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 225 OF 274 · Later Kibitzing>
Nov-14-15		Domdaniel: Of course, the greatest formerly living Irish actor, Richard Harris, played Dumbledore in the first HP movie. And Irish people were often associated with potatoes. Therefore the line "Potatoes, Harry?" is actually an ethnic slur. A genius has to be a bit mad, otherwise what's the point? The mad bit tends to be the fun bit. Not the biter bit. Or the bitter end. Or the bittern twisted. Oh, stop already...

Nov-14-15		Annie K.: Yeah, that. ;) The only little problem with the ethnic slur angle is that the book was written some time before the casting list was determined, but otherwise it works all right. :D

Nov-17-15		SwitchingQuylthulg: <Two, the long-awaited Leaderboard Update function for the Bookie has just been implemented! Now we don't have to wait for the Leaderboard to update at its regular intervals anymore; we can update it when we're finished paying off the day's bets. The function is resource-intensive, so we shouldn't use it after every single bet, but can run it as soon as all bets are paid, or even twice a day, if we're covering two events at the same time, and they are at significantly different hours. On top of that, the Leaderboard will continue to be recomputed automatically, now twice a day: at server time 4:15 am and pm. Annie> Nice :) c$200 says Daniel completely ignored every suggestion about not wasting resources auto-compiling if nothing significant has happened since the last manual update.

Nov-17-15		Annie K.: <Switch> hey, nice to see you around! :) Well, I didn't make such suggestions, because I figure it might be good to have the automatic update in case we ever have a Bookie who tends to forget to run the manual one. Also, the thingy runs as part of a bigger task list, so the frequency of those other updates is a consideration too. I did consider suggesting separating it, but I guess there's no urgency about that just now. :)

Nov-18-15		SwitchingQuylthulg: <Annie: Well, I didn't make such suggestions, because I figure it might be good to have the automatic update in case we ever have a Bookie who tends to forget to run the manual one.> The suggestion wasn't to eliminate automatic updates completely, just to skip them if nothing significant had happened since the last update. A lot of resources could be saved easily, and auto-compile would still do the job if the Bookie never ran a single manual update. Here's a less sane game for you: [Event "rated blitz match"] [Site "Free Internet Chess Server"] [Date "2015.11.18"] [Round "?"] [White "NN"] [Black "Quylthulg"] [Result "0-1"] [WhiteElo "2003"] [BlackElo "2035"] [ECO "A04"] [TimeControl "180"] 1. Nf3 Nc6 2. e4 g6 3. d4 Bg7 4. d5 Ne5 5. Nxe5 Bxe5 6. c3 c5 7. a4 d6 8. Na3 f5 9. exf5 Bxf5 10. Bd3 Nf6 11. f4 e6 12. dxe6 Ne4 13. Bb5+ Kf8 14. fxe5 Qh4+ 15. g3 Nxg3 16. Qxd6+ Kg8 17. hxg3 Qxh1+ 18. Kf2 Qh2+ 19. Kf3 Bg4+ 20. Ke3 Qxg3+ 21. Kd2 Qf2+ 22. Kd3 Qe2# {White checkmated} 0-1

Nov-18-15		Annie K.: <Switch> yeah, sorry - it's just that I put my answer to you in the wrong order. Thing is that running the Bookie recompute script alone is actually not a heavy task at all, it's probably not significantly heavier than just checking whether anything happened since the last update would be (and it's already written...). It's the other functions in the task-list it's in, that make running the program seriously resource-intensive. So the solution would be to provide the Bookie with a version of the program that runs only the Bookie update, without the rest of the task list. And meanwhile (after my post yesterday) Daniel told me - without my suggesting it first :) - that he is going to do that too, one of these days, but it's not urgent. ;D I'll catch up with your game in a bit, I'm at work now. :)

Nov-18-15		Annie K.: <Switch> Great game - as you know, I love it when everything but the kitchen sink is flying around like that... :D

Nov-20-15		NeverAgain: <Domdaniel: BTW, I just got a book by Lasha Janjghava. Who is Georgian, or possibly Kartvelian. Any idea how to pronounce his last name?> Easy - [ʤɒnʤ-'gɒvɒ] ʤ = j in jump ɒ = a in ah All you need is to see if the name is on the Russian Wikipedia (of course, knowing Cyrillic helps there ;) @<Annie K.>: need clarification on the pronunciation of Szén, please - Biographer Bistro (kibitz #12511)

Nov-20-15		Annie K.: <NeverAgain> aha, thanks! Excellent, I can always use help with the Slavic pronunciations. :) The problem is mostly trying to figure out if the transliteration in case is trying to rely on Latin-type or English pronunciation. Looks like this one was going for English, then. And I should also try to remember never to underestimate their preference for consonants over vowels! ;p Ah, that Szén issue again - tough trying to explain a sound that just doesn't exist in either English or Russian. I'll head over to the Bistro. :)

Nov-20-15		NeverAgain: Whenever you need help with pronunciations just drop me a line in my forum.

Nov-20-15		Alien Math: <Annie K.> i think i can hear the é in Szén from your pronounce, with hungarian the stress always falls on the first syllable of the word? so é are not stressed but have a half step longer pronounced duration like in hate minus a y soft vowel after?

Nov-20-15		Annie K.: <NeverAgain> thanks, and you are welcome to drop in here any time, too. :) <Hanh> correct, é is a "long vowel", and out of all English vowels, is most similar to the first part of the diphthong of the _a_e form, but it's not exactly that vowel either. Also correct that in Hungarian the stress is always on the first syllable, but with a one-syllable word that would be true in any language. :)

Nov-20-15		Alien Math: <Annie K.> right right, my problem are attempting to pronounce or understand a diphthong appear unfamiliar with their different usage, had some examples from both china russia and german to better hear them now, without those i doubt i would notice or be able to pronouce any of them

Nov-20-15		Annie K.: Well, as far as I'm concerned, a diphthong is mostly just a combination of two successive vowels, really - their only specialty is in syllable management, where normally you'd divide up a word according to a 'one syllable per vowel' rule, but the two vowels of a diphthong will go to the same syllable (so 'sane' is a one-syllable word, rather than being broken up as 'say-in'). BTW, Hungarian has no diphthongs; even though it's quite common for two vowels to appear in a successive order, when a word is divided into syllables, these vowels will always be broken up. English also complicates things by being non-phonetic, so you wind up with having to remember that two particular vowels need to be pronounced as a diphthong when they appear in certain positions, even though they are not next to each other.

Nov-20-15		Alien Math: curious moment about <zs is not sz> and phoneme pronounced from bistro Biographer Bistro (kibitz #12527) some of the main things we have to learn or unlearn when studying how to pronounce various english words for việt nam born and raised types are on this page http://englishspeaklikenative.com/r... even i still have difficulty finding hearing or saying some of the sounds in english

Nov-20-15		Alien Math: one of our native born singers after a year of learning decided to sing in english, impossible by miu lê https://youtu.be/ufJEty5wWxw

Nov-21-15		Domdaniel: <Never Again> -- Thanks for the Janjgava pronunciation tip. I can read Cyrillic, but not Georgian script. < Whenever you need help with pronunciations just drop me a line in my forum.> Um, you don't actually seem to have a forum at the moment?

Nov-21-15		Domdaniel: <Annie> You have an amazing ear, hon. Possibly even two.

Nov-21-15		Annie K.: <Dom> thanks, though the Russian 'soft L' probably wouldn't agree. ;s <Hanh> thanks for that page - I don't think I agree with its definition of diphthongs, but it's an interesting take. :) Miu Lê has a lovely voice. Now you pointed out the kind of problems Vietnamese would have in English, I noticed some of the difficulties in her lyrics... a question: if Vietnamese doesn't have "L", then what is her name really like? :)

Nov-21-15		Domdaniel: Pronouncing 'Janjghava' ... As Annie says, the transcription from Cyrillic seems to be based on English sounds. So, while 'J' has a 'y' sound in most European languages, here the English-style 'J = dj' (as in jean = djinn) takes precedence. This sound interests me. For several years I had a girlfriend named Djinn. She was originally called 'Jean', but found that French-speakers often thought this indicated a male, so she began to use the spelling 'Djinn' instead (based on a novel by Robbe-Grillet). So back to 'Janjghava'. If both the J-sounds are English-style, then the name is roughly 'Djahn-dj'gahvah'.

Nov-21-15		Domdaniel: ... and not, as both Annie and I thought, as something like 'Yanny-ghava'.

Nov-21-15		Alien Math: <Annie K.> there are "L" found in vietnamese, most common found only on front of the word and the letter are pronounced like l in Love, most common reason l are mistaken for n are it interchanges depend on its usage, năm would be 5, năm mươi would become 50, and yet 15 appears as mười lăm and not mười năm, mui lê last name would sound like lee for most northerners or lay depending on region, she says her own name as lee

Nov-22-15		Alien Math: Another consideration about "L" as we say it compared to how Americans say it, our form blends L with our words well, using the American form there is an extra layer of difficulty as the letters following L have the wrong inflection or stress added

Nov-23-15		Domdaniel: I'm told that there are eleven (11) distinct L-sounds in the Irish (Gaelic) language ... though I can only pronounce two of them, aka 'dark L' and 'light L'.

Nov-24-15		Domdaniel: Query: what is a "180" time control, as played by Switch in his latest insane game (in which his opponent had various ways to win, but I'm sure Switch knows that)? Is "180" = 180 seconds, ie 3 minutes? I've heard of games played at this frankly insane speed. I may even have tried it myself in the distant past. (I have a vague memory of playing blitz, starting 5 mins each, with the winner of each game losing a minute next time: I won at 5-5, 4-5, 3-5, and -2-5, and then lost 5 in a row: just couldn't deal with one minute). "180" ackshly seems as bad, now. I wouldn't play anything under 10 mins, and that reluctantly.

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