New (to me) Technologies

  My son Ben got an Amazon Kindle for Christmas last year. The Kindle fire is a tablet device that is specifically designed to display eBooks and movies purchased from Amazon. Most chess eBooks are nothing more than PDF versions of the print copy. For example, in a fit of nostalgia I recently purchased the entire run a magagine I subscribed tp years ago, the 1988-2000 Inside Chess on a DVD in ‘searchable PDF format’. The entire format is unwieldy. Each issue is in an individual PDF and must be opened separately. The PDFs themselves are blurry as if they were scanned in and on some of the pages I can see the imprint of the previous page. It was a disappointing experience.

  When Tim Brennan published his Tactics Time Kindle eBook I was sorely tempted to get it since I enjoy his Tactics Time ChessBase product so much. Tim has a handle on the new capabilities that can be obtained from chess eBooks. His eBooks puzzles have the answers on the next screen (instead of at the back of the book) and provide an internet link to the game the puzzle came from. I knew from Tim’s promotional materials that there are Kindle readers for PC’s and tablets but I was still lazy about getting the book though it only cost 4.99. But Tim borrowed a tack from most of the successful drug dealers I’ve known and offered a free eBook with 300 very basic puzzles. Before you think I'm knocking Tim or drug dealers, I would point out that I've also used the 'free taste' technique by waiving the entry fee in the last 3 chess tournaments I've held on National Chess Day.

  I had some spare time on Saturday and downloaded the free book as well as the Kindle reader for my PC and iPod. Tim’s eBook is well designed for the medium and while I don’t especially care for the Kindle interface and the lack of physical contact with a book, I’m sure it will grow on me just like typing email on my iPod and Windows 7 and Windows XP and Windows 95 and DOS. I was impressed enough to buy the Tactics Time eBook and another one for 99 cents called ’Chess Patzer to Master – How an Everyday Joe does it’ by Paul Powell. It is a short little book by a National Master with a handful of his games and some generic practical advice about how to go about improving practical results. At 99 cents, it is a nice little read but if I had to pay more than five dollars for a printed copy I would feel cheated. The problem I see with all the digital chess books on Kindle is the lack of an interactive game board to play over the moves, but I have no doubt it will be solved in due time. The great thing I see about eBooks is that since the publishing cost is minimal, authors with new publishing ideas like Tim and Paul Powell only have to invest time and effort to publish and sell their books and the chess public can decide whether they will be unknown authors or join Fred Reinfeld and Bruce Pandolfini on the top shelf of prolific chess authors.

  While I’ve dipped my toe in the eBook pool, I’ve jumped headfirst into the deep waters of another newish technology, the podcast. I’m in the habit of listening to the local sports station KXNO on my drive into work and while at work, I’ll either listen to music on my iPod’s Rhapsody application or sports from KXNO, Chicago’s WSCR, or New York’s WFAN. The only podcast I’d downloaded was Joel Osteen’s weekly inspirational message but when I heard Sports Illustrated football writer Peter King mention his podcast during a radio interview, I decided to try to find it on my iPod and sure enough there it was. Peter King’s NFL podcast was on every Monday or Tuesday for the first half of the football season and contained a couple of interviews with players, executives, or coaches. It was a good show to look forward to but in December it started showing up later and later in the week and then the last week in December was missed and another week was missed in January and then the podcast ended without even a Super Bowl wrap up show. That underlines the big problem with podcasts as opposed to radio: radio stations have to broadcast, but podcasters don’t have to stick to any schedule even if they are a nationally known brand like Sports Illustrated.

  There aren’t any chess podcasts on iTunes that have been updated in the past year and I'm certain there is a niche for one, but there is plenty of chess content on YouTube that can be subscribed to for free and if you insist on paying, there are regular programs on the Internet Chess Club or playchess.com. I subscribed to Daniel King’s power play channel and been treated to the GM’s analysis of the game of the day from the recently held Candidates Tournament in London. Given that a chess podcast needs to have an animated board of some type to show games, YouTube may be a better medium for chess podcasts then iTunes but I suspect it's the ads that draw the chess content providers to YouTube because iTunes doesn’t allow ads. Most podcasts on iTunes are used to promote other products by the publisher while YouTube publishers generate revenue by ads.

  Despite the lack of chess content on iTunes, there is plenty of sports content and I’ve found four other sports podcasts that I enjoy. Every Wednesday I get legendary sportswriter Frank Deford’s three minute segment from National Public Radio’s All Things Considered program. Deford’s commentaries are short but dependable and very interesting.

  To take the place of Peter King’s on-again off-again NFL podcast, I’ve subscribed to the Rich Eisen Podcast. Rich Eisen is the lead anchor for the NFL Network and understandably gets the top players and executives as guests. The podcast is on only once or twice a week (and sometimes not at all) which is too infrequent for my taste but when it is on it is generally at least an hour and a half long.

  An infrequent but excellent podcast is 'Inside Sports Illustrated'. Every week or two or three, host Richard Deitsch interviews a SI writer to talk about an upcoming story in the magazine and share some insights on the subject. Lance Armstrong, the 2014 Winter Games, and the 20th anniversary of the dream team were the subjects of some recent podcasts. Occasionally Deitsch does an interview with a sports celebrity. Last year there was an hour long interview with Al Michaels and yesterday I was treated to a half hour interview with Mr T. who talked about his wrestling experiences, playing Clubber Lang in Rocky III, and being a bodyguard for Leon Spinks and Muhammad Ali. This podcast is so excellent I wish it could be heard on a regular basis.

  By far my favorite podcast is the CBS Eye on Basketball podcast, where the CBS NBA bloggers Zach Harper and Matt Moore spend anywhere from a half hour to an hour each weekday talking pro hoops. They go over the previous night’s games, the upcoming night’s games, and whatever else is going on in the world of the NBA. Earlier in the season they spent a lot of time discussing the soap opera that has become the Los Angeles Lakers season and the last month was devoted to the Miami Heat’s near record winning streak, but in between they discussed the year’s top rookies, playoff scenarios, and pay special attention to players that normally escape national attention like J.R. Smith of the Knicks, JaVale McGee of the Nuggets, John Wall of the Wizards, and Ricky Rubio and Nikola Pecovic of the Timberwolves. The reason players from the Nuggets and Timberwolves are featured prominently in the podcasts is that Harper is based in Minneapolis and Moore is in Denver. Their intimacy with the nether regions of the NBA provides a nice contrast to most of the other national coverage of the NBA that tend to focus on the top five or six teams and pretend that the other two dozen teams in the league don’t exist. I look forward to this podcast every day and listening to it on my drive home from work makes the hour pass a lot quicker than it did before and I’m learning a lot about basketball.

  Although I’m enjoying the CBS NBA podcast a lot, I may have been better off spending my time paying attention listening to college basketball. After leading my office NCAA tournament pool going into the round of 16, I had five of the final eight teams heading into the round of eight and on Saturday afternoon, the first of my final four selections made it when Syracuse beat Marquette. But then everything went wrong when Ohio State lost to Wichita State, Florida was demolished by Michigan and Duke (my championship pick) looked like a bunch of slow old men in losing to a blazingly fast Louisville team. Despite my miserable weekend, I’m still in the lead of my office pool but can only win if Wichita State beats Louisville and Syracuse beats Michigan on Saturday, which is not very likely. I think that before next year’s ‘March Madness’, I’ll bone up on some February NCAA podcasts.

Not a 'AAA' Chess Camp

The 2012 West Des Moines Chess Camp!

  After a couple of months of organizing, advertising, and preparing lessons, we finally held our West Des Moines Chess Camp last week. Last Sunday, the family took a trip to the Wal-Mart to get the camp snacks. I packed 144 pudding cups, 14 gallons of Sunny D, 4 gallons of Apple Juice, 144 packs of cheddar chess crackers, 144 fruit cups, and a couple hundred plastic spoons and cups into my groaning shopping cart and found an empty checkout line. The checkout lady noted that I sure had a lot of stuff and started asking what I needed it for, so I asked Matt very loudly, ‘Matt, how long do we have to keep them locked in the basement?’ That was the end of any Wal-Mart cashier questions, but I did mention to her that I was buying supplies for a chess camp after I was well on my way to getting out of the checkout in record time.

  I had arranged to take Thursday and Friday off from work and on Thursday morning I packed up my car with all my chess stuff and snack items under the confused, bleary-eyed gazes of my next door neighbors, who apparently were up all night assembling Marshalltown’s largest empty beer can pyramid. We greeted each other with nods of feigned indifference and I was on the road and at the Learning Resource Center in West Des Moines at 8:30. I started dragging all the supplies in when Frank Li and his dad Jingyang arrived. Frank is a talented 8th grade chess player from West Des Moines and his parents offered his help at the camp because they wanted him to be involved in some volunteer efforts and I was happy for the help.

  Jose arrived around 9 and we decided on how we wanted to split the big meeting room into 2 and arrange the desks. Then Bethany Carson arrived. I was extremely lucky to get Bethany to my guest instructor this year. She knew many of the kids already, was as excellent with the kids as I thought she would be, and as the 5 time state girls champion had their respect as a chess instructor. Jose is awesome with kids, had many of his students in attendance, and as the state chess champion had plenty of credibility with the other kids. I felt I would have my hands full not being the weak link! The campers started to arrive at 9:40, so Jose and I started greeting the campers as they came in and got them in their proper rooms. We had 35 campers and put one third in an advanced group and the rest into a beginner section. In no time, it was 10 and we were ready to start.

  Bethany was going over some of her most instructive games with the advanced players while I was giving a lesson to the beginners in how not to lose in 4 moves. It sounds like a silly topic, but at my tournaments and at St. Francis I see so many players lose to the 4 move checkmate that I thought it would be good for these campers to learn some chess ‘self-defense’. When I give a lesson, I like to engage the kids and make them speak up and share their ideas. Out of the 2 dozen kids arranged in a semicircle around me, there were 5 or 6 kids that wanted to sit on the edges and talk with their friends, 10 or 12 kids sitting in the middle that were interested in the lesson and would contribute, and the rest of the kids would drift between goofing around and paying attention. The lesson went really well and after an hour and a half we gave the kids a break and let them either play outside or stay in and play chess.

Left: I wore my cool Marvel Comics T-Shirt on Friday. Center: Frank and Bethany enjoying a rare free moment.
Right: Jose keeping an eye on the day ending tournament.

  After the lunch break, it was my turn to work with the advanced players while Jose was going over some puzzles with the beginners. I had prepared a lesson on looking for discoveries where one piece moves to discover an attack by a piece in back of it. I like to call these moves ‘ninja moves’ since the piece hiding in back gives the visual impact of a ninja appearing out of nowhere to make an attack. The lesson was going OK, but it was taking a lot of time to switch the puzzles on the demonstration board and that slowed the pace of the lesson with a delay after every puzzle. I was trying to engage the campers in sharing their ideas and it was going well, but Frank kept on finding tricks for the defender in the positions that I hadn’t looked at when I was preparing the lesson. None of the tricks made the answers to the puzzles wrong, but it made me have to think while giving the lesson and that slowed down everything more. Next year, I’m going to make sure Frank reviews my puzzles before the camp! After the lesson, we decided the kids needed to play and gave them a choice between playing a team chess game called bughouse and a speed chess tournament. It was a good idea and except for one of the campers having to visit Julie the nurse when her finger got bruised by being caught in chess clock the day ended on a good note. We cleaned up and tried to vacuum the floor to pick up what seemed like millions of cheese cracker particles, but the vacuum cleaner's filter hadn’t been emptied since the Stone Age and the motor overheated so the vacuuming had to wait until the next morning.

  I got home at 6:30, went with Kathy to walk Daisy and Baxter, watched Burn Notice and slept like a baby until Friday morning. It’s amazing how exhausting it can be working with almost 3 dozen young chess players. I was hoping to be back at the learning center at 9am, but since we couldn’t finish vacuuming the night before, I was out of the house at 7:30 with the plan of arriving at 8:45. I was halfway between Des Moines and Marshalltown (otherwise known as the middle of nowhere), when I noticed the low tire pressure light come on. I was 15 miles away from a gas station with an air pump so I just kept going along until I felt the familiar shimmy of a flat tire. I pulled over, found the little donut spare tire, tire iron, and jack in the bottom of the trunk, and changed a tire on my Kia Rio for the first time since I bought the car 2 and a half years ago. I couldn’t go more than 50 miles an hour with the little donut tire, so instead of getting to the learning center at 8:45, I arrived at 9:10. I have an AAA card and called them to see if could get someone to come out and fix my tire. They told me they didn’t do that sort of thing. I put out the day’s snacks and started vacuuming the room when Jose and Bethany arrived. I told them the story of my flat tire and Bethany’s dad Tim offered to take my tire to get fixed. I gave him directions to the Freedom Tire shop I used to get my tires at and within an hour, he was back with a new tire which I put in my car with the idea of replacing it after the camp.

  The second day of the camp went much the same as the first day. In the morning, Jose went over his instructive games with the advanced players while I spent the morning teaching the beginners some simple endings. After the lesson, I’d let the players demonstrate what they learned by trying to win against Bethany, Frank, or myself from the lecture positions. Around the hour and a half mark they started getting noisier and noisier so I took them outside to the nearby playground to work off some energy for a half hour and then took them back in for lunch. In the afternoon, I went through an endings lesson with the advanced players and just like the day before, Frank kept on trying to find tricky ideas. But this time I knew most of the positions cold and didn’t have to spend as much time working the solutions out and I got through the lesson at a nice pace. We closed out the camp with a bughouse tournament, gave out participation certificates, and said our goodbyes to the camp for another year.

  As we were cleaning up the room and packing up from the camp (the fruit cups were a big thumbs down this year with over 100 left!), Jose and I were talking about what changes we’d make for next year’s camp. Unlike last year, I‘m planning on having a camp next year because when I talked to many of the parents, I see there is a need for an inexpensive chess camp. There is no question that a lot of the families can afford a week of their summer and hundreds of dollars for chess camps like the $400 one in Des Moines in August, but there are also a lot of families that can’t. The feedback I got from the parents was outstanding and the low-cost camp is a perfect complement to my low-cost chess tournaments.

There's always some clean up, but I wasn't expecting donuts to be on the cleanup docket!

  Filled with the great feeling of a well-run camp, I went out to my car to finally replace my donut with my new tire and found out that I left my tire iron out in the middle of nowhere when I put the donut on in the morning! I called AAA to see if they could get someone to change my tire and after punching my 16 digit membership number into the phone and then having to repeat the number to 2 operators (why do they make you punch in the number if you have to repeat it to the operator anyway), I was told that since I didn’t have a flat tire, they wouldn’t be able to help me. I asked the operator if that meant that if I punched a hole in my tire with a knife, AAA would send somebody? The operator said ‘Of course we would!’ I’ve been paying these clowns for 15 years, but at that point I hung up, loaded up my car with the leftover fruit cups and other snacks, and drove to the Target store to buy a tire iron. I didn’t realize that the Super Target’s idea of an automotive department was steering wheel covers and car wax products and so I left empty handed. I got on the highway and heard on the radio about a traffic jam up ahead so I pulled off on Hickman Road to find an auto parts store. I saw an Advance Auto Parts and pulled in to get my tire iron and next door I saw a Freedom Tire shop! I pulled in and saw they were closing in 15 minutes. I asked if they could change my donut out for the spare tire and not only did they stay open late to do it they did it for free since I had bought my tire from another Freedom Tire. If I do decide to rename next year’s chess camp, the ‘Freedom Tire Chess Camp’ wouldn’t be a bad name. It would surely be a better choice than the ‘AAA Chess Camp’.

Vacation at Zanzibar’s

  I was home all week on vacation and as I wrote last week, I had 9 days off, some books I wanted to read, a website I wanted to write, some beagles I wanted to walk, and some chess I wanted to play.

  I spent about 3 hours a day for 5 days working on my website. I bought a domain on Monday, uploaded the site on Wednesday, debugged some issues on Thursday and Friday, and www.centraliowachess.com is a reality. It’ll be nice to have my own piece of the internet to publicize tournaments and post reports and articles. I’ve been using the IASCA website for this, but it seems hypocritical of me to use their site for publicity at the same time as not liking how they portray my efforts in their broadcast emails. I designed the site to be data driven, but with only a few focused pages I’ll be able to keep the site updated in a timely manner without spending too much time maintaining it. Of course, a project like this tends to take on a life of its own. In the future, I want to add a photo page instead of using chess.com and I have an idea to allow users to upload chess games that can only be viewed by people they designate, but these types of improvements can wait. Now that the site has been up for a bit and I’ve been able to look at it a little more critically, I’ve identified a few enhancements for the next time I have a few hours on my hands.

  I followed the final rounds of the Tal Memorial super tournament from Moscow on the Internet Chess Club, where the World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen and No. 3 Lev Aronian shared first place. The top US player Hikaru Nakamura had a disastrous tournament, finishing last and dropping out of the World top 10. I hope the poor result is just the result of Nakamura’s adjusting to his new coach, former world champion Garry Kasparov. If Nakamura fails to emerge as a serious contender for the world championship, will his millionaire benefactor Rex Sinquefield feel as if his support of US Chess is just good money after bad? Time will tell.

  We got Daisy and Baxter out for walks 4 or 5 times every day, walking at least 3 miles every day, and more on Friday when we took 3 separate walks for beef stick treats. When I wasn’t walking the dogs or working on the web site, I was reading my chess books. I started with the Yuri Averbakh memoir, “Center-Stage and Behind the Scenes”. Yuri Averbakh was a Soviet Grandmaster, trainer, and arbiter (umpire) from the 1940’s to the 2000’s. His career spanned the Stalin purges, World War II, the rise of Soviet chess to world dominance, the decline of Botvinnik and the loss of the world title to Bobby Fisher, the rise of Karpov and the defection of Kortchnoi, the Karpov-Kasparov battles, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the split between Kasparov and FIDE. There aren’t any games in the book, but once I started reading it, I couldn’t read anything else until I finished it on Wednesday. This isn’t a book for the non-chess player or a young chess player, but for someone like me who grew up reading about the great Soviet players (and is of Russian heritage, by the way), the book is a fascinating look at the chess world through the prism of the Soviet system where everything from being assigned to play in a foreign tournament, getting an a apartment bigger than 144 square feet for 4 people, and staying out of the purges of the 30’s and 40’s took political maneuvering and a lot of luck.

  As I expected, I didn’t get very far with "1001 Checkmate Combinations". It is a dense book, but it does look like a lot of fun and focuses on checkmates with a piece or a combination of specific pieces per chapter. I’m about a third of the way through "Lessons with a Grandmaster" by Boris Gulko, but I don’t think it’s doing me very much good. It is a collection of 24 of former US and USSR champion Gulko’s games as explained to ‘A’ player and psychologist Joel Sneed. The games themselves are interesting enough, but when Gulko explains a move with comments like ’29…Na4? Will be met by 30.Rd4 and Black loses his advantage’, it doesn’t help me too much because I’m not sure why one side even has the advantage, much less why said advantage is lost. I don’t think the problem is the book, I’m just not good enough of a player to understand it.

  I had been playing a chess game on chess.com against Ben Tessman. Ben is from the Des Moines area and I’ve met him at a couple of tournaments over the years. Ben is an improving player who also blogs on chess.com under his handle of ‘SirBenjamin’. Our game finished this week when Ben missed a tactic that lost a piece, which happens when someone who plays only one game at a time (me) plays someone like Ben who has at least a dozen games going on at once. I’ve played Ben 3 times on chess.com and I’ve seen considerable improvement every time. I was planning on heading to Zanzibar’s Coffee Adventures yesterday for some coffee and chess so I invited Ben to come on down. I also wrote to Zanzibar regulars Dan and Mike letting them know Ben and I would be heading over.

  After our 5am walk with Daisy and Baxter to get some coffee and beef stick treats, I left for Zanzibar’s at 7:30 and arrived at 8:30. No chess players were around, so I got a Tanzania Teaberry coffee, a bagel and cream cheese, and a newspaper and sat down to read and wait. Ben came over at 8:45 and got some sort of cappuccino drink. We talked about Ben’s chess student, our different techniques for teaching, and Ben (an IT professional) gave me the useful advice that to get my chess website up on the search rankings I need to get people to click on links pointing to the website (LIKE THIS ONE – PLEASE CLICK). Then we sat down to play a couple of games. We drew for colors and I was Black.

  The game took around 45 minutes. We went over the game and talked about some of the ways Ben could have developed his pieces and then it was time for another game.

  This game was a lot tougher and took about an hour. In games between players at our level, tactics most always decides. At that point it was time to go so we said our goodbyes and went on our separate ways. I felt bad that Ben missed meeting the Zanzibar regulars (any of whom he would be competitive with), but I was happy that he came down and we had a chance to talk and play. When I got home, I helped Kathy put up the Christmas Tree and started the thankless task of moving my data to my new computer (After 5 years, my trusty Dell has gotten very persnickety about booting up). I knew this day was coming and had a new HP laptop at the ready for over a year in preparation, but moving the data is still a labor-intensive process. Even so, I did find some time to play some 3 minute chess on the Internet Chess Club. I’ve been trying to get my 3-minute rating to its all-time high and making good progess. Here is one of my better efforts from this morning:

Endgame – The Bobby Fischer Biography

  I bought the Bobby Fisher biography “Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness” from Amazon.com a couple of weeks ago for $14 with free shipping. The book lists for $25.99, which is what Bob Long of Thinkers Press was selling it for. ChessCafe.com was selling the book for $20. Bob is probably going to be upset with me for buying the book from Amazon if he reads this since he is always railing about how Amazon squeezes all the profits from the books, leaving little for the publisher/author and nothing for the smaller booksellers like Bob. But that is the beauty of amazon.com in a Wal-Mart sort of way. If I want a book, I can probably get it from them cheaper than from anyone else and if it is a book like this one that was heavily publicized, they will send me an email offer at the lowest possible price. Anyway, I have $12 in my pocket that I can use to purchase a book or DVD from Bob which I have done plenty of times in the past and you won’t find me complaining about paying Bob $30 for his biography “The Chess Assassin’s Business Manual” when it is on sale for $10 on the remainder market 3 months later.

  I’m a product of the “Fischer Boom” of 1972. When Bobby Fischer won the right to challenge then champion Boris Spassky in Iceland, the entire country was rooting for the American to beat the Russians at their own game (5 Russians had held the championship for 34 years). The match was on public television 3 or more days a week during the summer, sales of chess sets went up 10 fold, and United States Chess Federation memberships tripled. To this day, the Fischer Boom has reverberations as people my age have taught our kids chess and volunteer to share our love of the game. Fischer won the championship, didn’t play in any tournaments or matches, and lost his crown in 1975 when he refused to defend it against the new Russian challenger, Anatoly Karpov. Sales of chess sets and USCF memberships went back to the pre-Fischer levels and the Russians held the World Championship for 33 more years, until Viswanathan Anand from India beat Vladimir Kramnik for the title in 2008. Fischer went to Yugoslavia in 1992 to play a $5 million dollar rematch against Boris Spassky in violation of a US ban on playing in a county under UN Embargo. Fischer spit on the government ban at a press conference, won the match, and was not heard from again in the mainstream press until 9-11 when he went on a Philippine radio station to declare his happiness for the destruction of America. Up until that time, he was allowed to travel the world even though the US had revoked his passport and had a warrant for his arrest, but after his 9-11 diatribes, Fischer was no longer looked on by the government with a blind eye. He was arrested in Japan in 2004 for not having a valid passport, held in jail for 9 months while he fought extradition to the US, and was given Icelandic citizenship in 2005 and lived there until his death in 2008.

  The author, Frank Brady, had written a previous biography of Fischer “Profile of a Prodigy” in 1965 and updated it in 1972 after Fischer won the World Championship. He is a professional biographer, having also written biographies of Orson Welles, Hugh Hefner, Barbara Streisand, and Aristotle Onassis.

  I knew before buying the book that there would be no chess games in it, but all the reviews I read said this was the definitive biography on Bobby Fischer that had a lot of new information, and I did like the Profile of a Prodigy book, so I went for it. I was disappointed in that there was very little in the book I didn’t already know. The first third of the book talks about his poverty stricken childhood, no father and a mother that is always working, protesting, and studying to pay much attention to him until his sister brings home a chess set among many other games to play with. He takes to chess, immerses himself in it, and his mother takes him to a chess club in Brooklyn. He gets better and better and by the time he is 15, he is the US champion and is competes successfully internationally and is one of the top 10 players in the world. The second third of the book talks about how he blames the Russians for his failures on the international stage, is insulting to the patrons of US chess (in one example, a patroness of a tournament gives Fischer his prize money in an envelope and offers her congratulations, only to have Fischer rip the envelope open and count the money to make sure it was all there, completely ignoring the patron.), dropping out of matches and tournaments over an imagined slight or argument over playing conditions. Eventually, the USCF bends every rule they could to get him into the 1972 championship cycle that Fischer didn’t bother to qualify for, and he wins an astounding 19 games in a row against grandmasters to set up his match with Spassky. Fischer held out for more prize money that had every been paid for a championship chess match, lost the first game, forfeited the second in a protest over the having the cameras removed from the playing site (they were), then came back to only lose 1 more game in the match, winning by 4 games.

  The latter part of the book details how Fischer gave most of his championship prize money to Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God and was destitute for much of the 70’s and 80’s, (even though he had numerous endorsement opportunities that he turned down), living off the Social Security checks his mother signed over to him, blaming his troubles on a Jewish conspiracy against him (Fischer is at least half-Jewish), and collecting Nazi literature to help him prove the conspiracy, his comeback, 9-11 rantings, exile to Iceland, and finally his death.

  If you are a chess player and knew about all of Bobby Fischer’s triumphs and tragedies, I think you will find very little in this book you didn’t know already. The one thing that I didn’t know was that he kept a good relationship with his mother up until her death and how supportive she was of his chess career.

  If you don’t know much about chess, would you want to read a book about someone who was a gifted chess player, but with the exception of his mother, turned his back on anyone and everyone who ever helped him or tried to help him, including his own country? Even in the last part of the book, Fisher is quoted talking disparagingly about the Icelandic people and nation, the one country that was willing to give him citizenship and rescue him from living out his life in an American prison.

  Because of Bobby Fischer, an entire generation of Americans tried out chess as a pastime and to this day more people find the measure of confidence, fellowship, and self-esteem over the chessboard that they could not through athletics and other activities. But even 40 years after he won the championship and 20 years after his last competitive game, he is the one name most people associate with chess and many of these people tend to think of chess players as crazy nuts like Bobby Fischer. This is a shame because while the population of chess players has (like all organizations) its share of crazies, most adult chess players are upstanding, hardworking, responsible people. The Iowa Closed Chess Championship will be played next month. The 6 players competing include 2 outstanding students (not high school dropouts like Fischer), 1 lawyer, 1 surgeon, 1 college professor, and 1 engineer. How much easier would it be to me to get donors for my series of chess tournaments if these 6 people came to the donor’s mind when they thought of chess players instead of Bobby Fischer? You could make the case that some or none of these people would have played chess in the first place if not for Fischer and there's a lot of logic behind that viewpoint, but I feel Fischer did at least as much harm to the perception of chess in the United States as he did good and I don't even want to get into the opportunity lost to popularize chess if he had just kept playing without going wacko.

  To sum up my thoughts on Bobby Fisher, a priest walked in on the St. Francis Chess Club 2 weeks ago and was telling the head coach Jim Mona and myself how good he thought it was that these kids were learning to play chess. Then he said, “Maybe you have another Bobby Fischer here?” and Jim and I said almost at the same time “I hope not.”

Not backing down

  I previously wrote about my posting to Bob Long’s blog about his description of the rating of one of the personalities attending his October’s chess clinic, Andres Hortilossa, (“his rating was 2199 last I looked”) and the misleading response Bob posted. I had previously written a review about Hortillosa’s book “Improve Your Chess at Any Age”, which served a collections of the author’s games and outlines his chess improvement system.

  It seems as if I have opened a hornet’s nest. 2 weekends ago, the author responded in a blog posting referring to my opinions as a ‘big lie’ and ‘factual accusations’. And this past weekend, I was sent a copy of 4-page article printed in Long’s ‘Chess Reports’ magazine where he and Hortillosa refer to me as an ‘idiot’ and ‘sophomoric’ [Clarification: Long referred to me as an 'idiot', Hortillosa as using 'sophomoric logic'], among quite a few other insulting phrases. The language in the private forum was a lot less civil than in the blog postings, but I don’t think I was meant to see this one, as it is a subscriber-only magazine that is part instruction and part advertisement for Bob’s other chess-related entrepreneurial endeavors.

  I like to have a good humor about things and don't care for all the vitriol from Bob and Hortilossa. I offered my opinions and generally had a favorable review of the book. I'm rather offended at taking a private beatdown in a subscriber only magazine without having the opportunity to respond, but since I have my own 'media' outlet as the Tom Petty song goes, I can stand my ground and not back down.

  Hortillosa seems upset with my opinion that his jump from an unrated international player to one rated 2199 was the result of an exceptional performance in his first internationally rated tournament (most US tournaments are not internationally rated due to the high cost and extra regulations), since his national rating (that was established over 20 years and 900+ games) was never 2199 and his international rating has been in free-fall over the past 2 years (losing 200+ points in less than 2 years). In his post he points out that his initial international rating was indeed 2199 and asks if I am just ignorant of that fact or am just promulgating a ‘big lie’, treating my mentioning that his national rating was never 2199 as a denial of his initial international rating.

  He also doesn’t seem to like my conclusion of his rating downslide as showing his system “could not improve his chess at his current age”. He notes that when he follows his system he has good results, but when he doesn’t follow his system, he plays like ‘his critics’ (that would be me, I assume). I’ll give him a tie in the ‘sarcastic remark’ contest although I do like my play on the book title better. An improvement system (chess or otherwise) doesn’t give me a lot of confidence when the inventor and primary example of the system can’t follow it consistently. If he can’t follow his own system, what hope do I have of following it and more importantly, why should I even bother? In an entire universe of chess improvement systems, I’m going to pick one that the originator can’t follow? For me to sign on to a system, I’d like to see a sustained improvement from its leading advocate, not being Cinderella for a tournament or two and then having the horse and carraige turning back into mice and a pumpkin at midnight. I’ll pass on playing Charley in a real life version of ‘Flowers for Algernon’.

  I could relate when Hortillosa compared his system to a weight loss program that I shouldn’t dismiss because he has put his weight back on. He says “Hank, ignore my own ’weight’ issues. See if you can really use my prescriptive ‘diet plan’ because you might be a better practitioner of the plan than I could ever become.” I don’t think Hortillosa is aware of my having been recently labeled as obese at my work’s health screening, so I won’t accuse him of being weight-intolerant, but I did get to think who would I want to help me lose weight if I was really serious about it? I came up with 4 choices. Who would you pick?

Yes, I picked #2 also. There’s a reason the TV show on NBC isn’t called ‘Losing it with the guy sleeping on a lazy boy' or ‘Losing it with the guy who can drink his furniture’. I went to the Target today and looked through all the weight loss books and workout videos. None of the people on the covers of the books and DVD’s looked like a guy that would need the New York Fire Department to come over with ropes and ladders to help him get out of his apartment building when he fell down, like this fellow (You can read about it here).

  Mind you, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being so obese that you need the fire department to help you out of your apartment building when you fall down. I'm merely saying that I’d go elsewhere for my dieting advice, thank you. But, maybe I can get in touch with him to see if he has a chess improvement program…

  (How's that for sophomoric?)

Chess Book Review – ‘Improve Your Chess at Any Age’ – Is there a fountain of youth?

There are a few proven and well-known subjects that will convince people to buy a chess book:
  1) The book to help your child to become a chess champion so all the other parents will be jealous of you.
  2) The opening book that you can study and immediately win games without having to play to play the middlegame or endgame.
  3) The book that shows you how to get better at chess even though your chess rating hasn’t shown any noticeable change in 20+ years and you are closer to being dead than being born.

  I’ve always been wary of books #1 and #2. Most of the really good young players I’ve met could beat me without ever having read a book. Opening books can help get easy wins against players I would have beaten anyway, but players that are better than me always seem to make some move that is not covered in the book and left to my own devices, I just get outplayed. I call it the talent factor. The best kind of opening book is one that explains the ideas behind the openings, but they are few and far between and still rely on your level of chess ability

  On the other hand, I’m a sucker for book type #3. The classic book in this genre is ‘Rapid Chess Improvement' by Michael de la Mazza, who advocated doing some of 1200+ chess tactic puzzles every day, building up slowly but surely, increasing the number of puzzles until after 127 days you do all 1200 puzzles at one sitting. It helped him win a large cash prize at the 2001 World Open, and then he immediately retired from chess. The idea has a lot of merit, but I didn’t have the time to devote to the regimen.

  There are also the 'system' books that tell you how to think and what to think about. The excellent CJ Purdy books by Thinker’s Press fall into this category. I find the Purdy system is very useful, but knowing what tactics to look for and recognizing and finding them over the board runs into the talent factor again. Looking for tactics is a great idea, but it doesn’t help if you can’t find them in the limited time over the board. The Purdy method has helped in my correspondence chess games where you have a couple of days to go over the moves.

  Last March, I found myself with a few extra dollars in my pocket and bought the book ‘Improve Your Chess at Any Age’ by Andres D. Hortillosa from Amazon.com. The book advertises that Hortilossa’s method of chess improvement helped him to go from an unrated player to an international rating of 2199 and “that a player can improve at any age as long as he or she is inspired with the right attitude and enabled with the right thinking process“. The thinking is mostly a rehash of the Purdy system (look over the whole board, find threats, rank the threats, focus your response against the worst threats, make a mental list of moves to consider, make each move in your head, evaluate the threats after each proposed move, repeat until you think you have the best move) without a listing of the specific tactical ideas to consider. One idea I found interesting was instead of solving tactical puzzles from actual games, one should play the entire game to see how the tactic was set up.

  I looked up Hortillosa’s chess record in the USCF database and was disappointed to see that while he was unrated on the international rating system, his national rating was 2101 in 1994, fell to 1900 by 1997 and stayed close to that rating until August 2008 and then lifted his national rating to 2000 in the next year, wrote his book, and has stayed around the 2000 rating since. A rating of 2000 is considered expert, 2200 is a national master level. (My son Matt's rating is 2080 and my rating is 1690). Hortillosa's international rating started at 2199 after his very successful first internationally rated tournament in Rhode Island in 2008, and has steadily fallen since to his current international rating of 2027. Apparently Hortilossa cannot improve his chess at his current age (although there may be some other reasons for the lack of improvement).

I think I can recap the method as such:
  1) Build your chess rating up to a high level
  2) Lose 200 rating points
  3) Hire a grandmaster coach
  4) Gain 100 rating points back
  5) Write a book on how to gain 100 points

  Luckily, there was much more to the book than helping players improve as it also covers many of the author’s games during the period of his rating improvement. I liked the games a lot. As a 1600+ rated player, I don’t think I get a lot out of going over grandmaster(2500+) games and it helped to look at the thought processes of a player rated at a level I could compete with. Hortillosa goes over the games with a lot of humility even in his wins and the back and forth nature of the games was very entertaining. There are enough diagrams that I could follow the games without having to have a board in front of me. The author has an old world style of wordplay that I found very attractive to read in a ‘Yoda’-like way. Here is a sample of some of his offerings.

On reviewing your games
  “Do not romanticize your wins because the only information these wins will give you are the errors of your opponents but not yours. You cannot gain from correcting their errors but you will by correcting yours”

On recovering from mistakes
  “One way of forgetting bad memories is to pretend that the current board position is the game starting position.”

On playing stronger players
  “Play like you are their equal and the brain may even surprise you”

On searching for moves
  “Finding pseudo-impossibilities over the board will secure easy escapes from lost positions and reward the determined player with unexpected points.”

  “Take the time to search for one move available to your opponent that has the force to effectively nullify the idea behind your plan.”

Practical chess advice
  “Positivism fuels energetic play and aptly reflects your move choices as they tend to be active rather than passive.”

  “Begin your search with the assumption that even in dire situations resources do exist.”

  “The possessor of the time advantage should strive to keep heavy pieces in play, especially the queen which has the most potent capability of exacting double attacks.”

On thinking like your opponent
  “What does he want? I didn’t know because I didn’t ask. If you do not ask, you will never look. And if you do not look, you will not find as well.”

  As a book to help the aging player improve, my money would have been better spent on buying directions to the Fountain of Youth from a traveling gypsy. But since I never would have bought the book unless I was searching for a quick fix, I consider myself lucky to have at least found an entertaining games collection and some useful advice and can recommend this book for entertainment if not a magic wand to improve your chess.

Book Review - The Chess Assassin's Business Manual by Bob Long

  I got a copy of this book from the author himself at the Iowa Open last week. Bob is the owner of Thinkers Press, the chess publisher of many fine books including my favorites, the Cecil Purdy Collection. There is not a lot of chess games and positions in the book, so it was easy to finish the book in a week. The book talks mostly about Bob's careers in the typesetting business, chess publishing business, and the chess sales business. Bob's talks a lot about all the bright ideas he's had and the problems he has had dealing with cheating competitors, etc. I find the main thread of Bob's successes is not his great ideas or his business savvy, but simply that he cares about his work and outworks his competition. He mentions as an afterthought how he changed fonts on the chapter headings that is on the top of every right-facing page, but the font or even chapter headings would be an afterthought to most. These small tidbits explain why the Thinker's Press books are the best chess books on the market, in my opinion.

  There is a fair amount of self-promotion in the book. On page 212, Bob spends an entire page telling you how he can show you how to make 25 to 50K in the first year. I enjoyed Bob's stories about selling books and playing at chess tournaments. More of his personal stories would have been nice, but I guess 'assassins' shouldn't talk about their personal lives very much. I found this book very entertaining because I know about Bob from the books his company publishes. It is not a pure chess book, business book, or memior, but after reading it, you will know a more about chess, business, and Bob.

Book Review - True Combat Chess by IM Tim Taylor

  I got this book at the US Open as a damaged book for $10 and just finished it. It sells for $24.95 on USCF Sales. You may remember Taylor's controversial articles in Chess Life about his attempts to get a GM norm in Hungary's first saturday tournaments. All I know, is that he made it sound like so much fun that if I had read his articles when I was in high school, I would have worked a lot harder on my chess.The book includes Taylor's 'Winning the Won Game' series on JeremySilman.com, but the new material is all Taylor's games, mostly about about his struggles to compete for GM norms. There are many whole games in the notes, but I found the games very understandable and enjoyable just to go through on their own and there are more than just moves and variations. The section on trying to hold a position when down to only the delay or increment is a lot of fun to read through. If you have $25 to spend, I recommend it, but if you wait, it will surely be available for $10 at chess4less.com someday.

My favorite quote from the book   "The time for self-recrimination is later, crying in your beer in your hotel room! At the board, one must fight! Furthermore, every new move in chess is like a new spin of the roulette wheel - anything can happen. One can even win!"