i got melo as 800 elo.

The forum needs to have an NBA player chess tournament where we guess who would win each round. Or would that go in SE: Fantasy Sports subforum?

Put it here imo. Sounds fun.

Tbf, Melo is probably much stronger at blitz than OTB. CP3 probably GOAT chess player but if I were a TD at a tournament he was playing in I'd probably hide somewhere far away from his board.

Sounds like a great idea.

Dwight Howard replied to me on twitter about a year ago. He said he was on the chess team in high school.

You could put it in this forum, but it would obv get more traffic in SE.

Lol Howard. I got him as 300 ELO. No way that dude could sit still and be quiet during actual tournament games.

Yeah after his ongoing and pathetic INdecision his last year in Orlando, then opting in, instead of looking to sign with the team he wanted to Brooklyn, and then the lack of actually fully developing his offensive game...

I have him as like 600 ELO.


Take the 12 best chess players from the NBA for a tournament, and I'd wager that Kobe would win the event.

#KobeSystem

McL - who do you have Bill Walton vs. Phil Jackson?

Jeff Gundy vs. Stan Gundy?

Carlsen's AMA on Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comment...e_world_chess/

Anyone located in Vegas or will be there for WSOP interested in putting together a chess tournament during the series? I'm sure there would be plenty of interest

The National Open runs in Vegas I think it's first week of June.

Phil Jackson hands down.

I'd say that Bill Walton would be the romantic type of chess player, employing lots of gambits. Meanwhile Phil Jackson would be the solid, 1. e4 and Sicilian player.

Jeff Van Gundy, but I imagine Stan would be no slouch. So the matches would be somewhat close.

#BrotherRivalry

I imagine Phil Jackson (White, here) would employ this sort of opening setup:

Rei, Yugo:

re: chess

Who you got Kevin Durant or Tim Duncan?

Or rather, Kevin Durant or Lebron James?

LeBron had a cartoon show "The Lebrons" and at the end of the first episode he has "kid LeBron" playing chess against a friend of his.

So he's clearly a fan of chess.

This is the part where kid Lebron is playing chess: http://youtu.be/Q5ZNXp77RhE?t=5m38s

Duncan in a long game. He had lots of European teammates to learn from and he is, after all, the big fundamental.

Durant in blitz though. I bet Westie & him play a bunch of it.

Got Lebron over KD. Bron is probably immensely naturally talented and does seem to have the social acumen of a chess player.

You know who probably is legit good? kirilenko. Dude is Russian and spent half of his career injured to study up.

A couple semi-relevant links re: basketball and chess:

http://20secondtimeout.blogspot.com/...be-lebron.html
http://main.uschess.org/content/view/7853/141/
http://www.chess.com/blog/billwall/a...who-play-chess

looks like it's june 13-15 this year, good timing for me I think.

My chess club got coverage in our local paper! http://www.heraldandnews.com/breakin...tml?mode=story

Also, that article fails to mention that I got the best win of my life in round 1, beating a 1901: http://www.chessvideos.tv/chess-game...r.php?id=90660

Or that I had the most painful almost win of my life in round 2, managing to find myself up a piece for a pawn against a 2021 - and then blowing it in the endgame and losing: http://www.chessvideos.tv/chess-game...r.php?id=90671

Or that in round 3 I was comfortably up two pawns on a 1651, and then straight up blundered my queen.

Gah! So close to being just that amazing break-through day I needed to *prove* I'm not a Class C player, but rather am stronger than that. I still feel that actual review of the games overall bears it out, but nonetheless I really want the results that back it up, and will actually cause the rating change! Still, all in all yesterday was a very good day

Nice game! Painful to have lost some winning positions, but winning won games really is a huge part of chess. To be as good as those guys you have to not only take advantage of their mistakes and convert those positions, but also mysteriously cause the class C scrubs to blunder away winning positions against you.

btw the two links both go to the game you won.

Second link fixed

that second game is pretty nasty I'm afraid, I think neither player really deserved to win

IMO in the Gruenfeld you should be trying to play ...c5 every game as early as possible, to break up White's centre. There are a handful of situations where it's not possible, specifically in the Qb3 line and some g3 positions, but for the most part if it doesn't look terrible it's probably the right idea. Here after 6. e3 the main line goes c5 dxc5 Qa5, and in this position he doesn't have the Qb5 resource he had in the game. Maybe 6...c6 is also OK but it's not really in the spirit of the opening.

You did very well to complicate the position once you were worse, nice tactics and eventually he fell for something.

Did you resign in the final position? Or did you lose on time/stop recording moves here? It's worth knowing that Q vs R is extremely hard to win, GM Walter Browne famously lost a bet playing it against a computer. I would not resign this position even against a GM. Losing the h-pawn shouldn't change anything here, if anything it might give you some stalemate tricks. Along these lines it's also worth knowing that there are a few fortresses (absolute draws) possible with Q against R + P - for example, on move 56 if your h-pawn was on g7 instead you would be able to draw - don't move the pawn, just shuffle the R back and forth from h6 to f6 and move the K if you are in check.

My clock went under 2 minutes somewhere around move 40. We had a 15 second delay but no increment. When the h-pawn dropped it was recorded on the back of my scoresheet as move 43, because I was trying to get to 50 and had re-numbered the moves toward that end, but of course the capture reset the 50 move counter and at that point my clock showed 12 seconds. I stopped recording then, but I've never studied QvR and 15 seconds per move wasn't enough to work out OTB how best to put up a fight, and it took about 10 more moves before the rook fell and I resigned.

I do know that QvR is famous for being hard to win, and pinned a lot of hopes on that once I blundered my way into allowing him to queen.

As for the opening, I definitely struggled to find a plan. I did look at 6. ... c5 but at the time somehow concluded that I couldn't play it because d5 was too weak. Hence playing the more passive c6 instead. Then I saw Qb3 as piling on d5 further, and so e6. Looking back over it I see where this obsession with d5 was unnecessary on my part.

You can deal with the pressure on d5 by going dc4 at a suitable time (normally after rc1). It's not much of a concession in the centre since he won't have a d pawn.