Uruguay exploits touch-piece move; Karma finally found

So the debate continues to rage over Uruguay’s deliberate handball on the goal line to snatch a remarkable, controversial and unexpected victory against Ghana.  News forums and blogs have shown quite a split consensus over whether such a foul brands the culprit, Luis Suarez, an unsportsmanlike villan, or a national hero.  Even former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has weighed in, calling Ghana the true winners of the match.

Personally, I don’t know what all the fuss is about.  It seems simply logical that in such circumstances, when a goal would have surely been scored, a penalty goal should be awarded.  Rugby has the penalty try; in tennis, a successful challenge to a call wins the point if the umpire declares it would have been so.  And it’s not as if they don’t have the video technology to do it; heck, if the video ref had been introduced, perhaps Englishman Frank Lampard’s incorrectly disallowed goal would have boosted England to, well, a 4-2 loss instead.

In chess, of course, we have it easy.  If you touch a piece, you have to move it.  If you make an illegal move, the players go back to when the move was made, thus taking the game back to ‘what would have happened’.  Not that our sport isn’t without its controversy as well, of course: our cheating scandals have to be much more imaginative, as the infamous ‘Toiletgate’ episode demonstrates.

Well, at least justice was served to some extent, with Uruguay going down to the fancied Oranje of the Netherlands in the semi-finals.  Karma?  In South Africa?

Ah, so that’s where she got to!

World Cup déjà vu

So both England and Portugal exit the FIFA World Cup, and so too do their respective stars, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, having made little more than a smear on this year’s championships.
Following the omission of Ronaldinho from the Brazilian team, we now have the comical situation of watching the Nike ‘Write the Future’ soccer ads in the breaks, despite the fact that it features the world’s top football stars… who are no longer in the Cup. Probably a bit of Karma there in that Adidas is the official sponsor, but then again, who am I to comment on Karma?
In addition to the failure of the world’s richest players failing to deliver, there have also been numerous reports of divisions and personality clashes within various teams. France went on strike and gave up, although at least this time, the Germans didn’t occupy Paris. The English players couldn’t decide whether having an Italian coach, or sleeping with each others’ girlfriends, was worse for team morale, so they decided to do both. Apparently there was even unrest in the Australian team, although nobody noticed.
These stories are not all that surprising. We only need to look at the chess Olympiads over the decades to see that a team of stars often goes down to a cohesive line-up of national ‘mates’ (pun not quite intended). Russia has really failed to shine over the past couple of championships, despite out-rating the opposition by a hefty margin. The English team has a history of divisions, with a famous rift between two of its stars getting so severe that they refused to play on adjacent boards.
Instead, we have seen the unified and ebullient national teams of China, Azerbaijan, Armenia, the Netherlands and Norway – generally teams of friends off the board as well – achieve great triumphs. The guys in each line-up work together, eat together, study together and relax together – and nothing means more to them than national victory, certainly not individualism.
The most recent reports have been of disharmony in the Soccer have come from the Argentinean team, but I find these hard to believe. One of the key reasons for Argentina’s success, in my opinion, is the instalment of Maradona as coach. This is a man who has been in love with football his entire life. He runs up and down the sideline like an excited puppy on the edge of water, performing tricks whenever the ball whistles his way. He’s even admitted that he gets the urge to chuck on the shorts and run out on the field, every game. Maradona lives every pass, every kick, every mistake and every goal with his players, and they know it. Having this legend-turned-coach on their side has surely got to be an inspirational factor behind their success.
Reminds me a bit of our own Gary Kasparov. Chess is his first and only love, and you only have to read the reports of his collaborations with Carlsen to see the comparison. He’s gone out of his way to help his successor achieve greatness, and I have no doubt that it’s not only his knowledge and wisdom, but also his passion for the game, that has been passed on. Kasparov even went out of his way to call up Anand and offer him advice during the Indian’s match with Topalov – and given Anand and Kasparov’s own rivalry of the past, you can really see how the love of the game has conquered all ills for the great Russian.
We’ve even got a bit of the same story at home, with our retired legend Ian Rogers showing great philanthropy in helping out the rising chess generation in Australia. Players like Zong-Yuan and myself know full well the impact that having an icon of the game in your corner can have on your results.
Having said all that, and having once again made tenuous links between current sporting news and chess, I am tipping Argentina for the crown. Firstly, a victory by the Albicelestes would justify my argument that the influence and benevolence of a legend of the game can inspire a harmonised team to great success. Secondly, Maradona himself has promised to run naked down the streets of Buenos Aires if Argentina wins the Cup – and surely we can all agree that’s something we need to see.

The world game

I do love the World Cup.  I’m talking football here, by the way, which will no doubt immediately propitiate the non-chess readers.  The concept of a truly world game bringing the globe together in a celebration of culture, tradition and general bonhomie is really something,  And I’ve spent many a late night over the past few weeks glued to the screen as the drama, excitement and history unfolds.

But I have, naturally, a few comments to make.

First of all, you do have to be a little crazy, a little bit of a fanatic, to be able to watch ninety minutes of passing with a very real possibility of not witnessing a single goal.  Have you ever tried switching between channels when there are other sports on?  It just doesn’t work.  I tried watching a Cup game after the rugby league State of Origin finished, and it was just painful.  It was incredibly difficult to go from a high-energy, intense sport where dramatic action presents itself every two minutes, to the more complex patience of soccer.

Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate fully that soccer is an incredibly complicated, tactical game, in much the same way that chess is.  In fact, I think that’s part of its downfall in this regard.  Just as the more naïve spectators are more likely to enjoy watching poker on television than chess, soccer has a hard time competing with other, more action-packed sports in front of a generic, non-affiliated television audience.

Naturally this is an over-simplification, and there are a number of other factors which explain why soccer doesn’t share the same popularity issues that chess faces with the general public.  For one, soccer is heavily ingrained into the cultures of many nations – for some, it’s seen as a way of life, of domestic tradition, rather than just a game.  Another reason is that it’s far easier for the layperson to understand what’s happening in a soccer game, who’s winning, who’s losing, and to understand the commentary, than to comprehend the shifting tides of a chess game.

Still, chess should be able to claim the same position on the world stage as football.  It deserves more in the arena of public opinion.  We deserve a World Cup of chess with the same level of attention, flamboyance and vuvuzelas as this one.  At the very lease, we need the same level of Australian support – after all, as opposed to soccer, at least Australian chess is on the up, right?

Twenty-20 chess, anyone?

Nudge nudge, cough cough

“The reports of my death have been greatly overrated,” Mark Twain once famously wrote.  Indeed, despite comments such as Tim Molesworth’s “You look like death” and Tritty’s “You sound like crap”, I’m finally well enough to sit upright and return to this (unfortunately neglected) blog.

Apparently, it’s some combination of bronchitis and a secondary infection/virus.  Despite Tim’s quizzical claim that bronchitis “is a nineteenth-century disease, right?”, ‘the bronk’, as I affectionately like to call it, seems to have infected a sizeable proportion of Canberra.  Perhaps I’m not the only one who lives in a draughty garage after all?

According to the Doc, my body was valiantly holding out until after the GRE exam, which meant the infection finally blew out (and thus rendered me at my most contagious) over the Victorian Open long weekend.  Apologies to all the participants who may have contracted my lack of ebullience, including international master Igor Goldenberg, who assured me that at his age, bronchitis was a far more serious threat than losing 20 rating points.

At first I thought the timing couldn’t be worse – a week where I have a three-day, FIDE-rated tournament and then have to move house is hardly the time to be metaphorically licking one’s infected wounds – but it’s surely a better result than sitting the exam at half strength.  Not that I feel anywhere near half strength at the moment, mind you.  I’d settle for thirty percent right now.

A fortnight off work is just a little bit too long, and, perhaps rebounding against the insanity of GRE study before this, boredom has started to set in.  This is compounded by the facts that the new place currently has no internet, and that I’m too drugged out in the evenings on enough antibiotics to comatose a small hippo.  To compensate, I’m watching highlights on the various world news services on SBS.  If nothing else, I’m hoping the bronk might help me pick up a few words in Arabic.

Unbelievably, barely any of the 600 new words I learned before the exam came up.  Quite depressing, and in fact my score for the verbal section was below expectations.  I refuse to be contrite or lugubrious about my vocab efforts, however; I feel far more erudite than I’ve ever been before, and various social experiments have showed that it is now easier than ever for me to drive away annoying conversationalists at parties, simply by listing useless language ad nauseum. 

I am of course a bit disappointed by the score, but hopefully most economics departments don’t care too much for grandiloquence. And besides, despite a mid-exam panic attack, the maths section turned out alright.  I’ll find out the essay scores in a week or so, and will dutifully report back.

Finally, I feel I should in all fairness report that Tim claims he knew all of the words on my previously posted list.  And he did, along with Tristram, help me move house while I was effectively a dead fish walking.  However, Tim still claims that bronchitis is basically extinct, so I’m not sure how much we can read into that.

By the way, anyone seen Karma lately?!

Picking a number

Humble apologies for my delayed posting.  I have been running myself ragged doing practice questions for the GRE.  While I am proud to report that I have indeed expanded my vocabulary by 500 new words (albeit archaic, useless ones that I will never utter), the quantitative side is driving me insane.

Two months ago, I was actually excited to study for and sit the GRE.  I know this is an odd way to feel about an exam, but I think many people enjoy the challenge of a brain teaser or an IQ test, which is what I expected this to be similar to. 

Not at all, unfortunately.  Instead of testing intelligence or even simple mathematical ability, the GRE quant section uses chicanery, trickery and slight-of-hand to deceive respectable students from choosing the correct answer.  Such immoral question-setting strategies as mixing up the units, changing the scale of graphs, and ambiguously defining primary-school math terms, litter the practice sets.  I’m going nuts.

I should have twigged earlier.  All of the practice books and online guides (those not sponsored by the testing company, I should clarify) are unrestrained in their harsh criticism of the integrity of the exam.  “It is not a measure of how smart you are”, reassures one.  “You shouldn’t try to learn math – just learn how to beat the test”, announces another. 

How disillusioning.  You may be capable of calculating Fourier transforms and higher-order differential equations, but unless you can remember whether zero is an integer or a natural number, you’re not going to get the score you need.  And there’s only so many three-digit-by-three-digit multiplication sums you can do at sixty seconds per question before you make an error.  In the words of Samuil Shchatunovski, “It is not the job of mathematicians… to do correct arithmetical operations.  It is the job of bank accountants. ”

I don’t feel any smarter at all.  In fact, exactly the opposite.

I heard an interesting fact the other day.  Americans do better on multiple choice questions than any other nationality.  This no longer surprises me; the US education system, from high school to post-grad, seems driven towards equipping students to succeed on these types of questions alone.  As one of the practice books puts it, “The aim is to eliminate four wrong answers, not to calculate one right answer.”  I’m not entirely sure that’s how the real world works, although the next time I’m at Starbuck’s and have to choose from between five cup sizes, I may start humming the Star-Spangled Banner.

Humble apologies again, this time for the rant.  Really, I’m just getting frustrated by my stupid errors, which is a flaw actually worth remedying for the real world.  Sour grapes on my part.  It just annoys me that I know pages upon pages of Sicilian Dragon theory, but I didn’t know that an object’s width can actually be longer than its length.  The former may be more important in general, but not for the next 72 hours.

Or is that 62 hours?  Damn, forgot to carry the one…

Returning to breakfast as usual

Many thanks for the messages people sent after my anti-Karma day, inquiring as to my heath/car/sanity (mainly the latter, unfortunately).  Your concerns, however obtusely directed, were well appreciated.

However, I can state that we are back to business as usual.  Fi has kindly lent me her purple Holden Barina, which I drive with a masculinity-secured pride.  Work has settled down, I have banned myself from eating any leftovers over a week old, and I haven’t mentioned the Winter of ‘41 since Tuesday.

In appreciation and recompense for your concerns for my state of mind, I have decided to offer you some free consumer advice.  Think of this like ‘Brand Power’ on the telly, except without the hot presenter.  I present to you my personal evaluation of Uncle Toby’s “High Fibre Bites”.

Many people don’t have much time or regard for breakfast; I’m one of them.  Of course, we all know that it’s ‘the most important meal of the day’ – which is total rubbish.  If I didn’t have dinner every night, I can guarantee I’d be a whole lot hungrier than if I skipped breakfast.

Anyway, it is true that it’s a necessary meal, if only to keep one going until lunch.  For that reason, I want more out of my cereal than a couple of flakes – I want to feel like I’m at least eating something heavier than cardboard.  Many Aussies, particularly Aussie blokes, feel the same, which is probably why Weet-Bixis so popular here.  Apparently, the more you eat, the better chance you have of making the Australian cricket team.  Ever tried the Weet-Bix challenge of eating one quickly without any liquid?  Hilarious!

This last piece of trivia is actually Weet-Bix’s one fatal flaw.  No, my childhood favourite was always the Mini-Wheats (not to be confused with Mini-Creeps) – chunky little wholegrain-fibrey pillows with blackcurrant fillings.  And best of all, they can be eaten straight out of the pack as satisfying snack-fodder, no milk required.  Furthermore, as opposed to Weet-Bix, mueslis and other heavy cereals, they don’t go soggy towards the end of a bowl.  Perfection!

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, they got taken off the shelves at my supermarket a few years ago.  Imagine my joy to discover they’d been brought back just a few months ago!  The stock is rather limited – perhaps it’s a trial thing – so I naturally bought the entire shelf and stocked myself up for the Winter.  What can I say?

However, I allowed my eyes to wander, and I foolishly bought a box of Uncle Toby’s new range ‘High Fibre Bites’, which looks eerily identical to Mini-Wheats.  Could it be?  Could they actually have improved on perfection?  Surely any brand with the backing of basically every Aussie swimming gold-medalist is worth trusting, right?

WRONG.

The imitation ‘Bites’ are basically filled with air, making it the equivalent of a blow-up pillow to Mini-Wheat’s down-feather-filled, Egyptian-cotton-lined pillowy goodness.  Furthermore, inside each airy bite was no blackcurrant sweetness; only some sort of processed-sugar flavour.  Given that they come in honey and brown-sugar-and-cinnamon flavours, I can only assume that the cereal basically consists of a corrupted version of cardboard and sugar – which, in fact, would probably be tastier.

I don’t look forward to breakfast; in fact, I wish I could start most days with a second lunch.  But I’d at least like to think I’m getting a blackcurrant-bang for my buck, rather than experiencing the displeasure of eating a textbook smeared in glue.

(Now there’s a sentence you won’t hear on Brand Power, no matter how attractive the presenter is.)

Dave’s vote of consumer confidence:  Mini Wheats – High Fibre Bites, 1-0.

DISCLAIMER:My opinions are neither influenced nor sponsored by the makers of Weet-Bix, Mini-Wheats or High-Fibre Bites – nor, for that matter, by Brand Power and its perversely pulchritudinous presenter.

Kellogg’s and Sanitarium:  If you do want to give me money for having volunteered positive publicity for you, feel free.

Uncle Toby’s:  No amount of money would entice me to endorse your product.  Perhaps you should try Stephanie Rice;  I hear she’s a sell-out.

Edit:  I have been advised to remove my witty Paint-edited cartoons of High-Fibre Bites and Mini-Wheats for intellectual-property-rights purposes.  I am currently seeking legal advice as to whether a graphic of someone eating a textbook covered in glue would be defamatory.

Dear Karma

Dear Karma,

Hi.  How are you?

I must apologise for not writing more often, but, to be honest, for the most part, I don’t feel I have to.  For the most part, you seem to do your job commendably well, and I have no real need to interfere, much less comment, on your existence.

On that: I must also apologise for the several occasions recently in which I have used your name in jest, almost as if you didn’t exist.  Very rude of me.

Speaking of rude, however, let me tell you about my day.

I got up a little later than usual this morning, I admit.  You see, I’d been up all night doing practice exams for this ‘GRE’ exam.  You know, the one that is supposed to right my murky life path and send me onwards to doctoral glory.  The one that’s coming up in two weeks; the one that I’ve put my other studies and, well, life on hold for.  Unfortunately, the practice exam didn’t go as one would hope: not only did I fail to make one of the relevant entrance scores, but I failed to make all of the relevant entrance scores, in every section.  No matter; these things happen. Hardly an event worth mentioning.  Realistically, in the long run, all it meant was a late night.

One seemingly innocent consequence of this was that, having gotten up later than usual, there was no hot water.  Now Karma, I know this shouldn’t seem too unusual for a five-person house, but in actual fact, in my house, it is.  And I know this doesn’t sound like an event worth making mention of, but when you get up in the morning in Canberra – in May – in the former garage of a 1970s house that has no heating or insulation, but a multitude of cracks in the floor – it becomes a bit more of an event.

No matter.  Of course, because I was running a little late, I had to park in the more remote of Treasury’s car parks.  And, of course, it was raining.  Again, not an event worth mentioning, you’d think.  Except that it was raining in Canberra – in May – in the morning.

Soaked, shivering and shattered, I began the day at work.  Ah, the public service, I hear you cry!  Surely no room for whining there.  Hardly an event worth mentioning, you’d think.  However, today just happened to be ‘one of those days’, Karma.  In fact, not only was I unable to take a lunch break, but I wasn’t even able to spare the time to run down a grab a coffee.  So unendingly chained to my desk was I that I dug around the fridge in the kitchen near my desk to see if I’d left any spare food from the previous week – I couldn’t go out and buy lunch, you see.

Eureka! I had found a spare container.  Had you really returned to grace my day, Karma? Unfortunately, it had aged deceptively, and I spent most of the afternoon engaged in a vicious three-way battle between stomach cramps and urgent briefings.  I felt like the Germans in the Winter of ‘41,  except colder.  But no matter, Karma; after all, the day was coming to an end!

Not that it was all smooth sailing towards the end of work, mind you.  My computer froze – not once – but three times while I was finishing my projects due by day’s end.  It’s not that unusual for our work network to go down, mind you.  Fortunately, though, it was only my computer crashing.  I say fortunately, of course, because I don’t want to spread this bad luck around.  Not that it’s luck, of course.  These things happen.

Karma, this is where I get just a little confused.  Having been unfortunately presented with three ‘urgent’ tasks, all with a coincidentally simultaneous ‘midday tomorrow’ deadline, to fill my morning tomorrow, I began the sodden trudge back through the cold, dark Canberran rain to my distant car.  Again, forgive me for complaining – these things do happen, I know.  And my house is, after all, a mere 10 minutes from the office.  In fact, so determined was I not to let this day degenerate further, that I was extra-careful on the dark, rainy roads.  Uber-careful, you might say, in quite the same way that Hitler wasn’t in the infamous Winter of ‘41.  In fact, as I approached the last intersection before my house, I slowly, deliberately and correctly gave way to the car coming from my right, just in case.  Hardly an event worth mentioning, you might say.

Until I got rear-ended by the car behind me.

These things happen, Karma, I know.  Hardly an event worth mentioning. Which is why I won’t go into the irony of being a hundred metres away from my front door when I got rear-ended trying to be too careful.  Or the irony involved in having to write down the other guy’s details in the pouring rain.  In the dark.  In Canberra.  In May.

Nor the irony that I can no longer get to work on time tomorrow, and therefore won’t be able to make those midday deadlines.

Hardly an event worth mentioning.

So I’m off to bed now, Karma, in my converted-garage of a room, currently shivering at around 3 degrees Celsius, while my crumpled shell of a car sits limply in the driveway.  I only mention it because, well, somehow it seems worth mentioning.  I know, I know – these things just happen.

In any case, I just thought I’d drop you a line, see how you’re doing and what you’re up to, that sort of thing.  Speaking of which, what are you up to tomorrow? Got any plans?

Fancy a catch-up?

Yours sincerely,

Dave

Investophobia

First of all, let me equivocally thank the many of you who emailed me to brag about how many of the words you knew. Particular thanks to those chess players who wrote in to tell me they each knew all of them, thus negating the one viable excuse for my illiteracy. Phoey.

On the plus side, at least today’s new words are perfectly suited to describing the vicissitudal path of the Australian stockmarket. Financial uncertainty in Europe and the US has engendered a rapid decline in our markets and the Aussie dollar, leaving many investors in a state of penury and considering a career change to numismatics. While I don’t mean to sound glib or in any way impugn the Greek government for their various financial peccadilloes, their ingenuous and subsequently quixotic approach to sovereign debt has forced innocent Australians to ford through a fractious week in the markets with a Spartan parsimony.

Leaving my orotundity aside, the Aussie index fell a whopping three percent in the first 15 minutes of trading today, continuing the downward trend that has seen a record week of losses. While the turmoil in Europe for the Portuguese, Greek, Italian and Spanish (the so-called ‘PIGS’) economies is reason enough for their tortuous week, the same factors shouldn’t really be playing such a role for our market turbulence – and certainly shouldn’t exacerbate it. So what’s going on?

For starters, the globalised nature of today’s financial markets means that you simply can’t isolate the effect of regional factors to only those areas; international debt jitters will be felt everywhere, and we’re not going to escape on the basis of geographical remoteness. Nor can we count on China’s stability to pull us through a potential double-dip: uncertainty over the future of Chinese monetary policy and their housing market is only going to further ruffle feathers at home.

But most importantly at all, we probably need to start paying a bit more attention to our own economic fundamentals. We can no longer ignore the possibility that – shock! – we may have just gotten lucky throughout the global crisis. On the off chance that our resource sector pulled us through, perhaps a new Super Tax on mining is not the way to go. If we are actually in a housing bubble, then perhaps adopting some of the Henry Tax Review’s suggestions for slowing housing demand are worth another look.

Or perhaps we simply need to stop naively expecting our economy and markets to grow at irrationally high rates – and start thinking realistically about our future.

During the financial crisis, I once had a prominent chess parent come up to me while I was playing a tournament game and berate me for her stock portfolio collapsing. (Presumably, she incorrectly thought I represented the government, and somehow, therefore, the reason for the market collapse.)  Apparently, she expected her investments in Australian shares to continue to grow by at least 15 percent every year.

I tried to explain that if she really wanted to reduce the risk of losses in the portfolio, perhaps she should choose a less risky investment, such as a term deposit. “Why would I want to do that?” she exclaimed incredulously. “I wouldn’t make as much money!”

Perhaps our culture has gotten a little too comfortable in exceptionally positive market conditions and unsustainably high returns. We did come out of the crisis in good shape, but that’s no reason to get greedy. After all, we don’t want to turn into greedy, little PIGS, now do we?

DISCLAIMER:  As for every post on this website, the views expressed are my own and in no way represent those of the Australian Treasury, the Australian government, any other government, any other grandmaster, chess players generally, or anyone who rides a bike, whether clothed or not.

Loquacious Bombasticisms

I don’t like being bad at things. Nobody does, of course, but in my case, I particularly loathe being the worst at something.

It has come to my attention that, of my six work colleagues and I, I have by far the most limited vocabulary. I can, of course, make up excuses to explain this travesty, such as:

-   That I spent my youth on chess and numbers;

-   That I really only read chess books, which are usually written by Russians and translated with a simplistic English vocabulary; or

-   That they are lawyers. 

However, none of these excuses adequately replenishes my bruised ego. So I’ve taken it upon myself to improve my vocabulary one word at a time, using Kaplan’s “Vocabulary in a Box.” It’s basically just flash cards of 500 really tricky words that most regularly make their way onto the international graduate entrance examination (GRE), which I’m sitting in a few weeks.

Each day, I stick a dozen or so on my workspace wall, and my workmates clamber around and try to outdo each other with their verboseness (of course, I don’t know any of them). While the others boast about who knew the most and argue over definitional differences, I diligently memorise the lot by day’s end, and then get ready to start the process again.

It’s painful.

However, one thing I’m doing to make it easier is trying to slip in as many of these newly-learned words into my written work, presentations, and everyday conversations (at the obvious risk of sounding like a tosser). This tiresome process was finally rewarded on Friday when the Financial Review published my letter to the editor, despite the fact that none of my colleagues (or myself, for that matter) could understand it.

Unfortunately, the novelty of sounding erudite around my peers has quickly worn off, but hopefully it will all prove worth it, come the exam. I will then endeavour to forget the 500 words as quickly as possible during the post-exam celebrations.

For those of you who revel in a challenge, or just want to see how much better your vocab is than mine, here are today’s words (of which, this morning, I knew none):

• Restive
• Credulous
• Umbrage
• Viscous
• Pejorative
• Iniquity
• Florid
• Languid
• Imprecation
• Interregnum
• Lugubrious
• Polyglot
• Dictum

UPDATE: It just got real.

A really unfortunately timed blog post just then, it turns out. Topalov just played, as my mate Tritty describes it, “a blunder not even my 1500-rated student would make”. I think that’s unnecessarily harsh. Towards 1500’s, that is.

There’s playing ballsy, and then there’s just straight out blundering. I have to say, I’m surprised. Anand is older, more fatigued, and playing in his opponent’s home town – I’d really give the edge to Topalov in the tie-breaks.

But we’re not getting there now. No, Sir.

It’s like a batter walking off the pitch before the bowler bowls the ball. It’s like a goalie going for a drinks break before the opposition take a penalty. It’s like going all-in with 8-high – and showing the table your hand as well.

I don’t know what the explanation is. All I do know is that the psychology of what made Topalov lose it like this will be debated for a long while to come.

I shouldn’t be so preemptive – the game is still in progress, and, as they say, the winner is always the person who blunders last. In any case, I’m not going to bed any time soon.

Stay tuned.