Saturday, March 16, 2024

LCCC Had 21 Players Last Meeting - and Can We Put Some Luck In to Chess?

 


The Livingston County Chess Club meets every Monday night between

4pm and 10pm

at the Buffalo Wild Wings in the Green Oak Mall in Brighton, MI. 

Stop in for some friendly chess, good food and 'refreshments'.

Everyone of all ages and playing strength are welcome to attend. And free lessons to all beginners!

The title question: Is there luck in chess? 

If you are talking about on the board? No. Zero, zip, nada.

If you are talking about opponent pairings, health, attitude, game preparation, rest prior and of course concentration level at the board, these are all subject to luck as humans are not machines. 

So, luck is a factor both for and against us sometimes. Even if all human life factors are good for your opponent, or you, momentary lapses in judgement or board sight awareness can appear out of no where. You can sometimes be lucky or unlucky.

Remember, you never win a chess game. Your opponent loses it. And vice versa.

But can you insert a little luck into an actual chess game? Yes you can! And it does change the game completely. 

Let me introduce to you - Dice Chess!

1. You need 3 regular 6-sided dice or better yet, a dice app on your phone.

2. White rolls/moves first and you use the Scale below unless the dice pair or triple. IF that happens, you are allowed to make any move you wish. 

3. And you can always roll to see what you get and move your king or castle legally as you desire.

 4. If you are in check, you can make any legal move you wish to get out check.

Otherwise, the Dice Chess Scale rules!

                              1 = Pawn move

                              2 = Pawn move

                              3 = Knight move

                              4 = Bishop move

                              5 = Rook move

                              6 = Queen move

5. If the dice do not give you a legal move, then you forfeit your move, unless you wish to move your King, but you don't have to. King safety is still paramount.

I played a few games against the computer, and I set the computer at a very low rating. It was fun but that's all it was. It makes chess more like backgammon, which is a game of skill in the long run to be sure. But it is not chess!

To really make chess a game of luck, use only 2 dice and change the scale to this:

                               1 = King move

                               2 = Pawn move

                              3 = Knight move

                              4 = Bishop move

                              5 = Rook move

                              6 = Queen move

I did not have the stomach to try this variation.

Thursday, February 15, 2024

2023 Club Champ Crown - And We Are Back Every Monday Night!


Waiting for Summer!

The Livingston County Chess Club meets every Monday night between

4pm and 10pm

at the Buffalo Wild Wings in the Green Oak Mall in Brighton, MI. 

Stop in for some friendly chess, good food and 'refreshments'.

Everyone of all ages and playing strength are welcome to attend. And free lessons to all beginners!

Club News: Our 2023 Club Championship concluded with co-champions! Pete B and Mike N drew their championship game and no one in the field could catch them. Congratulations to both players.

Announcement: The Checkmate Detroit Lounge is a unique restaurant with a chess inspired decor located at 546 East Larned Street, Detroit, MI. 

On Monday February 19, 2024 from 6pm to 12am, the Checkmate Detroit Lounge is hosting an event call the "Smack Talk Chess". This is sponsored by The Ultimate Urban Chess League and 8 Kings Entertainment. Go to Smacktalkchess dot com for more information.


 

Sunday, January 21, 2024

LCCC Back! 2023 Club Championship is Underway! Yes, a Little Late!


Christmas, New Years and the Lions on TV made us lose our location for three weeks. But we are BACK!

The Livingston County Chess Club meets every Monday night between

4pm and 10pm

at the Buffalo Wild Wings in the Green Oak Mall in Brighton, MI. 

Stop in for some friendly chess, good food and 'refreshments'.

Everyone of all ages and playing strength are welcome to attend. And free lessons to all beginners!

See you all on January 22nd for the continuation of our 2023 Club Championship.

 

Let’s think about what it takes to have a Chess Mind! An article by Lajos Steiner circa 1937.

“Chess is generally considered a slow game that requires a great amount of patience for it’s players and on-lookers as well. As a chess player, I would feel sorry for a person, who ignorant of the meaning of chess, might be sentenced to sit and watch a chess game for several hours.

Though there are some forms of chess which interest even non-players (simultaneous and blindfold exhibitions, as well as speed chess), chess is a game that has to be learned to be appreciated. Once learned, chess does not require any more patience than any other human activity. Are you bored reading a good book? You are not. But read a book in a foreign language where you don’t know what is going on and it will not hold your interest.

Chess becomes interesting for a person when he has mastered the movement of the pieces. He now finds himself in a new world as his chess mind develops. He sees combinations that win material. He sees attacks that trap the enemy king. He sees the artistic beauty of the pieces dancing around the board to complete the mission of their leader!

A chess mind is a combinative one. It sees the different possibilities of a situation and tries to find better situations that can be derived out of the current one. A chess mind is at once, logical, but also imaginative. Surely this helps increase the intellectual standard of humankind.

Young people taught to play chess will profit in many ways. They require a feeling of responsibility. They soon discover that in chess – and life – you cannot depend on fate, but on yourself. They start the competition on equal terms with their opponent. There is no umpire or referee that can make an incorrect call against you. If you lose, it was of your own hand.

This inspires one to improve one’s self. To find faults and weaknesses and eliminate them."

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

Michigan Plays for the Collage Football Champ. That Cancels LCCC for January 8th! Back on 15th

 


LCCC will NOT be happening on January 8th due to the Michigan Wolverines are playing for the National Championship on television and our location will be swamped with MICHIGAN fans. The Club officers voted to take the week off and free up the tables for our gracious hosts. But normally;

The Livingston County Chess Club meets every Monday night between

4pm and 10pm

at the Buffalo Wild Wings in the Green Oak Mall in Brighton, MI. 

Stop in for some friendly chess, good food and 'refreshments'.

Everyone of all ages and playing strength are welcome to attend. And free lessons to all beginners!

See you all on January 15th for the start of our Club Championship. Information is in the article below.

Monday, December 25, 2023

LCCC Closed for Christmas and New Year's Day - But Club Championship Begins Jan 8

We are not meeting for the next two weeks as our location is closed for the holidays ...or in the case of New Years Day, full of football fans.

We will be back on January 8 and we start the New Year off with our Club Championship! It's free to enter so why not join in and test yourself?

The tournament will begin around 6:30 or 7pm depending. The game time limit will be ONE HOUR with no delay or increment, for both players. So a nice slow time limit to enjoy the game. It will be only one tournament round a night for 3 or 4 Mondays in a row, depending on the number of players.

Of course, casual chess and lessons will still be happening, before, during and after the tournament game. So stop by! Everyone is welcome to enter!


The Livingston County Chess Club meets every Monday night between

4pm and 10pm

at the Buffalo Wild Wings in the Green Oak Mall in Brighton, MI. 

Stop in for some friendly chess, good food and 'refreshments'.

Everyone of all ages and playing strength are welcome to attend. And free lessons to all beginners!

Saturday, December 9, 2023

LCCC Club Championship Starting Soon! - And Fischer - Karpov 1975 Re-visited


 The Livingston County Chess Club meets every Monday night between

4pm and 10pm

at the Buffalo Wild Wings in the Green Oak Mall in Brighton, MI. 

Stop in for some friendly chess, good food and 'refreshments'.

Everyone of all ages and playing strength are welcome to attend. And free lessons to all beginners!

Our 2023 Club Championship will start soon. Be sure to sign up. It is free of course! It will be one round per night with a time limit of 45 minutes with no delay or increment.

That's Bobby Fischer in the picture at the top there. 

So anyway, a couple nights ago while suffering with a cold, I was browsing the internet.  I came across an interesting article by Anatoly Karpov about the 1975 world championship match that never happened: Karpov vs Bobby Fischer.

First, what’s interesting is that Karpov said almost nothing about the match that was never arranged, in 1975. From what I have read in Chess Life, those negotiations fell apart over Fischer’s insistence on a match to 10 wins, with a 9-9 tie going to the champion (so that Karpov would actually have to beat him 10-8 to win the championship).

Karpov merely said at that time was, “It is possible that if we had met face to face earlier, then we might have played the official match of 1975. At that time our intermediaries and representatives did many things to keep that from taking place. Each of the official sides considered it a matter of honor not to agree, and to take a hard-line position. Both Fischer and I understood too late that we should have met without the intermediaries.”

Whatever. Karpov was in lock step with whatever his government wanted, and they wanted the title forfeited to Karpov. Not saying Karpov did anything wrong, but pulling a “Spassky” and demanding to meet with Fischer in private to save the match, was not in Karpov’s mind – ever.

Fischer and Karpov did not meet in person until 1976, when they met three times: first in Tokyo, then in Madrid, and finally at the Phillippine embassy in Washington. Karpov claims — and of course, we have only his word for it — that he and Fischer very nearly agreed on the conditions for a match.

Karpov says that he realized Fischer would not back down from his insistence on a match to 10 wins, and so he agreed to this, provided that there was a suitable break at the halfway point. What about the 9-9 match clause?


Karpov (left) claims: “The rule about retaining the title in case of a 9-9 score fell away of its own accord. Fischer considered himself the champion of the world among professionals, the absolute champion. I, from his point of view, was the official champion.”

If I’m interpreting Karpov’s writing here correctly, Fischer was willing in case of a 9-9 score to let Karpov be known as the “official” or FIDE champion, while he would be the “professional” or absolute champion. A rather interesting precedent of the split that actually occurred, more than a decade later, when Kasparov bolted from FIDE! Irony!

So why didn’t the match occur, then? Karpov says that it was because of one technicality.

“At first we met in the city of Washington, and then went to the Phillippine embassy, (because Campomanes, the president of FIDE at that time, was a Phillippine citizen) had agreed with the ambassador that if we came to an agreement, we could come by and ask for his secretary’s help in formulating the documents.

We had agreed about practically everything, we arrived at the embassy, and the text of the agreement was typed. Only one question remained unresolved — the name of the match. I presumed that we would eventually work out the name together, but at that moment we didn’t have a consensus. Fischer demanded (what else is new?) that the match should have the name “The Absolute World Championship for Professionals.

At that time the idea of sports professionals was not well accepted either in the Olympics Federation or in the USSR. I understood that with a name like that I would never be allowed to play the match. I would not have been able to convince the government of my country that we should forget about the name and set as our main goal the organization of the most interesting sporting event, at least in the history of chess.”

It’s very interesting to read this passage, knowing about the hypocrisy that exists over the “professional” designation, where virtually all Soviet athletes were considered “amateurs” even though the state supported them financially. [We have the same system here for our Olympic and college athletes, but it is usually corporate money spread around (like there is a difference there, but I digresss)]

Fischer wasn’t stupid. He had to know that this would be a way of thumbing his nose at the Russians. But also, it’s a very consistent culmination of his lifelong battle to have chess players recognized as professionals. You can also see why he didn’t mind leaving Karpov with the title of FIDE champion in case of a tie: the only title he cared about was being the absolute champion. I think it was a very interesting mind game going on here, if this information is true!

According to Karpov, he and Fischer never met again after their near-agreement in Washington.

It’s a little bit difficult to know how seriously to take this tale of Karpov’s. There were certainly rumors of a hush-hush meeting between Karpov and Fischer in 1976, but I have never before read a detailed account of it.

The thing about the story that’s a bit suspicious is that Karpov comes out looking awfully good. He and Fischer agreed except for one little sticking point, but — darn it! — that mean old Soviet government kept them from playing the match. Aw, shucks. Better luck next time, and Karpov gets the title.

Here is what one reader of the Russian “64” magazine has to say about Karpov’s article and his supposed willingness to play a match against Fischer:

“One doesn’t wave one’s fists around after the fight is over! This isn’t the first time we have seen something like this from you, Anatoly Evgenievich [Karpov]. I’ve heard more than once about how you “wanted” to play Fischer and Kasparov. Unfortunately, I’ve only heard it from your mouth.”

A little harsh. How hard would most people actually fight to play a very long and tough match to win a world title that your opponent is handing to you? If only those typed documents from the Phillippine embassy would turn up, then Karpov’s story might have a little bit more veracity. Until then, I would take it with a grain of salt.

My opinion is that some of the above tale is true. But in reality, I feel Fischer was never going to play anyone ever again. His ego would never let him lose the title over the board.  

I think Fischer had gone over Karpov’s games by this time and knew losing was possible, if not probable.

Chess history is that much poorer as that match was never happening.

Friday, November 10, 2023

LCCC Not Meeting Nov 13, 2023 Officially - And There Are Several Ways to Play Chess!

 


LCCC will NOT be happening on November 13 officially due to the road construction making traffic a nightmare. Some of us my brave it, but it is not a normal meeting night. But normally;

The Livingston County Chess Club meets every Monday night between

4pm and 10pm

at the Buffalo Wild Wings in the Green Oak Mall in Brighton, MI. 

Stop in for some friendly chess, good food and 'refreshments'.

Everyone of all ages and playing strength are welcome to attend. And free lessons to all beginners!

In Club news, we have been playing our Action Tournament. After four exciting rounds and two Armageddon rounds, we have a champion; Vince V! Congratulations Vince!

We chess players already know that standard chess is as close to an infinite game as there is. With 9 million possible moves in the first 3 moves, 288 billion after the first 4 moves, and that the number of possible moves for all possible games, is more than the number of atoms in the visible universe, it is safe to say that you will never get bored!

But…….some people like even more ‘variety’. Hence the invention of chess derivatives or variants.

I will leave out chess training derivatives, such as “pawn wars”, “Queen vs 8 pawns” and “Knights Move Only” types. Those things help beginners lock down how the more difficult pieces move.

I am also leaving out derivatives that require special boards or sets, I am also leaving out the “Team” variants of game variants of “Bughouse” and “Crazy House” (see photo). Although those are fun to play!

Here is a list of just some of them that your scribe thinks are the best. That is not to say that the ones left out or better or worse. Wikipedia did an excellent job of listing almost all of them (see List of Chess Variants on that site.

Ø Fischer 960 or 960 Random: The pawns are normal but the back rank pieces are “mixed up”. The only two rules are that the bishops must be on opposite colors and the king must be in between the two rooks for castling purposes. There are phone apps that will randomize the pieces for you.

Ø Transcendental Chess: Same as Fischer 960, but the set up does not have to mirror each other. You just hit the app twice for two different set ups.

Ø King of the Hill: First one to move his King legally to the center squares; e4, e5, d4 or d5.

Ø Racing Kings: First one to move his King to their 8th rank. Captures are allowed on your opponent’s King to win, but there are no checks or checkmates.

Ø Three-check Chess: Check your opponent's king 3 times for the win. Obviously, a perpetual check is now a win!

Your humble scribe enjoys Random 960 very much but would consider playing these other variants listed above.

Never played these, but consider these variants also;

Ø Deity Chess: Bishop also moves like a knight!

Ø Atheist Chess: Knight also moves like a bishop!

Ø Agnostic Chess: Rooks moves like a knight and also like a bishop, but only one square diagonally.

Ø Chauvinist Chess: Rooks also moves like a bishop and a knight, and the queens are not used to give the Kings some peace and quiet.