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Later Kibitzing> |
| Sep-10-12 | | Kinghunt: This was hard for a Monday. It took me a few seconds to figure out which queen to sac. |
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| Sep-10-12 | | Abdel Irada: <sushijunkie>: I think <chrisowen> is actually a keyword-generation program being tested in the CG.com environment. You can find entire webpages consisting of such strings of random utterances, their purpose obscure, their effect obfuscatory. Or perhaps he's practicing cryptographic communications. Note that the solution is always embedded somewhere in his posts, in some form. Our challenge as readers: to find and make sense of it. Then again, perhaps he's introducing some new form of poetry based on the stream of consciousness: Whatever freely associates itself in his mind as he types appears on the page. In any case, he is an enigma. Or perhaps an Enigma. Only the second coming of Alan Turing could tell us for certain. |
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| Sep-10-12 | | Abdel Irada: <Kinghunt>: One thing that narrows the field is that there is no legal means of immediately sacrificing the queen on d1. Now, perhaps if one could play 10. ♕xc1 or 10. ♕xd4. Having the option to take one's own pieces *would* lend another dimension to these puzzles. Sadly, this isn't an option unless your name is Isam Mohamed. |
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| Sep-10-12 | | Tiggler: <Abdel Irada: <What immortal hand or eye...>> <Shaped this fearful symmetry> Just to show I am burning bright, too. |
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Sep-10-12
 | | OBIT: Getting to a position with four queens so quickly is bound to provoke some skepticism, but it has been done even faster - in Casper vs Heckert, 1975, the protagonists got there on move 7. |
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| Sep-10-12 | | Tiggler: <Abdel Irada>
If we did not have <chrisowen> we would have to invent him. |
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Sep-10-12
| | OBIT: <chrisowen> is just e. e. cummings writing from his room at the rehab clinic. |
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| Sep-10-12 | | Tiggler: <OBIT>
I think he is William Burroughs cutting up <recipe of the day> and mixing it with POTD posts. |
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| Sep-10-12 | | Tiggler: <chrisowen> As I said before on another forum: if you are reading our speculations about you, no offense is intended. Just keep on keeping on. |
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| Sep-10-12 | | QueenMe: Unusal that nobody's discussed the real killer move that White missed: 9) ♘e6!.
Black cannot capture with either pawn: if 9) ... dxe6, then 10) ♕xd8+ ♔xd8, then 11) g7xh8=♕, which prevents Black's queening (thought he should still capture the rook for the material), because now the knight no longer blocks the long diagonal. If 9) ... fx6, the White answers with 10) ♕h5#, the classic fool's mate. So white either wins immediately or ends up with a decisive material advantage. Yet I suppose woulda'-shoulda'-coulda's don't really count for much in such a bizarre game. At least we should credit Black with stopping the insanity early by coming to his senses, tipping his King and saying, "Enough of this! Stop the experiment!" |
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Sep-10-12
 | | Phony Benoni: <QueenMe> <9.Ne6> is ingenious, but Black has <9...Qa5+> in response:
click for larger viewNow Black's promotion on a1 will stop White's on h8, and neither 10.Bd2 Qe5+ or 11.c3 Qxc3+ help White much at all. |
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| Sep-10-12 | | RookFile: After 10. Qxf8+, everything is ship shape for white. |
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| Sep-10-12 | | Kinghunt: <Abdel Irada> Believe it or not, that was exactly the reasoning that brought me to the solution. |
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| Sep-11-12 | | stst: What's difference between Shiplay & Shipley? a vs e.
Or, 2 Q's in very different positions.
For White, immediate Q-sac won't work.
Delay just one move, got it. Thus:
10.Bh6 allowing a delay
(A)10... Qxd1+
11.Kxd1 e5/f6/Qc7 etc will not release the K, which is completely sandwiched by its three soldiers (P), and
12.Qxf8# finishes off. |
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Sep-11-12
 | | LIFE Master AJ: Other than simply circumstantial stuff, I see no reason to believe that the game is manafactured. Its badly played to be true, but we have thousands of games in this DB between non-masters that have the same problem ... you need only see my comments for a few of the the contests from the Gibraltar tournaments ... for more of the same. |
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Sep-11-12
| | LIFE Master AJ: << Admittedly, this is all speculation. But I've seen nothing but speculation that the game was concocted. And I just get tired of people automatically assuming that any unusual game is a fake. >> Agreed. Truth is stranger than fiction.
I could see someone deciding that Anderssen never played the "Immortal Game" ... using the same benchmark that is given here. There is just one problem with this assumption, dozens of people witnessed the game. And as Hubner's analysis of that game shows, there are MANY improvements. In fact, when using Fritz, I find just about EVERY game can be improved upon ... |
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Sep-11-12
| | LIFE Master AJ: BTW, such captures are a lot more common than you might think. I could dig up about 10-20 examples that I have played on www.chess.com, but I will spare you, as most of these were played at every rapid time limits. |
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Sep-11-12
| | LIFE Master AJ: < <Once> "I sometimes think that just about every conspiracy theory is a combination of wishful thinking and a misunderstanding of the science of big numbers." <<<<>>>> >> Well said, for ONCE ... we actually agree on something ... that also must be the science of big numbers at work. |
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Sep-11-12
| | LIFE Master AJ: Here is a game I played as Black on ICC a number of years ago. (2001) BTW, I used to save every single game I played, nowadays, I don't bother. 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Nc3 a6 4.d4 b5? 5.e5 cxd4 6.exf6?? [Better was: 6.Nxd4 , which is much better for White. ] 6...dxc3 7.fxg7? Bxg7 8.Be2?? cxb2,  and White Resigns. (I did not record the time limit, but I am sure it was probably bullet.) |
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| Sep-11-12 | | Abdel Irada: <Once>: Are you pleased to find yourself in agreement with <LMAJ> "for ONCE"? If not, why not? On a more serious note, I should clarify what I'm asserting. I have not categorically stated that this game is fake, merely that it is suspicious. And my reason for doing this is not that both players have somewhat improbably queened pawns early in the game; on that score, the theory of very large numbers certainly suffices to account for the apparent anomaly. What arouses my suspicions, and, I suspect, those of many others here, is that the symmetry is just a little *too* perfect. After all, what do we know of this game? We have a score, which could equally be the product of actual play or invention. We have two players with virtually the same surname, accompanied only by first initials (which happen to correspond precisely to the difference in the spellings of their surnames). We have one game in the database for each player: this one. Absent irrefragable evidence for or against the contest's authenticity, I tend to think credulity is not in order. This is not "conspiracy theory"; it is merely healthy skepticism. |
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| Sep-11-12 | | Abdel Irada: For those who may have wondered about my reference to Isam Mohamed above: In 1989, I played regularly at the Mechanics' Institute in San Francisco, where I resided at the time. My "board" rating (for in-club games) was about 2075, but my most consistent rivals were two experts who, thanks to their playing only me and one another, had horribly misleading "board" ratings in the 1300s: Isam Mohamed (a visiting member of the Sudanese royal family; inferably from a minor branch not in line for the crown) and a transplanted New Yorker named Elmer Love. Playing White in a ten-minute blitz game against the former, I reached a position something like this, with Black to move: 
click for larger viewAt this point, Black put the question to my bishop with ...h6. I playfully "threatened" the knight and then withdrew the bishop to h4. Perhaps distracted by some humorous remark by Elmer, who was spectating while awaiting his turn to play, Isam was only watching out of the corner of his eye. Apparently he failed to notice my actual move, assumed I'd taken the knight, and "recaptured" on f6 with his queen. I could have called him on an illegal move (and at that time, an illegal move meant an instant loss), but instead played ♗xf6, leading to this position: 
click for larger viewAt this stage, Mohamed studied the position closely, realized he'd lost two pieces on one move, and resigned. |
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| Sep-12-12 | | rilkefan: <Abdel Irada>: hilarious story. Btw, re <Once> and <LMAJ>, probably before your time the former put a lot of effort into an attempt to reconcile the latter and a variety of commenters here who didn't get along with him. I stopped paying attention to the dispute - rather, I went to some effort to avoid it - shortly afterwards, but I just took <LMAJ> off ignore under the impression that the flames have subsided and everyone is behaving well. I would guess that <Once> deserves some credit for that state of affairs, and if so I'm grateful. |
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Sep-12-12
 | | perfidious: <Once> deserves a great deal of credit for his efforts in bringing about a truce, which lasted for a while. |
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Sep-13-12
 | | FSR: <perfidious: <Once> deserves a great deal of credit for his efforts in bringing about a truce, which lasted for a while.> Indeed he does. He labored hard and with great patience at a thankless task. However, the current pretty peaceful state of affairs only occurred after CG.com banned <LMAJ> and a number of his critics for a week, warned others, and disabled new kibitzing on <LMAJ>'s games. See the February 27, 2012 post on chessgames.com chessforum. Perhaps not a perfect solution, but things have been much quieter since then. |
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| Sep-13-12 | | rilkefan: Thanks for the pointer, <FSR>, I was oblivious. |
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Kibitzing
sac: 10.Qxf8+