Boylston Chess Club Weblog: Collecting on a bet

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Collecting on a bet

In my post "How many chess blogs are there anyway?" I laid out the following proposition:

..."In the next two hours, I bet I can find 5 chess blogs you've never seen before." Any takers?

While most of the chess blog reading community didn't seem interested in taking me up on it, About Chess' Mark Weeks decided to play:

You're on. I'll trust you to use only two hours, and you'll trust me when I say whether I've seen them or not. My database has 275 entries, of which 127 were active in the last six months. Please give me a heads-up when you're ready. - Mark

Now, I had originally proposed this as a bar bet, so I wasn't really anticipating going up against one of the few other individuals in the entire world who actively maintains a list of chess blogs. Therefore, this needs to be viewed as probably the sternest possible test of my proposition. I nevertheless gladly accept the challenge in the spirit of "if it's not hard, it's not worth doing."

As Mark points out, trust is key to this exercise. On my side, I will actually complete the exercise live on BCC Weblog. I will list new chess blog finds at the bottom of this post and include the elapsed time starting at 0 and going to 120 minutes. If you are so inclined, you can keep checking back in real time to make sure I don't add anything after the two hours have elapsed. For Mark's part, he publishes his chess blog database on the web for all to see. While it may not be perfectly up to date and while he may have come across other chess blogs which he didn't list for one reason or another, he will need a compelling explanation if he claims to have seen all the blogs I find yet not have them in his list. All that being said, I have every reason to believe that this exercise will be pursued on the up-and-up by both sides. I'm sure Mark agrees.

Mark added one more stipulation to the challenge:

P.S. I'll accept no more than one blog not written in English!

Now I'm not sure why we ought to be discriminating against non-English chess bloggers, but since I don't have any other takers I'll gladly accept his conditions. Should I come across more than one non-English blog I will list them below, but recognize that only one can count towards the quota of five.

What are the stakes? That's not been discussed, though after I win I'm sure Mark will come up with an appropriate prize. Am I feeling a bit cocky? I'm absolutely brimming with confidence that I will prevail. In fact, I'd be surprised if I even need to use the second hour (I sure hope I don't end up eating these words!).

Keep checking back; I'll be starting soon...

Starting now!

I wanna get better at chess! (3)

Hypermodernity Chess Blog (7)

Snodland Chess Club (9)

Chess Opening for Blitz!!! (11)

Diary of an Itinerant Chess Player (13)

That's five in thirteen minutes, but I'm going to keep on going in case Mark has seen any of these before.