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 45 OF 274 · Later Kibitzing>
Sep-04-10		benjinathan: You should move here and then you would get both (in fact all). Or do you get Jan. 1 as a holiday anyway?

Sep-04-10		Annie K.: <benjinathan> "here" is Canada, IIRC? :) I'll try to get around to it. ;) We don't officially get Jan. 1 off, but since many people celebrate the so-called "Civic (/Civilian) New Year", it's understood that people may take the day off, or show up for work but not get much done.

Sep-04-10		benjinathan: <"here" is Canada, IIRC?> Right. Plus you would get 2 days off for some of the holidays you only get one now: Rosh and Pesach. Seems that is enough to justify a country change;-).

Sep-04-10		Annie K.: OK, if I weren't already convinced, I would be now! ;)

Sep-04-10		benjinathan: See you soon!

Sep-05-10		chancho: Emerson Lake and Palmer From The Beginning http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm1O...

Sep-08-10		jessicafischerqueen: <Whether it's worse to be perceived as a liar, or as a shallow, unintrospective brat - from his perspective - I don't know, so I have no idea whether I'm defending or condemning him here. :p> I don't think it even matters if you are defending or condemning him- I'd say you are doing neither, at any rate. Rather, you are presenting accurate analysis. Understanding a phenomenon and explaining it accurately doesn't require any extra label. This is one of the pillars of the "idea of science", certainly one of its main goals. <Annie> I think it's clear that you don't have any personal axe to grind or bias on this issue- far from it, in fact. It's a matter of public record that you were well-disposed, if anything, to <Natalia> prior to this incident. In fact, a reader of your posts would be hard pressed to prove that even now you are ill-disposed towards <Natalia> and <Peter>. Quite the opposite. If what you posted is accurate (and I think it is), if anything you are doing her- and especially him- a favor (if they read your posts with an open heart, and with their egos in their back pockets). There is no defense to "accuracy." And "accuracy" requires no further explanation or ethical gloss. We've all got warts- and when we show them to others, consciously or unconsciously, other people are going to comment on them. I'd say you've bent over backwards to be fair in your comments. That's my impression anyways. Best, Jess

Sep-08-10		Annie K.: Thanks, <Jess>! :) You're quite right that the "judgment" is irrelevant one way or the other - and I wasn't even really trying to sum up my opinion(s) there, so much as simply recognizing that what goes around comes around, and if I go around analyzing other people's posts, my own posts may be analyzed as well. No problem there - and that was just a helpful tip for any would-be analysts of <my> post. ;) Figuring out the people, and their different POV's is what fascinates me - it's just what I <do>. "Judgment", "good" or "bad", just gets in the way of accurate observation; it colors the the interpretation of post-judgmental input, and I can't have that. :p I may have an opinion, often do in fact... :D - but I'll rarely let it be more than a minor note to me, almost always open to reinterpretation at any time - and even that <must> be put completely aside when I'm going about my main hobby of analyzing further input. I'm not trying to be "fair" - I'm trying to get a realistic picture, so I can build a "personality profile" model good enough to function as a working hypothesis. The test of that is whether it makes <all> the observed events/behavior make sense, and - where applicable - enable me to predict, at least in broad lines, further events/behavior. BTW... a funny basic contradiction of human nature is that almost nobody likes to be <analyzed>, yet almost everybody wants to be <understood> (at some level). Go figure. :p ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In this case, one of the first questions to ask would be: why did PZ register to the World team <openly>? As has been pointed out by many, including himself, if he wanted to "spy", it would have been much simpler with an anonymous account. So that leaves two other possibilities: 1 - to "rattle" the team (aka psychological warfare / gamesmanship) 2 - for the reasons he said, and he honestly didn't see the conflict of interests there. The second possibility is rejected at first sight by many people because the conflict of interests is utterly obvious to them and "should be to anybody" - but we'll take a look at that... ;) The first possibility: accepted by some, mostly because the second one was already rejected, but actually unlikely: rattling one's opponent may be "worth a try" - if one has no pesky ethical principles to hold them back, and really, such people are not all that common - in an OTB game, but in CC? A whole team is not going to stay rattled for the weeks, maybe months, that this game will last. So this strategy would mean a very high PR price for a very tenuous chance at the sort of advantage that few people would try to get at all. Not impossible, but the statistics are against it. Subpoint <a>: the idea that the intent may have been to completely disrupt the team / game from the start is even more unlikely. If the game were aborted on move 2, that would have been a PR disaster for them. That's why the "revolt" worked, and that's why I was confident it would. :) Subpoint <b>: the idea was that now, if NP loses, she can claim she was upset. Um, an average 6 year old can come up with a better excuse for losing, and with lower risk of alienating further clients. Let's get real? So let's take a closer look at the "preposterous" second possibility again... to be continued. ;)

Sep-08-10		hms123: <Annie> I know people who honestly(?) don't see anything wrong with stealing. Finders keepers, losers weepers. It works for them. Doesn't seem quite right to me.

Sep-08-10		Annie K.: <hms> certainly, such people - lacking a "conscience", aka sociopaths and psychopaths - exist, but with the obvious exception of politicians, are rarely people who would allow their moral deficit to show while trying to make their living by being in the public eye, as this couple is trying to do. For this, unconscionable, but usually pragmatic type, the stakes if caught would just be too high.

Sep-08-10		therealbenjinathan: <2 - for the reasons he said, and he honestly didn't see the conflict of interests there.> I think there can be some support for this conclusion gleaned from a review of the kibitizing in her game against chess.com. It really was a different animal than what we do here; much more informal and relaxed. It seemed like it was just impossible to herd cats. They even had a seperate section where the strong players went away and talked amongst themselves. It was essentially impossible, from what I could see, to determine what the Team was doing even if you read it all. In that context, "cheating" could hardly be that. It may be that he just did not realize that we are quite different here, take it much more seriously, and for the most part act as a team. You can actually get an advantage by reviewing the talk in our games. b

Sep-08-10		hms123: <Annie> I am talking about people I know--with PhDs, teaching at major universities, being successful, etc.--and being <entitled>. Once you're entitled, apparently the rules no longer apply. Some really are psychopaths or sociopaths--but not the kind that kill people.

Sep-08-10		crawfb5: <Once you're entitled, apparently the rules no longer apply.> <H> When did you move to CT?

Sep-08-10		zarg: <therealbenjinathan: It may be that he just did not realize that we are quite different here, take it much more seriously, and for the most part act as a team. You can actually get an advantage by reviewing the talk in our games.> Yup, exactly my impression too! In addition from looking at that game, where NP destroyed the World team, I don't think PZ really expected much of a different story here. So why on earth should the cg'ers be so upset about? "My" wife is gonna outplay these spacebar masters anyway! lol

Sep-08-10		hms123: <crawfb5> You should see what my neighborhood is like--CT wouldn't have a chance.

Sep-08-10		crawfb5: <hms123: <crawfb5> You should see what my neighborhood is like--CT wouldn't have a chance.> Then you've never been to Westport... I engaged in my weekly "honor system" shopping trip today. I went to the supermarket, scanned my loyalty card, picked up a handheld scanner and some bags (I forgot to grab my reusables before heading out the door), and began scanning and bagging my items. When I was done, I headed toward the self-checkout register to download my scanner's contents into the register so I could pay. I like this system because it gets me in and out faster and there are some additional discounts available for using it, just as there are discounts for using the store loyalty card. And yes, it <does> appeal to my techie side. I don't have any illusions about my store wanting to help strengthen my moral fiber. Supermarkets operate on a thinner margin than many other retailers, so naturally they look for ways to cut costs, just as the introduction of self-checkout registers years ago and even the development of allowing customers to pull their own merchandise decades before that. My trip today did trigger one of the random "audits" that they periodically run to help keep honest people honest, but all that meant was I went to a human cashier and she did a spot check of about a half dozen items. It took very little additional time.

Sep-08-10		hms123: <crawfb5> I am sure you are right, but these people don't understand elementary turn-taking--as in the car that gets to the four-way stop first gets to go first. The rule here seems to be that the person with the most expensive car gets to go first. I never get to go at all.

Sep-08-10		therealbenjinathan: Here, the person with the least expensive car goes first. We can't be trusted.

Sep-09-10		dakgootje: I don't have a car - would I get to go first?

Sep-09-10		crawfb5: <dak> As a pedestrian, I would strongly advise you to pretend to be waiting for a bus until there are <no> cars at the intersection. <Then> you can cross, if you do it quickly.

Sep-09-10		dakgootje: Or I could impersonate one of those traffic-controllong police agents and while all car-drivers are thinking "wait, do those still exist here?!" I quickly sneak to the other side of the road!

Sep-09-10		hms123: Q: Why did the <dak> cross the road? A: To impersonate a police officer.

Sep-09-10		Annie K.: Hey, <I> was going to say that! :p OK, I'm up, got coffee, voted, now I want to play some blitz. More posting later. ;)

Sep-09-10		dakgootje: You are twice-over <just> too late today miss! :D

Sep-09-10		Annie K.: <dakkie> I'm not a morning person. And by morning I mean noon. So sue me! ;p Heh... back to blitz...

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