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!
A reminder that next week our 1st Annual Duck Chess Tournament will begin. Be there by 6pm or so to sign up for FREE! The time limit for the tournament will be 45 minutes for each player with a 5 second delay. The tournament round will begin around 6:30 pm.
For those of you not familiar with Duck Chess, the rules can be found on-line. It is a variant of chess where after a player moves, he must also move “the duck” to any un-occupied square on the board. And the Duck Chess Rules will be available for all participants the night of the tournament, so no worries there.
The tournament will go 1 round per week for 3 rounds or maybe 4, so keep that in mind when signing up. Playing in every round of the tournament gets you an entry into our drawing for that beautiful wood chess set valued at over $150!
Now for a little lesson for all chess players, but especially for all you “advanced beginners”.What is an Advanced Beginner you might ask? Well, your humble scribe defines one as a player that knows how the pieces move and knows the basic strategies of ‘developing your pieces’, ‘protecting the king by castling’ and ‘controlling the center.’
What normally happens at this point is the player wants to learn some “openings” that he hears veteran players talk about that are played. Thais an 'advanced beginner.'
While it is a good idea to learn some openings, you don’t want to just memorize them. You need to know the reason and/or strategy behind the moves. If you don’t do that, you can walk yourself into bad situations.
As an illustration, I first need to explain what a book called the Chess Informant is.
It is a book series that captures almost all of the games played in major tournaments since the last issue was published. It used to be the bible for all Grandmasters as they poured over the games of their future opponents, and to see if there were any new opening theory nuggets to be tried.
Well in 1987, this game was played and placed in the Informant book; GM Miles – GM Christensen, San Franscisco Open:
1. e4 , e5 2. Nf3 , Nf6 3. Nxe5 , d6 4. Nf3 , Nxe4 5. Nc3 , Bf5 – (see diagram) with the Informant giving Black’s last move as an (N) for Novelty! The game went on for another 15 lazy moves before the players agreed to a draw.
What was not mentioned in the book (and how would they know anyway?) was that Miles and Christensen had agreed to a draw before the round started.
Well, the young future world junior champion - and future World Champion, - GM Viswanathan Anand did not know that either! And computers were not used to analyze positions yet before publishing, as computers were not yet as good as the best players at that time.
So, without checking, Anand played this opening with Black against GM Alonso Zapata in Beil, 1988 - to hopefully surprise and scare his opponent with this ‘Novelty’.
Well Zapata played 6. Qe2 in less than a minute!
Anand instantly saw that 6. ….Qe7 loses to 7. Nd5 and that 6. …d5 loses to 7. d3. So, the future chess world champion, Anand, resigned on the spot!
History was made. This gave the world the shortest loss ever by a GM in a tournament game!
So even the best, have lost by not knowing why certain opening moves are played. The moral is to learn and not memorize.
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