BCC Master Lecture Series presents IM Friedel

A 90-minute lecture by IM Joshua Friedel

Attack like a MANIAC!

When: Wednesday, December 14th, 7:00 p.m.
Where: The Boylston Chess Club
Admission: Advance - $3/5 (BCC members/non-members), At the door - $4/6

IM Josh Friedel is perhaps the strongest player ever to come out of New Hampshire. He achieved the National Master rating at age 13 in 2001. He became a Senior Master in 2003, and became an IM in 2005. Josh has an uncompromising, attacking style that is generally rich in tactics. Josh will be talking about his road to the IM title, showing us some of his favorite games, and providing some attacking tips along the way.

Some of Josh's accomplishments:

• Qualified to play in 2006 U.S. Championship
• Participated in 2005 U.S. Championship and other national tournaments
• 1st place in 2001 Pan Am Open, 2003 Queen City Open, and many smaller open tournaments
• Participated in three US Cadet Championships (2nd place in 2002)
• Two international events (World Youth and Pan Am Youth)
• Won a scholarship to UTD by coming in 2nd at the Denker Tournament of High School Champions

Light refreshments will be served.

How did I end up with two white bishops?

Link

Sightings

1. Globular has announced his return to active chess blogging.
   
   
2. Old friend Logis has started a new blog and is threatening to start posting about chess again.
   
   
3. The Knights are expanding with two new members added in the past week -- Athlumney and Dluzewski (and Salcido returning from hiatus).
   
   
4. As always, there are recent additions to the Other Chess Blogs listings. New ones include Aakaash's Chess Life and Qxh7#.

Caption Contest II

If we both concentrate really hard, we can
make the pieces move without touching them

Leave your caption in the comments.

Source: "Chess master shows no mercy" from the Portsmouth (NH) Herald.

Boston Blitz Trading Card #4

Designed and Produced by Matt Phelps (Globular)

Customer Research

I received an e-mail from a chess retailer interested in my thoughts on what makes for a good chess table. Since I couldn't think of anything more insightful to say than 'four legs and a top', I thought I might give all of you an opportunity to weigh in. So, click the comment link and describe the characteristics of the "perfect chess table."

Just cover your eyes and play

Today's New York Times piece on Sex and Chess is generating a fair bit of activity in the chess blogosphere. Here are some related posts: Daily Dirt - The Kenilworthian - Susan Polgar.

Life is not a game of chess!

Finally, someone takes the other side of this topic:

Granted you have to have some plan, but life isn't a game of chess, it's more like parchessi or even yahtzee if you will. A plan for victory is nice, but you still have to account for that roll of the dice to really judge your final outcome.

Sims Chess

The next round is on me

A few weeks back Goran wrote a post about a blog value calculator from Technorati. While it makes for an interesting momentary diversion, a little research will quickly discourage you from spending the money all at once.

How does it work? Well, it starts with the sale of Weblogs Inc. (a blog network) to AOL. The creators of the calculator assumed that the value of a blog was directly proportional to the number of other blogs which link to it (as reported by Technorati). Therefore, they took AOL's purchase price for Weblogs Inc. and divided it by the total number of blogs linking to all the Weblogs Inc. blogs. This resulted in a value of $564.54 per link. So all the calculator does is retrieve the number of blogs which link to your blog and multiply it by this value. In the case of Boylston Chess Club Weblog this is 43 links x $564.54 per link = $24,275.22.

This blog is worth $24,275.22.
How much is your blog worth?

What's wrong with this approach to blog valuation? Several things.

First, there is the "links as a proxy for visits" issue. I addressed this earlier in a post about Blogshares. To summarize, links are important and probably do have some correlation with visits, but they are easily manipulated and overall do not represent an adequate proxy for visitors.

Second, it seems silly to assume that AOL was simply buying Weblogs Inc.'s links (or visitors for that matter). Weblogs Inc. has proprietary technology they developed to support their blogging operations and presumably there must be some value attributable to the Weblogs Inc. brand. Therefore, the calculator almost certainly overvalues the price per link.

Finally, there simply isn't a liquid market for blogs. In fact, only a few blogs have ever been sold. Therefore, it is unreasonable to assume that blog value follows a linear relationship. Instead, a more reasonable model would probably be something like 99.999% of blogs are worth $0 and just a relatively small number have some value based on the revenue streams they produce.

So what is your blog really worth? In the chess blogosphere, if you are not Mig then I would estimate <=$0. Even for the few that might be earning a penny or two from Adsense, I suspect that if you discount your cashflow and make an honest assessment of your expenses (including your time) you'll find that your blog is actually under water financially. There's nothing wrong with this of course. Few, if any us, play chess for the money either. The rewards from chess blogging (as from playing) come from another side of our lives.

Canadians Rejoice!

Baltimore wins the inaugural US Chess League Championship 3.5-0.5 over Miami. League MVP IM Pascal Charbonneau promises to take the Championship trophy on a tour of all of Canada's provinces.

Links: Official USCL report, Match results, Interview with Pascal Charbonneau

Related Post: USCL Championship Match Postponed

Boston Blitz Trading Card #3

Designed and Produced by Matt Phelps (Globular)

New url, same errant content

In case you didn't see Tempo's post on this topic, DutchDefence has changed his blog's url. Those of you who link to him should update your links to point to http://www.lrci.blogspot.com/.

The Next Stage

The Cave's Samuel Montgomery-Blinn is ready for a career change:

Chess Boxing appeals to me in the strangest way right now. I mean, come on. I've a black belt in Taekwondo, and I'm not a complete idiot with a chess board. Friends tell me I'm crazy, but I want to join a league as soon as possible.

J'adoube has had similar thoughts.

The King's Paromologia

...a great paromologia, a figure that concedes a point in order to make a stronger one, like sacrificing a pawn in chess.

From "Can’t We Kill the Bike Instead? " at It Figures.

Free Chess Speech

Here's a different kind of chess blog:

...yes it finally happened. We shot our mouths off so much we all got banned from the Game Knot forums.... So we've started our own forum right here where we can shoot off whatever we want.

Check out Pawn Stars Uncut (at your own risk, of course).

Knick-Knacks

Rob Horning explains why chess books are primarily symbolic decorative items:

The fact that they are unreadable - full of chess notation and illustrations and discussions far too abstract for a novice like me without a chessboard in front of me - forces me to resist the temptation of actual[ly] reading the book and makes the book into a pure signifying object, something that can signal my interest in chess without my being led into foolishly wasting time reading about it. The impossibility of my consuming them as books allows me to appreciate them as decorative objects that help illustrate my interior life for others.

Boston Blitz Trading Card #2

Designed and Produced by Matt Phelps (Globular)

More chess variants

The Cup Joke describes a version called "Molly Chess":

Molly used to have a move where the queen would swirl around ... knocking pieces off the board.

GM Igor Ivanov dead at 58

From KUTV in Salt Lake City, Utah:

Igor Ivanov, a Russian defector who became Utah's greatest chess player, has died in St. George of cancer. He was 58.

Despite his illness, Ivanov tied for first place in the Utah Open tournament just three weeks ago. He was Utah's only grandmaster, the highest rank in chess. In 1979, he defeated then-reigning world champion Anatoly Karpov.

"He was our state champion,'' said John Coffey, vice president of the Utah Chess Association. "He was our best player by far. Nobody else even came close. Serious chess players like having someone of that caliber. He'll be missed for the great player that he was.''

Read more...

Update #1: Here is a longer piece from The Salt Lake Tribune.

Update #2: Seems I was way behind the rest of the blogosphere on this one. Check out posts from The Chess Mind, Chess News and Events, The Closet Grandmaster and Onlinechess.ca (ChessSmith and I independently ripped the same picture from the net).