Congratulations!

Poker players WOAT, but chess players have a pretty strong lean towards being antisocial IME. Bridge definitely better for socializing. Mileage prob varies heavily depending on how popular chess is in a given location though.

While reading your write-up I did notice myself thinking that it's a bit odd a long time (I'm assuming) poker player would even think things like "overrated" or whatever. It all evens out in the long run, .

Out of curiosity, how old are you and how much do you play and what other time do you invest in chess? I'm sure I should be opening a book and studying instead but, ok, asking you this is much easier.

Good post Unguarded. I'm trying to get to somewhere around where you are but very slowly due to being older and not having much time to devote to chess (and probably not as motivated), but your advice still applies.

In other news, the World Championship has been announced for London next November.

Thank you!

Oh, for sure... the social skills of chess players can be pretty lol. But many of these players are kind, good-hearted, and good sports. I was just comparing the moral standards of the average player in each game. I probably spend more time chatting with the kids and teenagers at my chess club than anyone else because they tend to be more sociable. Tournament directors also usually have strong social skills. I think I am also lucky in that my clubs have some very outgoing, interesting people. And while there are certainly some awkward types who come off as rude, I almost always find that they are pretty cool and don't mean anything by it. I had this guy a couple months ago who declined a draw in a symmetrical opposite colored bishop endgame. 1 hour and 30 moves later, it was still a dead draw. The tournament director has to stop the clock and declare it a draw so that we could finally go home. I was like "wow, what a dick my opponent is!" in my head. But now that I know him better, I have learned that he simply did not understand that continuing was pointless and that his coach taught him to play on no matter what like some of the old school Russian coaches used to do. In fact, he's one of the nicest guys at the club.

Hmmmm... I probably didn't make a ton of sense and most of my advice was somewhat tongue in cheek. After all, 1800 is still a long way from proving that I have any serious chess knowledge or the ability to impart what knowledge I have upon others. If you have the latest edition of Reassess Your Chess, I think that Silman's chapter on chess psychology is magnificent and mind-blowing. He basically argues that a macho, tough-as-nails, relentlessly optimistic mindset is worth at least 200 rating points and gives lots of examples of his "macho chess" mantra succeeding along with plenty of examples of common psychological meltdowns. He also argues that Lasker became an easy GOAT candidate due to his patience, relentless optimism, and endgame skill. He contends that these traits more than compensated for his less than ideal opening and tactical skills.

I consider myself a poker player with a chess problem lol. In the past, I tended to go through spurts where I studied and played frequently, got pissed when I didn't skyrocket to expert, and then quit for years. I was 1240 2 years ago and came back for 3 months. I prolly averaged 90 minutes per day of studying for those 3 months and shot up to 1450ish. I then completely quit for 8 months before coming back for 4 months and shooting up to 1630. I was probably averaging 2 hours per day of study during this time. I took 3 months completely off due to illness before returning again this August. In the past 2 months, I have really put my foot on the gas to make it to my life goal of 1800. I honestly think I have been playing and studying more than most of the FIDE top 100 these past 2 months. Recently, I have been playing 6-7 90/30 games per month and have cut way back on my internet blitz. I have also experimented with daily 25/10 games against Shredder since it plays more human-like than most programs. But its play is still unmistakably computerish. For example, it can be set on 1500 and will make some crazy, elaborate knight and bishop maneuver in the middlegame that nobody under 2200 would consider. And then a few moves later, it walks into a knight fork. But it is also helpful for me to train against Shredder since Shredder is more than happy play the opening I want to practice or play complicated endgames against me over and over. Good luck finding any takers if you ask some club players "I am working on complex, multi-piece endings... would you be interested in setting up some instructional positions and playing them out against each other?" I think consistency is more important than anything though. Our brains need to be taught that chess is as important as our workout routine, driving a car, cooking, showering daily, etc. I am 38 years old.

I was somewhat reluctant to answer that question because I suspect that you are subconsciously seeking excuses. I feel like it is important to realize that many old school GMs such as Lasker, Alekhine, and Botvinnik had PHDs or MDs and some even worked full time and were equally brilliant in other fields. I strongly believe that the notion that we must start extremely young is false, especially today since most of us have been playing video games since age 5-6 or so. I think that video games stimulate the same parts of our brains as chess. I have been a world class gamer, a world class poker player, and I believe I can become a world class chess player if I put my mind to it. Is this realistic? That is not the point. I have trained myself to genuinely believe that I am coming for Magnus because I believe that self-belief and optimism are crucial and worth at least 400 points. And you know what? Anyone who tells me otherwise is wrong in my mind and I am not having it any other way. Everyone and their dog told me that I would never make it in poker for countless reasons. I received no support from anyone until I made my first 6 figs in poker. And when I made it to the top in LHE, most people insisted that I was a luckbox who played like crap and that variance would catch me. It took a million+ hands on PTR to prove some of them wrong. The rest still think I am a dumbass

I have, of course, failed miserably countless times in my life due to my "**** the rest of the world" attitude. It used to crush me. Then it got better. Then it just became a natural part of the process for me. The world is full of people with low self-esteem who do not understand ambitious risk-takers and who will seek to break us down if we let them. But it is what genuinely makes me happy and I refuse to live my life any other way. I honestly believe that most extremely successful people make it because they failed 100 times and kept getting back up before the 10 count. They may have switched goals, but their relentless hard work and optimism never ceased!

Wall of text crits for 347892... eyes bleed!

If it's a passion/motivation issue, then by all means just have fun! If it is a confidence issue, believe in yourself and make it happen!

Oh, and a huge key that I did not mention... I briefly went back to school to study psychology last year and learned about the concept of "mastery orientation" vs. "performance orientation". A master orientation means focusing on constant learning and improvement rather than concrete goals. This makes it literally impossible to fail. We CAN definitely get better at tactics from month to month. We CAN get better at endgames from month to month. Who knows when our ratings will reflect it, but it will come in time! A performance orientation means that we fail if we do not reach our goal. This can be horribly depressing. For example, a C student in high school may decide that he wants to go to a good college before in the summer between his junior and senior years. He might make straight As his goal. This is a huge leap and may not happen immediately. If all of his work is focused on making straight As, it is likely that he will become discouraged when the process moves too slowly. He may quit or alternate back and forth between working reasonably hard and reverting to his old slacker ways. But if this same student has a mastery orientation, then the process becomes an end in and of itself. He IS improving every day that he works hard and learns. He is always winning. And his grades will naturally improve in time. Maybe he only becomes a B student by his senior year as he works on his study habits and fills the knowledge gaps from his slacker days and has to go to a community college for a year or 2. This is fine! With a mastery orientation, hard work, and a positive attitude, he may very well find himself on his way to a top tier grad school within a few years. Research repeatedly backs this up. Unfortunately, the world has done a terrible job of adjusting to this fact. Most Americans are extremely performance-oriented, for example.

It is okay to be a nerd. It is okay to be ambitious. It is okay to bust your ass. It is also okay to be a well-rounded, laid back type who is more interested in family and friends than wild goals!

Very good posts, dude!

May I ask, which games (as in gaming) were you world class in?

Yeah, nice post. I agree with most of it although I'm sure I could try to pick a few nits here or there.

I've been back at chess for the last 2-3 years after taking ~10 years off. And I've studied regularly and am stronger. I agree that work and optimism go a long way. Almost all of my bad games are the result of my brain not working well that day or I go into the game depressed/sad or something like that. I generally try to do some breathing exercises and clear my head as much as possible before, but sometimes that only helps so much.

I do have a sense that relentless optimism is one of the reasons Kramnik keeps going and going and is so strong. He may be the least objective out of all the top GMs, often claiming advantages or drawing chances in post mortem where other players just look skeptical. lol

You mention something about ppl not playing your openings. If you approach it this way I think you could have excellent results: "Hey, let's be study partners. You play against my openings and I play against your openings. Then we review them together."

I wish I had a study partner but I have probably convinced myself it wouldn't be logistically possible to have one for some reason. Although anything should be possible.

For instance, I'm 192x USCF and would be your study partner if we could find times to make playing training games work. To me the difference in strength is somewhat important (obv I'd want to study with someone higher rated, but of course you would too) but I think even more important is that both players are of similar mindset (want to work on chess/improve rather than just blitz out a bunch of games and call it a day). We're also similar ages (I'm almost 37).

Anyway, it's something we could try if you're open to it. Feel free to see my log on this forum if you're curious how I've been studying. I've stopped updating it much since this forum seems so dead and I keep forgetting to.

Quake 1 was my best game. I was all but unbeatable in DM6 (undefeated while taking on all comers for months) and few were better at locking down a map, but I started well after Thresh won the Ferrari. I won't post my handle publicly though on the off chance that the hackers who constantly screwed with me come back around. I loudly and relentlessly called out blatant cheaters which they did not appreciate

While I stopped before becoming world class (diminishing returns plus no money) I was also quite good at Diablo 3 and could come reasonably close to matching speed demo records in old school games like Dragon Warrior 3 and Final Fantasy. The Dragon Warrior 3 speed demo record is just super sick imo... a brutally unfair game and the guy really poured his heart into making it happen.

So poker is the only game where I can provide concrete proof of my accomplishments.

Yugo, I have read your entire blog in the past and am always left wondering "when is this guy going to just play a zillion tournaments and stop theorycrafting" lol. You may have weaknesses that are not obvious to me, but you seem to have the knowledge base of a 2100 or so. You seem WAY better than the experts at my club.

Thematic sparring sounds fun! My "relentless optimism" is only for game time and study motivation. I am brutally honest with myself in post-mortems and try my best to be objective. For example, I had three brutal losses a couple months ago that exposed the fact that I am horrible at endgames compared to other Class A players. I am now obsessed with endgames and have turned the tables on my peers! Let me know if you would be interested in thematic sparring in complex endings as well. I have an app with 50+ complex endgames that are nearly equal. I don't care much about rating... but an ambitious, studious study partner would be refreshing! Most people at my club are lazy or no longer seek to improve.

Sounds great but it may be until Monday until I get back to you. I'll send a pm. Right now I'm too busy keeping my daughter from destroying my new analysis chess set I got recently.

Also, maybe you or the forum can help me fix not playing enough. It's a mainly logistical issue for me. Very few times where a 3+ hour game doesn't make everything else much harder. And it's very hard to find challenging games online at a long time control.

congrats!

some comments:

It seems like ur a man on a mission to prove to I'm assuming urself and the world that you can accomplish feats others deem near impossible.

i've never looked into the subject on why we learn and improve quicker at a game such as chess at a young age. I've heard this said over and over sooo many times, but i've never cared and still don't care enough to look into it or research about it even though google is one click away. i started playing chess when I was 7 and hit master when I was 15 after xx,xxx hours of study and play. I quit chess all together shortly after. I always wonder if I can do better if I get back into it now, but I have 0 motivation to spend another xx,xxx hours to find out at what point i'd plateau at. I have a buddy who says I'd never hit GM in my lifetime even if I tried and as much as I want to try and prove him wrong, he's right since I have 0 motivation to prove him wrong.

I believe with ur current motivation, current system of study, trial/error, and mastery on other fields such as LHE, u'll probably find rapid improvement and my estimate is u'll hit master and beyond after x,xxx hours of study and x,xxx hours of play. i'm sure when that day comes, u'll feel like ur on top of the world even tho you could have spent the time getting good at things that are easier to get good at.

if you ever do find urself stuck in a rabbit hole, gl finding ur way out. i'm sure u'll exhaust all options before giving up if so. just remember it gets tougher every class level you go up. gl with the grind.

ps: huge fan of the stuff u post in the limit holdem forums.

as much as i think and would like to think that intelligence plays a role, I still feel like motivation and the love of repetition of thousand of games and tweaking it slowly (faster for others) through trial and error to accomplish better results is a bigger factor.

In a way, poker and chess is similar. I'm a tagfish at blitz now since my intuition has me playing the same **** and repeating the same pattern and theme over and over throughout the opening, middle, and endgame. I dunno how to improve or adjust my play in a way that improves my blitz rating. I also don't care enough to study, so i just click buttons and hope for results. Hard work is very intimidating for the tagfish!

Yeah, chess is a grind, that's kind of the point. It's a way to challenge yourself. BTW I'm 51, and at my peak rating (2240), and still feel like I can make progress at OTB rated classical time controls. But I'm still a fish at blitz, I don't know what to do to improve there.

one more thing i think is important is it's helpful to have some friends in chess (ideally around ur level +-200 points)

i've had a lot of friends from chess growing up. coincidentally, many of them also quit chess at around B,A,expert,2200,2400 strength.

we would discuss chess, go over each other's games, play endless blitz games otb and on icc/fics/etc, help prepare, etc. this is probably worth a TON of points already. even envy when a rival goes up by 100 points would fuel my motivation.

i'd imagine it would be the same for ur LHE. i'd bet you had friends or a community of internet friends who were crushers and the exchange of ideas helped strengthen u guys. u guys probably lived and breathed through the birth of internet LHE and seen LHE evolve into what it is today.

it's pretty hard for us livetards to graduate into an actual player, because we don't have the sample sizes you guys had. we didn't go through the evolution of internet lhe as new ideas formed and old ideas were dismissed through millions of hands. we only memorize formulas but we're not in sync with why the moves we make is right. we've never gone down the wrong path before finding the right path. i mean that is how u become a master at anything right? u guys first cbet 100% on every flop. then u guys started to check back more. u guys know when and why to check back now. we do it because we read it on the internet or see it in a book or see an alpha livetard do it. we don't know many of its when and why.

it's also hard for us to correctly analyze many lhe situations due to its sheer complexity. it's comparable to a bunch of 1400s trying to predict the optimal moves in a sicilian-svesnikov 15 moves down the road. u guys pretty much monte carlo'd a ton of situations. even if the moves are not optimal, they are still the opinions of masters and IMs. we're stuck with some of the results u guys provided, which got passed down to the alpha livetards generations down. we also have no written history on anything, because it's lollive. there's no scoresheet for us to record our HHs and a PT4 database for us to see actual quantitative stuff.

there's no 400 years of games stored on databases for us to analyze. there's no houdini. the best we have is 2p2 which is filled with either misinformation or the right strategy but the wrong or no reasonings. there's only a few IM and the thing is it's hard for me to distinguish between a master or B player from an IM, because there's no rating attached to their name.

/rant!

Oh god, lol... I was like "wtf is Sugar Nut?" Stu Ungar... Sugar Nut... Stu Ungar... Sugar Nut... lol! People often think my handle is a Stu Ungar reference, but I didn't know who Stu Ungar was when I made it.

Take your time Yugo, no worries... I have so much stuff I need to be doing that I am the last guy who is going to complain if you just wanna play a long game once per month or some such.

Tiger415, thank you! Some people think "Rapid Chess Improvement" is a godsend while others think it is absurd. I have not read it, but I don't feel like the takeaway was that "tactics, tactics, tactics" rules all. It was certainly enlightening in that regard, but I think the more important lesson was that "older players with time and motivation can improve just as fast as kids". Silman argues that "tactics, tactics, tactics" can work "tactics, endgames, tactics" can work, and his own balanced approach can work too. Also, I think Silman is pretty butthurt that a club player was the one to universalize the importance of tactics while Silman was a bit of a dinosaur in that regard in the early editions of his books. But I trust Silman so much because he has shown that he is flexible and can change with the times as he continues to improve his coaching skills.

And ya, I am basically done if I get stuck unless I decide to get into coaching scholastic players or some such. But right now, I just see so many easily fixable holes in my game. I do, of course, rely heavily on my tactics. And I feel like I am continuing to improve rapidly in that regard. My endgames are a total joke, but I think they are a gold mine of points. Being able to view the game as a coherent whole is huge and starts with the endgames (thank you Capablanca). My endgame repertoire is 100% useful forever while I will invariably tweak my openings a lot. And it is a huge psychological edge feeling like I always have an "ace up my sleeve" with my new endgame skills as opposed to feeling like "If I don't finish him in the middlegame, I am toast so I better create complications". I always have the option to drag players into deep waters and play for a win so long as I am not completely lost. I play everything against 1. d4 because I know nothing. All of my openings are abortions, but I still suck less than my opponents in the openings most of the time. And so on.

And fwiw, I am so brutal to the livetard hyenas because they have berated me, trolled me, harassed me, tried to get my posts removed, tried to get me banned etc. for almost a decade to the point that I and many others hate posting there. But in reality, there are a lot of cool live players who selflessly helped me transition into live poker before I decided that I hated it. So no, I don't really think you're a lazy douche because you like live poker. And I also think that a lot of tight players are very strong players. The flashy LAGTAGs tend to implode within a few years, but guys like Mason keep surviving every poker apocalypse for decades!

TimM, that is awesome and inspiring! My guess is that you keep improving at 51 because you believe you can keep improving at age 51! As far as blitz, I love Hikaru's vids. I also suck at blitz, but he really helps me "get it". His biggest weapon is his clock management. He goes into equal endgames with a 30 second edge, declines the draw, and either flags or wrecks his opponents. They get tired of it, go on tilt, and start spazzing out trying to finish him early and end up getting tooled even harder. Many of his blitz games are hideous piles of crap, but he makes titled players play like club players against him.

As far as being old being a problem, I just don't believe it and my course on Lifespan Development backed me up. There doesn't appear to be any logical reason for us to struggle in chess until our dementia starts. After all, most of us seem to accept that our politicians shouldn't be 25 year olds! In fact, we seem quite happy to elect 70 year olds under the assumption that their wisdom more than makes up for their age and the possibility of them dying in office.

Oh, and it just super cool to know that there are so many USCF masters or better in the LHE community. I thought it was just DrElo for the longest time!

Great to see all the chess talk at the moment.

I think I'm going to make a thread when I can get the motivation together. Basically from when I was last updating goal type posts I had vast rapid improvement and crushed my goals. Then I had about about 10 months of a downward slump to the point I've dropped to about 1800.


However in about August I moved from a regional town to Melbourne to take a position as a chess coach. Now I go around to schools teaching chess to kids. as of next year I'm quitting my second job and just doing the coaching full time. I think the coaching is actually mildly detrimental to my game as I'm teaching at a low level. The good news is in my chess company I am now surrounded by exceedingly strong players including many IMs. Also being in Melbourne I finally get the chance to consistently play stronger players. Now that I wont be working 7 days a week over like 60 hours, I should have time to actually work on my chess. for the 1st 2 weeks of January I will be playing in the Australian chess championships and expect that from next year I will be looking to make great strides in my chess!

good posts guys, I agree with the importance of optimism. back when I was coming up through the ranks I hit a plateau at 2720 or so and thought I'd never make 2750, because guys like Meowmedyarov and Aroooonian were so tough. but I decided to just keep working on my game because I knew I'd be able to do it somehow, and soon I was a 2800+ GM

Tiger, in one of my posts shortly before the alpha livetard rant, I told everyone how to reach the level of the strong internet players. All of the posts from the online era are still here just waiting to be read as well as the vids we watched. In my experience, people make 2 choices when I tell them exactly how i worked my way up: 1) They put in the work and get so good that I oftent regret having helped them lol or 2) They make excuses, the most common one being that I am some sort of super genius prodigy savant or whatever which also is not true.

Most of what you suggest about how I worked my way up is false. It was 90% sitting in my underwear reading, studying, simulating, grinding, making an ass of myself on the forums, etc. I had no consistent study partners until Tpirahna in 2013 and it went terribly... still slightly surprised we didn't murder each other. And that was well past my "prime".

Also, I guarantee that I could figure out who the best posters are within a week if everyone changed their handles and writing style. I don't read strat much, but Donjuan and DeathDonkey are super GMs for sure while Mason is the Korchnoi of the forum... still a strong GM, but getting up there in years and a bit dogmatic lol. If you just completely rip off those 3, you are doing great! 3 different styles, 3 different perspectives, and all 3 can work great for the right person!

Loafes, that is awesome! I am thinking about volunteering with kids in chess, but it makes me so nervous because I have so little experience with them. Kids usually like me and trust me, but it is so hard for me to remember to keep everything "PG" which is pretty important. One solution I have considered is working with kids in bad neighborhoods so my bad manners will blend right in lol.

Judit, thank you for my first troll post in this forum! Also, ridic cute kitten!!!

RE: coaching being detrimental to your own chess

I do not agree with this. It all depends on how you approach it and if handled properly, can actually be very helpful to your chess.

I don't remember how, or when, did I hear it, but someone smart said something that I've used for years as sort of my motto as a coach - "if you cannot properly explain it, you don't really understand it".

When I first started coaching over 10 years ago, I thought it is just going to be easy peasy, I mean I've spent most of my life on chess, didn't I? I was very much wrong. A lot of the things I knew, or thought I knew, I clearly did not fully understand, because I couldn't explain it properly to my students. Which means that when I was trying to improve my own chess, I was actually trying to build upon a shaky foundation. And it is very hard to build something on top of a foundation that is very shaky - you can, but at some point the cracks in the foundation appear and you cannot build anymore.

When I realized that, I had a rather easy decision to make - I could either not give a damn and just provide mediocre lessons and stamp money, or I could use this newfound knowledge to not only provide much better service for my students, but also to improve my own game. Therefore, preparing for lessons with my students became my own chess study, in a sense - and since I had to prepare for lessons anyway, I didn't need any extra motivation. And so through this process, I believe that I managed to solidify my "foundation" tremendously. It is very hard to attribute improvement in chess to anything specific, it might have been a combination of many things, but when I started coaching I was about 2250ish, and now I am at 2420 with a couple IM norms, despite not really working on my own chess (despite the abovementioned preparation for lessons) for many years. (I should mention that due to other commitments in life I don't coach anymore, nor do I really play anymore - but when kids grow up I will get back to it, and I can promise that I will get that IM title for sure!).

So I guess what I am trying to say, loafes, is that despite coaching lower level players, you can still find ways to use it to your advantage and solidify your own chess knowledge, which will in turn make it easier to build upon it. Granted, it is probably harder to do when coaching little kids (my students were always adults, ranging from 1600-2100 USCF), but I believe it can still be done, if you approach it with this attitude.

I will take full credit for ~100 of that ELO increase. You are very welcome, sir. :P

Do you know of other players who had similar experiences? It doesn't seem like just the coaching without specifically working on your game should help you so much at a pretty high level in chess. How much of it do you think is/was psychological and taking some of the pressure off because you weren't working so hard on your game directly?

Thank you, my man

Well, I agree that it was certainly a combination of things, including some psychological aspects. I think I simply matured over those years and therefore was able to more consistently make practical decisions, instead of emotional ones. That certainly helped to not drop rating points where I don't "have to", which meant more net ELO gain.

However, I maintain that the improvement in my chess was firstly due to what I explained above, i.e. coaching. I am not sure how to properly put in words. Let's try to use a very crude example.

Let's say that before coaching, I subconsciously understood what a bad bishop is and that I need to improve it, but when I started coaching and my students would ask "why is this bishop bad? what aspects of the position make it bad? what aspects of the position should I change to make it better?", I could not provide a proper explanation, i.e. even though I sorta understood it subconsciously, but I didn't understand the aspects of it at a master level. So now, let's say while preparing for lessons I look in to this bad bishop thingy more in-depth because I need to be able to properly explain it, and after some work I can now comfortably understand the different aspects of it and explain it to my students. That in itself does not necessarily mean any improvement, because I was still doing the right thing in those situations before, albeit subconsciously. However, understanding those aspects of the problem has "connected" with other parts of my chess understanding and suddenly I could start using it better when evaluating positions, or making plans, or even just in general being more comfortable in situations where I have the bad bishop, etc.

Does that make any sense? It is a crude example, since the bad bishop theme is rather simple, but the same concept works for much more complex stuff, too. So, basically, I think that coaching has been tremendously helpful to me for identifying my leaks so to say, which I never even would have guessed that I have. And then, the principle of "head-fake" (Randy Pausch, anyone?) - similarly to how you try to teach kids stuff via playing, instead of via cramming, the fact that in my mind I was doing this studying not to improve my own chess, but to help my students improve, made it much easier to do and much harder to procrastinate or put-away, because I felt responsible not against myself, but against my students (that is also a massive leak, I should be the person that is holding myself the most accountable, but...).

Perhaps a way to try and summarize, is that it helped you fully internalize a lot of knowledge you understood but not as intuitively as you ideally would?

Anyway, I essentially agree. Although in the case above perhaps the poster is teaching very much beginners so there may be a bit of low hanging fruit to help solidify but teaching basic mates and very general principles may not really be super helpful.

Awesome to hear that coaching was actually able to help your game, maybe that mental attitude can make it the same for me.

However in my case I’m essentially teaching at a very low level, occasionally one of my private students or slightly more advanced classes I can teach something of basic strategy however the vast majority of who I’m teaching is about 300-700 Eli never really much more than 1200 except on rare occasions. So It’s not just that I’m not gaining from the lessons but I’m less motivated to do chess stuff when I’m doing boring chess stuff day in day out.

I find I’m still improving but I think it’s more about working and hanging out with the stronger players and gaining chess understanding through osmosis

So...looks like chess programmers can all go home now.

J F C