For the want of a nail

I was pitted against another Expert last night, a professorial fellow from New Jersey. After 5 1/2 grueling hours of, you guessed it, defending, I finally cracked and lost my first game of the tournament. A bitter pill for sure as I thought I had once again wriggled out of harm's way and secured myself another draw against an Expert. My opponent didn't make any overt mistakes the whole game so I felt I was given a stern testing of my ability. It boiled down to a Rook-and-Pawn endgame which is a classic ending situation in chess. Top level players say studying Rook-and-Pawn endgames will improve your chess dramatically. Think I'll take them up on it. Afterwards, my opponent said I had played well during our time-trouble scramble near move 40 (we were both low on time trying to reach the 40-moves-in-two-hours cutoff) which is nice to hear. It was right about then that I felt I was getting back into it so at least my intuition is working somewhat! Still, it sucks to lose. I'd like to plan on that not happening again this week.

The yin-yang of modern day chess are the chess-playing computer programs out there that can analysis your games at the highest level. Good in the fact they can teach you plenty, show you where you made a mistake and lead you to the promised land with brutal efficiency. The downside is they can be a crutch, a substitute for actually rolling up your sleeves and doing the hard work (yes, chess can be hard work if you REALLY want to improve. The time factor involved is a whole other topic for me!). The program I use is called Shredder 10 and I've been feeding my games into it every night afterward to see how I'm doing. Very enlightening! According to Shredder, in my round two draw I was flat busted most of the game and a few late errors by my opponent let me secure the draw. Last night I was slightly worse but not fatally so and maybe even resigned prematurely! Bloody computers! I'll have to put in the "hard work" after the tournament to see what's really going on there. I have the games in a form to post online but can't seem to get them up on this blog-thingy. Maybe I need a place to host them? Any suggestions out there?

The fun part of the evening was me being on board 40, which put me right behind the seating area for the top boards. I was in rarified air from a status perspective. It's a thrill sitting up with the big dogs, another reason I hated losing, now I'm cast back in the middle of the pack, 1 1/2 points out of 3, right where I started three days ago. I was also part of the dress-shirt-and-tie crowd having come straight from work. I thought there'd be more of us, perhaps most are finding time to go home and chage first? Time, what a luxury!

Sightings: OK, so I don't get this at all and have never seen it in a chess tournament before but, there was a group of younger players, I believe all female which is a rare sighting itslef at a chess tourney, that had on complete kabuki-esque face and body paint. Some in white face paint and red arms, others in all red with sparkly crap in their hair. What the?? It was fun at first I'm sure as they walked into the hall and attracted a bit of attention. Of course when my game ended just past midnight and there's only a half-dozen games still going on and one of them was one of the kabuki kids still playing, red facepaint now faded and streaked, I'm guessing the novelty had worn off too. Lest you think I make some of this up, feel free to come out and watch the insanity going down at the Doubletree in Oak Brook. Just bring me some Skittles.