Phony Benoni Member since Feb-10-06 · Last seen Jun-11-22 Greetings, O Seeker After Knowledge! You have arrived in Dearborn, Michigan (whether you like it or not), and are reading words of wisdom from a player rated 2938--plus or minus 1000 points. However, I've retired from serious play--not that I ever took playing chess all that seriously. You only have to look at my games to see that. These days I pursue the simple pleasures of finding games that are bizarre or just plain funny. I'd rather enjoy a game than analyze it. For the record, my name is David Moody. This probably means nothing to you unless you're a longtime player from Michigan, though it's possible that if you attended any US Opens from 1975-1999 we might have crossed paths. Lucky you. If you know me at all, you'll realize that most of my remarks are meant to be humorous. I do this deliberately, so that if my analysis stinks to High Heaven I can always say that I was just joking. As you can undoubtedly tell from my sparkling wit, I'm a librarian in my spare time. Even worse, I'm a cataloger, which means I keep log books for cattle. Also, I'm not one of those extroverts who sit at the Reference Desk and help you with research. Instead, I spend all day staring at a computer screen updating and maintaining information in the library's catalog. The general public thinks Reference Librarians are dull. Reference Librarians think Catalogers are dull. My greatest achievement in chess, other than tricking you into reading this, was probably mating with king, bishop and knight against king in a tournament game. I have to admit that this happened after an adjournment, and that I booked up like crazy before resuming. By the way, the fact I have had adjourned games shows you I've been around too long. My funniest moment occurred when I finally got a chance to pull off a smothered mate in actual play. You know, 1.Nf7+ Kg8 2.Nh6+ Kh8 3.Qg8+ Rxg8 4.Nf7#. When I played the climactic queen check my opponent looked at the board in shocked disbelief and said, "But that's not mate! I can take the queen!" Finally, I must confess that I once played a positional move, back around 1982. I'll try not to let that happen again.

Phony Benoni has kibitzed 18634 times to chessgames   [more...]

Jun-11-22 M Blau vs Keres, 1959    Phony Benoni: Not a good recommendation for the DERLD. Out of 59 moves, White makes only three in Black's half of the board. And two of those conist of 3.Bb5 and 6.Bxc6.      Jun-11-22 chessgames.com chessforum    Phony Benoni: Er, it's back. Karpov vs Timman, 1988      Jun-10-22 Orlo Milo Rolo   Phony Benoni: Marco!      Jun-10-22 Lilienthal vs Bondarevsky, 1947   Phony Benoni: Another one for you King Hunters. Black's monarch travels fron g8 to b8, then takes the Great Circle Route back to h3 before calling it a day.      Jun-10-22 GrahamClayton chessforum    Phony Benoni: <GrahamClayton> I've posted a question for you at L T Magee vs J Holland, 1948      Jun-10-22 L T Magee vs E L Holland, 1948    Phony Benoni: <GrahamClayton> The source you cite, <Chess Review, May 1948, p. 24>, gives Black's name as <E Holland> "Chess Life" (June 5, 1948, p. 1) has a table of results giving <E L Holland>. That form also appears in USCF rating supplements for a player fro ...      Jun-09-22 Biographer Bistro    Phony Benoni: SkinnVer Here Among the Fold?      Jun-09-22 Flohr vs Bondarevsky, 1947    Phony Benoni: Black's bishop makes me think of Godzilla emerging from the depths of the ocean to wreak havoc. However, in the end it's his Two Little Friends who steal the show. Well, maybe not so litt.      Jun-06-22 W Ritson-Morry vs G T Crown, 1947   Phony Benoni: it was the last round. Rison-Morry was mired in last place. These things happen.      Jun-06-22 W Adams vs M Kagan, 1947   Phony Benoni: Some more informztion. The game was published in <Chess Review>, March 1948, p. 23. Black's name is given as "M Kagan", and the location as "Massachusetts". There is no other game data, but I think we can now safely assume Black is <Milton Kagan>. Earlier in the ...

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Living in the Past

< Earlier Kibitzing  · PAGE 482 OF 914 ·  Later Kibitzing> May-11-13    Jim Bartle: I'm pretty sure we went through this before, but how late can a batter swing on a wild pitch with two strikes and still run to first. May-12-13    playground player: <Jim Bartle> Thank you, Jim. I've been fascinated by that site ever since I was a kid reading <Kon-Tiki>. I've only seen pictures, of course. Some of it looks very oddly modern--lots of straight, clean lines. Plus you keep running into all this stuff about Tiwanaku being 12,000 years old, etc. May-12-13    Jim Bartle: I don't think it's that old. Chavin (in my area) is close to that age, as is Caral on the coast. I knew Heyerdahl a little when he was working at Tucume on the north coast of Peru. Visited with Johan Reinhard. He was in amazing shape for his age, and really energetic. May-13-13    OhioChessFan: <JB> that is the umpire's discretion as to whether it was a legitimate attempt to strike the ball. I know Pete Rose claimed to have purposely swung at pitches with 2 strikes that he knew wouldn't be caught. May-13-13    Jim Bartle: Ok, that's that. If a batter swings after the ball is clearly past him, he won't call the strike. But it also seems you could have more arguments about check swings, except it would be the batter who wants a swing called. May-13-13    OhioChessFan: The complicating factor there is any runners are beholdened to an after the fact decision of swing or not. With 2 outs, they need to run. But if there's a ruling of no swing, they may be thrown out when they didn't need to run. I am always amused by the football equivalent, when there's a questionable catch/fumble. The offense always hopes the review will say incompletion and the defense hopes they rule it a catch. May-13-13    Jim Bartle: Yes, that's funny: "No, I didn't catch it, I drpped it!" In tennis sometimes the returner hits a winner off the return of a first serve, and the server challenges that his serve was out. It can be a problem in college tennis where the players call their own lines. I saw McEnroe return a serve against, I think, Eliot Teltscher, and Teltscher missed the volley because he thought his serve was out. He complained but really had no case. May-14-13    OhioChessFan: Ouch. http://aol.sportingnews.com/mlb/sto... May-14-13    playground player: <Jim Bartle> I don't know much about Chavin--could it really, possibly, represent a civilization going back 12,000 years? May-14-13    playground player: P.S. to <Jim Bartle> Did the Chavin people know how to write? If not, how could they have achieved so much? But I haven't found anything about any inscriptions or codices they may have left behind. May-14-13    Jim Bartle: I was mistaken. Chavin was built about 3,000 years ago; I confused 1,000 b.c. with 10,000. Caral is definitely 10,000 years old, on the coast, but much more primitive. An article on Chavin and Tiahuanaku, presenting the theory of mountain worship in Andean cultures: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&... May-14-13    Phony Benoni: OK, here are four more-or-less famous baseball players: Danny Darwin Mel Hall Ken Oberkfell Rick Reuschel What distinction do they, and only they, share? May-14-13    Travis Bickle: Hey Phony don't forget they drop that puck in The United Center tomorrow night! http://espn.go.com/chicago/nhl/prev... May-14-13    WannaBe: <Phony Benoni> Well, according to Wiki, they all played for the Giants, but I'm sure that's too easy. May-14-13    Phony Benoni: <Travis> No way. You cannot be alive in Detroit right now and forget about hockey. <WannaBe> Perhaps I need to make this even more difficult. Here are two box scores from the career of Danny Darwin that might give it away: http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/... http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/... May-14-13    Jim Bartle: They played with both Bobby and Barry. May-14-13    WannaBe: They played with father/son Bonds?? May-14-13    Phony Benoni: <JB> Yup. I was just fooling around with http://www.baseball-reference.com/o..., and was surprised to find there were so few. What's even more surprising, at least to my mind, is that Bobo Newsom is still no more than five steps away from anybody who has played major league baseball since 1871. And that means that nobody is more than ten steps away from anyone else. May-15-13    Jim Bartle: Bobby Bonds was an instant hero in SF when he hit a grand slam in his first game in June 1968. Mays was fading and Bonds looked like the next great Giant. And he was at times. He had a brilliant 1973 through August and looked sure to become the first 40-40 man and finally win the Mvp. Then he had a terrible September, ended up with 39 homers and came in second again in MVP voting. Then with sky-high expectations he had a lousy 1974, and after the season was traded straight up for Bobby Murcer. A huge disappointment for Giants fans. May-15-13    playground player: <Jim Bartle> I had never heard of the Caral culture until you mentioned it. From the pictures I've seen (not many), I wouldn't call it "primitive." They were living in cities and building pyramids at about the same time Egypt was building pyramids. Did any of these really old Andean cultures have writing systems? I don't see how you can manage a civilization without one. PS--Bobby Bonds in 1974 had a much better year for the Yankees than Bobby Murcer had for the Giants. I never understood why Bonds got traded around so much. But I do know he was never traded for Wes Stock, Don Money, or Dave Cash. May-15-13    Jim Bartle: Caral was really only discovered in the past twenty years. The first time I went very little was excavated, and it was mainly mounds in the desert. Now much more has been uncovered, though it!s still not too exciting. As far as I know, the Chavin culture did not have a written language. But it did have wonderfully expressive artwork, intricate designs on stone, which obviously had the significance of writing. Here are the Lanzon, which is inside the main building, and the Estela de Raimondi, which is in the museum: https://www.google.com.pe/search?hl... https://www.google.com.pe/search?hl... May-16-13    playground player: <Jim Bartle> Civilization itself is an enigma. The conventional story has always been many thousands of years of primitive hunter-gatherers and then wham, bam, from mud bricks to microchips in just a few thousand years. There's something odd about that story, don't you think? If civilization is "wired in" to the human race, why should it have taken so long to develop? And if it's not wired in, then why should it have appeared at all? <Phony Benoni> As host, I hope you don't mind these digressions on your forum. May-16-13    Phony Benoni: <playground player> Perhaps the beginnings of civilization were best explained by Bobby Fischer: "When I was eleven, I just got good." The potential was there; it just required the right spark to reach the tipping point. (Mixed metaphors; the mark of a decadent civilization!) May-16-13    Phony Benoni: <Tal7777777> No, I don't play chess anymore. I always talked a better game than I played anyway. It's a reference to a famous baseball quote by Ernie Banks. And a bit of a pun, dating back to the days when baseball conversation was not criticized in the Kibitzer's Cafe. Talk about chess is only allowed in two cases: 1) I bring it up. 2) Somebody else brings it up. May-17-13    perfidious: <Phony Benoni>: Only four, what with as often as Bonds <pere> bounced around during his career? It is hardly as though the '78 Rangers or '81 Cubs were models of stability or success. Jump to page #   (enter # from 1 to 914) search thread:    < Earlier Kibitzing  · PAGE 482 OF 914 ·  Later Kibitzing>

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