Shifting Focus

{Coincidentally, in an interesting example of parallel evolution, there seem to be many other bloggers that have recently taken self-improvement much more seriously as well. Check out Blunderprone's blog for more info on his ACIS (Adult Chess Improvement Seekers) movement.}

 For the last while I've been content to learn more about chess –endings, opening repertoire, reading some of the classic game collections such as Alekhine's NY 1924 and Nottingham 1936 tournament books, and Botvinnik's 100 Selected Games, etc. However, as I enter my 40^th year of existence, I look at the sidebar of this blog ("hopes to become a B-class player before senility sets in") and the subtitle ("Do as I Say, Not As I Do") and have decided to do more of what I say.

For me, I identified the following areas as needing the most improvement:

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Heisman's "Three Showstoppers"

Last month, Dan Heisman's column at ChessCafe.com ("The Three Show Stoppers") set a lightbulb off for me. Which is odd, because he's discussing issues of time management, piece safety and piece activity that he's written about before. However, these concepts came together to form a "perfect storm" of chess instruction.

A theme of Heisman's is that there are certain basic skills such as time management and playing what Heisman calls "real chess" consistently on every move of the game. The trick, of course, is consistently. If 49 moves out of 50 you play properly, and 1 move out of 50 you launch a stinkbomb of a move because you moved too fast or a piece was hanging, then your chess strength is severely diminished. I think that, for most people, working on improving this aspect of their game will likely produce greater dividends than just about any other chess-related activity.

Easily said, but as the byline of this blog says: "Do as I say, not as I do." It takes gumption to work on this, and if most of your chess is online blitz then you're not going to be able to play "real chess" a la Heisman unless you're pretty gifted. However, in this column Heisman reduces the essentials to three principles:

• Time Management: not moving too fast or too slow, but using the appropriate amount of time for each move
• Safety
• Piece Activity

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Why I Don't Accept Tells on ICC

A long time ago I stopped accepting tells on ICC during games. Part of me feels bad about this, because I know I'm filtering out greetings like:

"Hello! My name is Paulo, and I am 11 years old. I am from Brazil. Where do you live?"

but poor Paulo's words meet a wall of cold silence.

Unfortunately, there are enough idiots on "Teh Intertubes" that I feel it's necessary.

Case in point: in a K+P vs. K endgame, I was about to promote the pawn, but my opponent didn't resign yet. That's totally fine...I have no hatred for people that are prepared to fight all the way to checkmate. I decided to underpromote to a rook just to practice the mating technique.

We reach a position where his king is in the corner, he has one legal move, and it will be followed by mate. He has over 7 minutes on the clock, to my 5.

After no response for a while, I decided I at least had 5 minutes to unload the dishwasher. My opponent let the clock run down to about 1 minute, then moved.

I immediately mated him, and got the following response:


(click for a larger view...if anyone knows how to circumvent this auto-shrinking Blogger does, let me know)

This amused me so much I had to share it, for two reasons:

1. He ran down the clock, and then complained about the game being a waste of time.

2. Why does he think I don't accept tells during games? Here's a hint for him: look in the mirror.

Feel free to respond to this post and share your most "my head a-splode" examples of idiotic behavior by online opponents.