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[wobbly]

Posting a little chess history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp4FSTXyyi8

This is Spasky - Bronstein. It's the game from the start of James Bond: From Russia with Love. Kings Gambit. Spasky is the world champion who lost to Fischer, I hate that this is what he is famous for as he was a great player (and from what I understand a good human being). He is often overlooked, as he has an unusual style of play where he often enters chaotic positions and says ok, I don't understand the position, and you don't understand the position. I bet I can deal with this situation better than you can. It's a style which sees most of his games get passed over in instructional books, because the author is trying to explain a position and probably doesn't understand it either. Bronstein was one of those players good enough to be world champion who never made it. He drew a world championship match with Botvinnik and Botvinnik held the championship, because a draw fell to the defender. Very Crazy game.

[wobbly]

Managed a miniature the other day:

1. e4 d5 2. exd5 Nf6 3. c4 e6 4. dxe6 Bxe6 5. d4 Bb4+ 6. Nc3 Ne4 7. Qa4+ Nc6 8. Ne2 Bxc4 9. Be3 Bxe2 10. Kxe2 Bxc3 11. Qc2 Nxd4+ 12. Bxd4 Qxd4 13. bxc3 Nxc3+ 14. Ke1 O-O-O 15. Qf5+ Kb8 16. Be2 Qd2+ 17. Kf1 Qxe2+ 18. Resigns

I don't normally play the Icelandic Gambit (3 ... e6), I just know it by reputation, there's a reason most people just allow black to recover the pawn with 3. d4 (and white is better there). Anyway 3. c4 is playable (Stockfish says white is actually better, though it also preferences 3. d4), but its super risky if you don't know what you are doing. My memory of theory was 5. d4 is a mistake and 5. d3 is theory. My memory is wrong, 5. Nf3 is main line, and 5. d4 is second best (and better for white). It's only after 6. Nc3 that white was worse (by not much), and after 7. Qa4+ much worse (maybe holdable). After 9. Be3 its losing by force.

Anyway not how I usually play. I'd rather take free pawns, than gambit them, so it was satisfying to win in a style I don't normally play.

[Starver]

I "know how to play chess", much the same as I might know what the switches, pedals and levers do when sat in a driving seat, but don't necessarily know how to drive a car[1]. I'm well beyond the level of "so what does the horsey do?", but generally find myself defeated by anyone who can make even a half-hearted feint to force me to open up a seemingly unrelated area of the board that suddenly their long-range pieces can stab a threat through. (I can always spot how it happened, but never developed the 'feel' for the developing domination that I end up succumbing to, or how to foil it[2].) Most computer programs that I played in the old days (early home computers) outclassed me, just because there was generally no "totally dumb, practically zero lookahead" difficulty setting, and no self-respecting chess-player would want to play that.

But I've been having an interesting time analysing this scenario, in particular how Black has (properly) played their pieces, for example which two or three (or four?) moves the black queen used to get to where she is (depending upon whether black realised that white wasn't going to be the usual threat). I was going to mention it at the time of publication (at the end of January), but I got tied up in other things before I got around to it, and have just been reminded.

Of course, my actual analysis of what I worked out is saved to a different device from this one but, spotting the thread being bumped again, I thought I'd better at least entertain you with two different tales of bad playstyle, maybe contribute more solidly to the thread in the future.


[1] I do know how to drive a car, as it happens, although some vehicles tend to have vastly different ideas of how the rear screen-washer gets activated, but I still like this analogy.

[2] In some ways, though, I'm like the bad poker player... I can totally non-plus a good player, at least until they realise how inept I actually am, and that I'm not actually a strategic genius keeping them on the hop...

[wobbly]

I was not sure whether to bump this thread, or post in random questions. For a while I've been idly curious about games from Kirsan Ilyumzhinov.

For those who don't follow politics from Chess or former Soviet countries he was the dictator of Kalmykia and at the same time president of FIDE (international chess association). FIDE is like FIFA in that it's very corrupt, just with less money and more insanity. To add to Kirsans feats of fame he is also an alien abductee. I'll maybe add a link to him talking about it, but otherwise its easy to google and find.


Anyway question/what I'm curious about, he was supposedly National champion of Kalmykia, so where are his games? This is the only one I can find.

https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1600034

[Duuvian]

Sorry, I don't know much about Chess. Here is an article that mentions FIDE though

Exposed: The links between world chess and Russia's war machine
https://www.politico.eu/article/how-vladimir-putin-uses-chess-arkady-dvorkovich/