Lesson 18: Reviewing Games With Variations

I borrowed this game from a great blog post called "The Instruction Value of Amateur Games" at http://chessimprover.com/the-instructional-value-of-amateur-games/.

My goal was to introduce you to the text protocol by which variations are recorded. The red colored text marks the moves of the main line, and comments are in green.

March Mayhem Tournament

Wow we brought home the traveling pawn for what I believe is the first time in at least three years! John and Elek had perfect scores in K-3 for 1st and 2nd place, Vincent won scholastic masters, Liam got 5th in K-1, and August got 4th in K-1. Congratulations! The other attendees were Amelia, Bria, James, and Nash.



The DGT electronic boards were finally functioning fully, we had two going at the same time and it was a lot of fun to watch outdoors on the TV. Bria had a particularly entertaining game where she won by baiting her opponent with a free rook. In the final round, Jack's huge comeback attracted a lot of spectators!

Lesson 17: Another Example Game

Like last session, we had cutouts of the players that we studied (Nazi Paikidze versus Narmin Kazimova) in their 2011 match. Their game can be viewed and downloaded from chessgames.com.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture this time. Nazi is the 2016 (current) U.S. women's chess champion and will attempt to hold this title March 27th through April 10th in St. Louis. I also admire her for protesting the women's world chess champsionship in Iran due to mandatory dress code.

Lesson 16: The Magnus Effect

In this lesson we went over one of the famous games of Magnus Carlsen where he, at 12 years age,  defeated Sipke Ernst with an aggressive attack. See the full game at: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1272702 and maybe search the game on youtube for some video commentary by strong players.

In class we had students voice the players. I wanted the voices to be "chess accurate" when called upon. In the event of a sacrifice, the attacking player might say something like "I may lose this rook, but your king is now less safe."

We'll probably try this again next week!

Queen of Hearts Tournament

We played this tournament on February 25th at Israel Temple of Brevard up in Viera.

Only two of our players could play this time: Vincent and John:

They both did well, Vincent scoring 3.5/5 in scholastic masters section, and John scoring 4.5/5 in K-3, winning it!

Some of the games were watchable on the external display connected to the DGT e-board. We actually had two boards we were trying to display, but the second one got shipped without pieces!

John deserves recognition for his steep improvement in these last few months. I've mentioned this in a previous post, but the climb hasn't stopped! Here is his rating history graph:

In three months, John has become the second strongest player in the club. Up until the past few weeks, it was all self study (printed material, youtube videos) and now he's attending Chris Bortzner's weekend classes at Brevard Chess center.

Congratulations!

Lesson 15: A Game with a Gambit

A gambit is a gamble, an instance of gambling. In chess it usually refers to purposely losing a piece in hopes that the resulting board state will lead to compensation (a win, an attack, future material, anything whose value exceeds the first lost piece).

It's easy to compare material. We know that a knight and bishop are (in simplest scenarios) worth a rook and a pawn, by performing math.

But gambits let you make "fuzzy" comparisons. How do you compare a piece to a position? Is a pawn worth a rook on an open file? Is a knight worth a battery against your opponents kingside? Exploring these risks by taking them and meeting them with a friend is one of the main things that makes chess a lot of fun!

For this lesson, we went over a game published at http://www.academicchess.com/worksheets/grabsky_game.pdf

The player "Hardy" offers the piece, and the player "Grabsky" takes (or GRABS!) nearly every piece offered. While Hardy is down on material, his remaining pieces are always more active than the "sleeping" piece of Grabsky. Play through this game again!

Lesson 14: Beginner KP Endgames

We likened two fighting kings to sumo wrestlers, and called the three squares that face the opposing king the wrestler's "belly":



But whose belly is really in charge here?

• if white to move, black's belly is in charge because c4,d4,e4 are off-limits to white
• if black to move, white's belly is in charge, for similar reasons

Serious chess people call this "opposition" and treat it as a noun, an item of sorts that you can have or lose. "White has the opposition" means white's belly is in charge, in our analogy.

So what? Well if white's belly is in charge, he can maintain his belly all the way to d8, controlling that square. Similarly, if black's belly is in charge, he can control d1.

So what? If white can walk a pawn with him on his way to control d8, he promotes and wins. And the same applies to black, seeking promotion on d1.

Lesson 13: Bishop Power

These sheets come from the Chess Life Kids magazine, Feb 2017 issue. The first is a nice departure from serious chess positions, a case where a bunch of (seemingly) wrong-colored bishops must deliver mate to the king!

And second is just a worksheet with puzzles where a bishop is involved with checkmates:

Remember that Chess Life Kids is a bi-monthly (one magazine per two months) publication that comes with scholastic USCF memberships.

Lesson #12: Counting

We returned back to basics with some simple exercises counting the number of attackers and defenders. In the simplest case:

• if you are defending and have at least as many defenders as your opponent has attackers, you are safe
• if you are attacking, you need more attackers than your opponent has defenders to move in

But what about other considerations? What are the value of the pieces? What about any intermediate checks? We borrowed from a nice website I found:

http://www.chessfornovices.com/chesscountingexercises1.html

http://www.chessfornovices.com/chesscountingexercises2.html

which summarizes nicely:

We've learned a number of important lessons through these exercises:

• The number of attackers and defenders matters.

• The value of the attackers and defenders matters.

• The order of the attackers and defenders matters.

• You aren't forced to play out exchanges right to the end.

I encourage you to visit the chessfornovices.com website links above to support their work. But here also is a condensed printout of the puzzles presented:

 

King and Queens Tournament

January 21st, 2016 at Viera Charter School:



Vincent, Amelia and Bria, John, and the three Lamoureux's showed up to play. Our K-3 team was third, Bria got the biggest upset prize in K-6, August got 3rd in K-1, Vincent got 1st in scholastic master's section, and John got biggest upset in K-3! Congratulations to our neighbors Gemini who won First Place in K-6.

Unfortunately John had to leave before the trophy ceremony so he missed any trophy or group photos. But John is showing himself as the most improved player on the team. During class he uses terms and phrases that I recognize from books, but have never actually taught. Examples: "The piece is overloaded." and "He's peeling open the h-file", which means he's studying on his own. He gained a remarkable 106 rating points this tournament with 4 out of 5 points, and his biggest upset comes against a player that has at least one personal coach. His performance this tournament demonstrated that determination can beat out other advantages.

Our First Chess Tournament Broadcast

At the King and Queens tournament on January 21, 2017 we broadcasted the scholastic master's section to chess24 with 6 players and one DGT e-board:

We were fortunate to have wifi internet access at the school. I was a little bit disappointed when I called Viera Charter school prior to the tournament to inquire about parents using the wifi on Saturday and was sternly told no. I'd settled on, but was worried about, using tethered internet through a cell phone. But Chris somehow hooked up with the VCS IT guy and he was present in the morning to help me and the tournament attendees connect.

Chess24 was amazingly helpful. Oliver (my Chess24 main contact) was apparently monitoring the tournament because he emailed me when an issue arose with the pairings. And later on, when one of the results was not showing up in the leaderboard, he quickly detected the problem and communicated with me to resolve it. I was very surprised with the one-on-one attention that Chess24 gave such a small, amateur production. Two hiccups in 15 games (5 rounds each with 3 games) is not too bad, but we'll need to improve if this is to scale up.

A goal we're considering for the next tournament is to track all the games, but we need to resolve the issue of how to section the players and how to transfer the pairings and results information from whatever software Chris uses to PGN format.

While this is the most advanced setup we've had for watching the games, we must remain pragmatic and ask how useful it was for players and parents. Several people watched the games from their mobile, either because they had kids playing or to check how much time is left in the round. But there wasn't a huge enthusiastic draw like their was with Matt's camera setup at the October Brouhaha.

I think the reason is the ease of accessibility. In October, you simply had to walk up to a large screen. With chess24, you an internet accessible device. You need to type the URL, find the tournament, find the round, and the game.

Matt and I are brainstorming what a good in-between would be. One really nice thing about his webcam setup is that it was on a LAN, so we operated independently of any internet access of a particular tournament venue. But the large TV is slightly inconvenient to move. And keeping a computer hooked up to it exposes it to damage or theft. A little mini projector? A raspberry pi connected to the TV? Who knows what we'll come up with!

DGT Serial E-Board: Connecting to Chess24

Chess24 offers a live view of your tournament through their website. The interface by which you inform chess24 of the tournament parameters and ongoing results is primitive but powerful: editing remote files.

Initial Configuration

To get started, visit their FAQ page for organizers seeking seeking to broadcast their tournament, which has the appropriate contact information. Your account will be given the tournament organizer role and you'll be directed to an online form that help create the initial configuration file for your tournament:

This form does not tell chess24 about your tournament, it is only for loading, editing, and saving configuration files which are stored in the Javascript Object Notation (JSON) format. This is a nice format because it's open and can be edited with a text editor. Once your tournament information looks good, save the JSON file and email it to chess24. I expect that, in the future, you'll be able to submit your JSON files online and skip the relatively slow email step.

Enter FTP

Everything is configurable through this JSON file, which you can edit with a simple text editor. Upon receiving this, chess24 will create a name and password for you on their FTP server, as well as a directory structure to hold the results of your rounds in and the initial JSON file you submitted. Let's have a look. I'm using the default command line FTP client that comes with MacOS but any others will work and be prettier:

Chess24 also gives you a URL to their viewer on their website, in this case it's https://chess24.com/en/watch/live-tournaments/kings-and-queens-2017-january#live. The first experiment I had to perform was changing the JSON file and seeing if my change was reflected live on the website, it was!

If changes to the JSON configuration file on the FTP server are immediately seen by visitors of the tournament viewer, I bet we'll be making changes to a PGN file so that visitors immediately see the move on the live board. Let's configure DGT's LiveChess to do exactly this! Choose File->Preferences and the FTP settings dialog appears:

Make sure that the directory matches the directory on the FTP server. Now actions in LiveChess (like a piece being moved on an e-Board, or our reporting the result of a non e-Board match) should connect to the FTP server and publish the changes. Start a game and let's see if we can observe LiveChess in action:

We can see that it creates not just a games.pgn file as expected, but some other files too. I think chess24 ignore all files except those named either "games.pgn" or "results.pgn" so we can consider these benign artifacts of LiveChess and safely disregard them.

Understanding Live Game Upload

Now let's start up the e-Board and make some moves, and see if we can really witness LiveChess reporting the moves to chess24. We'll do this by reading the games.pgn file after each move. Make sure the "Game Upload" checkbox is marked in the lower right of LiveChess.

On successive reads of the file, we can see the game being played! And the game viewer is being updated live based on this file! One problem I can foresee is if the name values in the [White] and [Black] PGN tags don't exactly match the player text given in the JSON file, so be sure these are identical, including capitalization, spaces, and punctuation. Here it's all tied together with a successful broadcast of a test game. See the video description for some notes on clock synchronization too:

Results on boards that are not live are simply reported in LiveChess, and the games.pgn fill will have an entry for them inserted with a result, but no moves. These showed on chess24 immediately and did not require a separate results.pgn file to be made.

DGT and Chess24 Do it Right

Notice that the viewer and FTP server being live before the actual tournament start gives us a nice sandbox or test area to rehearse the tournament in. This is an indispensable feature that probably will never be specifically advertised as one.

I must really commend DGT and Chess24 for not closing up the data formats and interactions into their own inventions. DGT uses the widely adopted and easily readable PGN format and Chess24 is using JSON, PGN, and communication over FTP. If you're not initially familiar with these, it could be a bit of a learning experience, but it's worth it. The transparency of it all makes issues easy to debug, and the control afforded means you can make any conceivable change about your tournament on the fly.

Lesson #11: Deflection

Today we talked about the concept of deflection, which is tempting or forcing a piece of your opponent's to a different square so that you can carry through with your plan.

One technique we used to finding moves in deflection situations is to visualize fantasy situations that move or removed a problematic piece. Your thought should sound something like "if only that rook weren't there, I'd have mate" or "if my opponent's king wasn't there, the queen would be undefended". Then you can search for moves and lines that may play toward these fantasy situations.

The material came from the October 2016 issue of Chess Life Kids, available for view on USCF if you're a member.

 

I hope you'll be able to play at the tournament this Saturday!

DGT Serial E-Board: First Impressions and Setup

I'm lucky to have access to a DGT E-Board for possible use in the scholastic tournaments and the Space Coast open in April.

Of the serial, USB, and BlueTooth forms of the board, serial was chosen because of its proven track record in large tournaments and ability to expand out to many boards, with a longer distance than USB allows. The boards are somehow connected in a bus with the software reporting "DGT Bus Protocol". I'm used to serial being a two-party point-to-point arrangement, so in a later post I'll try to explore exactly how multiple boards share the serial lines.

Around $1100 purchased:

• Serial Tournament e-Board (board and pieces)
• DGT-3000 clock
• "Connection Material" for 1st Tournament e-Board

Beware, I'm a critical consumer, especially when a considerable amount of money has been dropped for something. The first thing that I didn't like was that the DE-9 female connector and plate is not flush mounted with the side of the board. It's sticking out quite a bit, ruining the finished look.

Like the DGT North American Clock, the DGT3000 feel light and hollow to me. The former seems to get great reviews on Amazon and the chess subreddit, but can't help but feel that their build is inferior to the stocky Saitek Mephisto. And it came with a single AA battery, when two are required!

The user manuals are just inkjet printed pages stapled together, but this is 2017 so the latest PDF's from the website obviate these physical copies. Here is the one titled Installation Manual:

The wiring diagram shown here doesn't match the cables that come with the kit (see below for full parts list). After verifying that I have the latest Rev 1603 manual from the DGT website section containing manuals I nearly gave up before finding that it's the LiveChess software manual that depicts the serial setup a bit better:

But what is the 10252 "connection box"? There's none in the $300 "Connection Material" kit:

• 2 cat5e patch cables: 20m and 5m lengths (ValueLine brand) $15
• 4 RJ45 splitters (ValueLine brand) $5
• a 12V/1A AC adapter (Sunny brand, SYS1460-1212) $20?
• USB to RS232 (EasySYNC ES-U-1001-R10) $26
• male DE-9 to male cat5e and male 3.5mm stereo jack $20?
• female DE-9 to male cat5e and female power jack $20?

Those connectors sound like some custom work, but how complicated can they be? In model trains, Lionel sells a similar connector including power supply for $38. I couldn't resist peeking inside:

Some type of power regulation stuff? A cap, diode, and resister? It's beyond me, but it's not just spliced wires, as I naively assumed. Anyways, it's up to you whether the price is fair, but a penny pinching buyer may be able to assemble this kit themselves. Here are some pictures of the first connections:

The power cable in the top right leads to a wall outlet, and the male USB in the bottom right leads to my computer. Here's is a wiring diagram that includes my estimate of how additional boards would fit in. Connectors in green, wires in purple:

Now that the board and clock are wired, let's get the computer hooked up. While other software can communicate with the board, that's out of scope for this post where I'll use the intended LiveChess software from DGT. Upon plugging the board in, Linux reports:

[125867.211017] usb 2-2.2: new full-speed USB device number 8 using uhci_hcd

[125867.320186] usb 2-2.2: New USB device found, idVendor=0403, idProduct=6001

[125867.320190] usb 2-2.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3

[125867.320191] usb 2-2.2: Product: US232R

[125867.320192] usb 2-2.2: Manufacturer: FTDI

[125867.320193] usb 2-2.2: SerialNumber: FTYQGZEA

[125867.352676] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial

[125867.355062] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic

[125867.355198] usbserial: USB Serial support registered for generic

[125867.362643] usbcore: registered new interface driver ftdi_sio

[125867.362731] usbserial: USB Serial support registered for FTDI USB Serial Device

[125867.362796] ftdi_sio 2-2.2:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected

[125867.363611] usb 2-2.2: Detected FT232RL

[125867.363614] usb 2-2.2: Number of endpoints 2

[125867.363616] usb 2-2.2: Endpoint 1 MaxPacketSize 64

[125867.363617] usb 2-2.2: Endpoint 2 MaxPacketSize 64

[125867.363618] usb 2-2.2: Setting MaxPacketSize 64

[125867.366861] usb 2-2.2: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0

So from your computer's perspective, there's just your typical FTDI emulated serial bus on /dev/ttyUSB0. Now say what you want about Java, its use in LiveChess allowed it to run on Linux with no steps other than unzipping it and invoking the runtime:

a@ubuntu:~/Downloads/LiveChess-1.4.8$ java -jar ./livechess-1.4.8.jar

I'm very pleased that DGT supports Linux directly, not just by accident (because its software is Java). There's even tips about creating udev rules so that you don't have to run LiveChess as root to access the serial device (section 3.4 of the DGT LiveChess manual).

And I'm also very happy that DGT doesn't burden the user with licenses and key files and other hurdles like registration. The software is available for download immediately to any visitor of the website.

The GUI enumerates serial ports and finds the board by ID, which is the product serial number from the side of the board. Direct and simple!

There's a little bit of boring steps you need to do in order to actually get a game started, like creating a tournament, players, and a round, but when all that routine is done, I'm happy to report that it works:

One question I was very interested in where the intelligence lies to determine what is or isn't a move. If the board sees simply the position of the pieces, then during the act of sliding a bishop across a diagonal or castling, it will see multiple board states that should collapse into a single reported move. Does the board maybe wait for the pieces to settle? If so what's the sampling rate and would it work for blitz? Does it even know whose move it is?

The answer is that the board captures and remembers every unique board state it can, and does not appear to know the player turn. The LiveChess software performs the abductive reasoning to determine which chess moves would have explained those board states.

This is evident in the "moves" and "memory" tab in LiveChess when you try to trick it by, say, walking thing king around the board before settling it on g1 before moving rook to f1. LiveChess will show all those intermediate moves, and condense it to O-O at the end.

The next step is trying to stream a live game to chess24, but that's for another post.

Lesson #10: Reading a Chess Magazine

Today we went through an article "Tales of The Arabian Knights" by Rick Kennedy in the December 2016 issue of Chess Life Kids. There were several goals:

1. learn from the game
2. review and exercise our chess notation reading
3. learn to learn from resources other than these Thursday chess club meetings

The third goal is important because it's an investment of sorts: you spend a little time up front learning to learn, and then you gain access to a wealth of chess knowledge beyond the tiny lesson or worksheet per week.

If you have a USCF membership you can view the entire magazine here and will receive your own hard copies every two months (6 total throughout one year). I took the liberty to copy the single page and present it below. Hopefully Chess Life will agree that this is serves more as an advertisement than an infringement and not complain to blogger:

And let's not forget that this is a really cool game, with two sacrifices and a beautiful double knight mate at the end!

Official information is available at the Spacecoast Chess website but the information was condensed into a leaflet and sent home with you:

I hope to see you there!

Lesson #9: Basic Mate Procedures

On Dec 8 we covered the "ladder mate" using two rooks to squeeze the opponent's king against the wall. If the king tried to stop our plans by approaching the two rooks, we exploited the speed difference between the two pieces and just shifted our ladder activity to the other side of the board.

On Dec 15 we covered the procedure to mate with queen and king, the steps were roughly:

1. corner them! (use the "shape" of the queen's attacked squares to push the opponent's king towards a corner)
2. take the wall! (on his way to the corner, the opponent's king will eventually touch the edge of the board, when you should make a queen move that keeps him there)
3. bring your king! (to be the eventual protector of the queen when she delivers mate)
4. mate!

I recommend the supplemental lesson at Chesskid. The homework is below:

Lesson #8: Stalemate

Today's meeting started not with the lesson subject, stalemates, but with the nice position from Magnus's defense of the world championship:

If you remember, the winning move was 1. Qh6+. If black responds with 1..Kxh6 then white wins with 2. Rh8# and if black responds with 1..gxh6 then white has 2. Rxf7#. We approached how one might find this move in an amusing way, by asking "What is the most absurd move, perhaps the most absurd check on the board?". I try to put checks and captures at the top of my candidate moves list, but admit I would have tossed this one out before giving it serious consideration and missed the tactic.

I was lucky enough to be watching this game live, along with the other tiebreaks:

After Sergei had moved, Judit Polgar, who was commentating, impressively found and exclaimed the line a while before Magnus played it.

Next we reviewed some of the fork homework from the previous lesson. The hardest puzzles were not the ones where a piece forks two others, but where a piece forks a piece and a square. In all the examples, the square was one where, if the knight occupied it, checkmate would result. Trying to stretch your imagination, I asked "if your knight could TELEPORT anywhere, what dream square would he get to?". Then we'd see if, through normal, non-teleporting moves, we could realize that dream. Like the Magnus game, we think of the absurd, and then see how well it can be joined with reality.

Since these problems exploited a checkmate square, but there was no immediate check, we modified our three pre-move questions:

1. What is my opponent doing?
2. Are there any hanging pieces?
3. Are there any checks? How safe are the kings?

Remember the general mechanism working behind forks: We give the opponent two problems, and they have only one move to try to solve both.

Ok, on to the new topic, stalemates. This is a tough, technical issue for some people to get. Remember the criteria for checkmate:

1. king is under threat (check)
2. there are no legal moves (no way to escape check)

Stalemate is the same, except for the first requirement:

1. king is NOT under threat (no check)
2. there are no legal moves

A few examples and exercises were given in class on the demo board. Stalemate is considered a draw, and thus it can be useful for you to escape defeat if you can force yourself into a stalemate. And that was what the two homework problems involved: