Question for the day: ‘If you zoom around in fast cars across the city, could this help improve your rating?’
Archive for the ‘Humour’ Category
The Q
Posted in Humour, My own warped humour on September 23, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Free car amongst many other prizes.
Posted in Humour, My own warped humour on September 23, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Should I continue on with this blog, I will introduce mental challenges with prizes to be won for the lucky person. The top prize is going to be a car and most likely that will be a tough challenge like solve mate in 1 but a real tough mate in one. The sort where someone with a FIDE rating of 1200 needs half a minute on the clock to find it and someone with a FIDE rating of 2200 needs an hour easily. I will have other prizes, like packets of crisps, pen sets, cheese grater, ironing board, ant killer, and even a chocolate fireguard. I should add that if your rating is over 2800, you can’t play.
More details to follow
Mark, you could be onto a nice little earner here. Just charge people one pound to enter and pocket the profit
Take their money and destroy your website in the process. Never look back.
Project abandoned
Posted in Humour on September 17, 2022| Leave a Comment »
I am sorry to say that I cannot continue any longer with the pinball-chess project. It was working brilliantly and some serious money was going to be pumped into it by investors but there’s a problem which can’t be solved. Everyone knows that pinball and chess are virtually identical, as we’ve said but in pinball you try to get a high score
No matter how hard I tried, this I can’t work with because in chess we win by checkmate and can’t get any high scores. I’ve come as far as I can go. The solution is to keep ramps and flashing lights with extra ball, and the exciting multi-ball option but without a high score in play. You can’t put high scores in chess no matter how hard you try. So that’s it. I am done with this project: it was good while it lasted. I know we all want multi-ball in chess, that’s obvious but I can go no further.
Was it a dream?
Posted in Humour on August 5, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Early this morning I was drifting off and suddenly had images of chess clubs deep in the Soviet Union where players sit around tables. Then in bursts a bear and mauls a 1. d4 player. It got me thinking.
In modern day Russia, there must be clubs in the countryside where players are mauled by bears more than others but which one is the worst? Is it just 1. d4 players they go for, are they more likely to maul someone playing with the black or white pieces.
Bears aside, which animal attacks chess players the most? Are any famous incidents regarding them?
My money is on dogs being the worst but they are not mentioned in the FIDE rule book, so I don’t know. Do you get extra minutes on clock if you are attacked by an animal during a competitive game…what about insects? Is there a definitive guide listing the animal or insect and the time increments granted for these unwarranted attacks.
FIDE makes chess players feel unsafe. There is no code of conduct regarding creature habits and fending them off. Something should be done about this. For example:
Wasp 25 second increment
Vulture 30 second increment
Sealion 35 second increment
Leopard 2 minute increment
Hippo 5 minute increment
Something like that to get the ball rolling, what do you think? Should I contact FIDE about this? I might not get a reply. It’s just a thought and maybe it was just a dream after all. To some this is all just fantasy, to me it’s humour. No matter what, it’s my life.
Mark. J. McCready
New approach to Alekhine’s Defence
Posted in Humour on August 3, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Play chess not lottery
Posted in Humour, My own warped humour, On-line journal on August 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Well here we have someone who went and won the lottery. He got the right numbers and got rich out of it but then got himself killed after celebrating.
https://www.77kaoded.com/news/boonchoo-poungmala/2306532
I think we should avoid the lottery and stick to chess. You are less likely to get killed in chess or go on the rampage either.
Stick with chess, that’s my advice. Avoid lotteries, they can’t help your chess and could affect your opening repertoire…possibly?
Dubious gamesmanship in play there
Posted in Humour, My own warped humour, On-line journal on August 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »
I feel I should post this even though it’s not quite chess related. We can learn from this and apply it to our chess I think.
So, imagine you are at a shrine, and there spirits from the after world contact you. They give you lottery numbers, and so off you go investing time and money on the lottery. But those spirits went and gave you the wrong numbers and made you lose. What would you do then? Would you just forget about it or would you return to the shrine and smash it up? The spirits there gave you the wrong lottery numbers, and so to get revenge, you should smash their shrine up right? Well one guy did and you can read about it here: https://www.77kaoded.com/news/diawkongsin/2318069
This story is very important for our chess development even though playing the lottery is a lot different to playing chess. If we are playing chess and are contacted by spirits, should we trust them and listen to them? They might stitch us up and get us to play bad moves? Okay, its highly unlikely this has ever happened in chess but that shouldn’t stop us from coming up with a plan. If we blunder during a game, should we go and smash a shrine up then? When should we start or stop smashing things up? I think this guy in the story could have been a Grand Master. His logic and calculation skills are right up there.
And so to end, the moral of the story is, to develop further as a chess player we should develop a sixth sense on when it’s okay, or not okay, to smash up a shrine. This is a very important chess skill.
Mark. J. McCready (thinking he is funny again)
11.38 am on Monday August first,
Laksi, BKK
Chess in the heatwave
Posted in Humour on July 19, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Back in blighty I believe the temperature has soared to 40 C, and we only just had the annual ChessFest in Trafalgar Square.
Playing chess in that heat phroar, well how do you do it? The trick is get yourself a few GM norms and become a Grandmaster as quickly as possible, that way when you play you’ll have lots of fans by the board!
(Now you have to admit, even by my standards, that is a cracking joke is it not?)
Read Rowson Right
Posted in Humour on July 18, 2022| Leave a Comment »
‘myth buster’It’s uncommon for a Grand master to also be well educated, having a Ph.D. Rowson does though and he writes well too. He’s well worth a read but you do need to read him ‘lento’ as the content is often dense and requires reflection.
Apologies for sliding into ‘myth busting’ mode but one of the attributes given to chess players is that we have a good memory (courtesy of opening theory) but it just isn’t true. Do you know which game does require a good memory, one if fact so vastly superior to chess they are incomparable, well do you? If not then I shall tell you -it’s Scrabble!
Final ‘myth buster‘, it’s not true that all chess players are like myself, incredibly handsome with a stunning physique, tanned with a six-pack and wearing sunglasses, full of charm and charisma too…(oh Mark really!! Maybe you should go to bed! That’s not remotely funny and working out why you think it is…erm no thanks, just drop the attempts at humour before you embarrass yourself further and get to bed pronto…of all the deplorable things to come out with! Really you should be quite ashamed of yourself because you really aren’t funny -ya know!)
Mark. J. M
1.35 am, a dark room somewhere…
Clocking it up
Posted in Humour on June 28, 2022| Leave a Comment »
In each of the last two years I have played over 1000 games on line. Naturally I played brilliantly throughout, except for when I was absolute rubbish or just downright diabolical. The moral of the story is ‘stay online, play online, lose online, go offline’.
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A side note on how to read old Tom Sweby's columns
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Not perhaps, but quintessentially, Old Tom Sweby is best thought of as a passionate devotee to the newspapers he wrote for. He was well read and knowledgeable of the Bedfordshire chess scene and well beyond, given that he was the president of the S.C.C.U. once upon a time. He was generally well-respected and rubbed shoulders with many, if not all, of those eminent within British chess circles. It would, however, be a critical mistake to see his column is primary source material entirely. That it is not. You will also find secondary source material quoted too, and the reliability of that is not quite as Tom hoped. Given that he wrote for decades, this is to some degree inevitable, and after all we are all prone to error whether we realize it or not. Thankfully, with regards to old Tom Sweby, they are infrequent and for the most part old Tom continued to document events and developments in the Bedfordshire league from the get go as best he could but, of course, everything lies open to interpretation. Despite this, and generally speaking. this does indeed make him informative and thus worth reading. Dare I say his columns constitute a narrative describing the latest developments, match reports and changing nature of the Beds league...he knew his audience and wrote according. This manifested itself over decades but brevity was always in play courtesy of the restictions imposed by writing a column. Should you wish to read a in instrumental figure of the Beds' league post WW2, you are quite welcome to peruse what has been posted here... . :-) I should, however, point out that as the decades wore on he gradually moved on away from narratives concerning the Bedfordshire league towards affairs both historical and international. The reasons for this are multifarous, old age was a predominante factor presumably, however, the bottom line is with regards to how the Bedfordshire chess scene developed post WW2: old Tom Sweby is your go to guy. He wrote more about chess in Bedforshire than anyone else did but given he was a Lutonian and writing for a Luton newspaper there is both bias and greater coverage of his hometown than the rest of the county.
Gallery
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- I’m either 10 or 11 here
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- 1982, myself versus Brian from Sunderland.
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- At the Thai Junior chess championships. My daughter of course.
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