Luton chess club is to field a team in the Bedfordshire league for the coming season. Presently, it is being formulated and who is willing to commit being established. Most likely it will enter the second division as its strongest players cannot sign up.
It’s good news and hopefully the club will continue to go from strength to strength.
MJM
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Due to the sudden onset or mental and physical deterioration, followed by a worsening of the aforementioned two, left floundering I picked myself up and plonked myself on a plane. Up into the sky I went, leaving Asia behind in favour of Europe. Homeward bound I was and it had to be that way. Earlier than planned yes. Nonetheless, the right thing to do it most definitely was.
Bangkok to Luton but which one is really home? Really, which one? Not so long ago that was Bangkok and I felt it in my blood. Okay, so I return to the club I grew up in but recognize the new location I don’t. Feel an affinity for it’s emptiness I can’t. Recognize one person only was all I could do. And that’s home? Is it really? It most certainly didn’t feel like it. Factor in I felt like an outsider, was I really home? But, then, what is home? Where, exactly, was that sense of homeliness I tapped into in Bangkok?
2 wheels NOT 4!
Here’s a video of my arrival.
Do you want to see what it looks inside? There isn’t much to see except lots of unused space.
Not really my cup of tea.
What was I expecting then? When I thought about what my town is about, I thought my opponents would look like this:
About the chess. Damned if you play, damned if you don’t.
With rest and recuperation comes invigoration. I played twice and won twice with fifteen minutes on the clock. I blundered once but my opponent was weak. As one photo shows, patriotism prevailed and I opened with the English when I had the white pieces. It was pleasant to play but a longer break was needed.
Note to self: wait for the blackout.
Mark. J. McCready, 1044pm. Tuesday May 30th
Luton, England.
Posted in Luton Chess Club | Leave a Comment »
Yesterday I told myself to visit the chess club but I couldn’t. I told myself to because it was meant to be my last visit to the club this year and I wanted to say goodbye to friends and playing partners there. But somehow it didn’t feel quite right, it wasn’t really goodbye.
Most of the members @Bangkok Chess Club are transient and I am no exception. I have relocated many times before, only to return the following year, and for this reason it didn’t really feel like a ‘goodbye’ more so a ‘see you soon’.
And that was how it was left…
MJM
Posted in My own endeavours, On-line journal | Leave a Comment »
I am on a trip. I am on a train. A train to downtown. Food. Water. Trips. Then it be chess but when I don’t know. No when. No alcohol. Progress. Much of it. Boredom. Much. One trip leads to another. Boredom dissipates and then there is another trip. What a day tripper this chess player is. And handsome also. Yes very.
Posted in My own endeavours, My own warped humour | Leave a Comment »
Thousands upon thousands of on line games blitzed out over the last few years really have taken their toll. And no this is not the first time I have posted this. Factor in no competitive chess for over six years too and what remains is a detritus. For he who cannot step up to the mark when required to has much to answer for.
Deviation from, or break with, tradition where a whopping 30 mins on the clock to think in has left me erm…well, rather red-faced. I’m operating at about 50%, the glass is half-empty you could say. You could also say it’s half-full. It matters not.
Nothing left to be said than the sober reflection ‘Why wouldn’t it be that way?’ Online blitz is rather unserious but as soon as you opt for more time up your game you cannot…well I couldn’t.
I did, however, find an effective way to distract opponents. In the chat I said to many ‘Hey! you see that hand you’re holding your mouse with, you want that hand broken!’ I got two instant resignations out of that.
Really, there is nothing left to be said except it wasn’t worth all the effort. All I learnt was my game is not tickety boo! I am, rather ungraciously, bowing out and will instead watch youtube videos of flying wheels, rabid cats, and drunken boxing…
Comment from opponent: Don’t believe him. I played him and got thrashed. He’s an amazing player. The best I’ve seen.
Comment from opponent: I got massacred by this bastard, he’s fucking well good. You’ve got no chance.
Comment from opponent: He threatened to break my hand. I went and told my step-father and he smacked me in the mouth and kicked me in the bollocks for lying to him BUT I SWEAR he threatened to break my hand during the game, he put it in the chat.
Comment from opponent: He bastardo Inglazi. He speak ‘I-a-break-a-da-hand. He good play da chess. He son of da gun.
Comment from opponent: I got fuckin’ leathered by this cunt and he threatened to break my hand during the game. He’s a dangerous bastard, I’d steer clear of him if I were you.
Note to self: topic for next post –how to break both your opponents hands during a game of chess.
Mark. J. McCready, 03.50 Saturday, May 13th 2023
A dark room somewhere out there, anywhere. You don’t ask me where unless you want that hand broken! You got that?
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If it were the case that at your club you have FIDE rated tournaments how up to date with FIDE’s latest updates on their set of laws are they, and is this significant?
Here at Bangkok chess club, we don’t adhere to the latest rules & laws. Technically this invalidated the tournament and results but no one blinks an eye, and the organizer prefers the old rules, as they are ‘less annoying’as he put it. How untypical this is I cannot be sure, nor do I know whether anyone really pays attention or is that bothered. Bangkok chess club is by its very nature a friendly club, no one really takes their chess seriously.
Perhaps at clubs habited by professional players it has greater significance, although most likely the consensus amongst amateurs is that the latest rules are rather complicated. Some of the changes are significant, the most obvious being that you can now make two illegal moves instead of one. Why they implemented that change I do not know but it does require greater assistance from arbiters, and is less workable than it may appear.
Why do I draw attention to such matters? Well if the organizer at your club is going to bend the rules or disregard those most recent, you do need to know. It’s a critical error to assume that the laws of FIDE are applied by everyone, and its also a critical error to assume everyone is up to date.
I am but then I have to be. I am often described as the most handsome chess player in town and tend to receive more attention than most. I need to look good and so keeping up to date helps. There isn’t a chess player in my home town more handsome than me, and my county too. And as we all know, some of the greatest chat up lines are based of FIDE laws? I mean what could better than ‘Hey, what’s article 4.3 in FIDE’s handbook? when you are trying to woo the latest female at the club.
They work outside the chess club too! The next time you see a lady you like, casually walk up to her, say hi and ask something like ‘You don’t happen to know what article 7.2 in FIDE’s latest handbook is do you by chance?’ You’ll be dating in no time! Given how handsome I am, I don’t usually need to make the effort, whenever there’s a new woman, tranny, or gay bloke at the club, they usually come to me.
Well anyway it’s not so bad being a handsome chess player just makes you a bit lazy. For those less handsome, the need to impress isn’t so great, so if you aren’t up to date, it’s quite unlikely that anyone will care, and in case you’ve forgotten FIDE is far from the professional organization it presents itself as, and understanding the changes they make can be challenging.
One last thing, I may be wrong regarding chat up lines about FIDE laws working outside the chess club but they are damn site better than what they replaced which was usually cantered around whether the lady I was wooing had headlice, with requests for proof that she definitely doesn’t have them. For some reason, whenever I pulled out a piece of paper and a comb, it always sank like a lead balloon!
I’d best go, I must return to the bathroom as always want to be trim and lean, that’s all for now… .
Mark. J. McCready, 11.25pm Thursday 4th of May
A place where I lie wounded, Bangkok
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If I were up for it, I would play in this.
But I am not up for it, Mentally I am not strong enough and I am awaiting results from blood tests. I cannot play chess. I cannot do anything. I just sit and wait and hope for a brighter future.
Mark. J. McCready 10.57pm, Monday May 1st,
Purgatory, Bangkok
Posted in My own endeavours, On-line journal, Personal Interest & Experience | Leave a Comment »
The world championship is over, Magnus has been dethroned. Liren has emerged victorious and here is the press conference after the match has ended. If you’ve been a FIDE member for some time, or an active chess player over the years, or perhaps are a journalist even, then you will know that FIDE is far from the professional organization it tries to present itself as. The number of reasons are so great, I simply cannot go into them here or I will be up all night long! Regarding the press conference linked below, you ought to know that FIDE no longer requests that the questions are vetted beforehand. Questions have been raised over this but they have been left unanswered. If you go to the 11.54 minute mark you will hear Ding Liren being asked a question by Maria from chess.com: it is the question he is currently being quoted on answering the most across the various social media platforms most commonly used. The question pertains to the meaning of life itself, making it philosophical in nature. Firstly, you could question that the point in asking a chess player what the meaning of life is per se extremely dubious, but secondly, Liren’s answer isn’t articulate; partly because English isn’t his first language and partly because Philosophy isn’t his background. However, it is mine and his answer constitutes an alignment with Nietzsche’s assertion that you should live by your passions. Liren makes it clear chess has always remained central in his life and when time goes by and he is not playing in tournaments, he doesn’t feel ‘so happy’, as he put it. I’ve linked the interview below, but as you might expect, it’s a bit of a strain because the questions haven’t been vetted there’s clearly much room for improvement with some questions being rather poor indeed and others so vague the players struggle to answer them. ‘How’s the organizing things here for you?‘ Would you like to answer that? Anyway, here it is:
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Yesterday I had a plan. That plan was to take the skytrain and enter the city. Stop off at my favourite Indian restaurant for a vegetable curry. Get back on the skytrain and go to my hospital for my medication (I have hypermania), then go to the chess club. But that way go it did not. Within minutes of getting on the skytrain I fell critically ill. My whole world collapsed around me because the week before (subject of The visit that never was) I suffered so immensely from my life being threatened that I have been in a state of near collapse ever since. All I could do was hang on for dear life on the skytrain, try my hardest to walk to the hospital, collect my medication, and go back home. It was not very pleasant to arrive at the station I was supposed to get off to go to the chess club and then watch it go by but I had no choice, I was so sick mentally. By the time I got home, it wasn’t even 7pm but I had to fall into bed immediately and lie still all night long. Being the true hypermaniac that I am, of course sleep was not possible, and yes of course it’s not possible tonight also and no it won’t be possible tomorrow night either but these are trivialities. Like I said in the previous post, when your life is close to being taken away from you, you aren’t going to like it and you aren’t going to know what to do. What I didn’t say was it’s not something you can just walk away from and expect to be as right as rain the next day either. And what I couldn’t say was how sure I was of what was happening around me. Was I so startled that I couldn’t see things straight? The answers are coming, the answers are coming, a conclusion will be created… .
Yesterday, I didn’t have the power to play chess. I felt so wounded. I felt confused. I just wanted to go home, close my eyes and make everything go away. I could not speak to anyone, not even my own daughter. All I could do was lie still for many hours, not even hoping that my wounds would heal. I cannot put into words how hurt I have been and if that isn’t bad enough I must wait weeks before I can learn if I have been left with a terminal illness too, one which will eventually destroy my immune system and take my life from me.
Mark. J. McCready, 02.13 am, Sunday April 30th 2023
A quiet and lonely place where I have cried most days this week, Laksi, Bangkok.
Posted in Life beyond the chess board, My own endeavours, On-line journal | Leave a Comment »
Suppose that you have a job, you have income, and you have time off -like most of us. Suppose that you take holidays and like to factor chess into them. That could mean entering a tournament or maybe just visiting a club to meet locals and survey the scene there -with a few pics for your Instagram account, or Facebook or whatever your preferred social media platform is.
Does this sound quite normal or quite abnormal? I can assure you, having been posted abroad for almost a quarter of a century now, it’s common to meet chess players who travel abroad to play our beautiful game because the options are boundless all year round. A great many do it, but I apologize, I can’t give you an exact number. Instead, let’s just assume it to be in the tens of thousands of those who have and continue to do so. Professional players, of course, make their living by travelling and playing chess at the same time, some of whom are on record as stating they have done so in over 100 countries. Admittedly, I have only played chess in 6 different countries, posing as the official photographer in only one of them.
We all blunder in chess no matter how good we are. The only difference being the frequency with which it occurs. We blunder away in life too, although this may be less obvious, depending on how well you know yourself, your take on consequentialism, and various other mitigating factors aided and abetted by your own drunkeness, tomfoolery, absentmindedness, dubious driving habits…I could go on.
Let us suppose you twice intend to visit the very same chess club on your hols, putting in the necessary groundwork in beforehand, establishing where the club is located, when they meet, and so on. But it doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen on your first trip. It doesn’t happen on your second trip. Why? How can a scheduled part of your holiday not come into play, and not just once but twice?
In asking such a broad question, invariably a multitude of plausible explanations arise. And not only that, crucial elements can be easily overlooked too. For example, what happens to people when they go on holiday? Do they stay the same or do they go into party mode and just want to have fun? After all, that’s what holidays are supposed to be all about right? Over the years I’ve seen all sorts of things go on including chess players spend thousands travelling half-way round the world to enter a prestigious international tournament and then weren’t even capable of making it out of their hotel let alone make it to the first round, owing to a drink problem so severe they were paralytic before the tournament began, as the tournament started, and then only got worse. I’ve seen GMs fly on in and party so hard they would resurface at each round looking either massively hung over or completely drunk still from the night before, causing them to behave erratically at the board and sometimes just resign on the spot. On one occasion a GM fell so far down the rankings, he was paired against one of my friends, who I have beaten in the past as we were both rated about 1900 then. Even my friend beat him because he was that hung over and didn’t want to play on!
Life doesn’t always go as planned, we all learn that as we mature. On holiday the likelihood increases as we tend to enjoy ourselves too much and this often factors in an excess of things, which aren’t good for us. Things like alcohol and drugs for example. Sometimes things develop which are good for us but derail our plans. You might meet a nice woman you want to spend time with, which might take priority over previously made plans. When you go abroad wanting to have a bit of fun, its hard to know exactly where it will take you, and for that reason what you had planned may not come about. As long as we’ve had some fun and enjoyed ourselves, our plans can be cast aside for another time, can’t they? Isn’t that how it goes?
I recently visited Cambodia, and its capital Phnom Penh. I see it as my second home in Asia because I used to live and work there and know the place pretty well. It’s a place where I can meet former colleagues, close friends, ex-girlfriends and enjoy a thriving ex-pat scene. It’s a city that has shown a greater degree of progress over the last 15 years than any other in south-east Asia and has a lot to offer. Not only that, the Khmer people are sincere, humble and hard-working. They are also very friendly and pretty good at speaking English too. They occupy a city untainted by tourism, and that cannot be said of the bigger cities in the same region. Unlike Bangkok, the closest major city to it, Phnom Penh isn’t a tourist trap full of hustle and bustle all day and all night long. Instead, it offers relaxing walks along the riverside, adorned by royal palaces and feels far more laid back. There are no roads gridlocked by traffic, only streets where anyone will offer their services to you if you need something or cannot find your way around. A stark contrast indeed.
But despite my efforts I never did make it to the chess club on both my recent trips and I am too ashamed to say why. Okay, well I was whilst writing the previous sentence but I am not now. On the first occasion my own very bad habits got the better of me and made me so sick I had to spend days in bed recovering, missing the opportunity, and on the second I was accompanied by an ex-girlfriend from back yonder and that…erm, well, dominated proceedings shall we say. Or should we say being a romantic old fool, I didn’t want to leave her side? Unabashed hedonism with no regard to the consequences was what wiped out the chance of any chess and it’s absolutely fine, it really is. On my list of ‘to do’ things it wasn’t very high up. And what is true of my chess is true of my life too. I have made so many blunders throughout my life that they are no longer soul-destroying, having just rendered hours of effort to emerge victorious no longer possible. When I blunder in chess and life, the result is always the same. I feel nothing. Part of me expects it at some point. If I do not blunder yes there is a sense of relief but that is all I am capable of feeling: that and only that. I am not sad that I didn’t visit Phnom Penh Chess Club. Why? Because holidays can and do go badly wrong sometimes. Crime exists everywhere. Only death is real when confronted with your own. And no you won’t like it very much. And no you won’t know what to do. Most certainly it will radically alter the nature of your holiday, and for me, trigger an arresting escalation from being robbed on a deserted street late at night, as happened on the first visit, where all I lost was all my possessions instead of my life. May I offer some advice? As Franklyn D. Roosevelt once said ‘the only thing you have to fear is fear itself’. If danger, or wrongly perceived danger, comes your way, just punch your way out of it. Twice I tried to do that and twice my soon to be opponent backed off super-swiftly. It’s just a shame I couldn’t keep it up. Almost all who threaten only do so to scare you into getting what they want. And they will do so mercilessly because at the bottom of it all lies the undeniable truth that in Asia: life is cheap. Turn the tables on them with real intent and watch what happens -and don’t take too long about it either! Tough when your life is on the line but necessary. It will stop your opponent from thinking about killing you and suddenly start them thinking about how to defend themselves instead. Anger -and yes I do mean of the explosive kind- is your saviour, and your only saviour trust me -just don’t kill anyone!
And on that note I had better leave it there once more proud of myself for employing a Nietzschean technique, which my professor described as ‘pulling the rug from under your feet’.
‘From the military school of life: That which does not kill me only makes me stronger’.
F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Comment from fan of the site: ‘I see this McCready is at it again, he loves to break the boundaries of chess just because he thinks its too conservative. He loves to trick you into thinking the content is chess-related then pulls you in different directions and inserts content that alters your emotions whilst reading. I take my hat off to him, he’s bloody good at it but I wish I hadn’t read this. Who wants to read about what to do if their life is threatened. He really is a bad sport this McCready fellow.‘
Comment from critique of the site: ‘I don’t like this post. That bloody McCready has put the fear of god up me! I was going to go to Rio De Janeiro but I think I’ll go to Bognor Regis instead! No I won’t! I’m going nowhere now! I’m staying at home! Bloody terrible post this is! Wish I hadn’t have read it now!’
Mark. J. McCready 6.39pm, Saturday April 29th 2023,
Laksi, Bangkok
Posted in My own endeavours, On-line journal, Personal Interest & Experience | Leave a Comment »
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A side note on how to read old Tom Sweby's columns
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.
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