Improving at chess.

There are three areas where I've tried to improve myself this year: Maths, writing and chess. I've written about my efforts to improve in Maths here  but I haven't discussed my efforts to become a better chessplayer.

I first purchased a PC and connected to the Internet back in January 1997, by July 1997 I had signed up to play at the Internet Chess Club (ICC) and I remain a member today. As I will elaborate upon down the track, the ICC became the focus of my online existence for many years and I was one serious ICC addict. In my early years, my chess improved quite a bit as I purchased some books, played a lot of games online and played a few over the board (OTB) tournaments and got better. However, my major focus was the social activity on ICC and not the game itself.

In recent years, the exhilarating array of social contacts that characterised my first decade on ICC has faded, many people I knew then have moved on and with the rise of social networking, ICC is no longer a place which people use to fulfil their social needs online. It's become rather staid and boring. It's still a good place to play the game. I still found myself playing chess, but it was the same fast chess games I'd been playing for fun when ICC was at its peak. You don't get better by simply playing fast games, chess involves thinking and unless you're prepared to do some, you won't improve much.

As I eventually found fast games unfulfilling and didn't have enough online friends to justify spending a lot of time there, I was considering just quitting the game. But I kept logging on, which made me realise that I still liked the game. So, it was clear I had a choice, I could keep playing crappy games, or I could try to actually get better. 

I consulted Google University about how to do this and perusing a range of articles led me to Dan Heisman ,among others and they suggested that the key things needed for below average players to improve were tactics, playing long games, tactics, developing one's skills with chess strategy along with a mild focus on openings and endgames. For extra work, they suggested tactics. For advanced work, they suggested more tactics. For non chessplayers, a tactic is a forcing move or set of moves that wins you some of your opponent's army. Strategy is about where you should put your pieces so that they have some chance of participating in a tactic. Openings and endgames, as you just may have guessed, have to do with the start and end phases of the game.

Despite all the years of playing quick games of chess, I am shit at tactics, which is why I'm not that good at the game. I have signed up to Chess Tempo which a website devoted to helping chess shmucks like yours truly develop their tactical skills. It has an extensive free section but the extras were, I think, worth the small cost. I have been following the advice of Dan Heisman in how I am using Chess Tempo. Lots of repetition and lots of problems that are simple as I need to become exceptionally accurate at those problems and I need to be able to recognise those patterns consistently. Good chessplayers are not better at random pattern recognition than ordinary people, but they are superb at recognising chess patterns. I am a regular visitor to Chess Tempo and I am taking its problems seriously.

I have also started playing longer games, I am aiming to play 3 long games during a normal week and 6 long games during a holiday week. A long game is one with a time control of 45 45 or longer, so it should take at least 2 hours if both sides use their time well and will generally take more.

One of the attractions of Bejeweled Blitz was the idea that I could become good at something like I was able to when I was younger. Now I'm wondering how much an old dog, who's played a game for a long time, can improve if he sets his mind to it. Despite all the chess I've played, I have never embarked upon a systematic program of improvement in the game before.

I started about a month ago and I've noticed some small improvements, but I am still well below the heights I reached on ICC at my best, which was a over a decade ago now! When I started my program of improvement, my ICC bullet, blitz and standard ratings hovered around 1600, my Australian Chess Federation (ACF) rating for over the board play was 1341.

I played the NSW Open under 1600 over the June long weekend and achieved an unspectacular 3.5/7, beating 3 weak players and losing to 3 players who were rated a little higher than me, indicating that my rating is pretty accurate for my current level of skill. I missed basic tactics in all 3 of my losses and in 2 of my wins as well, so the decision to focus on basic tactics is clearly wise. 

I'm not sure how good I can get, not having seriously tried to improve before. I'm hoping that I can become good enough to seriously compete in an under 1600 tournament with a view to getting a rating of over 1600 so I can play against good players. Online, I'd like to have a rating that hovered in the 2000's on ICC, rather than the 1600's. Neither of those would suddenly make me a great chessplayer, but I think it would be a good indication that being a little older won't prevent you improving at a skill as long as you put in the appropriate effort.

I'm enjoying the process so far so I anticipate it will continue, if it doesn't, it's not critical as this is for fun. I intend to re-visit this post from time to time and see how much I have improved. While the journey is definitely more important than the destination, I am rather curious about where this will all end up! 

Movie of the Week: ESPN 30 for 30: Broke

Another in the absorbing series of ESPN 30 from 30 documentaries, director Billy Corben explores the failure of many American professional athletes to keep the seemingly enormous sums of money that they have earnt from their varying sports, despite the massive increases in remuneration that these sports have experienced in recent decades.

 The numbers vary, but what is certain is that a large percentage of athletes in the NFL, the NBA and the MLB end up broke within 5 years of retirement.

Broke is an absorbing ride, Corben's approach is to divide the film into sections with each section outlining one of the ways that athletes struggle to deal with the income that they have and how it gets away from them. Interviews with many former players such as Curt Schilling, Keith McCants, Bernie Kosar and Andre Rison along with financial experts and commentators form the core of the film.

Corben appears to be more interested in presenting that individual stories of the players than in conducting a systematic analysis of why the problem exists or what can be done to resolve it. It's a discussion starter. Only Curt Schilling was at all familiar to me so the stories had to stand on their own merits and they did.

Looking at the stories as presented by Corben, some of the problem is that the players themselves are young and living shallow lives as many young people would, spending big, partying hard, attracting women and generally having a great time without thinking about tomorrow. An additional difficulty is that that athletes don't have the types of tax deductions available to companies and businessmen so they're actually paying their fair share of tax and lose more than they expect to it.

The athletes that have the most trouble seem to be those from disadvantaged backgrounds whose families never had to worry about the need to teach their children how to handle having too much money. While there's more blacks than whites getting in trouble, as there are also more blacks than whites in the NBA and the NFL, that's not a huge shock and the number of whites in trouble was enough to demonstrate that labelling the problem as a racial one is too simplistic by far.

Athletes found themselves unable to deal with the demands for money from family, friends and the communities they were raised in, it's easy for them to acquire large entourages while the money is there Injuries also proved to be a big problem, the salaries didn't last as long as they had expected and so they didn't end up make the sort of money they actually budgeted for when they got their first contract or 2. 

Most of us will tend to live a much more expensive lifestyle if given a larger income. For young athletes in American sports, this has proved to be quite the mixed blessing, as too much money often is. Billy Corben's Broke presents an absorbing account of the people behind the cliche of the spoilt, broke, former athlete. 7/10

The state of the blog and the week ahead for The Went Report

On the 30th April, I wrote a rather dispirited post where I acknowledged that I did not anticipate that I would be able to turn this into a fully functioning blog as I'd written precisely nothing in 8 days despite having given myself, as I thought, the freedom to do so.

Since that post I have  written 22 posts, comfortably exceeding my output in the previous 6 years! In addition , I have 2 drafts close to publication and a post with the best part of five thousand words nearing publication readiness. For an encore, I adjusted the settings on the blog and added some links so it functions like a real blog! Most of my posts have gained a small audience, smaller than what I am hoping I will have down the track, but better than nothing. My review of The Announcement has been picked up somewhere, as it continues to steadily add viewers, it is now past the 100 mark and gets a few views every day. Consequently, I  upgraded the post last week in response to that as it was a pretty thin review.

I usually advertise my posts on Facebook, and I have mentioned a couple of them on reddit and Stumble Upon and in varying Facebook forums. I will continue to do this and I hope some people will end up reading the blog on a regular basis.

I'm anticipating that my upcoming Bejweled Blitz series of posts will set some blog records for me. I think they are more likely than most of my posts to attract search engine attention over time and I think they will get  a fair number of visits from Facebook too, and the posts will remain topical for quite a while so  I'll mention them periodically on the Bejeweled Blitz fan forums. I'm thinking that a thousand views isn't an unreasonable expectation for them to get over time, and that higher than that is not impossible. 

My old list of possible blog topics has been organised, updated and is being added to as ideas occur to me. While I primarily write for myself I believe that there are other people who share some of my interests and feelings and will enjoy reading some of the things that I have to say. 

This week I'm looking to develop and post an account of my Tuesdays with Cassie, as I want a detailed post recording what she and I have done during her pre-school years to be available as she ages. I intend to post Part I of my Bejeweled series next Sunday, and publish the other parts on the following 2 Sundays. My book of the week post for this week will be about the Hairy Maclary books which Cassie and I have been having a ball with lately. My movie of the week for next week only needs some polishing and it's done, it's about the ESPN 30-30 documentary Broke.

This post actually started changing into something different about the nature of writing and the nature of my involvement with writing and I think it's the most deeply personal thing I've written, it's not done yet but I already feel the blood dripping onto the keyboard from the veins I opened up while I was writing it. That will be posted tomorrow.

Movie of the Week: ESPN 30 from 30 Soccer Stories: Hillsborough

The debut entry in ESPN 30 from 30 Soccer series is a brilliantly crafted, devastating account of the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. Ninety three Liverpool supporters died on the 15 April 1989 when they were crushed against the fence due to overcrowding in the pens behind the goalposts for the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. An additional three supporters died later in hospital.

Director Daniel Gordon investigates how and why the disaster happened, he details the process by which the Liverpool fans themselves were falsely blamed for the disaster leading to a 25 year battle  by the relatives of the victims to have the truth revealed. He reveals that there was a systematic program of altering statements by police and other relevant witnesses to hide the shortcomings of police management that was largely responsible for the disaster that day. Gordon explores how this program was aided and abetted by a mass media campaign spearheaded by Rupert Murdoch's The Sun newspaper, whose false headlines and allegations were as confronting as any of the visual images presented in the film, leading to a boycott of The Sun in Liverpool that has lasted to this day.

This is a captivating film. Daniel Gordon uses a mix of interviews with the leading players, including several of the police officers who haven't spoken in public before about their experiences, along with the use of footage from the day to explain in chilling clarity just what went wrong. The relatives who are interviewed are articulate, thoughtful and impressive witnesses who have a story to tell that is important and moving. Gordon does them justice. The film shows confronting scenes of people being crushed, not in close up, but clearly visible. This adds to the drama and tension one feels while watching this film and is critical to helping the viewer understand what happened that day. It is not exploitation.

The tragic irony of the disaster was that, due to an unrelated police scandal, the former police superintendent of the area, Brian Mole, had been transferred out of the position only 3 weeks before the disaster. He had a long and successful history of managing stadium events at Hillsborough, and was well aware of the possible difficulties involved with that management.  His successor, David Duckenfield, did not have this experience and it led him to make a series of highly criticised decisions and non decisions that contributed to the disaster.

At the time, it was common to have supporters at the each end of the field standing and watching in the game in unseated terraces. Due to problems with soccer hooliganism, these terraces had high fences at the front, preventing easy access to the pitch. At Hillsborough, fences dividing the terrace into four pens had also been installed, preventing free movement across the terrace which had been the standard way for people who were feeling crushed to get out. Gordon explores the parade of errors made by the management of the stadium and the police in dealing with the problems involved with the entry to the ground and to the management of the spectators at the Leppings Lane end of the ground, problems that had been apparent to the extent that there had been a near fatal crush at the same end just 8 years before.

The game had been going for 6 minutes when it became clear that there were problems in the pens and play was suspended. As the scale of the disaster became obvious, the head of British Football Association went into the police box, he was told by Superintendent Duckenfield that Liverpool fans had drunkenly broken into a side gate and flooded the pens with people. The side gate had been ordered open by Duckenfield himself, in response to frantic requests from officers outside afraid that people were going to be crushed to death trying to get in. This lie was the foundation of the allegations that Liverpool fans were drunk and that the disaster was their fault.

Gordon investigates the allegations along with the attempts to discover the truth in detail. This is headed by the pivotal contribution of Professor Phil Scraton, an articulate, authoritative interviewee,  whose research led to discoveries which contradicted the official account of events, demonstrating that the official account had been 'sanitised' at best and criminally altered at worst. These discoveries led to an overturning of the original inquest and to the opening of new inquests into the 96 deaths. Therese inquests are continuing at time of writing and the film is not currently available for viewing in the United Kingdom as a result.

Daniel Gordon has created a definitive documentary, a superb account of the Hillsborough disaster that will surely move and anger most people who watch it. This is not a great documentary, it's a  great film. 9/10.

At the time of writing, the film was available here