First set is nice Reg. Tough call. I’d get it, if I was rich, lol.
The knight on the link I just posted would bother me. It is broken.
I really like the one you posted but I agree, a broken knight would be a deal breaker. It would bother me every time I looked at it.
I wonder what it was priced at originally. The owner must be picked. I wonder if it was thrown after a blunder.
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Too funny, Dan! I agree with you. The first set looks nice.
I have a board with a broken knight too. I’ve been looking for a replacement piece to no avail.
That knight totally ruins the set. I thought it was on purpose, until I read it. Too bad.
Did you see the Shawshank Redemption?
Several times! Why?
I wonder how much Andy Dufresne’s chess set would have cost?
No amount of money could have paid for it.
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Another draw. Blitzes on Wednesday. Carlsen should win. Caruana is a terrible blitz player, which tells me he plays like a computer.
Unfortunate it came to this but Caruana had his chances. He couldn’t capitalize. That’s the game.
As expected, the blitz matches were not close. Carlsen won every game. Probably, decent caruana lost. He would have been a very boring champion.
He would’ve been boring, true, but so is Carlsen so nothing would’ve been lost. Personality-wise, we haven’t had an interesting champion since Kasparov and then Fischer before him. About every 20 years so we’re due for another one soon.
3 time blitz champ, Grischuk is interesting. Looks and acts like Fischer. Clearly, not the best traditional player. The Indian kid is likable. Only, because he is cute.
The Indian kid is likeable because he’s poor and cute, but he’d be as boring as Anand. He’ll grow up, make some cash, buy his parents a house, get married and live a good life. It’d be a good story for a week and then we’d forget about him, just as we did Anand. Kasparov was a moody drama queen but it was often interesting. Fischer was a total lunatic which was the most interesting of all.
I totally agree. Apparently, the game is quite popular now, but I don’t think it has anything to do with this championship.
This is somewhat depressing. The latest chess computer champion (AlphaZero) is now able to crush all its computing alternatives (and obviously totally destroy any human) without ever having studied a human game. It achieved this in 4 hours (!!!) by playing against itself.
We have been surpassed and our territory usurped. The balance of power will never again be the same.
Pretty aggressive. I would imagine with black also and I’m guessing the shorter time allowed, the worse chance stockfish has.
I watched that entire half-hour video. It was one of the most fascinating games I have ever seen. The thing that struck me was the patience of the computer. It would make sacrifice after sacrifice which would not be recovered until the very end of the game. That’s a level of patience and confidence that humans just don’t have. We need to see the results of our sacrifices immediately (or at least very soon) or we don’t feel satisfied. This computer doesn’t care. No human could ever come close to this thing.
PS: Whoever that girl was doing the commentary was brilliant, too.
I watched it too. The game was interesting. She was great at explaining. The video was 33 minutes and NONE of it was boring. She was accused of cheating in a tournament a little while ago, but it seems she probably did not cheat. The guy she beat did not accuse of her of cheating and still does not to this day. She is quite likable.
Totally agree on the AI. It seems to care little for pawns and does not care about instant gratification, lol. It really seems to like bishops and as she states, it doesn’t go by a point system. I’m thinking in general, especially as white it really favors bishops over knights, since it can seem to control how open it wants the board to be. I wonder what stockfish meter read after it saw that move played that it wasn’t considering. That bishop was a killer all the way until the end when it would have eaten the black pawns.