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| Dec-05-10 | | Jim Bartle: Here's a position typical of my play (as white, in that case) against a computer program. I think I have a good position, with mobile central pawns, and the two bishops behind them. My knight on f4 looks good, while the black bishop on h5 doesn't. Yet I have no idea how to proceed. I'm an expert at frittering away good positions. My impatient tendency is to push the central pawns and see what happens. On the other hand it's tempting to play Be1 to exchange bishops. Opinions?
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| Dec-06-10 | | crawfb5: I have finally located all of the 1896 Showalter-Kemeny match games, but I have a problem with game 11: [Event "US championship match"]
[Site "Philadelphia"]
[Date "1896.03.28"]
[Round "11"]
[White "Showalter, Jackson Whipps"]
[Black "Kemeny, Emil"]
[Result "1-0"]
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Nf6 4.O-O Nxe4 5.d4 Be7 6.Qe2 Nd6 7.Bxc6 bxc6 8.dxe5 Nb7 9.b3 O-O 10.Bb2 f6 11.Qc4+ Kh8 12.Nbd2 fxe5 13.Nxe5 Nd6 14.Qg4 Bf6 15.Rae1 Nf7 16.Nxf7+ Rxf7 17.Qc4 Rf8 18.Ba3 d6 19.Qxc6 Rb8 20.Qc4 Bb7 21.Qd3 Rf7 22.Re3 Be5 23.Rh3 h6 24.Bb2 Qe7 25.Nf3 Be4 26.Qd1 Rbf8 27.Nxe5 Qxe5 28.Rg3 Qc5 29.Qg4 Bf5 30.Bxg7+ Kh7 31.Qd4 Qxd4 32.Bxd4 Bxc2 33.Rc1 Be4 34.b4 Rb8 35.a3 a6 36.Re1 Bf5 37.Rge3 Bd7 38.h3 Rb5 39.Re7 Kg6 40.R1e3 Rbf5 41.h4 Rxe7 42.Rxe7 Rf7 43.h5+ 1-0 Note that around move 24 it gets strange and by around move 27-28 it gets stranger. Usually that means I've misread something, like confusing "B" with "R" or "2" with "3" but I can't quite put my finger on where I went off the rails on this game. I might have gotten the ending correct, but I'm sure I've got the middlegame wrong somehow. Could you take a quick look? This is old enough to be at the BDE main site (http://eagle.brooklynpubliclibrary....), which is much faster than Fulton. You can also call up a specific date. The article is on page 3, 29 Mar 1896. |
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Dec-06-10
 | | keypusher: <On the other hand it's tempting to play Be1 to exchange bishops. Opinions? > It's my considered opinion that Be1 is illegal.
The future belongs to the bishops, they say. So you shouldn't be in a hurry. If that was my position I'd play 1.Nxh5 Qxh5 then move a rook to d1 followed by d4-d5. |
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| Dec-06-10 | | Jim Bartle: Ha, I meant Bd1.
You're probably right, but my knight on f4 looks so nice and untouchable. I guess you can't have everything. I played the game out to a draw with a perpetual check from white. |
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Dec-06-10
 | | Phony Benoni: <crawfb5> I'll take a look when I get home tonight.\ <JB> My first thought was f2-f3, to set the center pawns in motion and get some room for my pieces. Of course the bishop and queen stop that idea at the moment, so 1.Nxh5 suggests itself. . |
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Dec-06-10
 | | SwitchingQuylthulg: <Jim Bartle> I'd go with silently improving your position bit by bit, slowly creating extra weaknesses in your opponent's position while eliminating your own, and finally coming down on him like a ton of rectangular building blocks... and with this in mind, I quite like the look of <1.a4>. |
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| Dec-06-10 | | Jim Bartle: Thanks, everyone. Slowly improving my position bit by bit is precisely what I'm worst at doing. a4 did enter my mind, though. My desire was to advance the c and d pawns without giving up c5 to the black knight. |
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Dec-06-10
| | Phony Benoni: Turn out the lights; the party's over.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-... |
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| Dec-06-10 | | Deus Ex Alekhina: <Bickle> <Detroit Lions will be the real thing next year> Uh, no, not really; they will continue to find ways to lose & set records for futility. |
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Dec-06-10
 | | chancho: The Jets are getting annihilated. |
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| Dec-07-10 | | Jim Bartle: Where have you gone, Joe Na-a-a-math? Broadway Joe has left and gone away. |
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| Dec-07-10 | | Jim Bartle: Oops, I thought I'd deleted that last one. |
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Dec-07-10
| | keypusher: <Jim Bartle: Where have you gone, Joe Na-a-a-math? Broadway Joe has left and gone away.> Namath is a stick used to beat all subsequent Jets teams, but it's really not fair. He was a sub-50% passer for his career, and I think 1968-69 was the only season his Jets teams won any playoff games. He got into the Hall of Fame for winning a game where Earl Morrall was surreptitiously replaced by Slomarko's grandmother. I guess it's no worse than Dizzy Dean making the Hall of Fame on one great season and 30 years of cornball schtick, but as far as I know Dean didn't lecture the Cardinals. |
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Dec-07-10
| | Phony Benoni: Dizzy Dean deserves a bit more credit. His HOF selection was based more on personality than lifetime stats, but he was a truly dominant pitcher who had four consecutive 20+ win seasons and also led his league in strikeouts four years in a row. By the way, his election was in 1953, so it took only about 20-25 years of cornball shtick. |
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Dec-07-10
| | keypusher: <PB> I should have checked baseball reference before dissing Dizzy around here. http://www.baseball-reference.com/p... He also led the league in complete games three out of those four years and threw a ton of innings. |
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Dec-07-10
| | Phony Benoni: A little bit like Koufax's career, in that he had only a few great seasons--but they were really great. Still, Koufax was so dominant that he was a sure HOFer. Dean might have had trouble getting in had he not been Dizzy Dean. Which brings us back to Namath, another player with a career haunted by injury. Maybe the completion percentage wasn't great, but I think he did have the first 4000-yard season. And I remember him as a great last-minute QB. But it's the brashness we remember most. And that One Shining Moment. Usually, the OSM isn't enough: ask Don Larsen or Kirk Gibson or Tom Dempsey. But that moment changed pro football forever, and it's hard to overlook it. |
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Dec-07-10
| | keypusher: <Which brings us back to Namath, another player with a career haunted by injury. Maybe the completion percentage wasn't great, but I think he did have the first 4000-yard season. > He did. 1967. But it was the AFL, which (IMO, obviously) at that time was sort of like the AL in 1901 -- a top minor league in the process of becoming a major league. He also had 28 INTs v. 26 TDs that year. On the other hand it looks like he set the AFL yardage record by a lot...I was hoping to shame Joe's memory with Babe Parilli throwing for 3900 or something, but Babe maxed out at 3465. Likelier candidates like Blanda and Lamonica also fell well short. Namath apparently completed 50.1% of his passes, so I take back that bit about him being a sub-50% career passer. And I do realize that football stats are even less comparable across eras than baseball stats. http://www.pro-football-reference.c... http://www.pro-football-reference.c... Injury, like illness in chessplayers, creates difficult questions. I prefer to focus on what someone did rather than what he might have done. But not even I would say you should ignore it completely. |
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| Dec-07-10 | | Jim Bartle: I think Namath was a great quarterback, and not only in 68-69. He had a great arm, super-quick release, not such great legs. Completion percentages were a lot lower before the rules changes in 1978, when DBs could no longer hit receivers past five yards downfield, and offensive lineman were allowed to push with their hands. 50% in 1970 is the equivalent of 60% today. |
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Dec-07-10
| | keypusher: <50% in 1970 is the equivalent of 60% today.> Sounds about right, but 60% today is actually below average. Twenty-one NFL QBs have completion percentages of 60.0% or above. Of course they're throwing really short passes by 1970 standards, too. http://www.nfl.com/stats/categoryst... In 1970 17 of 24 QBs had completion percentages over 50%. http://www.nfl.com/stats/categoryst... |
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| Dec-07-10 | | Jim Bartle: "In 1970 17 of 24 QBs had completion percentages over 50%." And not a single one over 60% (he said, conveniently ignoring Jurgensen at 59.9%). Percentage of completions wouldn't be the most important stat, though, since some quarterbacks throw downfield a lot and others (cough, cough, Fran Tarkenton, throw short, easy completions a lot). The single best stat is yards per pass attempt, and the highest on that list were Craig Morton (!) and Bob Griese. That page (kp's second link) also contains a stat that the 49ers were really proud of: Brodie was only sacked 8 times all year. In fact they wanted that record so much that with a big lead on Oakland in the last game, Brodie just didn't throw at all in the second half. He said he didn't want to screw up the linemen's record. And that guy who was lowest rated among the QBs, Bradshaw. Whatever happened to him? |
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| Dec-08-10 | | playground player: <Phony Benoni> Sometimes we forget that the Hall of Fame is about...*Fame*. Not statistics. Dizzy Dean and Joe Namath had impacts on their respective sports that went way beyond statistics. Reggie Jackson also springs to mind. It'd be nice if world-class organized chess had some notion of the benefits of fame, and stopped making championship chess so boring to most people. Capablanca, for instance, died some years before I was born. But I grew up knowing who he was, because he was so *famous*. I like Anand a lot, but he is not *famous* and never will be; and for some reason (this will be debated) Kasparov was never quite able to scale the heights of *fame*. The Fischer-Spassky match was the biggest thing in chess in my lifetime; but Fischer wasn't psychologically fit to build on the results, and the chess establishment even less so. We want some FAME around here! |
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| Dec-08-10 | | crawfb5: After much digging, I finally located the last of my Showalter-Barry games! I can't believe how much harder it was for the last few than all the rest. Now that I have a little more experience with Fulton and the non-Eagle papers, I may try to run that missing Showalter-Hodges game to ground. If CG processes PGN uploads by how much is in the queue, maybe I'm speeding things up a bit. If it's by time, well, there will be plenty for me to organize once they're finally in. |
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| Dec-12-10 | | andrewjsacks: The excellent football coach, is, of course, akin to the chess Master... Just a note. |
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| Dec-12-10 | | andrewjsacks: An interesting point regarding Koufax is that he is one of the very few, in all the world of sports, to choose to go out while on top--and stay out. Rocky Marciano in boxing.
Precious few others. |
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Dec-12-10
| | Phony Benoni: <andrewjsacks> In Koufax's case, he had little choice: the pain from his elbow had simply become too great. Jim Brown and Barry Sanders spring to mind in football. But there certainly don't seem to be a lot of other examples in baseball, perhaps because that's one sport in which real longetivity (20+ years) is relatively common. |
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