Not much bipedal locomotion imo. More like semi-permanent gluteal indolence.

how about a 2+2 team match?

me, wlrs, rei, and pahala vs. gorgonian, bigpooch, damagor, and the yugoslavian's puppy.

you're no cat or dog

I'm playing in a blitz tournament tomorrow! Will be my first live tournament in three years, and only my second in the last decade. 3 min + 2 seconds, double swiss. If nothing else, should be good for some hilarity when I play a couple hundred points below where I should due to the inevitable rust.

Wei Yi beat Ding Liren today, and moved to a 3.5/4 score at the Chinese Championship. His live rating is now 2728.8, which among other things is A) Higher than Vachiere-Lagrave and B) High enough to be eligible to be selected as a wild card for the 2016 Candidates Match (if he stays 2725+ through the July rating list).

Of course he won't actually GET the wild card unless China somehow gets in a super late bid for the Candidates Tournament, all the unconfirmed rumors I've heard are that it will end up being in the United States. Still, go Wei Yi!!!

Found out that my old rating is a whole class higher than I remembered it as. I basically never looked at it (or thought about it) back then, and had mentally swapped a couple of digits in my memory. That made me feel good.

At this point I like Lichess a lot. I installed Styles and have just about every available addon graphic for Lichess installed. With all of the videos, trainers, visuals, forums, open source, etc, etc...yes - Lichess has far surpassed FICS at this point, IMO. Far. It's getting better every day...as you said it would.

Rei — You have an actual rating? Is part of the fun of vaguebooking a solid 25% of your posts in this forum the vagueness of it or simply b/c you really have that much of your "chess identity" tied up in ratings that it's too painful to share some dusty old one?

I guess I don't have to care but with every subsequent post I think more that it's a shame you don't play rated games somewhere online but at the same time maybe that would lead you into a spiral of doom based on how you seem to avoid it. You obviously love chess from pretty much every angle. So it seems playing should be overall very fun and enjoyable too.

Added a lichess section to my website for graphics:

http://gorgonian.******.com/lichessorg.html

Just 25%?

I'm probably going to start playing blitz on chess.com regularly in a month or two.

Fun three-minute game with a weakened engine: http://www.chessvideos.tv/chess-game....php?id=101850. I have Black. 1. c4 e5 with the Four Knights setup leads to awesome positions.

Cool game!

Tournament got changed to 7-round single swiss at the last minute.

3 min + 2 seconds per move is too fast for over the board play in my opinion, I prefer straight up 5-minute blitz with no increment. Here, you think for 30 or 45 seconds in a key spot and all of a sudden you're in danger of being flagged.

Round 1: loss as white vs. GM Bator Sambuev
Round 2: win as black vs. 1700
Round 3: loss as black vs. GM Maxim Dlugy
Round 4: win as white vs. 1700 11-year old
Round 5: loss as black vs. 2300
Round 6: win as white vs. 1335, but he played like a 1700
Round 7: loss as black vs. 2055

Really tough pairings, crosstable if you want to have a look.

I was pre-ranked as #21 of 40, so I drew the short straw and had to play on board one in the first round. My rating was about 50 points too high or too low in this tournament. I was on the cusp of each point category, and got paired against the highest rated of the 1.0/2's in round 3, and the 2.0/4's in round 5.

I had the white side of the Alekhine against Sambuev, made a minor blunder early (1. e4 Nf6 2. e5 Nd5 3. d4 d6 4. c4 Nb6 5. exd6 cxd6 6. Nc3 g6 7. Be3 Bg7 8.Qd2 O-O 9. Nf3 Bg4) and wasted away a minute deciding between bad options, went with 10. b3, yuck. Castled queenside and defended very well, but the game was basically lost right there.

Played my Stonewall Dutch all four times as black! Dlugy methodically tore it apart, fianchettoed kingside, then went Nh3-Nf4-Nd3-f3-e4-smash. Lost the key final round game when I finally got paired with someone of equal strength, when a win would've put me in a tie for 1st u2000.

Fun to play a couple of GMs, but pretty lousy draw overall. Good to be back in the saddle.

Congrats on the 980 rating!!

Magnus timed blindfold simul against three players. Action starts at six and a half.

Sweet jesus. Some verbal gems from Carlsen shortly after the 15, 16, and 20 minute marks!

even though i know this is trivially easy for him it's still awesome viewing. thanks for the link.

Those guys are all probably titled players, too, right?

15:25 "Black castled queenside..."
MC: "That was risky."
Crowd: Laughter.

16:44 "Black has 2:43 on board __"
MC: "...It's more relevant that the position is lost."
Crowd: Crickets

20:05
MC: "Board __, Knight d5 check. Mate on next move."
Crowd: Laughter

No chance they are titled. Middle guy was decent.

[–]Uber_NickUSCF 1800 4 points 1 day ago*
Board 1 is 1600 USCF:
http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlTnmtHst.php?12439045
Board 2 was the strongest at either 1800 or 1900 USCF:
http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlMain.php?12273990
http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlTnmtHst.php?12787591
The second link shows a history of being above 2000 in the past.
Board 3 was the weakest player. I don't think he's rated but 1200 is my estimate.


also i skipped the intro and didn't realise that was chris partlow

OK wow. I wasn't really paying close attention to their moves so much as his. Magnus did say the clock was a big factor, as he didn't feel like he had any time to do deep analysis. I like how he said all you have to do is keep track of 1 game at a time. YEP. It's that easy! His definition of the phrase "keep track" differs from mine.

I would have guessed B1 to be 1200-1300, B2 1800 or so, and B3 1200-1300. The b7-b5 pawn sac from B2 looked like a cool idea (I'm assuming he knew it was a pawn sac, since it'd be too obvious of a "blunder"). He missed Nxf4 (I think) after the subsequent liquidation and Qxb5.

lol this.

He told board 2 he had a good position up to a couple moves before the end.

Great comic. Really shows that there isn't much to separate the 2-10 players in the world, but a huge gap between Carlson and the rest.