff appearance to replace Bear Bryant at Alabama and Parcells took over the coaching duties. Parcells almost was fired after going 3-12-1 in his first season but the Giants made the playoffs the next three years culminating in winning Super Bowl 21. After two seasons of missing the playoffs, the Giants made the playoffs in the next two seasons including the incredible 1990 Super Bowl season which included comeback wins over the two time defending champion 49ers in the NFC Championship game and the high-octane Buffalo Bills offense behind backup quarterback Jeff Hostetler.

The low point my Giants fandom...

  With his second Super Bowl in tow, Parcells left the Giants and spend the next 20 years as a turnaround artist that couldn’t stay long term with a team much like Yankee legend Billy Martin. Parcells stayed with the Patriots for four years, the Jets for three years, and the Cowboys for four years. Parcells took all the teams he coached to the playoffs and the Patriots to the Super Bowl. His accomplishments have been overshadowed by his long time defensive coordinator Bill Belichick who won five Super Bowls (and counting) with the Patriots.

...and the high point!

  Being a winning coach of a New York franchise made Parcells a larger than life figure, While Belichick has yet to write an autobiography or memoir, Parcells has written three (1987’s Parcells: Autobiography of the Biggest Giant of Them All, 2000’s The Final Season: My Last Year as Head Coach in the NFL, and 2014’s Parcells : A Football Life as well as a 1995 motivational primer ‘Finding a Way to Win’. Unlike the first two memoirs the 2014 book is more detailed and telling since Parcells was 73 when the book was published and had no designs on yet another coaching job. There is a lot of detail of Parcell’s childhood and many insights into his personal life that I had never heard. During his disastrous first season as Giants coach both his parents died. Parcells also talks candidly about his being an absentee father that missed almost all his three daughter’s events (including graduations) and was cheating on his wife during his entire coaching career. There is an entire chapter of how his ex-wife and current girlfriend carefully avoided each other at the funeral of Parcells’ brother.

  I don’t find Parcells’ personal life especially interesting – I was more interested his football career which the book covers in great detail from his college coaching career (including his stint at Army where he befriends legendary basketball coach Bobby Knight) to his pro assistant jobs and ascension to the Giants throne and beyond.

  Parcells is portrayed as a Lombardi-like figure that is super tough on his players that consistently attest to how Parcells made them better than any other coach no matter how much they disliked his harassing manner and the work they had to put in. Parcells came in for a lot of criticism after the first Super Bowl for cashing by writing his autobiography and then hunting for a coaching job that would give him general manager authority over the team’s personnel. This isn’t addressed directly but Parcells’ insecurity about his job after his poor first season when the press got wind of Giants general manager George Young recruiting his replacement is prominently featured and looks to have had an educational and scarring effect since for the next 10 years Parcells only took jobs that allowed him control over the football operations. Both the Jets and Patriot jobs became unattractive once new ownership came in and brought Parcells insecurities back to the forefront.

   After Parcells left the Jets it was a surprise to many (me included) when he went to work for the Cowboys and their very hands on owner Jerry Jones. It seems the two were kindred spirits in need of each other. Jones needed someone to show him how to run his football team and Parcells needed a job and both men were able to give up some of their control in order to work together. Parcells characterization of Terrell Owens as having an ego like a bucket with a hole in it that could never be filled was especially revealing and it now makes perfect sense that Parcells would try to command Owens' respect by referring to him as 'the player' instead of using his name.

  Eventually the Parcells-Jones partnership ran its course with two playoff appearances in four years and Parcells went to the Miami Dolphins as the director of football operations in a coda to his career. Once again the team was sold after he came on board and he left shortly thereafter. The book closes with Parcells’ induction to the football hall of fame and his settling down to his retirement with a brief flirtation to coach the New Orleans Saints during Sean Payton’s year-long ‘Bountygate’ suspension.

  I found this book to be revealing and thought-provoking. It is remarkable how many great leaders are driven by insecurities and Parcells seems to be part of that group. Once he was almost fired by the Giants in his first season as a head coach he was incapable of being in a football situation where he was not the dominant voice (except partially during his with the Cowboys). Parcells consistently brought players and coaches from the Giants to the Patriots, the Patriots to the Jets, and the Jets to the Cowboys to carry over his methodology but the results diminished at each stop (Super Bowl wins with the Giants, Super Bowl appearance with the Patriots, AFC Championship appearance with the Jets, playoff appearances with the Cowboys). It would have been interesting to see if Parcells could have developed Tony Romo into a championship quarterback but I think that as time rolled on the Parcells philosophy of building a football teal with athletic linebackers, massive linemen, and smashmouth running became harder and harder to win with due to rule changes that rewarded passing offenses. Parcells massive coaching tree of assistants who get their own head coaching jobs meant more competition for the same type of players. Eventually the league incorporates every different philosophy, distilling and integrating the best parts into the best parts of other philosophies that stood the test of time. It happened to the West Coast offense of Bill Walsh (who managed to get out ahead of the curve), Jimmy Johnson’s undersized but super quick defense, and Parcell’s smash mouth style. The only coach that has proven immune to the passage of time is Belichick with the final judgement still to be passed if he decides to ever change teams of carry on without Tom Brady.

Requiem For A Goose

Mr. (Goosey) Goose 1999-2018. The picture on the left is from when I first met him on July 20, 2014 and the one on the right when I last saw him on December 31, 2017.

  A few years back there were a few days during each year that I would take a few days off from work and stay home with Daisy and Baxter while Kathy would drive Ben and his belongings to his school in Idaho. Normally my dog walking routine is pretty structured but during these stay home days I would walk Daisy and Baxter through the alleys to sniff different areas while I would check out the backyards in the neighborhood. I would also take them 4 blocks north to Riverside Cemetery. The cemetery is on a huge stretch of property with a river in the back with lots of trees and right by the entrance is a large pond with geese, ducks, and a single swan. Daisy and Baxter loved meandering along the paths and I liked checking out all the different birds that would congregate at the pond.

  On July 20th, 2014 I took the beagles to the cemetery and there was a big group of people at one end. I recognized one member of the group as Levi, a high school friend of Matt’s. I stopped to say hi and Levi told me that his family was there to bring their pet goose to the pond to live. The goose had lived his entire life (13 or 14 years) at the acreage where Levi’s family lived with his mother but when the goose’s mother died he was very lonely so they were going to bring him to the cemetery where would be plenty of geese and people to hang out with. The goose’s name was Mr. Goose and while Levi and his family were gathered to say good bye to him and make sure he would be OK at the pond.

  I had been posting pictures of Daisy and Baxter, and the rest of the animals on Facebook since early 2011. I originally posted puppy pictures but Kathy’s family wanted to see how the beagles were getting on each week so I made taking and posting the pictures part of my weekly routines. Now that I actually knew one of the geese at the pond I talked Kathy into taking the beagles there on our Sunday morning walks and took pictures of Mr. Goose and the rest of the birds each week. Kathy would bring some bread to feed the animals and I would take pictures.

Mr. Goose was pretty sociable with the non-Canadian geese. Here are his crowds from 2015 and 2017.

  At the beginning of Mr. Goose’s stay in the cemetery pond we would find him apart from all the other birds but with a couple of months he gravitated towards the two other non-Canadian geese – a grey goose and a brown goose with an orange bulb on his beak. There are a number of people that stop by the pond to leave buckets of corn or feed bread to the birds. The winters could be rough but the cemetery staff always had a patch of the pond heated enough for some swimming room and there seemed to be enough food to go around if not enough to keep them from turning their nose at the bread Kathy would bring on Sundays. Mr. Goose seemed much older than the rest of the crew and preferred to stay out of the water but he was a personable sort that come up to you and squawk in order to get some bread and attention.

  We used to take our kids to the duck pond for some exercise and cheap entertainment but you notice more things when you go every single week for a few years. For the first couple of years there were three white ducks and a wood duck with a fluffy head as regulars along with the geese, swan, and the rest of the wood ducks. One year one of the white ducks was gone and the next year the fluffy headed duck was gone as well. The grey goose disappeared but was replaced by two more white geese that looked like streamlined versions of Mr. Goose. The grey goose disappeared one spring and then this past summer all the wood ducks and white ducks disappeared all in one weekend. The pond looked pretty bare without any wood ducks but within two weeks an entire new group of wood ducks had made their way to the pond. And every spring this Canadian goose with a crooked neck shows up with a group of baby geese that we would see grow bigger and bigger every year.

The birds at the duck pond come and go. The fluffy headed duck, brown and white duck, and the 3 white ducks were my favorites to look at but all disappeared in the past couple of years....

  And through this all was Mr. Goose who was slowing down with age and swung one leg awkwardly when he walked but had also become a local celebrity. He made the front page of the Marshalltown paper in 2015 (where I found his name was Mr. Goosey Goose) with the news that Levi’s mom is writing a children’s book about his life and times. Mr. Goose was also in the paper this year. One of Mr. Goose’s white goose pals had passed away from cancer and Mr. Goose was so despondent the cemetery was looking for a companion for Mr. Goose.

  This past week has been bitterly cold with the temperatures barely getting to zero. On Sunday, Kathy and I didn’t even walk to the pond – we drove Daisy and Baxter the four blocks. The pond was almost completely frozen. I took some pictures and Mr. Goose looked miserable. He was huddled in a ball and had that unkempt manner that has become all too familiar to me in seeing more pets than I care to remember in their last days. I thought he was dead but he perked up when Kathy threw some bread his way and grabbed as much as he could reach without getting up. Kathy and I both remarked how off Mr. Goose looked and hoped that it was just the cold weather and he would perk up soon.

  I got the news from Levi via Facebook that Mr. Goose has passed away on Tuesday. The cemetery called Levi’s mom and he has already had his funeral. It is sad to know I’ll never see Mr. Goose at the cemetery again but I was happy to have made his acquaintance. The only problem I had with Mr. Goose is the same problem I have with most animals I get to know – they just don’t live long enough. I’ve been through this with more animals than I care to think about and it is never fun to watch what are pretty innocent creatures get frail and die. I’m reminded of this daily when I see an older picture of Daisy and Baxter with their dark brown and black fur and compare to their ever-whitening faces. I guess the best we can do for the animals we care about is to try to make their lives as great as possible. That is certainly the kind of life Mr. Goose had by being brought to the Cemetery’s pond after his mom passed away. He had companionship and plenty of people came by to feed him. I’m not sure a goose or any other animal can have it better.

Rest In Peace Mr. Goose. I hope you enjoyed your life and have an even better afterlife.