Update for Week 13

Super Friends team members completed 80 games over the last two weeks, bringing the total count of finished matches to 457. As of Saturday night, our team rating was at 1241, which moved us down to 130th place in the GameKnot team tables (our first time out of the top-100 since we first appeared on the established teams list in August). Many of our losses came from timeouts rather than poor play, and we've spent most of the last two weeks in the top-20 teams, so it shouldn't take long before we're back up into the top-100.

Send me a message if you're having trouble keeping up with the number of matches I've assigned. I can always give you fewer games or ask other teams for longer limits (up to 7 days per move).

Our team record for the two weeks on finished matches was 36 wins, 36 losses, and 8 draws, bringing our total to 217/211/29 for a team score of positive 6. Wins in the two-week period came in from 1987DODGE, BEANOBUDDY, BRISTEN, CHECKING4FUN, DALEMAN, DODGER69, ETERNAL_SHADOW, HOME_ALONE_MARV, JASQUET, JVOLD, PIZZAKEITH, PUPPY_KING, RKBA6, ROKHOUND, SIR_LANCELOT, and THELLOO.

We gained three new members in the last two weeks, bringing our team up to a total of 33. New members include: CROCODILOPOLIS, EDGATAN, and TREVO33. Welcome to Super Friends!

Anyone can make anonymous comments on this site, but you have to be a member to make posts like this one. E-mail me at dirtwindow@myway.com if you would like to have me sign you up with a username and password for posting messages.

Analyze This

Mike_maxted recently lost this match against nranil1, and sent me the following message:

"I wonder if we could publish the game on the SF site and see if anyone can suggest where I went wrong?"

Take a look at the game, and share any insights you have.

Is chess as fun as it used to be?

This article exerpt comes from the San Antonio Express-News.

Some things in sports hardly change: the height of a basketball net, the length of a football field or the circumference of a baseball diamond.

Chess is different: evolution, change, even a variety of forms characterize this very unusual sport. Astonishingly, a game can take six or more hours to play. But there are also specialists in one-minute chess.

As the exploration of opening moves probes deeper and deeper, the chess battleground itself is being redefined. In an increasing number of today's game, the first 15 or 20 moves may have been played before.

And a once quintessential human role is changing. In a July interview, Vladimir Kramnik estimates that 80 percent of opening preparation depends on computer analysis which often substitutes for human analysis, creativity and insight.

The knowledge explosion limits human mastery in another way, says Kramnik. Today's grandmasters concentrate of necessity on a narrower repertoire of openings. Finding themselves frequently on unfamiliar ground, they are more willing to accept draws.

Update for Week 11

Super Friends team members completed 90 games over the last two weeks, bringing the total count of finished matches to 377. As of Saturday night, our team rating was up to 1353, which moved us up 60 spots to 32nd place in the GameKnot team tables (our highest-ever, end-of-week rating!)

Our team record for the two weeks on finished matches was 42 wins, 41 losses, and 7 draws, bringing our total to 181/175/21 for a team score of positive 6. Wins in the two-week period came in from 1987DODGE, BILLYTHEWONDERGOAT, DALEMAN, DODGER69, ETERNAL_SHADOW, GOGETEM, HOME_ALONE_MARV, JAMES55, JASQUET, JVOLD, LETHAL_MUTANT, MRUCK, PIZZAKEITH, PUPPY_KING, RKBA6, ROKHOUND, SIR_LANCELOT, SJMACK, and THELLOO.

We lost one member over the last two weeks, leaving us with a solid group of players, 30 in all. Feel free to extend an invitation to players you know. Anyone can sign up to join Super Friends by visiting our team profile page.

E-mail me at dirtwindow@myway.com if you would like to have me sign you up with a username and password for posting messages at this site.

Guerila Fighter

Island chess match memorializes local grandmaster and Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. He long claimed that the game developed his intellect and an ability to think strategically.

Chess Rehab

"Chess is better than selling crack," he says. "It's better than stealing, than pimping. It's better than doing prostitution. It's all we have."

The Fable-Makers Have a New Story

Two of three top grandmasters, including former world champion Ruslan Ponomariov, lost in the first of four rounds of the “People vs Computers” match at the Bilbao International Chess Festival in Spain, it was learned Thursday.

Is this a repeat of the John Henry and Paul Bunyan legends? If this is simply a repeat of man vs. machine, what exactly is at stake? Isn't the result inevitable?

Intuition

Once upon a time, when the word "geek" had nothing to do with computers, a scientist named John von Neumann designed a giant "calculation machine" with thousands of vacuum tubes and switches.

It could perform 10,000 commands per minute, but it was approximately the size of Rhode Island - which is why the word "laptop" wasn't included in its description.

Von Neumann was one of a group of government scientists hired to come up with a device to speed up the tedious process of calculating mathematical equations. Instead, the scientists started playing around with Von Neumann's machine and came up with a chess program. As the story goes, the only person the computer could beat was someone who'd only learned the game the previous week.

"That was because computers don't play by intuition," said Angelina Thomas of the Hemet Chess Club. "That's the difference. We put a man on the moon before we built a computer that could beat a chess master."

So what exactly is intuition? Do we truly rely on a "sense of the board" over tried-and-true logic? How would you develop that kind of loosey-goosey skill?

Fitting Chess into a Disabled Life

Jamie Duif Calvin was an obsessive reader and an avid chess player, one the top 100 women in the US. But then disability struck, not as a graceful transition, but "more like falling overboard in the middle of the night into a dark, cold, choppy sea." However, thanks to modern computer technology she has taken up chess again. Here is Duif's story.

Update for Week 9

Super Friends team members completed 43 games this week, bringing the total count of finished matches to 287. As of Saturday night, our team rating was down to 1271, which moved us down 52 spots to 92nd place in the GameKnot team tables (still in the top-100!)

Our team record for the week on finished matches was 17 wins, 21 losses, and 5 draws, bringing our total to 139/134/14 for a team score of positive 5. Wins this week came in from 1987DODGE, ADAMSKI, BORBA, DODGER69, ETERNAL_SHADOW, JASQUET, JVOLD, LETHAL_MUTANT, PIZZAKEITH, ROKHOUND, and SIR_LANCELOT.

Super Friends added one new member for a team record 31 players as of Saturday night: BRISTEN (on Sept. 27). Welcome to Super Friends!

Feel free to extend an invitation to players you know. Anyone can sign up to join Super Friends by visiting our team profile page.

E-mail me at dirtwindow@myway.com if you would like to have me sign you up with a username and password for posting messages at this site.