Revolutionise your tragedies

I’m not really in the habit of plugging chess books, nor authors.  But I’m going to make an exception for Victor Moskalenko, well-known author of The Flexible French and most recently Revolutionise Your Chess.

With no time to study chess (and even less time to remember my old theory), it was time for me to start thinking practically about how to survive at the board.  I needed a system that wasn’t too susceptible to the latest novelties, that was easy to understand, and that was fresh enough to keep me interested.  No mean feat.

Fortunately, in Revolutionise Your Chess, Moskalenko (or “Mister Stonewall”, as I’ve come to view him) sets out his system for playing the Stonewall Dutch as black against virtually any white setup besides 1.e4.  After getting inspired, I turned to the new Win With the Stonewall Dutch book by Sverre Johnsen and Ivar Bern (and featuring Simen Agdestein) for a brush-up on theory, and it appeared I’d found my antidote.

It’s one thing to try and learn a new opening from books, of course, but quite another to put it into practice.  I did the usual thing of trying out the lines in internet blitz games and then cross-referencing the more painful losses to the books, which gave me something of a feel for the positions.  Both books are really exceptional when it comes to explaining the ideas and themes in simple, easy to understand dictation, and after a while, I felt ready to whirl out my new baby in a real contest.

Cue 4NCL, the UK chess league, which held its third and fourth rounds last weekend.  I’d been recruited to play for Guildford, the second-best team in the league, for the crucial weekend that featured the derby with number one and hot favourite, Wood Green.  My duty as the ring-in foreigner was to beat the weaker guy with white in the first game, and then at least hold the draw with black against my higher rated Wood Green opponent in the second.

Now, the neat thing about the Stonewall Dutch is that, technically, you can play it with white, too.  And this way, you even gain a move!  It’s a little cowardly, but I decided to whirl out my Stonewall for the very first time against a 2200 with the white pieces in the first match, with some success…

(As you click through the moves, for those that are italicised, my comments should appear in the box under the board.)

Spurred on by this win and brimming with Stonewall confidence, I decided to use my new favourite opening in the critical Sunday match.  I was paired with black against English Grandmaster Nick Pert, who almost always opens with 1.d4, so the scene seemed perfect.  And, to be fair, I can’t complain about the opening:  the game followed almost exactly Moskalenko’s own analysis in his book and, even after I was left on my own, I felt very comfortable and even enthused about my position.  So much so, in fact, that instead of just trying to hold the draw, I decided to try and be the team hero and go all-out for the win.  Little did I know that my chess, though perhaps ‘revolutionised’, was still susceptible to tragedy…

Resolution Pollution

Ah, the New Year. That magical time of the year when, amazingly, every man and his dog, filled with hope and promise, resolves to change, revamp and improve every aspect of life over the next twelve months.

And then promptly gives up by the first weekend.

In recent years, however, I’ve started taking this whole resolution thing seriously. Perhaps it’s the disciplined, strategic chess player in me, or perhaps I just like the philosophy of new beginnings. Whatever the reason, last year, I carefully and meticulously concocted nine resolutions complete with plans, timelines and measurable outputs.

And the result? Seven from nine. Not a bad strike rate (in chess tournament speak, one might speculate that 7/9 is not quite grandmaster-norm level, but enough to place in a large open…). Some of the more trivial of the success stories that have been followed on this blog in the last 12 months include: “Start grad school”; “Volunteer in a third-world country” and “Learn a second language”.  The two fugitives – “Learn to sing in pitch” and “Learn to play Jack Johnson’s ‘Taylor’ on guitar” – were meant to acknowledge my complete lack of musical ability, but give me enough inspiration and achievability to make a move in a vaguely artistic direction.

They’ve followed on to the 2012 list, which currently stands at eight items – but, given that the world is supposed to end in December 2012, I feel it’s only fair to cut back the list by one.  The biggie on the list this year is curing my insomnia (which regular readers must by now be familiar with from such tales as here, here and here), and work is already in progress (he says, writing this at 4.30am…).  It ties in nicely with “Try at least a full term of yoga”, which apparently helps with this sort of thing (and breathing, and stress, and flexibility, and flat tyres, and tax returns and whatever else hippies claim this aerobic penicillin supposedly solves).

Grad school has not made this little predicament any easier, as it turns out that trying to sleep while algebraic equations float through your head is comparable to chess puzzle dreams (which any chess guy and more importantly chess guys’ girlfriends will tell you makes for a sleepless night).  But the course is not going anywhere, nor getting easier, so, in the light of alternatives, just call me ‘Yogi’.  (Suggestions, remedies and old wives’ tales for insomnia potions welcome, naturally.  Tristan’s recommendation that I add “Grow a goatee” as a resolution has been politely but firmly vetoed.)

Still, a fail on the insomnia front can only mean more time to tackle the other guys on the list.  I’m sure my neighbours won’t mind 4am singing practice, or the dulcet strains of an out-of-tune guitar played by a musicophile.  At least, if the Mayans are right, they only have another 350 days to put up with it.

Happy new year, everyone!

R.I.P. Kieron Olm-Milligan

I was completely shocked yesterday by the news of the passing of one of my oldest friends.  Kieron and I met at our high school (‘Churchie’) back when we were 14, playing chess together not just in the interschool competitions, but nationally and internationally as well.  His death is untimely and truly tragic.

Kieron was one of those all-round good guys who couldn’t seem to put a foot wrong.  He was one of the reasons chess became so popular at Churchie during my time there.  Together with Ben McPhee and Michael Davidovici, we formed the Churchie ‘Dream Team’ that won the GPS interschools six years in a row, won two national championships, and travelled together to New York in 200o, representing the Southern Hemisphere in the World Schools Final.

But as everyone knows, you need more than just results to make chess popular at school.  Kieron was a role model among his peers: he represented the school at the highest level for tennis, rugby and cricket, excelled in class, and had a razor-sharp sense of humour that elevated him to one of the most popular guys around, ‘despite’ his chess prowess.  After school, he kept active in the chess scene, playing often for Club Bullwinkle and entertaining us with his wit at the club’s irregular social events.  Unfortunately, we lost touch a bit over the past couple of years, and I hadn’t heard any news about him for over a year until yesterday’s email from Nik Stawski.

Looking back, there’s probably only a handful of friends of mine from Churchie I can say I really knew well, and even less who I looked up to.  Kieron was definitely one of them.

Farewell, Kizza.  You will be missed.

Utrecht-Groningen, Meesterklasse 2011, Ronde 3

Recently, I was lucky enough to get a brief excursion out of Amsterdam for a weekend, as the Utrecht team and I trekked to the most northern part of the country for our monthly league match. We were to face Groningen, a small student town that once boasted one of the most feared chess teams in the competition (thanks to an overly abundant sponsor). In fact, in 2006, I drew against Vassily Ivanchuk in the same match, but the financial crisis has hit chess as hard as the rest of the sporting work, and so budget cuts had left the Groningen team a little exposed.

Groningen is “so far” away (i.e. two hours by car – in Australia, we drive such distances just for lunch) that most of the team decided to stay the Friday night in the Tucan Hotel, one of Groningen’s finest and out in the middle of nowhere – but, most importantly, boasting an indoor soccer court. (Five years before, I opted to bring my girlfriend at the time to the chess match, staying at the same isolated hotel surrounded by people speaking a language she didn’t understand. A real rookie error on my part, but I must confess the evening company was a little better than my roommates this time around, Tommie and Joost. No offence, guys, but it’s hard to compete.)

The Friday night was spent in an epic two-hour ‘futsal’ (basically five-on-five indoor soccer) match between members of Utrecht and some other Dutch chessplayers. It transpires that an Australian playing soccer against Dutch guys is akin to a Dutchie trying to beat an Australian in tanning. Still, Utrecht proved the victors in the end, and at one stage I even managed to demonstrate some typical Aussie spirit with a flying rugby-tackle collision in front of goals.

Dinner with the Utrecht team is always an interesting affair, as I struggle to comprehend the fast-flowing Dutch conversation, speckled with local lingo and the sort of words not usually allowed in dictionaries. I was, however, able to follow the development of a tantilisingly controversial and vaguely politically incorrect bet between Utrecht members. Two crates of beer rest on Joost’s brave claim that he will have a higher rating than Dutch female prodigy Anne Haast. It is perhaps worth reminding of the famous gender-chess study that males almost invariably overestimate their chances against equally-ranked females in chess, despite it being a sport with absolutely zero basis for gender differences. Still, Anne and Joost currently sit at #1 and #2 for best individual performances in the Dutch league to date, so ‘game on’, as they say…

Now to the match itself. This was a crucial round for the Utrecht team, given that 2011 holds its best chance ever to win the cup, and the players didn’t disappoint. Well, at least not all. I, unfortunately, got spanked by Sergei Tiviakov in a game I would rather forget. Attempting a new line of the Tarrasch French against (it transpires) one of the world’s experts of the white side, I played a rather risky continuation in the hope of provoking an error. I quickly got up to grab a coffee, after which the Groningen chess bartender (yes, they exist) said “Oh, you’re playing Tiviakov? He never makes a mistake, you know.” That turned out rather prophetic, and I was packing up the pieces with a large ‘zero’ next to my name shortly afterwards. Martijn was similarly unlucky to be given the black pieces against Groningen’s only other grandmaster, Dan Brandenburg (who did, however, help us out in the soccer match), and went down. Dharma, punching above his weight, scored a solid draw to keep our top-order from recording a series of ducks (to use some cricket terminology).

But it’s Utrecht’s lower order that is our strength, and this was brought out once again. Swinkels proved he is more than just a terrible Dutch teacher (he has now taught me over a half-dozen phrases guaranteed to get me slapped by girls in any bar in the Netherlands), rounding out a comfortable win in one of those bizarre Kalashnikovish Sicilians that I never understand. Jelmer was a little lucky to win a black-square-dominated game; Joost played a textbook Najdorf crush to back up his audacious bet from the night before. Hans played one of the smoothest games of the round, getting a hybrid Two-Knights’ French and crashing through the middle in fine style.

That left the team needing just a point from its last three, late-finishing games, but the guys made sure to pick up a few extra valuable board points in the process. Jaap’s win against Iozefina (~Josephina) attracted the most spectators, but I can’t help but feel he was extremely lucky to see his courageous exchange-sacrifice home. Chiel played a sterling team game, always keeping the draw in reserve but allowing himself enough wiggle room in case the team needed him to go all-out for the win – in the end, only the half-point was required. Tommy played (in my opinion) the nicest game of the day, showing exemplary endgame technique in a tricky knight-and-pawns race to give us another full point.

Overall, this gave Utrecht a huge 7-3 victory, giving us the highest number of board points in the competition (though still only third overall on match points). A big effort by the guys, and I think in no small part due to the organisation of Tommy. Playing away against Groningen can be a depressing affair, but the combination of a nice hotel, boistrous dinner conversation and soccer ensures a team spirit that flows through to the chess.

And of course, being ‘only’ two hours away from Amsterdam, Tommy and I were able to make it back on Saturday evening in time for my former housemate Arlette’s housewarming party – which ultimately proved enough to compensate for my Tiviakov shalacking. But that is another story.

Chess for fun

Ah, now this is the way chess should be.

On Saturday I was recruited to play in the annual regional blitz championships, playing board one for Utrecht.  The event is basically a grudge match among the best of the Netherlands league teams from the union, and the day contains plenty of well-meaning ribbing and a chance to play for a year’s worth of bragging rights.

And the Dutch, naturally, really know how to enjoy their club chess.  The tournament was held in the Utrecht chess building – yes you heard me, a chess BUILDING – that is shaped like a rook and is entirely decked out with chess-themed ornaments, artistry and decorations (even in the bar – yes, naturally, there is a built-in bar).

What an entrance!

The crowd begins to gather, under the watchful eyes of the Rook

Schaaktime

Before the day had even reached noon, many of the jovial competitors were playing one-handed, with beer in the other.  Even in the tensest of blitz finishes, with seconds left on the clock, these amateurs (but, I would argue, professional booze-blitzers) wouldn’t spill a drop on their way to emphatic (and very audible) victories.  It’s a wonder they didn’t scare the cows – yes, the venue was surrounded by picturesque Dutch farmlands, complete with stereotypically dappled cows and the greenest grass an Australian has ever laid eyes upon.  With a very untypical sunny sky to boot, I’d have to say it was close to the perfect setting for a blitz tournament (even if less than half the Dutch sledging registered in my mind after translation).

After leading with six wins (and myself on six out of six) after the first six rounds, my team crumbled to finish third (largely due to my collapse, with 1/3 for my tail run).  The winning club was spearheaded by one of the country’s brightest chess talents, joint-European Junior Champion.  I tried my best to trick the cheeky whippersnapper (am I really that old now that I can use such phrases?), but in the end, I probably was even luckier than he to escape with the draw…

(Press the “<<” button to go back to the beginning, and then go forwards to go through the moves – comments and annotations will be displayed in the text box below.)

Play chess online

 

A tired tussle

After a usual day of class at Tinbergen, I’m exhausted. Not physically, of course, but that part of my brain that calculates anything is completely spent. This means that I basically haven’t picked up a chess book in a couple of months.

So you can imagine that after the exam week just passed, I was in no mood to sit in front of a chess board. Doubly so after the Friday night post-exam celebrations. In fact, for the first time in my academic life, I can honestly say that more than half of the class partygoers would have preferred to have just gone home to sleep instead of attend the dinner-and-drinks – myself included. Fortunately (unfortunately?), groupthink and peer pressure kicked in, and Friday evening we dragged ourselves out into the Amsterdam nightlife after what seemed like an eternity of study all-nighters.

Saturday morning, almost all of us enjoyed the rare opportunity of a sleep-in, something I hadn’t experienced in two months. I say ‘almost all’, because I was drafted to play in the Dutch chess league that morning. On board one. Against the strongest team in the league. With the black pieces.

As if it couldn’t get any worse, I found myself sitting across from one of my childhood chess idols, Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan. Feeling a little worse for wear, I was desperately hoping not to embarrass myself. My captain was well aware of my post-exam exhaustion and had concucted a cunning plan involving my board two poking me under the table if I started snoring at the board. The odds were not in my favour.

Fortunately, though unbeknownst to me, two things were on my side. My opponent, it turns out, was also suffering a fair case of fatigue, having just returned from winning a prestigious but undoubtedly draining tournament in Barcelona. And consequently, he was looking for an easy, textbook, routine game with few surprises. My strategy, on the other hand, was to play as unorthodox and interesting as possible – primarily to keep myself from nodding off. This probably rattled Yasser a little (though completely unintentionally on my part), but at least we both ended up with a quite enjoyable and entertaining game – even if we both played quite below par.

Meanwhile, classes already resumed this morning, so I’ll have to wait another eight weeks before I get my next weekend off. And wash, rinse, repeat.

WHITE: Yasser Seirawan BLACK: David Smerdon

Dutch League, Utrecht versus HMG.

29 October 2009

Office Fever

As we approach the first set of exams for the graduate program, it’s fair to say that almost all of us first-years are going a little crazy.  Upwards of 70 hours per week with our heads buried in crazy mathematical formulaes and indecipherable microeconomic texts has created the hardest working (and most unnatural) environment I’ve ever experienced.  And with only each other as human company as we traverse this little office word of funky Greek letters and squiggly mathematical symbols, it’s no wonder we’re all getting a case of cabin fever.

Even my dreams have slowly become infested with my studies.  I’ve had more than one nocturnal subconscious experience with a recurring unsolveable algebra problem – one of the few themes you can’t find in dream dictionaries.  (What would Freud say?)  My fellow study-slaves and I constantly use academic jargon in every day life; comments on “maximising utility” when ordering dinner or using “dynamic programming” to choose a novel (not that we have time to read one) are commonplace.  Our only outlet?  Inconceivably lame nerd-jokes; a sort of acknowledgement of our plight, a shared understanding of our common burden.  And a salute to a hardship of Geek in pursuit of the perhaps unreachable dream of knowledge, enlightenment and social good.

Yep, office fever has struck, and it looks like an epidemic – and perhaps five years’ worth.  But here’s a snippet of the half-laughs that keep us going…

(Bonus points for picking up the possessive apostrophe error, naturally.)

(Yes, that is the top of my head... photo courtesy of Olga; see http://olgagoestoams.wordpress.com/ for her hilarious but rather odd Polish blog.)

Dinner in the office after 24 hours without sleep - pen still in hand. (Photo: Olga)

As close as we were to success, little did I know that my Italian colleague, Luca, was suffering a particularly dire case of...

...OFFICE FEVER. (Unfortunate photo series, naturally, courtesy of Olga.)

Reflections on a misspent youth

Another birthday has come and gone, and I’m now four-fifths of my way through the continuous string of non-prime-years in my twenties.  (In non-geek speak, I’m 27.)  Another birthday in Amsterdam, too, to follow the 2006 extravaganza.

Despite being a newly christened Amsterdammer, it wasn’t a lonely birthday.  By chance, the Tinbergen Institute had organised a ‘welcome weekend’ for its new graduate students, so I spent the day with my fellow classmates in the quaint little Dutch town of Haarlem.  A scavenger hunt around the city, a cook-your-own hostel barbeque and classic party games (including my favourite, Mafia) were followed by pitchers of Dutch beer, shuffle dancing and ten-pin bowling.  How could I complain?

(n.b.1:  ”Shuffling” is a modern dance style, usually acompanied with hard trance music.  A little bit of trivia: it originated out of Melbourne, Australia, with the so-called “Melbourne Shuffle” of the late ’80s.  The main move in the more modern scene is the ‘Running Man’; think Gene Kelly crossed with a sort-of stationary Michael Jackson moonwalk, but on steriods.  My attempts to teach myself from YouTube videos in my room over the past week has given me impressive carpet burn on the soles of my feet.)

The Running Man: no longer the symbol for 'head to the exit'. Geez, get with the times, man.

(n.b.2: It turns out my (predominantly Eastern European) classmates haven’t had the ten-pin-bowling education that all Australian schoolkids seem to have forced upon them.  It being my birthday and all (and apparently it being an Eastern European tradition that the birthday boy be plied with drinks), I was certainly not in a coordinated mood, and started the game with four gutter balls in the first four frames.  A dedicated resurgence of Jedi-focus proportions followed to bring me home to a pitiful score of 92 – which turned out to be enough to win.  Yes, a 92 won a game of ten pin bowling.)

In the week leading up to my birthday, the television was utterly jammed with ten-year anniversary tributes to the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York.  ”Where were you on 9-11?” became an oft-quoted catchphrase in the press (and Facebook statuses – thank you for flooding my wall again, social media).  There’s perhaps an argument that the amount of attention this received was overkill, given the number of far more gut-wretching (but non-American) international tragedies over the past decade that have paled anonymously by comarison in the press.  But I did undertake the thought experiment, nonetheless.

September 11, 2001:  I was at home, watching the early morning Australian news as the twin towers saga unfolded.  I had the day off school, because – believe it or not – I was off to see the doctor about a kidney stone.  Yes, I was 16, but apparently my quirky habit of eating a kiwifruit a day whole (that is, skin and all…) wasn’t quite as healthy as I thought.  Somehow the combined effect of the acid and the inedible skins had crystallised in my kidneys.  A lot of people experienced a painful knot in their stomachs while watching the footage from the twin towers; mine was doubly so.

Silent, hairy kidney-killers

Too much information?  Probably.  But continuing the thought experiment, I then wrote down all the things I would have done differently if I could go back a decade to 2001.  It’s a really interesting little game, and I recommend you give it a go.  If you do, give me a snapshot.  Overall I came up with a couple of pages, some of significance, but mostly trivial.  Here’s three at random; two trivial, one a little more serious:

- I would have learned Mandarin.  I lived in a predominantly Asian neighbourhood in Brisbane, and we even had some Mandarin classes back when I was ten or so.  I think it’s going to be an incredibly useful language in future years, particularly for an Australian.  I wish I’d taken it up back when my mind was young enough to thrive on new information.

- I would have learned to sing. I’ve always loved the arts, but I have a voice that has had as much interaction with proper pitch as the Dutch have with sunglasses.  It’s on the bucket list.

-  I would have become a neurosurgeon. Of all the careers in all the world, this is the one I’ve though I’d really, really enjoy.  It takes a dedicated student, though, and one who knows very early on that this is the chosen path.  I missed that window a long time ago, but unfortunately it stays a regret.  And no, it has nothing to do with the Grey’s Anatomy star, ‘McDreamy’, nor his hair.

...okay, but the hair is pretty cool.

Svidler clean-bowls Grischuk, wins Siberian Ashes

Hearty congratulations to Russian grandmaster Peter Svidler, who today won the final of the World Chess Cup against compatriot and friend Alexander Grischuk.

After a tenacious month of cut throat knockout chess in the tiny Siberian town of Khanty Mansiysk, Svidler emerged as clearly the best player of the 128-strong event.  And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Proof that you don’t need to worry too much about opening theory to succeed in chess.  Proof that you can, in fact, win with the black pieces at top level.  Proof that nice guys don’t always finish last.

But, most importantly, proof that you can love cricket more than chess and still get away with the odd million or two in chess prize money.  There’s hope for us Aussies yet.

Quick heads-up: Smerdon back on Chess.FM!

A very quick note to say that I’ll be one of the Chess.FM commentators for tomorrow’s semi final matches in the World Chess Cup in Khanty Mansiysk, Russia.  Feel free to chuck the online radio stream on in the background to add a little ambience to your day as I wax lyrical about all things vaguely chess-related.

Games start at 10.00 am GMT on Tuesday 15 September.  Jump on board!

(http://www.chessclub.com/chessfm/ and click the big ‘radio’ button on the left.  If you don’t have an ICC account, you can watch the live stream of the games on various websites, with the official one being http://chess.ugrasport.com/?page_id=996).