I spend most of 2012 playing poker, and my chess SUFFERED.

Poker is much like life, it's unjust, harsh, and you can be punished for making all the right moves.

Yeah, you get more leeway to use your own ideas and build a positional advantage a lot easier, and you don't have to worry about running into everyone's pet Sicilian.

Actually I <loved> the positions I was getting with 1.d4. I seem to be naturally inclined towards positional maneuvers more than sharp positions that require calculation.

I actually developed my preference for 1.d4 when I first took up chess. Most of my games were against a chess program that came with an old apple computer someone gave me. After trial and error, I found that I lasted longer against the computer with 1.d4 than 1.e4 and so that was my first opening with white.

Then as I got more serious, I started developing a repertoire based on 1.e4 that my coach, Miodrag Perunovic came up with based on the fact that I was pretty good with tactics, despite the fact they were not my preference.

Then last year I decided to build a whole new repertoire based on 1.d4. And I had a lot of success with that, I think I gained about 500 elo that year, which gave me an elo around 2000.

But I decided that i want to do my best to master the game, and to do that you have to play positions that you are not as comfortable with to do that, so I've gone back to 1.e4 again, just to get better at those types of positions.

<Guess the Move> makes it completely worth it, IMHO.

I can only report on my own experience, but in 6 years I have never heard a single Korean person mention North Korea, ever, for any reason.

I can tell you that they don't consider them "bad people." Everyone I've spoken to it about has simply assumed that the North will be reunited with the South as a democracy, like in the case of Germany.

So there's a curious disjunct. I know more about the details of the North Korean state than do my students or colleagues. You do, too. Everyone does who lives outside of Korea.

Are they burying their heads in the sand? I don't know. Once a month they run an air raid siren over the whole country, but the students don't even hear it anymore. They've heard it their whole lives and nothing ever happens when it blows, so they are "reverse Pavloved" into ignoring it.

There are plenty of old folks in my village who lived through the Korean War- they are all bent over double from rice paddy induced scoliosis. They are also around 2 feet tall on average, because they grew up in a country without food.

Nowadays Korean kids can get up to 6 feet tall, thanks to a few generations of good nutrition.

Personally, I'm not afraid of North Korea simply because both Russia and China have told them, and recently, that they are "not allowed" to invade the south.

Back about 1973, I remember the schoolteacher who gave chess its momentum in the Burlington, Vermont area reading from Ken Smith's magazine 'Chess Digest' and urging others to apply Smith's advice.

Believe it went roughly as follows: open 1.d4 and 1.e4 for a year each and see which was more suitable to the player's style.

A number of the younger players in the club plumped for this, but, nonconformist that I have always been, it was rather too formulaic for me, and I went my own way, which-at the time-meant sticking with 1.e4.

For nearly all of my 15 years of chess I have played <1.e4> and <1.e4 c5>. This despite the fact that for at least the past decade I had inklings that in doing so I was playing against my natural temperament...for the usual reasons I was reluctant to switch, and I told myself that I was shoring up my weaknesses-- just as <agenbite> wrote:

<But I decided that i want to do my best to master the game, and to do that you have to play positions that you are not as comfortable with to do that...>

I could easily have written these words myself. I think it's a great attitude and I'm proud I share it (I wish I could apply it consistently in areas other than chess, but that's another story). Mastery demands you know it all, right? IQP positions, rook endings, everything. Open games as well as closed. Endings as well as middlegames.

But this insight still doesn't tell us when and how we should switch to working on our weaknesses. I imagine having a talented trainer would be an immense help here. For me, I know that I spent too long with sharp open games, probably several years too long. I'm pleased that things are clicking with my new repertoire (<1.Nf3> ∆ Reti or Catalan; Robatsch, Benko, maybe KID). and while I'm proud of the hard-won ground I gained in my years of beating my head against the Sicilian, I do think I'd be further along as a player if I hadn't waited so long to mix it up. Next time I won't wait so long (probably I will eventually move to <1.d4>.)

It's an interesting question in non-chess contexts too. I keep thinking about Ali, who would famously underperform against his sparring partners because he was working on his weaknesses. Any virtuoso on Ali's level has probably done similar things.

A couple cases where it backfired. You may know that the fourth finger is the frustrating finger for pianists, it doesn't respond as well as the others. The composer and performer Robert Schumann thought he would train his fourth fingers, so he attached them by string to weights suspended from pulleys on the ceiling. As the story goes he ruined his playing and this contributed to him leaving the recitals to his wife, Clara.

The other case was a man who badly wanted to be ambidextrous, so he worked diligently for years to do <every> dominant action with his non-dominant hand. He ended up not with two dominant hands, but with zero!

Because my other favorite Filipino sportsman got knocked out in December :).

Really though, So is my favorite young chessplayer. He taught himself how to be a master with a computer! He is really a modern chess player in the sense that he was raised by engines.

Carlsen is often credited with being this kind of player, but he's obviously a database guy. You can tell that So is the real deal.

A database player would say something like <Houdini is the best engine, it plays like Fischer>

So says that Fischer is the best player and that he plays just like Houdini!

His original user name was <theageofPilipinowit>, which is an important clue.

In fact, one of them moved over at such a young age he got all his culture living out in the country in Tennessee. So imagine a Filip wearing hunting gear all of the time, speaking with a heavy southern accent!

Every Filipino I've met, with the exception of that guy's older sister, has been pretty awesome.

I disagree with some of Everitt's speculations about Augustus, such as that of Augustus's oversight of the transition from Republic to Empire was more palatable than it would have been under G.J. Caesar.

For starters, we have no proof that Caesar would have installed an empire. I personally believe that Caesar would have been content with installing himself as Dictator for Life, enacting various reforms upon the Republic, and then allowing the Senate to manage Rome after his death. That is of course, only speculation on my part, but I have never read anything to refute this idea.

I highly doubt Caesar would have been overly brutal to his fellow Romans. Perhaps the one weakness that lead to his assassination was the fact that he loved to forgive his fellow Roman opponents. This fact lead to the suicide of Kato the Younger, who would have rather killed himself than be forgiven for opposing Caesar. Caesar loved to humiliate his opponents with forgiveness, and would often become angrier at the loss of an opportunity to forgive them than he would for their original transgression.

Augustus was not encumbered with this "weakness," a fact that illustrates the second point where I disagree with Everitt.

Everitt believes that Augustus did not wish for Cicero to be executed in the bloody proscription of the Second Triumvirate. I would disagree and submit that a more nuanced view is more consistent with Octavius's character and that he probably did not wish to <appear> to wish for Cicero's execution.

It is true that upon entering the Roman political stage, the posthumously-adopted Caesar wrote praising the famed orator and referred to him as "father" in correspondence, but by the time that the proscription was enacted, the famous republican had probably outlived his utility to Octavian, and I believe that the youngest Triumvir did as he always did; he made most out of a political opportunity. My pet theory is that Octavian feigned sentimentality towards Cicero in order to get Anthony to agree to put one of his own kinsmen on the proscription list.

The supremely-intelligent Octavian would have known that Cicero must necessarily be dealt with before he could turn republic to empire.

Cicero was such a gossip that his fellow senators did not inform him of the plot to assassinate Caesar for fear of him blowing their cover, despite the fact that he was one of the republic's most staunch proponents.

The rhetor's penchant for gossip leads me to believe that Octavian was well aware of Cicero's play on words in regard to Caesar's adopted son:

<"Laudandum adulescentem, ornandum, tollendum>

The superficial translation of Cicero's statement is that Octavian should be "praised, honored, and promoted."

But Cicero cheekily used the word tollendum, which is a Janus-faced word which means "removed" as well as "promoted."