How to win a game? Some people like to attack from the get-go, others like to counter-attack. If you decide to attack, the next question becomes in what way? Are you comfortable with speculative sacrifices?

How much are you willing to gamble in pursuit of the initiative?

I think everyone strikes their own balance here, but I think it happens fairly early on in chess development.

How might you go about changing your strategy now?

And if you do change, what will the consequences be?......You might alter the basis of your entire personality!

Previously beautiful games might appear ugly and vacuous....and dare I say it.....Vladimir Kramnik might just become 6 ft 2 in of irresistible hunky Russian Man-God!

You mean he isn't already?

<Combinations and chemistry are your only men.>

Where does this quote come from?

Did you have to mention that?

I was young, foolish, it's hard to tell an Indian Queen from a Queen Indian without experience,

I thought all Indian chicks spoke with a deep guttural growl.

Heh- you better watch out for <Open Defence>, my dear <Woodman>...

One time she threatened to have <Dom> sacrificed to the Moon Goddess..

AND SHE MEANT IT!

I made it up, your majesty. On the <spur> of the <moment>, while <racking> my (so-called) "brains" for a <bon mot>.

Strongly influenced, as you know, by Flann O'Brien -- or was it Myles na Gopaleen, or Brian Ó Nualláin, or peradventure even Jem Casey, the People's Poet, who wrote:

<In time of trouble and lousy strife You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life-
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN!

Did you ever hear anything like it in your life, said Furriskey. A pint of plain, by God, what! Oh I'm telling you, Casey was a man in twenty thousand, there's no doubt about that. He knew what he was at, too true he did. If he knew nothing else, he knew how to write a pome. A pint of plain is your only man.

Didn't I tell you he was good? said Shanahan. Oh by Gorrah you can't cod me.

There's one thing in that pome, *permanence*, if you know what I mean. That pome, I mean to say, is a pome that'll be heard wherever the Irish race is wont to gather, it'll live as long as there's a hard root of an Irishmen left by the Almighty on this planet, mark my words.>

I'm not, as you know, a proper "hard root of an Irishman". A hard root indeed would have to fall, by the Hokey, before I dared to compete with the likes of Jem Casey, never mind the multitudinous Myles.

And yet I try. For you. It's only a bleedin' pastiche, of course, with my trademark allusions to drugs and hard chess ("chemistry and combinations"). But it was also inspired indirectly by a piece of "art" I saw (and wrote about) recently: in the Limerick City Art Gallery, of all places.

I'll just say now that it was the <theory of mollycules> in action. And, while we knew that many people were part bicycle, a recent discovery demonstrates that many office workers are more than 50% swivel chair.

I'll forward a more lucid communique on this presently. You are owed a Roc or three in any case ...

<"If you and Jem Casey want to exchange dirty doggerel, there are sites for that sort of thing ...">

heh

"It's an ecumenical matter."

Jiminy Crickets I love <Father Ted> show. I've seen them all on perfect quality on free steal it and don't pay internet TV.

I also will respond to your latest public missile here after the always necessary, but never resented, PARSING.

Mrs. Parsley

"Good news is it Ted?

HAHAHAHAAHAH

That, my dyuh, is PCP. Pinko Canuck Protosocialism. You bin exposed too long to the 92nd parallel and the commies on the other side.

Which might be a workable hypothesis if the Canadians back home hadn't just voted the Conservatives back in. So mebbe PCP should stand for Pynchonesque Conservative Power.

Why Pynchon? Well, he wrote about "the bureaucracy on the other side". But I think he meant a sort of post-mortem other 'side'.

And a post-mortem is a device used by elite GMs to demonstrate all the combinations they saw, thus 'proving' that they *really* won games that they somehow lost at the board.

BTW, I had a closer look at the FIDE regulations for the Bonn WC match. Lots of detail about travel and accommodation: the FIDE President must at all times have first-class air travel and a suite in a 5-star hotel, or equivalent; the vice-president gets a 2nd-class plane ticket and a double hotel room; lesser functionaries get basic transport and a bed. The players aren't mentioned in this context.

However, it is stated that the players need *not* keep a record of their moves -- this is the arbiter's job. Wonderfully byzantine stuff: to claim a draw by repetition, a player must proceed to the arbiter's scoresheet and write down thereon the move he intends to make which will bring about a threefold repetition. There's a time penalty for getting it wrong (three minutes, or half one's remaining time - whichever is longer, or shorter, at the discretion of the arbiter ...)

Here's the real catch-22. The players do not have to keep a record of the moves. But they *must*, on pain of being locked in the bathroom, sign their scoresheets at the end.

This is all true. Well, mostly true. Check out the official site.

Apropos nothing, my two favorite words today are <sidereal> and <boustrophedon>. Sidereal, because it has a kind of starry-eyed cryptic-crossword innocence ("Is G-d on our side, really? Well, git shootin', then ... nail a space alien for Jesus ...")

Eh, sorry. A tad carried away there, dontcha know. Boustrophedon ("as the ox turns") because I tried to explain it to somebody earlier today, and found I could only do so by trying to produce and actual example: writing left to right on one line, then right to left, then left to right ... not easy when you've got mild Dysparity, aka difficulty telling left from right.

<In time of trouble and lousy strife

nalp tnilrad a tog llits evah uoY
You still can turn to a brighter life
!nam ylno ruoy si nialp fo tnip A>

Basta.
?dias ffuN

PS. Computers should have a *resent* key. Can I patent this, d'ya think?

*I resent that!*

Heh. Boustrophedon *heh*.

PPPPS. One more cool word. *Breaskit*, at first glance, looks like it should mean 'breast kit' -- the fantasy hobby item for every model-making teenage male (no, not *that* kind of model ... or that kind of *making* either ... though the difference may not matter much). Anyhoo, on closer inspection, 'breaskit' turns out to be a variant of brisket, which, in a culinary setting, means ... uh, breast kit.

More or less.

I'm not *trying* to be cryptic, y'know. This is how my actual thoughts come out of their own accord. Twisted, I agree. But you should hear some of the stuff editors say to me.

So, you like the kind of chick who keeps a ballistic missile under the pillow.

Has anyone ever told you that you're perfect?

And why aren't you President of India? Is it all those conservative Hindus who want long hair on women, loincloths on men, and no snogging in Bollywood, especially with apples?

Heh- I was just processing your earlier post and <Lo> (a Faulkner title) I find another!

Well to the fist, then more reflection, and to the sickened.

<A Pint of Plain> brought back cascades of memories of my <sainted drunken Pater> who was fond of reciting this precise verse around the house at the top of his lungs at odd hours.

He was also inveterately fond of "I ALONE BEWEEP MY OUTCAST STATE, AND CURSE DEAF HEAVEN WITH MY BOOTLESS CRIES!"

As a five year old, these habits both mystified and fascinated me.

By the time I figured out on my own what a <pint of plain> was it was already too late. At Simon Fraser Univeristy I did my best to emulate the protagonist of <At Swim Two Birds> (when he estimated his week's study time totaled 1.4 hours)--

I spent as much time as possible-- often all day and all night-- in the Student Pub playing chess and drinking "pints of plain" with my friend <Tony "Wagons Ho" Jow>, a redoubtable Chinese fellow addicted to both chess and lottery scams.

The quality of chess was low, but the "volume" of the games was of some considerable magnitude.

It was at SFU that I also first discovered that the correct Shakespeare line is "and TROUBLE deaf Heaven with my bootless cries."

When I confronted my father with this information, he merely looked up from his coffee and cigarette, sniffed, and said "My version is better."

This recollection brought me again to "chess days" with my Dad.

Before he died, two years ago next week, oddly enough, he gave me the old wooden chessboard we used to play on.

It has stood the test of time-- no termites or woodchucks have got at it--

I tried to stuff it in my suitcase to take to Korea but it was too big.

The board is worn on these squares:

(a white pawn denotes the squares that are most worn down):

click for larger view

Since my Dad only every played the <Spanish Game>, the archaeological evidence seems to suggest that he took a disporportionate number of games with the White pieces. He never once played me soft== a five year old girl-- and the first time I ever beat him at age 13, I knew that I had really beaten him for real.

I remember this vividly. I pestered him to play me every night after that.

Just this summer, while playing chess with his old friend Don back in Canada, I found out for the first time in my life that my Dad stopped playing me one week after I beat him because (quote) "He got tired of listening to you gloat and crow after each game."

One more memory, which you have inadvertently prompted with your typically rich penultimate post-- When I ventured to look at my first chess book from the Liberry, and noticed this strange configuration called the <"fianchetto">, I eagerly showed the diagram to my Dad.

He merely grunted, and said <verbatim>:

"It's effeminate to put your bishops there."

HAHAHAHAAHAH

He says this to a Primary school girl, and more, his own daughter.

Mrs. No Wonder I'm not a Feminist today.

Today, I zipped into a railway station bookshop looking for something to read on a 3-hour train journey.

Crap everywhere. Expensive crap, too. Thrillers, fantasy, chicklit ... 'nonfiction' about <Irish Roots> and <What Makes a Quiche Good in Bed> ... all at about €20 or maybe €15.

No chess, natch. No readable sci-fi, even. Wait, here's <The Man in the High Castle> by Philip K Dick. I was *almost* desperate enough to buy it, even though I have a copy already. Do I want to pay €15 for a new edition? No. Desperate, maybe; wastefully rich, no.

Then I check the slim shelf of Classics, all mysteriously cheaper than the assorted crap-lit and quiche-lit. They got an actual Dickens and a Dostoyevsky here, hey. But I, um, read them before already.

And then ... voila! The Best of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. About 400 pages. Including stuff I have never read. And in a new paperback edition, for the staggering price of ... €2.75. Which I had to double-check at the counter, seeing it's about one-tenth the price of yer average craplit.

Reader, I purchased it.

And that's the *other* problem with global capitalism.

Some night when we've all got a month to spare I might *try* to give my take on the *other* other problem. Or you could just read <Acirce's Greatest Hits> for a prescient overview.

They all laughed in 1928 too, didn't they? Those who dealt in <shocks and stares>?

But, like, Holmes for €2.75?
That's $3.71 US Dollars.
Or £2.14 British Pounds.

And 178.30 Indian Rupees, in case <Deffi> or <Vishy> happen to be in Heuston Station, Dublin ...

[*this bit is spoken-very-quickly at the end*]

"The value of your investment may go down as well as up".

Mine gave me a chessboard too, made of Italian marble that he lugged back from Italy. And he got me a box of real Russian chess pieces, in Russia - with a box marked 'Shakhmaty' in Cyrillic. Still got 'em.

Though the marble chessboard recently had a fatal collision with my laptop, which should teach me not to rest one on the other. The laptop needed a new screen, and I'm still trying to glue the five-piece jigsaw-puzzle chessboard back together.

As for <At Swim-Two-Birds>, I somehow managed to be totally unaware of its *existence* until I went to university. At University College Dublin, where the damn thing is set. And in an era when it was still possible to play a game of chess with the author's brother, The Brother.

Which I did, several times. Then I took a look round at home, and found some of Myles's other books, like <The Hard Life> and <The Dalkey Archive> had been there all along. I'd been too busy reading sci-fi to notice mere Irish stuff. I was an idiot when I was young.

Unlike you. BTW, you also qualify as a "bon mot" -- in Dublinese slang, where 'mot' (or 'mott') means ... oh, find out for yourself if you don't already know. I bet <Niels> knows: his ear for Dublinese is better than mine, and I lived there for nearly 20 years.

At least I got to travel round Europe -- Holland, East and West Germany when they were two countries, Sweden, Denmark -- with my Dad, before he died. I was 18. I remember him saying that if I wanted to be a writer, it might be a good idea to meet people and see the world. "Humans are a gregarious species", he said.

Did I tell you that I was an idiot when I was younger? But, as Pynchon sez: a younger self is a fool, but you wouldn't actually send him packing if he magically turned up on your doorstep.

Now I'm gonna be mouthing <"I ALONE BEWEEP MY OUTCAST STATE, AND CURSE DEAF HEAVEN WITH MY BOOTLESS CRIES!"> until I get the Shakespeherean Rag *just right* ...

Tho' my actual favorite Bard line is the one lifted by Paul Bowles for a title:

"When your accent slips, always have a better one on underneath".

"English as tuppence, changing yet changeless as canal water, feudal-still, reactionary Rawlinson End" ... Sir Henry, would you care to be the fourth man? ... 'Madam, I wouldn't even have liked to have been the *first* man ... Development is a collective conception: to have developed one, two, or three pieces does not mean that we are developed ... all the player's qualities, as man and artist ... we exchange in order not to lose time by retreating ... 'why, this is hell - nor am I out of it' ... all I want is outta here ... 'now in his mid-forties and still unusual' ... suddenly, a half-thawed chicken caught him on the back of the neck.

- Reg Smeaton, the village bore.

Your Dad was right. I bin practicing out loud. His version *is* better.

Homer nods, Marge Shakespeare slips, Mr Burns bought shares in The Toxic Avenger, and I'm not feeling too well myself.

Actually, I feel fine. But it's 3.23am and I'm outta here. Thank you. Goodnight, and I'll prep a roc for take-off during the next weather window.