User Profile: Annie K.

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Annie K.
Member since Apr-02-04

Annie Kappel
This profile needs an update badly, but I don't have the time... :)
My YouTube channel, featuring pronunciations of non-English chess player names: http://www.youtube.com/user/AnnieK1...
I'm 45 y/o, of Transylvanian origin, living in Israel since childhood. I speak English (no, really), Hungarian (great language!), and Hebrew (if I must, which is often, for some reason).
Afflicted with an uncontrollable sense of humor and other highly controversial characteristics.
I learned chess as a child, but had no further opportunities to practice the game. Returned to it seriously around 2004, and have been hanging out here since.
Note: if I am not home (i.e., here), you can probably find me at the Domdaniel chessforum, the SwitchingQuylthulg chessforum, the visayanbraindoctor chessforum, or the chessgames.com chessforum! :)
---
<My City of Moscow skits:>
<<<<<<>>>>> Kramnik's Party -> City of Moscow (kibitz #752)
<<<<<<>>>>> Sochi 2008: An F-Files Production -> City of Moscow (kibitz #774)
---
<Game Collection: My GotD Puns>
<My favorites:>
All Your Baze Are Belong To Us - L Baze vs T Palmer, 2004 - GotD Mar-21-10
Y Yu No Claim Repetition? - Yu Yangyi vs M R Venkatesh, 2012 - GotD Jun-30-12
He Who Has E Tate is Lost - E Tate vs Y Shulman, 2001 - GotD Sep-22-16
How Many Roads Must Aman Walk Down? - S Shankland vs A Hambleton, 2014 - GotD Dec-23-16 (besides the obvious reason for the pun - a long King walk - note also the terms 'shank' and 'amble' embedded in the player names)
So me the Wei - W So vs Wei Yi, 2013 - GotD Jan-29-17
This Won't Borya Ider - B Ider vs Wei Yi, 2014 - GotD Apr-01-17 (follow-up to previous day's GotD, 'This Won't Borya')
Injun vs Engin' - Anand vs REBEL, 1997 - GotD Jan-06-2018
---
<My other (linkable) site contributions:>
* The Player Names Pronunciation Project: http://www.chessgames.com/audio (or look for names with a loudspeaker icon in the Player Directory)
* Created on my suggestion: Biographer Bistro
* The first (now retired) Carlsen Dancing Rook: https://web.archive.org/web/2013040...
* The Caruana Dancing Rook:
http://www.chessgames.com/chessimag...
* The Hou Dancing Rook:
http://www.chessgames.com/chessimag...
---
<<<<<<< MAJOR CHESS SITES <<>>>>>>>>>
<< Correspondence chess <<<<<<>>>>>>>>
< ChessWorld -> http://www.chessworld.net
ChessWorld is my new main chess playing base. It's a rather restrictive site for non-paying members, but one of the best sites for paying members. The full features include excellent interface options and first class study and analysis resources. Nice community, likeable admin. Paid membership recommended.
< Update: while I will leave the original entry for ChessWorld as-is, I have by now been a member of the site for 2 years, and am now an admin there. I still think the site is one of the best, and the <other> admins are nice. :p >
My ChessWorld profile: http://www.letsplaychess.com/chessc...
< Queen Alice -> http://www.queenalice.com
Queen Alice is a charming site - well behaved players, decent admin, site design visually very pleasant. It is also completely free. Unfortunately, it lacks team play, the interface and resources are relatively simple, and it can be frustratingly slow (loading times). Nevertheless warmly recommended.
My QueenAlice profile: http://www.queenalice.com/player.ph...
< GameKnot -> http://gameknot.com
GameKnot is technically an excellent site, however I would not recommend it to the serious player who is looking for a site to settle in, due to an anti$ocial admin with ju$t one $ingle intere$t in hi$ $ite... oop$, $orry about the typo$.
My GameKnot profile: http://gameknot.com/stats.pl?annie-....
<< Other chess sites <<<<<<>>>>>>>>
< FICS - the Free Internet Chess Server -> http://www.freechess.org
FICS is a great site to play chess at various faster time controls. There are a few difficulties getting started with it - first, it can be hard to find an email they will accept for registration; and second, there's a lot of site code to learn. But it's worth the hassle. :)
< ChessCube -> http://www.chesscube.com
ChessCube is quite good for fast time control games - provided you have a strong computer with broadband, as the site is entirely Flash based, which means it takes considerable computer resources to load. The site is nominally free, but heavily commercialized with all sorts of frills that can be purchased on it.
< Emrald Chess Tactics Server -> http://chess.emrald.net
Emrald is not a playing site - it is an invaluable tactical training asset. The only problem with it is also the difficulty of finding an "acceptable" email address to register with; but once past that hurdle, the site deserves nothing but praise.
It's a completely free site. You can play (practice) there as a guest, but they recommend registering, so that their program can keep track of your progress, in order to assign you puzzles best suited to your current level. I strongly second that recommendation. Register and always play logged in! It will make a huge difference in the site's ability to help you improve. An issue that scares some people off Emrald is that your progress is tracked via a "rating system", and because of the high importance they assign to speed, if you are not used to finding tactics fast, your rating will be very low at first - and many people are simply embarrassed to play logged in for that reason. Don't let it bother you! If you let embarrassment hold you back from letting the site help you improve to the best of its ability, you are only shooting yourself in the foot, and nobody else really cares that much anyway. ;p
A few of the people I've recommended Emrald to, had dropped it after a brief trial with remarks along the lines of "Oh, it's a blitz training site. I don't play blitz, so I don't like their obsession with speed." That reaction is absolutely wrong - and it's also one that many people who try the site out for only a short time are likely to have, if only because players who are used to being rated, say, 2000 and above, at corr. chess sites, are going to be annoyed and put on the defensive about finding themselves rated as low as 1200-1300 at Emrald, and will wish to dismiss the "insulting" site.
Yes, the Emrald rating system is heavily influenced by speed. But thinking that the site's purpose is blitz training is a complete misunderstanding of the lesson taught. The real purpose of Emrald practice is not to improve your blitz skills, but to train you to recognize dozens of tactical themes and opportunities AT A GLANCE - which will not only save you time in games of any time control, but is often the only way you will catch them AT ALL. Those brilliant tactical shots that can be seen in anyone's collection of "most memorable games", are often moves that will either occur to you as soon as you glance at the position, or you will miss them altogether. That's what Emrald really teaches - tactical chess intuition.
<Intuition in chess can be defined as the first move that comes to mind when you see a position. --- <Viswanathan Anand>>
<Personally, I am of the view that if a strong master does not see such a threat at once he will not notice it, even if he analyses the position for twenty or thirty minutes. --- <Tigran Petrosian >>
<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>
^ TL;DR.

Any other questions, feel free to ask. I might even answer. ;p

>> Click here to see Annie K.'s game collections.

   Current net-worth: 990 chessbucks
[what is this?]

   Annie K. has kibitzed 8212 times to chessgames [more...]

   Sep-15-20 S Mariotti vs A Geller, 1990

Annie K.: The Black player in this game has been corrected from Efim to Alexander Geller. Thanks. :)

   Sep-14-20 chessgames.com chessforum

Annie K.: <MissS> ah, yes, the key term "I challenged her" - that pretty much describes the previous post too, which was a blown out of all proportion tirade about the severity of the Player of the Day (not the entire homepage as claimed, which I check on almost every midnight, ...

   Sep-12-20 Champions Showdown Chess 9LX (2020)

Annie K.: Note: if you can't see the games, please set your game viewer to pgn4web (in the box under the game score) - but remember to set it back to our default viewer Olga in the end, as it is about to be upgraded soon, and will be the best of our viewers. :)

   Sep-04-20 Chessgames Bookie chessforum

Annie K.: The logs have been checked, and the top places are cleared. Congratulations to winner <moronovich>, the other 5 qualifiers, and the rest of the top 10! :) We have opened the Fall Leg, so if anything turns up, betting can start immediately, but we have no official schedule for

   Aug-01-20 Biographer Bistro

Annie K.: <Tab> The WCC pages are tied in with some special functions, and changing them can cause far-ranging problems at this time (remember when merely changing the WCC page titles caused stats to disappear from the pages of participating players?), so let's take this up again after

   Jul-29-20 Ding Liren vs Leko, 2020

Annie K.: Identical to K Stupak vs E Shtembuliak, 2020 .

   Jul-24-20 Annie K. chessforum

Annie K.: A fun conversation from 2016... :) <Daniel:> I’ve come to learn a lot about what sports broadcasting must be like. Actually I learned about it long before CG when I worked at a newspaper. If there is a sporting event you MUST be excited about it, from a business ...

   Jul-22-20 Biel (2020)

Annie K.: It gets worse - the chess24 intro says "In case of a tie for first place chess960 rapid games will be played", but in fact the official site specifies that the chess960 tiebreaks in question are the ACCENTUS 960 games - which have already been played on the 18th, the event's first ...

   Jul-21-20 Csom vs A Yusupov, 1982

Annie K.: The only requirement for this excellent pun is to pronounce Csom correctly. Which means, as "Chom". :)

   Jul-17-20 K Pedersen vs G F Kane, 1972

Annie K.: <jith> thank you for the always helpful directions. :) So all 12 Pedersen games we have in Chess Olympiad Final-A (1972) games are about to be reassigned from Eigil to Karl.

indicates a reply to the comment.

Procrastinators' Club (planned)

< Earlier Kibitzing · PAGE 174 OF 274 · Later Kibitzing>
Jul-28-13		Annie K.: Salamat, <wordfunph>! :) <Karpova> much thanks, both for the compliments and for being the first to spot the birthday thing. ;) It can take many years of observation for me to grow certain enough of my interpretation of a person to post it publicly, and then I wouldn't do it if there wasn't at least a chance that it might help the subject more than it would hurt them. Although in this case, any help to be expected would be in the form of people who read that analysis trying to relate to him a little more kindly, or at least less cruelly. He himself would certainly neither like what I posted, nor could he ever admit to any of it. In fact, the best case would be if he just got angry and dismissed the posts without any reflection - as he can't help any of the issues involved anyway, and given that he's spent most of his life blocking out exactly the things I said, while anybody else would see the plea on his behalf in them, to him they would probably look like one of the worst "attacks" ever aimed at him. :\

Jul-28-13		hms123: <Annie> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztoS...

Jul-28-13		Annie K.: Thanks, <hms>! :)

Jul-28-13		Annie K.: Hmm, how about if I adopt 'Stop Thinking I Can Read Your Mind' as my motto? =) Now excuse me for a minute while I go and try to deflate my ego a bit... a rather ineffective procedure, I might add. Waayyy too many compliments lately. :s ;p

Jul-29-13		Caissanist: FICS seems to be up now, mostly. I use Babaschess myself so it didn't exactly give me warm fuzzies, but I do appreciate all their hard work. Here's the latest update from Chessty: <As you all know, FICS was hacked on July 18, 2013 and suffered severe damage. There were several complications which contributed to our lengthy downtime. First of which was that foxbat was out of state on vacation when the hack occured. It took some time before he could get back to start working on the server. Second, while we were working on correcting all the damage from the hack, we received word that we would lose our hosting sometime "soon". This necessitated looking for a new host. We are giving OVH a trial run and possibly may switch if it proves to be able to meet our needs. Third, in loading up the server, we have discovered that babaschess now has issues that cause errors. Removing timeseal helps but a fix will have to be made.> Does anyone know what <timeseal> refers to here?

Jul-29-13		SwitchingQuylthulg: <Caissanist: Does anyone know what <timeseal> refers to here?> It's the program that timestamps your moves so FICS knows how much you lag. If you disable timeseal FICS has no choice but to assume your lag is zero.

Jul-29-13		chancho: <Annie> A very belated Happy Birthday. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HE9...

Jul-29-13		FICS Info: <SwitchingQuylthulg>: Tx much! FICS admins have recompiled their server and claim that it is now working normally (i.e. no more Babaschess problems). The most recent news updates are in this account's profile.

Jul-29-13		Annie K.: <Caissanist> thanks again for the updates, very helpful. :) <chancho> both versions (original & parody) of that song somehow manage to be my all-time #1 favorite. How did you know? Thanks! :D

Jul-29-13		chancho: <Annie> You showed me the parody version after I posted the original some years back. :-)

Jul-29-13		Annie K.: Oh, right! :)

Jul-30-13		FICS Info: Yet another FICS FYI: I use Babaschess to connect to it, and found that today, when I try to do so, it doesn't work when I have "Use External Timeseal" for the value in the "Connection Type" field of the "Advanced Options" box from the initial login screen. I believe that "Use External Timeseal" is the default value, so probably a lot of people will run into this sooner or later. The error it gives is "Timeseal: The requested name is valid, but no data of the requested type was found." Changing it to either "Use Integrated Timeseal" or "Do Not Use Timeseal" appears to fix the problem.

Jul-30-13		Annie K.: Thanks. :) I logged on just now (Babaschess too), and no timeseal problems.

Jul-30-13		OhioChessFan: http://now.msn.com/chicago-tribune-...

Jul-30-13		Annie K.: Heh. Can't be bad! :)

Jul-30-13		chancho: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49Jt...

Jul-31-13		Annie K.: <chancho> that video is obviously a fake... Because the cat lost. ;)

Jul-31-13		chancho: lol...

Aug-01-13		Karpova: <Annie K.> thanks for bringing up the issue on the <chessgames.com> forum! It was interesting to read the answer but kind of a let-down as they don't detect a problem anywhere.

Aug-01-13		Annie K.: Actually, that was a very encouraging response - have to read between the lines a bit, but Daniel is saying that he won't support the GMs unconditionally if you can make a convincing case that they are in the wrong. The request to handle that privately is completely reasonable. :)

Aug-01-13		Thanh Phan: Certain players pages seem to only allow their negative viewpoint of this site anyways, all other posts become deleted if it is a viewpoint other than one they support, It seems pointless to attempt to comment on their page regarding their games or game positions, that has worked out less then well in the past

Aug-02-13		Thanh Phan: Almost forgot, a youtube video <Ancient Egypt - The Mystery of the Rosetta Stone - BBC full Documentary> http://youtu.be/UHFuoP_QrXM Has some neat thoughts on language in the beginning

Aug-02-13		Annie K.: <Thanh> thanks, I'll try to check it out this weekend. :) <Karpova> hmm, I think maybe I cut a few too many corners there. ;) The "they don't detect a problem anywhere" impression is nothing more than a part of the consistent site policy, wherein they have officially never undertaken seeking out problems themselves (absolutely understandable - if they had, they'd never get a minute for site improvement...); that's the whole principle of the whistle blowing procedure. If something is important enough to somebody to submit a complaint about it, then it may be important enough to handle. Otherwise, why look for trouble? What I did was provide the opportunity to state a preferred method of dealing with this sort of problem (since even if he wanted to address the subject, he couldn't very well stand on a rooftop himself and shout, 'hey, anybody wanna complain about a GM or two?' - at least not without looking like he was actively trying to stir the pot... somebody had to actually ask the question first!) - and he did take the chance. He could have said "well, actually, we prefer to support the nice GMs who are kind enough to communicate with members here, and trust them to moderate their pages as they see fit", but note that he didn't say that. His answer was the most encouraging one he could diplomatically give. So... now the question is cleared, please feel free to take him up on his word, and contact him by email. In my experience, he is very approachable and will give your message serious consideration. :)

Aug-02-13		Annie K.: [Event "ChessCube Game"] [Date "2013.08.03"] [White "anniek1974@chesscube.com"] [Black "king_richard@chesscube.com"] [Result "1-0"] [WhiteElo "1975"] [BlackElo "2018"] [ECO "B50"] [TimeControl "600"] 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. Bc4 e6 4. Qe2 a6 5. c3 Nd7 6. d4 Qc7 7. Bf4 h6 8. O-O b6 9. Nbd2 Bb7 10. Rac1 Be7 11. e5 d5 12. Bb3 g6 13. Bc2 Bf8 14. Bb1 c4 15. b3 b5 16. a4 Ne7 17. axb5 axb5 18. bxc4 dxc4 19. Ne4 Nd5 20. Bg3 Be7 21. Nd6+ Bxd6 22. exd6 Qa5 23. Ne5 Nxe5 24. Bxe5 Rg8 25. Qd2 g5 26. Bh7 Kd7 27. Bxg8 Rxg8 28. h3 f6 29. Bg3 h5 30. f3 Qb6 31. Bf2 Qxd6 32. Qc2 Rg7 33. Ra1 Qb6 34. Ra2 g4 35. hxg4 hxg4 36. fxg4 Rxg4 37. Qh7+ Kc6 38. Qf7 Nf4 39. d5+ Kxd5 40. Bxb6 1-0 (forfeit by disconnection)

Aug-03-13		Karpova: <Annie K.> Yes, it was a very diplomatic answer. I was probably expecting too much (more reflection on whether these player admin rights are really worth it) and this praise <As a compromise, I offered to either let me delete what I deemed inappropriate, or alternately I would give him administrative ability with the condition that he only deletes the posts that could truly be construed as libelous. He opted to do the job himself, and after reviewing what he deleted I have to say he used his power very judiciously. Had I done it myself I probably would have gone even further.> was more than just disappointing. But I agree with you that we should concentrate on the positive statement that unjustified suppression of a disagreeable information is taken seriously. And also the nice quip <When it comes to lower tier players we really don't care very much what they delete or don't delete, [...]> which you made so excellent use of.

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