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Revenge of the Sith

Darth Sidious Brings his Lightsaber

Posted by

7/28/17

Did you ever hear the tragedy of Kitt Fisto?

He was a promising young squid thingy Jedi who was savagely run through by the Dark Lord of the Sith without uttering a single line of dialogue in the prequel trilogy.

Observe:

Kitt Gets Hammered.

That's kind of how the chess rematch between Jemanji and I went. Since SSI lacks Yoda, Anakin and Mace Windu types, it fell on me to serve the arrest warrant on the kindly old SSI Emperor.

Here's how that turned out:

Mojo v. Doc game 1 7/28/2017

In this game, I was planning on castling queenside and launching a pawnstorm and everything else I had at the white king. I lost my queen on move 8, by reactively placing it on F7. G6 would have been much better, as I would have been where I wanted to be, and could have shooshed his bishop off with a pawn or something. Doc took with his light square bishop, and then there was no recovery after that. I made it to twenty nine without mounting a threat of any kind. Here's the finishing blow:

Mojo v. Doc Game 1 7/28/2017 The finishing blow. Its either my King or My Castle.

Game 2, I played my standard King's Indian and fared much better. Here was my high point.

Mojo v. Doc Game 2, 7/28/2017

I had poached a pawn, and I had two knights in the most annoying possible spot. This image shows the skill gap between someone of Doc's caliber and someone of mine. I go to great lengths to keep knights off my side of the board, because they are too much to think about. Doc can see I want a knight on E-6 to threaten his castle and king, so he puts three defenders on the position with a fourth in arms reach.

The game, and my short reign as SSI chess champ, ended when I blundered a castle on move 27. After this, all of my pieces were systematically deleted until on move 39, I had nothing left, and Doc had a queen and two passed pawns that were going to become queens.

In game 3, I accomplished my dream of castling queenside, and launching a full scale invasion of Korraban.

Here's how that went:

Mojo v. Doc Game 3 7/28/2017.

The invasion looks, well, kind of soft. I wanted to bring the pain but only had a few X-Wings. My armada of pawns was all chewed up from Rathtar hunting. I managed to put Doc in check twice and threaten him a little bit, but was undone by my absentee pawn on C-3 and negligently leaving my King on the back row without enough defense. I also played incorrectly. After the check on H4, forcing his king to G, I should have moved my castly back to where it was, and then advanced my pawn to break up his pawn chain.

Ah well. Coulda Woulda Shoulda gg.

Order is restored to the galaxy. Much respect to Doc for putting his Elo on the line to play a scrub like me.

-Mojo

Comments

thanks Mojo!

Game 1 - after ... Qg6, 7. Be3 then W is better developed and the threats include Nh4, Nd5, xc7 creating some difficulty in a queenside cackle 0-0-0. Sample line 7 Be3 Bd7 8 Nh4 Qf6 9 Nd5 Qd8 (if ..xh4 then Nxc7) 10 Qh5+ with a +4.25 evaluation. The Budapest makes for fighting chess!

Game 2 - White (you) had a gorgeous position with a P up and good squares for your pieces. However the QS majority is backward and Black has nice dark squares for his N's also (since W's dark sq B is eternally gone). The W Bishop is inert but White's squares on e6 and c6 are painful for Black, especially if the N's can be coordinated with any major officers. One suggestion for W getting that R-N-Q coordination would be to double or triple R's and/or Q on the e-file and try to penetrate on e7, with or without a KS pawn storm. ... point is you had an outstanding or winning game at that point. A shame the rook drop had to ruin an exciting battle.

Next time you open with 1.d4 I'll be playing some other system! This is twice now you've effortlessly achieved a plus against my fave system!

Game 3 - Agree with your analysis totally. Had the R gone back to ...Rg4 and you followed with ...h4 I'd have needed to exchange Q's and pronto.

....

Mojician understands chess profoundly, as an 1800+ player at least; it's only his occasional tactical oversights that hold him back from such a rating. This happens often; very high-IQ chessplayers are very strong in strategy but subject to missing the finer details of tactical combos. A malady Dr. D fights himself...

Looking forward to next battles! :- )

Warmly,

Jeff

My problem is depth perception.

Seriously...not just making excuses...when I look at a chess board, my eyes cannot focus on all of the pieces simultaneously...albinism causes a condition called pendular nystagmus...the muscles that control eye movement are weak and poorly developed, so the eyes cannot coordinate.

The result is that it does not matter in the slightest how well I understand a general position...I will almost always miss blindingly obvious threats and opportunities.

Or as Babe Ruth said...

"If my eyes went bad even a little bit I wouldn't be able to hit home runs." :- ) ... sorry about your disease Matt. Definitely rules out 'net chess on the 2D monitor.

I would say that playing blindfold takes about 600 points off your rating. A few times I've been in tournaments were absolutely-blind people had a tactile board in their laps and they played fairly well.

But the point is, any decent tournament player (such as you) is in a position to discuss a chess position with anybody.

So my 1500 club rating...

...is really a 2100 rating. :D Good to know

Still fun to talk about chess with ya.

Hey Matt,

Its still fun to talk some chess with you. The only time I hear about Nystagmus is in DUI defense. That is, the allegedly drunk .10 eyeball has a narrow field of vision and tends to twich and spazz out when anything happens out of the narrow field of vision. The more drunk your eyeball gets, the worse the nystagmus. Permanent beer goggles sounds like it would cause quite a few problems with everyday life. How is driving, playing video games, or talking to strange women? (Sorry couldn't help it).

See ya buddy.

I have no problems answering questions.

A genetic anomaly naturally generates curiosity, and I think that's a good thing, overall.

All I ask for is respectful dialogue, which this group has in spades. :)

I can't drive...I qualify as legally blind, not just from nystagmus. Albinism deprives the eye of some or all of its color receptors. I got the lighter form, so I'm not colorblind (actually I see color differentiations way WAAYYY better than normal...inherited my mother's eye for color and beauty, for which I thank God). But, with fewer color receptors, the eye has less ability to produce visual detail at high resolution. With my eyes, the world looks like it does through one of those old webcams or digital cameras with tiny pixel counts.

On top of that, I inherited my father's astigmatism and near-sightedness.

So...no driving. But I am actually a pretty good video game player, though I rarely play these days...not much time. I have surprisingly good hand-eye coordination for a blind man, so long as the screen is large enough. and I sit close.

As for women...I'm married...so...you be the judge. :)

Have actually seen people make the argument

with seemingly serious intent, that men who get married are NOT good with the ladies, which is why they have to 'settle' for just one. I, too, am married and proud of it, but it always strikes me just how *differently* people can view the same phenomena.

As to your 'respectful dialogue' bit, I wholeheartedly agree and my own experiences have borne out that the vast majority of our fellow humans agree. I worked with a woman who had a rare form of growth retardation, which didn't leave her a full-blown dwarf but somewhere in between that and average stature. All the other nurses were like, "No, you shouldn't talk to her about it--you'll embarrass her!" I was like, "I'm going to take the other side on this one," so I strolled up to her, confessed my ignorance of her condition, asked her if she wouldn't mind describing it for me, and her reply was to look me square in the eye and say, "You're the first person to ever just come up to me and talk to me about it without acting weird. Everyone else seems to think I'm too afraid or ashamed to talk about it in public; they're the ones who are afraid and ashamed. Thanks for being up front! Now, here's what makes my condition peculiar..." Fifteen minutes later, I understood about two orders of magnitude more than I had previously in terms of growth retardation, the various causes, and what some of the specific indicators were (most of that information has been defragged out of my hard drives by now, unfortunately) and had made a casual friend in the process.

Moral of the story, for me, was to stop projecting onto other people. Be courteous, respectful, and polite--but for the most part people would prefer a direct, honest approach to a circumspect one.

Man, I love this community! :-)

Anyone who views marriage as failure...

...is a failure.

Period.

Sorry, that's just how I see it.

Loving this

Loving the play by play! My high school chess was much less interesting!!