Magnus Carlsen reacts beautifully to pawn sacrifice: Central knight with...

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The Boring System

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When you go out to play a game of chess, what do you hope for? A win would be nice, naturally, and I don't suppose many of us would keep playing unless we won a few. But there's little satisfaction in beating much weaker opponents, so we must want more than that. Being made to think, seeing ideas that we haven't seen before, taking the other guy on in a real struggle... isn't that what it's about? How, then, to explain a game like this? White plays the dullest opening he can think of; Black goes along with it. White offers a draw at move 15. Move 15! The position more than justifies the offer, and if we were two grandmasters playing for prize money, well, maybe it would all be understandable. But this is two club players trying to spend their evening doing something they enjoy. I played on a while in the hope that something would happen, but it never looked likely. Can either of us enjoyed this game? I know that I didn't. Well, people will play the Lo...
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Chess publisher downtime and alternative

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When posting earlier today, I noticed that none of the games were showing up on the blog. Apparently chesspublisher.com is suffering some sort of downtime. I guess this was always a risk for a blog relying on a third party to host its games. This prompted me to start looking into alternative methods for getting chess games onto the blog. I fairly quickly found the free LT PGN viewer - and fairly quickly realised that ChessPublisher appeared to be based on that work. (I can't remember whether ChessPublisher gave appropriate credit for this or not; and can't check while the site remains down). Then I figured out that I could use Google's servers (explicitly, Google pages ) to host something more or less equivalent to ChessPublisher. So, after some fiddling, I'm proud to present Barnet Elizabethans' Chess Club's very own PGN publisher, here . Much as in ChessPublisher, you enter your PGN and are given an HTML snippet to put into your blog. In a sense, of cou...
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Playing away

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Over at the Streatham & Brixton blog, Tom has been running a series of How To Improve type posts. I'm a bit slow off the mark, but a couple of them caught my eye, for differing reasons. The first was his recommendation to practise with a real board , setting up conditions to be as similar to tournament play as you can manage. I expect it's good advice; if nothing else it sounds like awfully hard work and I've a nasty feeling that this is the main thing that's required if you're serious about improving. What it reminded me of, though, was a match a year or two ago over at Wanstead (I think). I was playing a board or two below fellow-blogger kingscrusher, who had presumably been spending rather too much time playing online. Half an hour or so in he takes me to one side and says something like: "Dave, this over the board stuff, I'm finding it a bit unfamiliar. The thing is, it's very... it's very realistic isn't it?". Well, it mad...
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