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‘whoa mike! what did I ever do to you?’

You know, I just can’t hold back a large (but wry…) smile whenever I hear news like this. Call me vengeful, spiteful, childish or just plain vindictive but when I see all these massive examples (sorry, allegations ) of fraud (financial mismanagement) and corruption (poor accounting?) in the western world I sit back and think; are African nations really that bad compared to these ‘masters of the game’?

Check the link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7444083.stm

Of course, there are the other stories about continued scandals regarding to UK MP’s/MEP’s expenses misuse and the MoD contract for Chinook Helicopters which came with inappropriate software and have been in storage (at cost) for several years now - an aside, the person who signed the contract is allegedly very difficult to locate. 

The second and fourth round produced a couple of interesting games. Yeah, inaccurate play in patches on both sides but overall, two very interesting games of Chess. Check out the fourth round.

Below, there are a few pix from the lovely little town of Oxford and the magnificient Exeter College.  

Very nice Chess Congress over this past weekend. Exeter College in the quaint town of Oxford was the venue. Funny enough, the room in which the open section was played had the amusing label (for Chess purposes, a misnomer );  Quarell Room.

Okay, done with the mundane stuff. I somehow (unsurprisingly) ended up in what appears to be my regular Congress position; a shared second/first place. Ah well…

Congress report coming up: pics, games, a blitz tourney, chicken tikka and a surfeit of C2H5OH.

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Kanu is the type of person that makes me proud to support my country, look up the after game footage from the FA Cup at Wembley and check the sweat shirt he had on, this is the message on it: ‘I love Nigeria’.

Portsmouth for the UEFA Cup!!!

There’s a word we use to describe it; ‘amorosis‘, otherwise known as ‘Chess blindness’ or ‘parallax‘ in some scientific circles . Painful as the game below was for Mr Bacrot, at least us patzers have hope in Chess when we see that even the super GM’s are capable of the occassional blunder. I just had to put up the picture from the final position, it’s Black to move after Qe7+. (apologies Etienne).

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The girl had it all planned perfectly. Get married to the octogenarian millionaire and screw him out of his fortune (literally). Everything was on course, the marriage was about to be consumated on the wedding night in the penthouse suite of the exclusive hotel when the old man suddenly brought out a set of nose and ear plugs. And what are those for ?, she asked. There’re two things I can’t stand, he replied; screaming and the smell of burning rubber.

And this neat one: The 75yr old man was about to get married to a nubile teenager so he decided to visit his Doctor for a quick checkup. After the examination, the Doctor said to him; you know, at your age, getting married to a teenager can lead to a sudden death. Looking the Doctor straight in the eye he replied; if she dies, she dies.

I’ve always enjoyed playing the Alekhine’s. It’s been a very useful tool for me over the years, particularly when I’ve wanted to take my opponents off the beaten track. Because of the essentially ‘provocative’ nature of this opening, you’re odds on to be in unexplored territory as early as the 7th move. In these days of mass computer-analysis driven Chess, the ability to steer a game into relatively unknown areas is very useful for those of us that like to ‘roll up our sleeves’ and ‘dig into a good game of Chess’.