One thing I do spend quite a lot of time doing on the internet is playing chess. I discovered chess.com last year, and play five- and ten-minute games when I have a spare moment. I aim to keep my rating over 1000 in the former and 1200 in the latter; I'm realistic about my skills as a chess player. The site provides a year-in-review summary that suggests I've fallen infuriatingly short of breaking even in games played in 2023, and I know if I try to fix it by playing a lot more games, my ratio will inevitably get worse, so perhaps I should leave it at that.
Anyway, the site is trumpeting a 2024 "daily chess championship", and I was wondering if I should enter it. Time control of "one day per move", which is apparently challenging to the players who take online chess seriously. There are prizes for best blogs and best video analyses of it, and maybe I could become some kind of chess-blogger. It would be different, anyway.
Thing is, I've never really played a proper game of chess, the kind where you think about your moves for a long period of time. Even the ten-minute games on chess.com seem very relaxed to me, even accounting for my brain slowing down in my old age. At school, Noddy and I would find a quiet corner on a twenty-minute break and play about twenty games, all while having an extensive and enlightening conversation about comics or TV or how great we are in general, or singing extremely cool songs.
This kind of tournament doesn't sound like all that much fun - "Opening databases and opening books are permitted in Daily Chess, but the use of engines and tablebases is never permitted," says the rules. I only really play one opening; I'd get lost if I was keeping track of some other standard opening, even before we get to the point where the players are supposed to be using their own brains. I'd turn to the wrong page of the opening book and do something ridiculous with my queen.
But on the other hand, I do play othello on eothello.com all the time nowadays, and you get a long time to play your moves there. And apparently lots of people sign up for and drop out of these big tournaments on chess.com, so maybe I'll win the entire championship by default. Or else my opponents will be caught cheating - three times on chess.com I've had a message saying some dastardly opponent was using unfair means to beat me, and I got my rating bumped up by a few points. I don't know how they catch cheaters - are they watching me right now?
Or you could switch to the much more admirable, much less corporate monopolistic Lichess.org and play endless bullet games like I do (1400 games a year? Phhft. That's a decent well-spent week).
ReplyDeleteWell, now I feel guilty for supporting an evil corporation. But I've already signed up for the tournament, so I'll just subvert them from within. Move my pawns in the right sequence to spell out rude words with the letters a to h, that kind of thing.
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