What Opportunity Tactics Did I Miss? Use tactics.bitcrafter to find them

 I found this nice tool at tactics.bitcrafter that examines your games on lichess and finds the tactics you missed from the last 25 games you played there: these are situations where your opponent left the door open for a big hit from you and you didn't take the easy money.

Here's an easy example of one I missed - a simple king-queen fork, with the pieces out in the open! I took five seconds to overlook this golden opportunity but instead I retreated my rook; I faintly remember not noticing that my bishop was covering that square. I went on to, undeservedly, win the game on time.

This one is more subtle - I had a 7 point swing in my favor waiting if I spotted this Nb4. It would allow me to get that knight to c2 and fork the king/rook and white would have a hard time stopping it cleanly.

The site does NOT include errors that you made on your move - it's just positions where you had an opportunity due to your opponents blunder and didn't see it. I think this is a very valuable tool because you can identify gaps in your perception of your opponents moves.

One thing to remember - it only finds tactics in game where you used the "Request A Computer Analysis" button on the analysis board.

Missed Opportunities in the Opening

Free Stuff in the Opening 

Oh boy, this game is kind of embarassing.    I'm play a Scotch opening and my opponent goes astray quite early, serving me up several opportunities to take pieces/pawns. But I didn't take them, fearing some kind of trap or gambit that just wasn't there. But the calculation was much more straightforward!

Two attackers - one defender.

Same again - two on one.

I should have taken the e5 pawn and the knight in the second image.  Lucky for me my opponent opened the door to me attacking his rooks and he rage quit on move 13. I'm almost 1500 rapid on lichess now.

Study-wise I'm leaning hard into the "On The Attack" series. It will take months to get through the whole lot but I'm determined to find out if it improves my play by recognizing over 1000 puzzle positions. So far....no. But I'm definitely improving at recognizing the puzzles themselves; on about the fourth repetition I'm starting to recall the moves by sight instead of calculating them (if I even can calculate them!).

I'm still completing my last two games in a chess.com tournament. I'm pretty sure I'll come second in my group with 7.5 out of 10, which is pretty good (EDIT: I won my last game, and the tiebreak! I don't know on what basis, but I will be in round 2!) . And I'm playing a lot of slow correspondence games against friends from the chess club. They are very solid players and I may need to start studying something new to learn what I'm lacking in those games. The occasional blunder that throws the game doesn't help either!

Visualisation as the Master Skill of Chess?

One intriguing training site I came across is Dont Move Till You See It. He suggests that if you train your visualization skills just 10 minutes a day you "unlock" the chess knowledge you have learned through studying because you're making your brain work harder during the exercises, compared to when you sit at a board to play. Your "chess mind" will be more forthcoming with the information after you've made it work hard at visualizing with your eyes closed.

His course is free to start; you get enough to work with and you can pay for premium content if you wish.

You can hear the creator talk about his system - and he gives away all the techniques for free - on Chess Journeys ep 82. I've got the five free emails describing the exercises but haven't done them yet.

As Fabiano Caruana says - "Visualization is probably the most important thing in Chess.

Mistakes and blunders, if we strip them down to the bare essence, are problems with visualization."

Nice explanation of an instructive chess game

 I've never heard the stages of a chess game explained so clearly - this a really helpful video.

Seeing it explained with a physical board is a nice surprise too - I think it makes it easier to understand.

Playing openings without memorizing

 Several of my chess buddies have expressed surprise that I'm not working on memorizing openings. It feels like an important part of chess, learning the exact "right" moves to play at the start of the game, but I've found several videos where smart people say otherwise. For a start, your opponents are unlikely to reply with the "right" responses to your theoretically perfect moves, not past one or two moves anyway.

I thought I'd put the videos in one place for easy reference:

Here's what they all agree on: play using the basic chess principles (control the center, develop pieces, king safety. Play slow games, not fast. Analyse your games after you play them.

Chess Dojo on learning openings from 0-1200: I just found these guys last night. I love that they have a structured training course, telling you what skills/books you should be using at different levels of chess ability. They emphasize NO opening theory till about 1200 ELO. They have some videos (I haven't watched yet) about opening principles.

Adult Chess Improver: Complete repertoire for black and for white, and here's a 6 part playlist containing those two wherein he talks about it a bit more. Again it's "use opening principles but don't focus your limited study time on openings, because that's not where you, a lower-rated player, are losing games."

Andras Toth: How to Get Better at Chess 0 to 1700: part one and part two. "90 games out of 100, games are not won, they are lost". A point I've made in earlier posts; games at this level are mostly decided by who blunders most/first/last (take your pick!).   Focus on tactics and calculation, and the basic principles: development, central control and king safety.

Spend 60% of your chess time studying, 40% playing. No bullet, 10-20% on blitz and just for checking your openings, because these short games don't give you time to think.

In my tournament games against higher level players they simply don't make those kind of errors! I wait for my chances to take something off them, but it never comes! I'm at the point where I need to learn the next set of skills; Chess Dojo suggests it's understanding tempo.

More About Chess Dojo

Look at their "Chess Dojo Training Program" playlist to see what you ought to know at different levels. It's free to know the requirements; you'll see them in the video. For me at about the 1000 level here's what they'd like me to do.

Polgar 5334 problems book: all mate in 1s, up to #700 of mate in 2

Learn Chess The Right Way book 3 (defense), Susan Polgar 

Chess.com Puzzle Rush 5 min: 14 (I have 27)

Chess.com PR Survival: 16 (I have 30+ I think)

Endgames position #1: be able to win with queen or rook

They have other requirements: memorize a particular game, review/annotate games etc.

Play 25 classical games (thats like 45 min + 30 sec?) and do 10 post mortems with a stronger player

At this level you should be good at playing in a miserly fashion; not giving up material  (i.e not hanging pieces, staying defended). They talk about chess having three “dimensions”:  material, tempi and quality of position. Beginners need to focus only on material, but at this level start to think about tempi. 

They expect you to try and win games by sheer force of material; taking more of it from your opponent than they take from you, then finish the game with a king+queen or king+rook combo.

Playing a "perfect" game

 The chess.com engine says I made no errors when playing this game, which is really nice to see. My stats are on the right side.

It's one of ten games I'm playing as part of a daily tournament on chess.com. In my group of six players I think I'm going to come second - it will be very difficult to catch the guy already in first place.

The game itself felt very smooth as I was playing. I didn't have any big breakthroughs but I did have three opportunities to pick up a pawn from my opponent.  He had a hanging bishop that I looked for ways to capture safely, but could not make that happen.

Interestingly, the engine says some of the times I captured a pawn that wasn't actually the best move! It preferred a positional move, but I'm a simple man and feel better when I'm ahead in material. It feels like a more flexible and "easy to trust" evalation for my abilities.

 I saw towards the end he could get into my back ranks but it didn't look like he could do any damage before I did the same to him, but with enough control to mate him. Thank you, Datiss, for the game!

Getting a New Chess Routine together

My daughter's idea of playing chess: all the pieces get together for lunch.

 For a few days there I was feeling quite overwhelmed with chess resources.  I'm trying to improve how I play, but I was caught between a bunch of ideas and resources I had found. After my run of blitz games on chess.com a couple of months ago I've actually played very few real games against people; I think I'm spending too much time studying!

I'll start with my conclusion first, if you want the short version.

I'm doing (or at least trying to) the following each day

1. One, perhaps two, 15 minute-per-side games on lichess.org. If you play you MUST analyse the game afterwards. (I played a nice one last night!). (Got this advice from Chessvibes on youtube)
2. A ten-minute tactics run on aimchess.com. I usually get 18-20 right. Around #12 is where I usually slow down and have to reaaalllly think.
3. Do problems from the Polgar "5334 Problems" book. They're all mate in one/two puzzles, but it comes highly recommended. Write down your answers, do the problems in your head even if you're using a physical board. I made a spreadsheet to track my answers.
4. Do tactics training on chessable.com; despite not grooving with the opening training there yet I'm enjoying the "On The Attack" (pawns/bishops/rooks/knight/queen) series of free courses. After seeing the same puzzle a few times I'm solving them very quickly; I hope this will translate into seeing them in games too.
5. I haven't started this regularly yet but I'm planning to combine information from chessable openings courses and using the chess.com "openings practice" feature. It sets up the board with the opening you desire, then you play against the AI of whatever strength you want, and the eval bar / lines will show you if your moves are "right" or not. This works better for me because you get to take back moves and go down different branches on-the-fly. I think I'll learn more this way, but that remains to be seen. I'll use the chessable courses to tell me which opponent moves I need to be prepared for, but I'll decide how deep into the lines I'll try to learn.

I'm trying to change my openings to something that makes better use of my supposed skills in tactics: my London/Slav are very positional and rigid and don't lead to many tactics. My friend Matt suggested the Scotch for white and Scandinavian with Qd8 for black and I'm enjoying both already.

--

I'm currently under the sway of Adult Chess Improver and Andras Toth (video 1). The first advocates not studying openings to any serious depth: you should know the basics/goals of the first couple of moves, but its more important to play solid, principled chess, not try to memorize multiple lines to 15 moves each. Check out his videos in the link there, he explains it very well. 

Toth hilariously HATES the London System :)  It teaches you only one pawn structure, among other issues. Counterpoint- GM Aman Hambleton said he played mostly the London all the way to his GM rating!

Toth is looking for beginner's to know enough about an opening to recognize a non-book move when they see it, and know how to to punish it (video). He dislikes timid play when aggression is called for and also despair's of beginner's "material first" mindset. I know why we do that - it's much easier to track material and know "I've got more firepower than my opponent" vs "I'm willing to lose a piece to get a better position" because I don't trust my skills to be able to judge a "good position" yet.

Both recommend, like almost everyone does, getting good at tactics!

My current stats are: 

puzzles/tactics: chess.com 2400, lichess.org  1900

rapid games on lichess.org 1400

blitz/bullet: 900 on chess.com

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Web Sites

1. Chess.com for playing games against people and bots, plus lessons, daily tactics and puzzles (both "timed + gradually increasing in difficulty" versus "untimed and difficult")
2. Aimchess.com for tactics training and general chess training. It has a neat feature where it analyses your games on lichess and chess.com and finds where you made a mistake, presenting it to you as a puzzle. It has a range of puzzle types and lessons including some I hadn't seen before, like "find the bad move in this sequence of moves".  My favorite feature here is the "do as many tactics puzzles in ten minutes as you can; three wrong and you're out"
3. Chessable.com has training courses which work by rehearsing/practicing "the correct move" over and over again until you have it memorized.  I signed up for lots of free courses including tactics and openings I play (London, Slav, French to start then more recently Semi-Slav, Scandinavian, Italian, Scotch)...the trouble is that these courses don't work for me! I try to push through them too quickly and the opponent's "correct" moves all blur together into a fog. I wasn't learning the right responses to the opponent's moves and was just guessing my way through the quizzes. Not their fault; I'm just not ready for that level of detail yet, I think.  My opponents tend not to play that many "correct" moves in a row - chessable's default free option makes you learn lines all the way through; if you pay then you can have LESS depth in the lines, which is an interesting paradox :)
4. Chesscup.com for a daily quick 3 minute and 5 minute tactics exercises.
5. lichess.org For playing games against real people and doing puzzles/lessons. The tactics competitions there are amazing - the other people seem SO good at them! My favorite feature here is that I can get computer analysis of all my games for free, not just one per day as chess.com does.

I haven't yet walked through any master level games, though most resources I read said that is important. I'll get there at some point.

YouTube Svengalis That Mess With Your Head

Adult Chess Improver Luka says with simple principled play you can get very far with chess. Don't get hung up studying and memorizing openings - game analysis will show you are probably not losing games in the opening! There's is a BIT of learning to do, and he illustrates that with the Italian game.

Another key idea for training is to have a go-to set of difficult puzzles, say 100 of them. Aim to solve them from start to finish TEN times. You will be training your long term memory and pattern recognition. This is different to going to puzzle web sites where you see different puzzles every time. Both methods have purpose: you use the first to build your skills to use in helping with the second.

Andras Toth - already discussed above. 

Chess Vibes - I LOVE his teaching videos. This list covers "why you're stuck at rating X" - it's usually blunders :)  This other list is his tactics/strategy collection and will give you a lot of basic skills - 35 top principles, 10 uses for your bishops etc. It's a lot of rules-of-thumb stuff that is the bread and butter of chess.

Books

I found many podcasts, websites and other resources that recommended books - here's the ones that everyone seemed to agree on.

Polgar 5334 Problems - a lifetime of mate in two/three problems

Sillman Endgames - you start with the first couple of chapters only and read on as you improve. Start with ladder mates, queen + king, rook + king and get gradually more complex. Everyone seems to pick this book!

Logical Chess, Chernev - Chernev walks through master level games and explains every move.

Simple Chess, Stean - A strategy guide.

Dodged a Bullet-Shaped Fork

 I've been playing a 15 minute game each night on lichess and just crossed 1450 points. This is a surprise because over the board I'm about 1150.  I'm either getting lucky or my tactics/puzzles skills are punching above their weight on lichess.  I just won another game due to a surprise resignation two moves after this situation occurred.

I made the bad move shown by the red arrow, which would have led to a game-ending fork; do you see it? His knight would take the pawn on d4, forking my king and queen. And the e3 pawn could not take the knight because that would put my king in check!  I walked right into that move and, very lucky for me, my opponent didn't see it, despite having all the time in the world on his clock!  It's possible they quit because they realized what they'd just missed and in a fit of annoyance at themselves -- pulled the plug.

 

Crazy game ends in surprise victory

 This game was pretty wild! I started with the very unusual b3 (called the "Nimsowitch-Larsen attack") because chess.com has badges/awards/achievements for doing certain openings. This was the last "easy" one to get because it only required me to play this particular first move. Most of the remaining badges I need to get (yes, need!) require the other person to play certain responses to my moves, and that's impossible to guarantee.

Oh, and I missed checkmating him TWICE around move 21.  But I am sort of proud of the rook sacrifice I did to hit his king at the end; something told me to go for it because I had another rook ready to jump in, and lucky for me it worked out. That's a terrible way to play chess though :)

Analysis showed we both played with about 30% accuracy, which is awful, and I lucked into a checkmate that I had no idea was coming - I thought I was just checking his king; this kind of thing happens when you are running low on time in a three-minute game!

Beginner's Luck with the English Opening

 I looked through the Awards section of chess.com to see what other badges and trinkets I could earn for my account. I noticed a section I hadn't paid much attention to: the opening books. They give you a little badge for opening a game in a certain way; some of them are multiple moves, but other's such as the English opening just require your first move to be a particular one. You might even earn some of these by accident!

I picked the English opening, 1. c4, and thought "I'll just blast through a game and see what happens; if I lose I'll still get the bade. Lucky for me the game went really smoothly with a nice finish!

Can you see the mate in 2?

That was fun! I'll try and get the other opening book badges too, which will let me get a taste for other openings. I'm currently doing London system as white and as black I'm playing the French against 1. e4 and a kind of semi-slav (which is close to a reverse London system) against everything else.

Your Opponent Can Mess Up Just Like You Can, Only Worse!

 Here's a great example of why it's good to keep playing, despite how hopeless your situation may seem.  

This game went downhill pretty quickly for me after the opening; it's a "daily" game, so each player has up to 24 hours to make their move. I messed up my first attack and all my attempts to trick my opponent into letting me back into the game failed, until the point above.  Analysis shows I was at -10, a crushingly imbalanced position when he castled and I moved my queen to here.

I assumed he would check my king with his queen, and I'd slip through my wall of pawns and hopefully be able to deliver the coup de grace and win the game if I could just avoid getting checked on one turn myself.

Luckily for me my opponent went Nf5, leaving me a nice mate in 2. Can you see it?  In a daily game you have time to use the analysis board and play the moves out, even the stuff you assume will work, just to be sure!

Turn off TV video/screen but keep the sound on

 Here's a useful tip a situation where you want to listen to music through your TV, or the speakers connected to it, but don't want to have the TV screen on while you do so.  My TV has this as a hidden feature that isn't even described in the manual - maybe yours does too?

Do a "long press" of the audio mute button - they usually have an image like the one above. Point the remote control at the TV and HOLD that button down for a second or two. If you're lucky the audio will actually stay on but the TV screen will switch off.

A winning game at a live tournament

 Our chess club meets every Tuesday night and the last meeting of each month is an official tournament. Our scores are entered into the US Chess Federation database and it usually brings some very strong players out of the woodwork that are working on their ratings. 

My first game was against a ten year old with a rating of 1950 (I'm about 1100). Our ratings meant he had a 99.7% chance of beating me . . . and he did, easily!

I want to post the third game I played that night because it encapsulates a lot about where I am as a chess player. 

https://lichess.org/pzFgEQkY 

Pawn to b5 was the key error in this game, allowing the devastating Nxc6

The game was fairly even until he allowed me to take his knight (free) AND fork both his rooks (also both unprotected)! It was a heck of a moment :) I remember seeing that square one move before, seeing that his b pawn was preventing me capturing and I thought "I know I shouldn't be playing hope chess, but I *really* hope he moves that pawn!" And then he did!" I looked at it closely to see if it was a trap, of course, but it wasn't :)

Interestingly computer analysis says I was winning until I pushed pawn to a3, but lucky for me that his response of b5 push swung threw the game back to me, and I maintained that strong lead to the end of the game. He allowed me to get his bishop cheaply too, which made the endgame easier.

I had played the same opponent in a crazy casual game the week before where I blundered (lost stupidly) two queens against him and he pulled a draw out of what was clearly a win for me, I knew I would have to be VERY careful to finish this game well. That memory is what made me move my knight and rook away from the queenside around move 44 - I could just "feel" I was going to lose a piece if I let his king get amongst my pieces!

Even the mate came as a surprise to me - I thought I was just checking him!

--


My victories usually come not because I engineered some amazing strategy and won, but rather that I saw an error my opponent made and I'm able to capitalize on it. I like to put it as: "I didn't win; my opponent lost."

Bryan Tillis, the club founder, said in response to this: "The lower the level, the more the evaluation of the game looks like a ping-pong match. It is not who blunders the most, it is who blunders last. I don't see players imposing their will on the position until 1600+. Before that rating range it is mostly blunder checking to get wins. I was once told by a strong GM that anyone can make it to USCF 2000 by simply not blundering; getting to master, though, requires a mass amount of loss and effort to learn a new skill set to work the position much like a boxer works in the ring."

So it turns out I'm pretty normal at this point :)

Double fork leads to resignation

 I greatly enjoyed this moment in a blitz game. The situation felt pretty even, and complicated, with a lot pieces near each other. 

 I noticed his queen and king could be forked by my knight, but sadly that square was defended. Then I saw I could bring my second knight to attack the same square - Nf4!  Would it work?

Yes!

I brought my first knight to e6, he captured it and then I brought the second. He resigned :)

Playing a lot more chess

I have a spent a lot of time playing chess over the past couple of months.  It kicked off when a new trumpet player joined our band and told us he was a professional chess coach.  I chatted with him and he told me there's a chess club that meets every Tuesday and I should come along and try it out.

My chess skills are stunted in a weird way; I know I'm good at tactics because I do a lot of puzzles I reached 2500 rating) , but I have been staying away from playing actual games against people (except for the slow tournament I did in June 2020). I don't know why; I just had a weird block about not wanting to know how good, or more likely, bad, I actually am at the game itself!

I took the invitation to join the club as the incentive I needed to kick myself into gear, find out my real Elo scores and get some advice on what I need to work on. I also signed up as a member of the US Chess federation so I'd be able to play in tournaments and get an official Elo rating (currently 1281 after last weeks tournament, where I beat two 1500 players!)

The people at the club were excellent; many of them are chess teachers and gave me advice on what I needed to work on. They said my tactics skills were indeed strong, but I had too many blunders (giving away pieces in "silly" mistakes) and needed to get those out of my game.

As for openings I was advised to keep going with the London system for white, learn the French defense for black against 1. e4, and to learn a "diamond structure" for black against everything else.

League of Legends

I was prepared to settle down and do some serious, slow study, but then I found the chess.com League system!

It's a kind of rewards system that the chess.com site added a while ago to encourage people to play games against each other. You get rewarded for winning and, importantly, there is NO punishment for losing. You are randomly assigned into a group of 50 users and whoever finishes in the top few spots will be promoted to a higher league. You will never be demoted - you can only go up and that's very appealing to me!  Its trivial to get out of the first couple of leagues but the higher leagues take, I estimate, up to an hour of day of play to earn the points needed for promotion.

You get points by winning short games against other people - the 1 minute bullet and 3 minute blitz are the most efficient ways to earn points.  

You see my dilemma; I was preparing to settle into slow study sessions and here comes this shiny trophy system encouraging me to play lots...and lots... of bullet/blitz.  As I write this post I'm a few hours away from winning the final promotion to the highest league, Legends. The stats page show I've played 470 games in the last 7 days. It's close to 1000 in the last 30 as well.

At least I know where my Elo ratings are now - I'm about 900 in bullet (1 min) and 850 in blitz (3 or 5 min).

Bonus Points

It turns out to be relatively easy to win promotion - chess.com offers bonus points (see the red circled bit above) for playing your games in their tournament/arena format, instead of against a random individual. It makes no difference to you - you can join and leave the tournament any time, but a win earns 2 or more extra points. So a 1 minute bullet win goes from being worth three points to five! That's a serious increase when you're playing hundreds of games. In my example here I have 612 points from bullet, 300 from blitz, and 592 bonus points. 

It's easy to join - simply click the Play button, then click "Tournaments" and pick a "1-0 Bullet" or "3-0 Blitz" tournament (they usually have hundreds of players) and then click the "Join" button. You'll be instantly matched with someone of similar skill and the game will start.  When the tournament ends (they last only 30 minutes or so), just join the next one and keep going. There is always a tournament of those two formats available.

It turns out that I'm the only player in my group of 50 that has earned any bonus points! Here's the player in second place - they have worked very hard to get here, but without those bonus arena points...well, I'm getting 5 points in 2 minutes where they are getting 9 points in six minutes.  I'm running  in second gear and they're still in first!

I think I have learned some basic raw chess skills from these hundreds of games; playing the same opening over and over again gives you insight into the traps you might fall into.  I'm ready to work more on the French Defense and also a more aggressive other opening for black. After I reach the Legends league I think there's actually no incentive to keep playing these short, fast games, so I'll have done what I set out to do and can settle back to study and working on my ratings.

In future posts I'll show some game highlights - despite the fast pace and huge numbers of errors, there's some fun moments in these games.

Playing in a Chess Tournament

I learned to play chess when I was young, like many children, but didn't take it seriously. I remember winning a tournament at school when I was seven years old, winning a chess book as my prize, but I didn't play in any organized way, or do any study, to follow up on that victory.

Fast forward to my late forties and with the easy availability of online chess I decided to give in another try...but I was incredibly hesitant to play against other people. Call it a psychological block or something; I decided just to do chess puzzles (simple puzzles here) instead and play some games against the computer.

Puzzles

A chess puzzle shows you a board with pieces in some arrangement; its your turn and there is a KILLER move that you must find. Usually the intended result is that you win the game immediately, or capture a piece - the result is not subtle. When you get it wrong, then are shown the solution, it can seem obvious and you wonder why you didn't spot it!

I made an account on chess.com and started doing the five free puzzles a day. The site tracks your progress and gives you progressively more difficult puzzles. I would make some progress and just get stuck at a plateau, failing to spot the answer in puzzle after puzzle. The worst feeling was when the intended solution was "I move here and my opponent responds with...WHAT? WHY?! I DON'T GET IT!"

There were a lot of those!

But eventually I understood the situations better, and started spotting things. My rating went from 800 to 1000, then 1200...1500....eventually I peaked at over 1800. Below you see my last year of ratings.

I'm still not quick at solving my five daily puzzles and my first guess is usually wrong! I can't just "trust my instincts" because they are terrible :)  I need to look at each possible line carefully and look for good, or bad outcomes.  One thing is clear - chess.com's puzzles are almost all very well chosen; the answer, when you see it, is obvious and undeniably the right move. Its very satisfying when you spot it, and it feels like your choice clicks into place.

Daily Games

I had tried playing a few games against real people, with the usual 10 or 15 minute time limit, but the pressure of running out of time felt awful and I didn't enjoy it. I looked at my options and found you could play games with a 24 hour per move limit; they call it a Daily game.

I played several of these and really enjoyed the process of taking my time with each move. I even got out a real chess board to help me consider my options in some games. My rating went from 800 (where you start) to 1026....it was time for a tournament!

Tournament

I joined a tournament that allowed players with ratings up to 1500. I expected to lose most of my games and get knocked out of the first round, but hoped to learn something along the way. I knew from watching some chess videos that lower rated players like myself often lose games just by blundering pieces - giving them away stupidly, saying "Oh, I didn't see that" when it was captured. I also hoped that my puzzles practice would help me spot opportunities when they arose.

Four players in our group of 10 dropped out quickly, failing to move in 24 hours, so me and five opponents played two games against each other. To my surprise, my opponents made mistakes more often than I did (my favorite was this one, in which I captured his queen very early...turns out its called the Khormov Gambit!) and I came second in the group! The top three from each group advance to the next round, so I thanked my good luck and went forward, expecting to be crushed this time.

In round two...I got the same result and came second in the group! My favorite result here is that I beat the group leader in both games, both of which I feel I played very well; that player is currently (as I write this) in second place for the entire tournament, so that's a great result!

OK, round three and I've got to be reaching my limit, right? Yes...but it was close! I came fourth in round three, narrowly missing the cutoff. I was very happy with finishing there and moved on to other hobbies and pastimes; mentally retiring from chess with a 1454 rating, and sitting in 11th place out of the 250 original players. But the tournament wasn't done with me.

A couple of weeks passed as other players completed their games very slowly and I didn't bother to check on the tournament to see if it was finished. A work colleague asked how I did in the end and I went to check...eighth place...hmmm....surely the final nine players should be ranked higher than me?

I checked the group standings again and something was off - the very strong Russian player who finished second had an "x" next to his name; "account closed due to inactivity". What?! My fourth place finish had just become third place and I was going to the fourth round! 

A few hours later the single remaining game of round three was concluded and round 4 began; my phone lit up with 18 notifications that a game had begun and my attention was need at the board.

Update: I did better than I expected in the last round and I finished in sixth place!

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I don't know much chess theory; I can kind of understand the London System for white, and for black I just copy white's opening pawn move, develop my knights/bishops and hope for the best. I'm REALLY surprised that my meager knowledge has got my this far; most of the credit goes to the puzzles I did and John Bartholomew's "Don't Make Mistakes" advice. It's been a real blast to test my skills and abilities, but having this many games going at the same time is quite time consuming if you want to give the games the attention they deserve.

Problem with my TV dropping off the wifi

Hey, I'm back!

It's been a while, but I'm still here in South Florida and occasionally I hit an annoying problem in life and actually come up with a solution. Here's one that you might find useful if you have a Smart TV that keeps dropping its wifi connection. The problem manifested in not being able to access any content. If I went into the Network menu it also couldn't use the "Test Connection" command. I had to "soft power cycle" the TV (basically turn it off and on again) to get it working.

My TV is a Vizio P65-F1.

The root cause of my issue was that I have a second wifi network in the same house...it's actually a range extender with almost the same name as my regular network, and it has the same password. I suspect the TV was getting confused at least once a day and trying to join the extended network, which, for some reason didn't work.

I changed the extended network to NOT broadcast its name (SSID), also to have a completely different name. I configured the couple of devices that needed to use the extended network to use the new name, and for three days now my TV (Vizio P65-F1) has not had a problem.

July 2nd 2020

Funny story: turns out that WASN'T the solution. The final answer, which has worked solidly for several weeks now is that TV's wifi settings include a "gateway" which was set to 0.0.0.0. I changed it to have the same value as the DNS/router, in my case its 192.168.1.254.

I also changed the TVs settings to use a manual IP address, and I changed my router's configuration to only hand out IP address from 20 up to 253 - basically I was reserving the first twenty places for devices that I may assign a fixed (or "static") IP address. I told the TV, for example, that it is 192.168.1.5

That combination has worked fine for several weeks now. I'll update if anything changes.

If you don't have a second network in range that your TV might be using, there is good advice at https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-fix-vizio-tv-wont-connect-to-wifi-4685906

Wired Magazine has a nice article about FoldIt, and my teammate "Cheese", a young lad and his family, who are all on my FoldIt team. It's a dramatic re-telling of our successful efforts in the CASP competition.

FoldIt News

I'm enjoy playing this game called FoldIt, which I've written about on the blog before. It's a puzzle game which contributes real results to research into the folding of proteins in nature; a very tough problem in biology.

The first results of our collective efforts have come through, and not only did the concept of "human-directed folding" succeed, but my team (Another Hour Another Point) was a big part of it!

http://fold.it/portal/blog

We won one of the puzzles and scored in the top 3 of several others, and the developers have concluded that a pack of untrained game-players match the perform of folding experts, so they can be freed of this work and do something else instead while the Geek Hordes do most of the folding work! This is very exciting :)

The last scheduled Space Shuttle night launch was yesterday, so being a fan of space exploration in general, I thought I'd better put my foot down and finally make it to a shuttle launch. What kind of space fan lives in Florida and doesn't see a launch at least once?

I'd had a particularly bad day at work - my Great Dane Patch had his first "accident" at work due to a very bad tummy upset, so I spent my last hour apologizing and scrubbing the carpet. I'm going to pay closer attention to this in future, and leave him home if he's had any problems in that department, since I know how lucky I am to be able to bring him to work every day.

Anyway, after that awful mess I decided to treat myself and try to make it to Titusville for the 7.55 pm launch. The weather was good and they said there was a 70% chance of a successful launch, so I zipped home, grabbed the camera and hit the highway.

Traffic was heavy at first, due to a closed lane, but it soon opened up and I reached the Titusville exit at about 7.30 pm. Driving into town I knew there was little chance of reaching Spaceview Park, and it was curious how natural it seemed to just turn off the road into a strip mall parking lot when the car in front of me did so, and the car behind me did the same thing. Obviously we were all there for the same thing.

I turned the radio to a local station that was covering the launch and lowered the windows so I, and the neighbouring cars, could hear some commentary. I put the camera into spot metering mode, attached the 80-200mm zoom and pushed the ISO rating to 800, forcing the camera to use the fastest shutter speed it could. I'm glad I did that, otherwise it'd be streaky-time, and you don't get second shots at this kind of event.



The buzz in the crowd went up at the 30 second mark and when the final 10 second countdown began everyone stood up. When the moment of liftoff came, the whole sky in front of us lit up like dawn, then an amazingly bright spot appeared and climbed to the skies. It was a clear night, so we were able to watch it all the way up, until it was just a bright spot. We could even see the SRBs seperate and begin their tumble back into the ocean. The sound of the launch didn't hit us till about 45 seconds after it had begun, and it was a big bass rumble that seemed to come from the whole sky at once.

There are a lot of things not to like about the Shuttle program, but it's an impressive sight when it launches!

A Few Days More

In a few days, Barack Obama will be elected the next President of the United States. This is good. I don't think the Republican party will have the capacity to handle this loss in a rational way, though. I think they'll declare that they lost because McCain wasn't hardcore enough, wasn't conservative enough. They'll retreat into a neo-con fantasy world and complain about Every Single Thing that Obama and the Democractic Congress do, and conspiracy theories about ACORN and dead people voting will flourish.

Still, I've seen a couple of blog postings worth passing enough, that stood out from the pack. Here's one by a certain "Lady De Rothschild", one of the few prominent Hillary Clinton supports who switched over to McCain's side. Her ideas are very sad, but check out the comments section!! That's where the action is :)

And here's a scorcher from Helen Philpott of "Margaret and Helen". Andrew Sullivan linked to them a few days ago. I agree with Helen when she says in a more recent posting that she's surprised the election is close at all. I'll leave to the more learned to write about why McCain has *any* support outside of those who still support George Bush (low 20% range, last I looked). I'm pretty open minded but I just can't see how anyone could pick McCain over Obama. I'm sure they'd say the same in the other direction, I suppose :)

My regular reading, in case you'd like to see where I get these ideas from, covers: Andrew Sullivan, Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, Think Progress, Glenn Greenwald and Huffington Post. On TV there's the Daily Show and Colbert, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann.