You are playing blitz down your local club but as you play the moves aren’t coming into your head. Instead you get lottery numbers then these urges to go out and place bets come.
Would you resign your game and go home or would you leave the club and get some lottery tickets OR would you quit chess altogether, change your identity, buy a plane ticket and start a new life somewhere else. OR would you get a pint of cider at the bar and forget all about it?
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Let’s say you are playing for the county. It’s a Saturday morning and you are in Newmarket, Turner Hall. You are in the middle game and putting up a good fight on the board. Would you get up from your chair whilst your opponent is thinking, walk out of the hall, to a newsagent and put a lottery ticket on in the middle of the game? How would you chose the numbers or have they been communicated to you already?
Would you do that in a county game? I wouldn’t. I’d lose concentration on my game and get done over. No malarkey for county matches. That’s pure chess. No lottery tickets, just chess and only chess. And anyway that town is famous for horse racing, a lot of those lanes are used as bridle paths and stink the place up with horseshit. I don’t want that on my shoes when I am trying to concentrate over the board and win for my team! Fuck that lottery bollocks, some other day maybe. End up with a horseshit sandwich otherwise…ah fuck that bollocks. No lottery and that’s final.
Posted in My own warped humour, On-line journal | Leave a Comment »
If you were playing competitive chess and then in the opening you are contacted by spirits, they tell you about your game and expected moves but everything they say is false and doesn’t happen, would you smash the clock up if it carried on? A professional player would smash that clock up but an amateur might just get up and walk around. If it were me and I was being told of moves that never happen again and again, I’d smash the clock up yes. Yes I would because they might go away then. But I would have to go to the bar first and get lagered up real fast, then you could really smash that clock up.
Tune in again for more professional advice.
MJM 2.47am
August 2nd.
A dark room in the capital
Posted in My own warped humour, On-line journal | Leave a Comment »
Rightly or wrongly, I will admit I had myself well entertained earlier today. That story about the shrine had me laughing for hours, and laughing and telling people about it and asking them if they would do the same and so on.
You can see the extent of the damage in the video here:
And let’s be honest, we need to chuckle sometimes. I can’t really offer advice on visiting shrines and factoring that into your chess. All I can say is that some spirits are evil and are tricksters too. I wouldn’t bother with them personally. I wonder what the police in the video thought of that bloke? How could they not laugh?
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It wasn’t a good day for Laos. They lost 4-0 to Lesotho, the experts at hiding from lions. There are not many countries below Laos in the table but hopefully they will pick up some points somewhere.
England appeared in form today and took down Serbia with ease.
Some of my former playing partners are doing well, there are participants in the Olympiad I have beaten before…but it’s always like that. Not too long ago I beat someone rated 1999 at the time but he’s nearly 2500 now and not appearing in the Olympiad. I could make it into many of the teams playing.
Let’s hope Laos have improved results.
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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?
Posted in Humour, My own warped humour, On-line journal | 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
Posted in Humour, My own warped humour, On-line journal | Leave a Comment »
Olympiad fever is keeping me awake… .
Laos will play Lesotho in round 4 of the 2022 Olympiad in Chennai (formerly known as Madras).
Regarding Lesotho, formerly their weapon of choice was most likely the spear. Whether that is still the case or what are they doing up there on that mountain in South Africa, apart from hide from lions, I also don’t know. Some chess is being played somewhere somehow yes, but that’s about all I can tell you.
If Laos can do well, it could overtake The Seychelles in the table -another great chess nation!
Of lesser importance, England will play Serbia and are favourites due to a slight rating advantage from top to bottom.
Current table, (which partially explains the pairings) can be found here:
http://chess-results.com/tnr653631.aspx?lan=1
You can tune into to Peter Leko and Peter Svidler on youtube easily enough, both of whom are remarkably gifted at showing you how far off from being a Grand Master you actually are -inadvertently of course.
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Admittedly, I have been to quite a few countries -36 in total. It’s not something I am ever proud of or boastful about but when the Olympiads come round, it’s always nice to look out for the countries you are personally fond of.
Laos is one of my favourite ‘countries’ in the world, to use the term broadly. On my last visit there (late March 2016), I cycled just over 140 kms on my Trek in north-eastern Thailand in two mornings before getting my bike over the Mekong river -also the border- and heading inland towards the nearest consulate in a small city, opulent with restored, colonial architecture and casinos -going by the name of Savannakhet. (or sleepy Savannakhet as I dubbed it).
But as lovely as the country and the people may be, or seem to be, their chess team at the Olympiad isn’t the strongest, with the top board being the only rated player, and only in the 1200 region. Still, it’s refreshingly pleasant to see them there as in itself that does constitute progress and it’s good for the country as a whole in terms of building cultural identity and defining progress more readily and explorationally. Should you ever go to Laos, you may notice it is still communist and will always border China. You may also notice that to define it as a nation is stretching the term a quite a bit since it is tribal across the nation and many areas are unchanged in the last 10,000 years, with what we take for granted in modernity, such as electricity and money, having not reached all parts of the country yet, with bartering systems well in place during daylight hours still. Their national language is official but is almost unheard of outside what towns and cities there are, thus almost certainly unlearnt and never used.
On a much more solemn note, the country I am currently a resident of has also entered a team, but having had a good look at it I was sad to see I could beat the entire team if I played any of them, and so returning to work in a land where there doesn’t appear to be anyone better than you isn’t a very pleasant feeling I can assure you. There’s a sense of something not being quite right, provided your level of self-understanding is sufficient enough to realise such things(that’s another way of admitting to not being particularly good at something)…perhaps I will have something to become boastful of when I finally get round going back to work. Some sort of national challenge may be in order then most likely declined, ignored, overlooked, and eventually buried under ceaseless online traffic somewhere… .
Mark. J. McCready
12.13am BKK
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I’ve linked the world champions reasons for not defending his title here:
Does it add up to you? If you think how much he earns for defending his title, and that most likely he will do so successfully several times over, that is well into the millions. It doesn’t add up to me but then I don’t know how rich he really is.
Mark.J.McCready
1158pm July 24th.
Laksi, BKK
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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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