Who's the master?

I played a game of chess tonight against ctd(c) on the ICC. It was an interesting game, and an incredibly boring one. Not completely for me, but after moving the same piece back and forth for about 50 moves, it does make you wonder. Why? Why am I doing this? The answer, ctd(c) was rated about 200 points higher than me so I was pretty happy with the concept of a draw. I would have moved that piece back and forth all night if I had to. Thankfully, there's always the 50-move rule. Not wanting to fall prey, ctd(c) did start mixing things up a little before the conditions were met for the 50-move rule. Those conditions are really "resets". The counter resets on a pawn move, or I believe a capture. And the computers tend to have a contempt factor built in, which makes sense. If the position is even, and you can avoid the 50-move rule without negatively impacting your position, why not do so. Anyway, on my 127th move, it could be avoided no longer. Game drawn by 50 move rule. I'm not going to include the game because, and I realize this, you probably don't care.

It was nice, because my play has been a little sub-par lately. Primarly because I've been focusing on school, so not really playing. The Mass State Open is on the 27-29th of this month and I plan on playing, so I need to get with it. I was a little surprised, given the "big" sound of the name, that the prize fund is so... small. That means they are expecting very few players. Maybe the race for the under 2000 crown will be decided by a cage match between Larry Williams and I. We'll have to get dressed up as our favorite chess piece and battle it out WWE style. For the U2000 the prizes go $450-250-100 for 1st-3rd. With rooms being $89 a night, if you're going for the money you'll probably be disappointed. After room, food, and entry fee, if you don't come in 1st you've lost money.

So I'm sure that Sean will be covering it in his blog (http://cocjournal.blogspot.com), but I have a feeling we have very few crossovers and I've just got to mention it. Gata Kamsky kicks ass! There was a great article on the Chessbase site today, although under one of the captions they call him Rustam (which, if you folled him back in the mid 90's when he was one of the top players in the world you'd know that Rustam is his father and everyone hated the guy), which talked a little bit about him. But he's currently playing in the MTel Masters 2006 tournament with some of the top players in the world. Our current #'s 1-2, Veselin Topalov and Vishwanathan Anand are playing, as well as ex-FIDE champion Ruslan Ponomariov, French GM Etienne Bacrot, and Peter Svidler. The ratings and current world rankings go like this:

1 2804 Veselin Topalov
2 2803 Vishwanathan Anand
4 2743 Peter Svidler
6 2738 Ruslan Ponomariov
15 2708 Etienne Bacrot
33 2671 Gata Kamsky

So it's my opinion that Gata is only getting the invitations right now because of who he used to be. He used to be in the top 5 when those were Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Vladimir Kramnik, Vishwanathan Anand, and Gata Kamsky. Certainly prestigious company, with Kasparov being considered by many to be the greatest chess player in the history of the game and Karpov being the winningest champion. But Gata left the game for 8 years. So right now he has the interest of a lot of people. Can he recapture the talent he once had? If he doesn't soon I think he'll find the invitations quickly disappearing. Being #33 in the world doesn't usually get you invited to the top tournaments.

The good news is that after some mediocre results, he's having a fantastic tournament. And against the caliber of players, that really says a lot. If he keeps it up for the final half of the tournament it will be quite a statement! So keep your fingers crossed and let's see how it goes. The standings as of today go like this (image taken from chessbase.com article http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3112 without permission):



One final piece of news. Bruce thinks that the animal I saw may have been a fisher cat. I'm not sure, because from what I looked at I'm not sure they get big enough. But there it is. Fisher Cat, Mountain Lion, Hallucination, you be the judge. All I know is that it was big, bad, and enjoyed staring me down.

Until next time...

Ed.