Seems like a (yesterday's) Veterans vs Youth tourney at Sheffield hosted a SIX reds tourney there with good old John Wayne winning first prize!

Just found out, and it was both mentioned at BBC as well as Eurosport.

I know you know I am squirming in my seat with pure excitement, but I do have to give you credit for sniffing out this new experiment, the other week, and voices supposedly HAVE been suggesting it for mainstream tournament snooker.

Resurrection of Modern Snooker?

Not just yet.... But it sure was a bit more than an April fool's joke, as you suspected/deducted.

But seriously, this is a senior's experiment, like in Tennis with the one Tie-break to decide the set and whole game.

BTW, the *other* thing I mentioned is in Zeeland in September, the world senior games, many sports - with the general rule that senior starts at 50. This seems to apply to the chess tournament as well, which is nine rounds over six days.

My parents were born under the sign of the Computer and the sign of the Psychopath. One girlfriend was an Astronaut, another was a Radar Dish.

They're not just random 'modern' stuff. The Psychopath matches Scorpio (which I'm told fits well) and the Radar Dish replaces Leo (broadcasting to the universe with a big frizzy mane).

I've just posted a "mystery puzzle" you might be interested in on page 576 of my forum.

It's a <Winawer Mystery> and its the second in a series I call

<BOOMIE'S "The <<<tactic>>> not played">

I am a chess book.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

*You* are a chess book? If <Hawking's Capitalist Lemma> is true, and if chess notation is "a type of algebra" and if chess diagrams work like other diagrams, then start ripping. Maximum projected sale of *any* chess book is exactly *one copy*. Bought by the author's mother, to stand proudly beside one's fetal scans and the pewter mug won for coming 7th in the <hop, skip & jump> at the community games.

Hawking, famously, said the sales of books halved for every equation printed. It's a curious inverse of the legend about the origin of chess, where the inventor 'only' asked for a grain of wheat for the square a1, two grains for b1, four for c1 ... doubling each time until you reach h8, and 2^63 grains. The total number of grains is, shall we say (2^64) - 1 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,615.

So Hawking's Halvings and Harappa's Doublings -- I'm calling <her> Harappa because it begins with 'H' and an Indian civilization was centred there, and because all the Indian women I know (two?) are brilliant -- have a neat quasi-symmetry.

If Hawking happens to die in the next 48 hours, of course, <The Curse of Flutch> will have struck again. It's named for one of my old pseudonyms, Norple Flutch. People 'he' wrote about frequently died.

"His last words, enigmatic as ever, were "Oh! Ohhh oooh glurg perihelion inspissated oh ohh OH."

Is it even *possible* to "frequently die", as distinct from dying frequently?

"Darling, I've died onstage every night since the panto season of 1959. I played a peculiarly unconvincing picaninny, who elicited hoots of laughter rather than sympathy. It might have worked if I'd been either black or white, but the green stripes threw them. Still, it's a living."

- Lord Hotspurt of the Wings, theatrical peer, voyeur, lens grinder, horticulture leader & pen-wiper. Life Master of FIB, the Federation of Implied Bimbos.

The pen *is* mightier than these words, the poor mite ...

Which brings us back vaguely on-topic (ontopic?), to wit, *books*. Next post ...

PS. Remember your punctuation, o my droogs and tadpoles. Vivian Stanshall reportedly went into convulsions on seeing an unpunctuated advertising placard at a seaside resort: <Spades Balls Sausages Chips>.

Now that I got a few puns & pious ejaculations out of my system, we may continue.

In Neo-Forum terms, this is neither a question nor an answer. Prelim stuff. But feel free to paste it into <Books: Egg Central> if necessary.

(1) *Why* Books? Is it possible to get by (learn, improve, grow stronger chessically, punish people, get a high rating, star in <Beneath the Valley of the Revenge of the Nerds> and confidently do a scene involving full frontal nerdity) with DVDs, comps, engines, databases, online opponents, Roman's Openings, chessgames.com & other useful sites, etc?

No. It isn't. This is why.

(2) Why *Books*? The question is not easy. Is your aim simply ('simply' - hah, the irony) to improve as a player? If so, how much? You *do* know, don't you, that you're unlikely to become world champ?

In that case -- how much better? And why? Have you rating targets, 1800, 2200, more? Titles? FM, IM, GM? Why not?

(3) I regard a one-volume all-openings *book* as a totally essential piece of basic chess kit. Yep, I'm a hypocrite: I didn't own a proper one myself until I was in my 40s. But this is why I appreciate its value.

Example: in my teens, I got Pachman's books on the Indian Defences and the Semi-Open replies to 1.e4 (Sicilian, Pirc, French, etc). Also the Queen's Gambit. These persuaded me to try the French, I did, I started to 'take pleasure' in it ... another young man ruined by Frogspawn.

But the point here is there were gaping holes in my openings library. I had nothing on 1.e4 e5 (Bronstein's book on Open Games was in the same series, as was Estrin on the Two Knights) -- and I *still* don't understand these openings very well.

I now buy new books on the French the way one would buy a new novel, maybe a book in a genre like mystery noir or sci-fi. I'm unlikely to learn anything new -- I already have books on every main French system, annotated and regularly updated from databases.

One exception was Watson's <Dangerous Weapons: the French> with lines such as 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nd2 h6, or 3.Nc3 Nc6!? -- but these aren't for beginners. Neither is 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nd2 b6, which I used to draw with Tony Miles. In a simul. When he was alive.

(4) Get BCO/MCO or similar. The one-book format was invaluable because you could bring it with you to a weekend tournament -- but now hardly anyone schleps books, if you have your laptop. Even so, it is *crucial* for a player's development to play every single opening -- ideally in hundreds of quick games (not necessarily blitz/bullet) in your teens or early 20s.

You must *not* read some chess book that tells you, say, the best plan for white against the Leningrad Dutch. Try to work it out yourself. Try, fail, fail better -- and *then* get a good book on the opening.

I'll return to this whole zone, but that's enough for now. Related areas are the 'problem' of opening books going out of date. (The really good ones don't: simple as that -- Robert Bellin's 1970s book on The Classical Dutch has been overtaken by time, ignoring whole lines that are now mainlines. But Bellin explains everything so well -- where pieces want to go, where they don't, good and bad pawn structures, etc -- that the book is still brilliant. My copy has been nearly rewritten with notes by me in the margins, about new moves etc. But the plans are more important than the moves.

I don't much like repertoire books, or those that cover an opening too openly from a particular side. Too partisan: you want some semblance of objectivity.

Don't you? Or does it depend on one's 'chess character'?

And just how well do we understand our own chess character anyway? In my teens I decided that I was a positional player -- mainly influenced by Korchnoi and Nimzo. But this was the Fischer era, and everyone else was trying to be Fischer, and I didn't. Maybe just to be different?

Lately I discovered I was wrong about being a positional player, which may explain why I did it so badly. I'm now more like a retard Tal. Maybe I should've begun there?

Arthur C Clark

Did you know the "C" stands for <Constantius>?

It doesn't, but I like to pretend it does.

I just ordered some books about <Bobby Fischer> and when they come I'm going to read them!

heh

The best way to improve at chess is to keep smashing your head repeatedly on stronger players, I betcha.

Repeat until you're dead.

And even after! It seems to be working fine for <Kortschnoi and Karpov>.

Did you know they are still better than everyone else in the world?

<Karpov> is still in the World Top 100.

All you have to do is love to play chess, and love to kill people.

I think.

It's working for me at the moment.

Be advised that "we" (by "we" I mean the <UPSETTINGLY CHEERY SURREAL BOOK AVATAR>) are reposting brilliant stuff about books without permission from people all over eh?

It has created a few mortal enemies, but we'd alienate the whole world just to get one good post about chess books to a wider audience.

So don't be surprised if you wake up tomorrow and all of <Frogspawn> has been reposted at the forum.

It's funny eh? One kind of gets the illusion that these "houses" of ours have some kind of expectation of privacy. Or some kind of "sotto voce" copyright protection, at least in the realm of "manners."

Remember them? People used to talk about them.

We even get "indignant" if "the wrong people" post "insults" in "our" houses.

When the whole bloody thing can be coughed up by GOOGLE by anyone who cares to look, at any time.

Bloody GOOGLE.

Do you live in an "L-shaped room" like poor <Winston>?

It didn't help much, come to think of it.

Say someone was learning about the <K'ung Bushmen>.

If they GOOGLED that, it would cough up literally hundreds of posts from our personal forums at this website addressed to

<N'Swaba: K'ung Bushman>.

But what do 'They' know? After all, 'They' said G-d was dead, and they all got struck by lightning. A highly miffed Iupiter/Jove/Yawweh, I believe.

All of Baal's clones were supposedly eliminated at the end of Stargate SG/Atlantis ... but I wouldn't hatchet my deities before they chicken. Count Dracula said that.

Speaking as an Energy Vampire with <False Energy Teeth>, I think the world's eternal victims -- whether chess opponents or those doomed to have the lifeforce sucked out of them by superior suckers -- have a duty not to resist too much. Like, is it worth the struggle?

In the end, everyone gets killed by the Indians.

Anyhoo, I know about Geurglical 'visibility'. So do you. We just have different strategies to counter it ... mine involves anonymity and losing myself in the crowd like a purloined letter.

I'm really crap at it. Perhaps, in life as in chess, I'm not a positional player after all... ? Okay, bring me a sharp knife and somebody's firstborn. I must make sacrifices.

Yes, we'll all have to make sacrifices. Our ancestors survived without driving, bathing, or Jerry Springer.

Isn't 'Bushman' like, y'know, Hottentot, Esquimaux, etc? A defunct ethnic terms which should be replaced by clicks, and then a minute's silence when they all die out?

A minute of silence? Heh. Good one, innit? Like "lifelong lucidity" and "sporadic bouts of virginity" ...

Slogan du jour: <Support Mental Health or I'll Kill You>.

With certain exceptions. I found a 50 Euro note in a copy of The Amateur's Mind, by Silman.

Luckily, I was drunk one night and dropped one on the ground and the bill flew out.

thanks <deffi>!