Thinking about it, if I decide to vent my true feelings about this ‘valentine’ miasma, the ‘acid’ generated might just eat through this post and corrode this whole blog. But, seeing as I don’t want to bring out Mr. Jekyll tonight, maybe I’ll just go for the ’service with a smile’ approach.

Okay, this is Val season. This is when ‘enterprising’ young guys out there might just need a batch of HM!’s and GM!’s. Hey, feminists out there, please no grumbles. As a member of the male race, I have to focus on advice to my breed. But, that said, I think I might have a few GM!’s in the bag for the ladies.

Watch this space for the Good Move! Guide to the February Blues.

Attributed to Julius Caesar at the crossing of the Rubicon: “the die is cast”.

Ever had that feeling you’ve been ’snookered’? Been roused into motion from your preferred state of inertia by forces you would deem unfriendly/unwanted? Y’all know the popular saying that goes; “between Scylla (the rock) and Charybdis (the whirlpool)”, or in plainer english; “between a rock and a hard place” right? I guess the general assumption is that it is only at certain critical times in our lives that we find ourselves in this precarious position isn’t it? Wrong!

I postulate that we are ALWAYS between Scylla and Charybdis. The only thing is, we are sometimes forced to wake up to this uncomfortable reality, ok, I know; we’d all like to remain in our more or less constant sleepwalking half-aware dream state wouldn’t we? Yeah right. What was that one about ‘pigs’ and ‘levitation’ again?

Anyway, it is at these occassional points of clarity that we ‘backbenchers’ and ‘professional fence sitters’ say to ourselves; “s**t!, these guys have involved me! d**n!”. O’ pitiful man. ‘Involved’ from the moment of birth, just takes time to realize this harsh fact. 

This is the point when we commonly say to ourselves: iacta alea est. “the die is cast”. “in for a penny…etc etc”.

Now, how do we proceed after finding out we’ve been snookered? The Good Move! Guide!!!  Moves galore!, moves galore!

Anybody need some Good Moves! ?

ok, looking at the Good Move! Guide again, what recommendations would it be possible to give a person like Ashley Cole, the Chelsea FC star thet’s been caught off his guard by the ‘Blonde Brigade ‘.

Let’s try: ‘Ashley to Cheryl’; “Darling, you know these things don’t mean anything, they are daily distractions in the life of everyday men and only serve to remind me of how much more important/valuable you are to me than the legion of ‘blonde bubbleheads’ out there” GM!

Or: ‘Ashley to Cheryl’; “Hey lady, I’ve made this painful sacrifice for us, look what Britney has done with the ‘controversial/messed up star’ routine. She’s defying all the stock exchange predictions! Now we can move up the celebrity ladder!” HM!!

Ah…, if only people had full access to the Good Move! Guide.

You know, just flashed into my head that a lot of people out there probably don’t even know what the concept of an Olympiad/Olympic Gold Medal is, much less one for an achievement in the game of Chess.

At the biennial World Chess Olympiad, approximately 145 (one hundred and fourty five) Nations present male and/or female National Chess teams to participate in the Olympiad in whatever host country has been delegated to host the event (this year it’s in Dresden, Germany, sometime in the third quarter of the year).

The male teams are normally made up of the top rated six players in the individual Nation and they play at the Olympiad on four active boards with two reserve boards (every match between Nations is four against four). The female teams consist of four players (three active and one reserve board).

Generally, the event is normally a twelve or thirteen round tournament, following a league format with a ’swiss’ pairing system. In a nutshell, at the beginning of the event, participating countries are divided into two groups, the highest ranked Nations (based on cumulative individual rating points of National participants) are placed in the ‘upper group’ while the other half or ‘lower group’ of Nations take the other side. The two groups are then matched against each other, after the first round, the same division occurs to make the pairings for the second round (based now on total points achieved per round) and so on and so forth.

The event is scored both on an individual and group basis. And so for example; the player participating on the ‘first board’ plays a certain number of games, with this he/she has a chance to win a Medal based on ‘individual percentage scores’ while the total points of all the played boards at the end of the event will indicate the ’overall winner Nation’.

A rather simplistic overview, I know, but at least this might assist somewhat in a definition of a ‘Chess Olympic Gold Medal’. Not an easy feat I tell you, be it ‘individual’ or ‘overall’, that’s why I laugh with utter amusement at some Chess players who seem to think that there is a ‘tree’ called ‘the Chess Olympiad’ and it is possible to ’pick’ one of the ‘Medals’ that grow off it. Ah, these Chess enthusiasts

‘Blitz. Blitzen. Blitzkreig. Lightning. Superspeed’: on the other side of the ring…, in the ’red corner’, it’s… : Chess.

So how do you match these two ideas? Super fast ligtning speed and the geriatric game of Chess. Impossible right? Well, not so! Blitz Chess, or ‘Blitz’ as it is most commonly known is a highly entertaining and stimulating form of the world famous mind conditioning leader; Chess. Played with a standard Chess clock (essentially two clocks joined together with a start/stop lever), the blitz form is always guaranteed to bring thrills, spills, etc to the Chess arena. There are many different time formats that are employed in blitz but the most common would be ‘three minute blitz’, ‘five minute blitz’, ‘Fischer timing’ (time added per move made) and the increasingly popular ‘bullet’ -  ’one and two minute blitz games’. All in all, if you look at the fact that most standard tournament time controls for Chess games range from a minimum of about three to ten hours per game, the categories of blitz/rapid Chess are a real ‘breath of fresh air’ for both spectators of the game and those players who love the game of Chess but simply don’t have all day to sit around staring at some inanimate wooden/plastic/whatever Chess pieces.

More talk about blitz later.                       

“Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.” Alphonse Karr (1849)

The more things change, the more they are the same. Or; ‘the more things change, the more we remain the same’.

Sounds contradictory doesn’t it? I mean, how can you mix ‘change’ and ‘constancy’ in the same sentence/definition? Well, I look at this as another facet of the ‘world is a stage…’ idea, obviously, if we all are simply ‘actors’ in the ‘game of life’ then it does not really matter if the script changes from scene to scene, play to play, one movie to another.

Michael Franks: ”the music begins/and the titles fade in/starring you and me…”, “love is like two dreamers dreaming/the exact same dream/just another technicolour romance on the screen…”, “we love and we fight/but it’s all day for night just a masquerade/we’re real til the red light is off/then we go take our faces off/like two clowns in a sideshow…”, “the feeling is already gone/I don’t know why I’m going on/can’t remember the ending…” 

Taken from this perspective, the onus remains once again; recognize your part in the frame of existence, play your part and play it well. We do not change; we are, and always have been; ‘actors, playing a part in a changing script’.

I guess on a worldly view, would it matter if: ‘Obama becomes US president?’, ‘Tiger Woods and Federer relinquish their strangle holds on golf and tennis?’, ‘Asia/Africa become the next world superpowers?’ ‘the sun winks out of existence?’, ‘life is found to exist on Mars?’, ‘England win the football world cup ???!?!’ 

This is a very interesting piece on the educational aspects of the game of Chess and the potential for children to profit intellectually from the introduction of Chess into schools as a taught subject. 

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=4412

I’ve put the intro to the article below. Happy reading.   

Outsmart the Guards, Capture the Flag
26.01.2008 – Igor Sukhin is a chess teacher with a method. The author of around 100 books – from chess to crosswords to mathematical puzzles – totalling around 1.3 million copies in sales, has developed special methods for teaching children the game. Especially 4-6-year-olds, for whom the study of chess dramatically improves their grades in school. Bisik-Bisik by Edwin Lam.

and there I was the other day, driving over to my friend’s place for an afternoon of football and drinks when I found myself being chased and hounded by this extremely horny woman.

so, eventually, I did what any gentleman would do faced with such;

I moved over to let her overtake. ah well…

Ok, second round, up against Ecuador. A good win for me in a complicated position, but there was something interesting during the game. Walking around inbetween my moves as I am normally wont to do, I remember running into my opponent from the first game, the GM. We had actually become like ‘friends’ sort of, anyway, we ran into each other inbetween moves in our respective games and after saying ‘hellos’ he asked if I wanted to have alook at his game - I think he had just played a novelty. Me, have a look at a GM’s game (?) Wow! Third round, an IM from the UAE, another tense victory. The fourth round, a Bolivian FM and by this time I was really in the zone. My first three games ever in the World Chess Olympiad and I had 2.5 points from 3. The game was tough but I managed to play some really good chess and pull off the win. The Olympiad was really becoming a party. 3.5pts from 4 games.

Meanwhile inbetween the chess games (one 7hr game a day) there was plenty of socializing, vodka drinking, exploration of new territory and general good times, who says chess players are all about boring stuff?

Then, all of a sudden, there were rumours of a possible Medal winning performance in our chess camp, apparently there was a chance of actually winning an Olympic Medal. hmm…. Now this was all news to me, I came to the Olympiad to play chess and have fun, suddenly there was this weight of expectation from a possible achievement (!) The result? I started to take the games seriously and as always happens; “the best laid plans…”, and disaster struck! Having performed effortlessly in the first four games against titled higher ranked players, I was up against a player from the Faroe Islands that I was higher rated than. Well…, so what did I do? I started by looking for games played by my opponent (which I hadn’t done for others in the previous rounds) and generally putting myself under all sorts of tension. The result was predictable. I had a better position on the board, chances to win and I threw everything away. I guess the moral of this story is: “don’t put your hand in the finger”.

C y’all in pt 5.   

just simply Mode9.

There’s no other way to cut it. I’ve always been a fan of rap music and of course, as a rap music fan, you have to get your boundaries and groups sorted out. Whe I want to listen to general inspirational and political rap music I go for Tupac, Nas, Public Enemy etc…, for smooth flow it’s the Notorious B.I.G., Big Punisher etc…, ‘blingism’ will probably be Fabolous, Diddy, Big Tymers etc.

Now Mode9. The guy simply tweaks my grey cells whenever I listen to him. He’s my ‘a = bx+c+z’ kind of guy - you aint got the time to figure out punchlines and metaphors, stay away from this guy. He’s the ‘thinking’ rap music fan’s hero.

I guess the drawback a rapper like this faces is the fact that he always seems to be in attack mode; apart from that, there seems to be a shortage of intelligent rap music fans out there. Ah well, such is life.

Malcolm IX, Pentium IX and E’ Pluribus Unum. Go look for these albums.

The album, Pentium IX has some absolutely slamming trax, check these lines from the title track:  (chorus) “wordplay/metaphor/punchlines/I flex/computer dialects/pentium ix” “…rip your notepad apart/reboot, ‘cos you’ve had a bad start” “tap the space bar/give me room, you little fart” etc etc. There are some really great tracks and beats on this album also, ‘respekt’, ‘lagos state of mind’, 419 state of mind pt2 revised’, ‘king of the jungle’ amongst many others.

Oh yes, did I forget to mention? He’s proudly Nigerian.