This year, my two big “impulsive pastimes” were German and Chess. Eventually, I’ll get around to giving a head-nod (not a heil) to the Deutschland, but for now we’ll talk about chessdom. Buckle up your boy scout belts, secure your pocket protectors in the full upright position, and add another layer of masking tape to your nose bridges ’cause it’s about to get geeky…
I knew the moves. Heck, I could even en passant and castle. What I didn’t know was basic strategy. For instance – if you open like this:
Okay, I tried to find an image to show the a2 pawn moving to a4. It’s such a stupid move that the internet refuses to give me a picture of it. “Hey internet! Give me a pic of the a2 pawn opening.”
“Lame, Lance. Lame.”
What the internet did give me was a clean pic of this:
Because that makes a heckuvalot more sense. Your queen & bishop can get out, your knights hop in. You can castle in three moves. It’s a clean, balanced strategy and the most common opening. I also learned the benefits of battering rams:
No, not those, internet. Sheesh you’re touchy today.
These:
It’s black’s move in this famous 1924 game. As you can see, black has two rooks right in a row AND white has two rooks right in a row. Black rook c8 will take white rook d8. Then white rook d1 will take black rook d8. Third move? A second battering ram – black rook a8 takes white rook d8.
For those of you still reading, Black’s still standing.
Oh sure, there were other things, but you can find those elsewhere. What I’m really interested in telling you is what I did after I learned the game. This guy Colby Williams played chess in clubs all through grade school, high school, etc. He’s the man to beat in my circle of friends (outside of a savant I’m now friends with). Colby, until I played him in a random coffee shop somewhere in St. Louis, had only lost a dozen times in hundreds of games.
I was his thirteenth loss.
Of course I’m not going to mention how many times he beat me before I beat him because that’s irrelevant. What IS relevant is how he then studied hypermodern chess, preparing to beat me all over again. He discarded his classical training and relearned everything.
So I started studying hypermodernism:
http://www.chess.com/emboard.html?id=275580
And what I found is that these guys opened off-center. They started dismantling that classic opening from earlier by protecting the QUEEN, not the king. It creates a sort of flanking, something Sun Tsu would love:
(both white and black hypermodern openings)
I haven’t played Colby since, but it’s changing my game. Here’s two other hypermodern games from Chess.com
http://www.chess.com/emboard.html?id=275582
http://www.chess.com/emboard.html?id=275583
What emerged out of this whole study was the humor of the “old way” of playing – think Jedi – and the “new way” of playing – think Han Solo. Out of those jokes, Colby wrote four webisodes of a series about chess. It’ll be airing right here on Literating Lance Schaubert, hopefully by the end of the year. It’s called 64 Squares. Keep on the look out for it through your broken glasses…
What’s been a game-changer for your pastime recently?
