eller

Some statistics about my training on Chessable:

- 178 courses on the dashboard. That’s a ridiculous workload, I know. But, as I’ve mentioned before, I become more efficient when there’s more to do. So, from a psychological standpoint, overloading my to-do-list means I really get more stuff done!

- 38 of those, I actually *finished*. Considering I’ve been on Chessable for 64 days now, that’s 1,7 days per course. Pretty efficient, I’d say – though, of course, many of these courses were free and very short. (Of course, I didn’t do the same amount of work every day: most chess was done on the weekends, with only a bit of evening nerdery before going to sleep otherwise. I have other things to do during my workdays… It's just that I spend the downtime others relax in front of the TV doing chess instead. LOL)

If we only look at the “big” courses I’ve finished, I was, fortunately, *still* efficient (at about one “big” course per week, that is, per weekend). Here’s a list of what I did! (Just ignore if you're not interested in the finer points of my training schedule.)

( cut for extreme chess training nerdery )
...as you can see, I'm pretty ambitious. XD

Fairies playing chess on a flower that was, basically, made for it... :)

Look at what doublebass made for me! She knitted me socks! Very special socks! Chess socks!!! Chess socks are the best socks!



They even have the letters from A to H and the numbers from 1 to 8!

And KING BUTTONS! Made from FIMO! I simply have to show a close-up of the kings...



The attention to detail is incredible. I'm in awe.

(There's a grey king, too, but it's glued to the accompanying card, and I'm obviously not posting that. I appreciate it all the same!)

...okay, I'm crying. Just thinking of knitting - I love all kinds of craft, but knitting is one of the things I'm just not able to do, and I regret that fact. I'd love to be able to make stuff like this! (Note: please don't link me any "beginner-friendly" tutorials. I know how this is theoretically supposed to work! It's just that knitting offers infinite opportunities to miscount and to confuse left and right. I suspect it's the world's least-dyscalculia-friendly activity, and the one thing I've never been able to compensate for. Uni level math is easy in comparison! XD) So I'm just the tiniest bit jealous of that skill.

Needless to say, I'm super happy about having chess socks now! :D I was very surprised by that fat envelope in the mail, like, I wasn't expecting mail from doublebass at all, but... then I unpacked these. WHEEEEE! I mean... Does it get any more awesome? XD

NEVER AGAIN cold feet when playing online chess! ;)

I've been quiet over the holidays, but no worries: that was because life has been the good kind of busy! :D

- Christmas. No actual celebration, and indeed, my dad had managed to forget about Christmas. Again. (No, it's not his age; it's that he's a mathematician. He's excused from mundane things like birthdays, holidays, or, for that matter, societally acceptable childcare. LOL) My mom remembered, which is why she handed me two bars of spiced chocolate. (I love that stuff; good of her to remember.)

- Music! I suggest you go and listen to that awesome piece of music immediately: yhlee wrote a musical Scarlatti fanart for me!
https://yhlee.dreamwidth.org/3525130.html
He was nice enough to provide the sheet music as well, which means I got to spend a pleasant evening at the piano. :D No access to a harpsichord at the moment, but I will find out what that sounds like, too! :D
(The background of this: I'm the tiniest bit obsessed with Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas. Nothing weird about that, right? Anyway - I'm SUPER SUPER HAPPY!)

- New chess set! Also from yhlee. I actually mnaged to wait until Christmas with opening the mysterious House of Staunton package... And, I mean, I sort of knew what was inside, what with a perfectly square package from a chess supplier (LOL), so I wasn't actually surprised, but... SO!!! PRETTY!!! I didn't get around to actually using the set, but... Next training session. Oh, and I'll take that opportunity to post photos, too. I wanted a non-foldable travel-sized set without the annoying middle line so badly, and now I have one! YAY!!! :D

- Kolthainn fanart! From serenity025 again - and she not only drew another ATC for me

but also MADE ME A SUNDIAL.
A completely nonfunctional sundial, that is - it's black (best color for something that's supposed to, you know, show shadows) and it has rocks instead of hours. :D As serenity025 pointed out in her Christmas letter to me, malfunctioning sundials are a Kolthainn plot point. She's correct, of course: it's all my own fault. And anyway, while Kolthainn so far didn't have a black sundial yet... now it exists. Totally. It's just weird enough! I'll also take photos tomorrow! :D

- Art! I also drew an ATC, for FireCave.

That's her OC Luna. Lesbian angel mail carrier? I read the character description and knew I absolutely had to draw her.

- Mail! I received holiday mail from sooooo many nice people - I think I wrote you all private messages to thank you... WHEEE. Super happy about all! the! lovely! holiday! cards!

...life's great. :D

I'm posting this because yhlee knows me too well. XDD





This is my (small but growing) collection of chess-themed face masks. Since the beginning of the year, I've been looking... I mean, if I have to wear masks, I might as well wear nice ones, right? (Also useful: people on buses and trains recognize a fellow player. I actually met some new people this way! With maximal distance, of course.)

Anyway: I have to thank yhlee for the lovely gift of the "I Love Chess" mask! I laughed sooooo hard when I pulled that one from the envelope... :D :D :D It's perfect!

I'm predictable.

Sooooo this is the "reasonable" side of the board for yhlee! The acrylic paste is dry and I'm doing some varnish tests on wood veneer leftovers already. :)





Objectively, really bad woodworking, but I'm super happy about it! I managed to build a chessboard, YAY!!! (On the other side, there's the Butterfly Board, so it has one mostly-sane and one really weird side.) And I didn't even have to read any instructional texts for it, either! (I don't do that when I can do the trial-and-error approach instead: I mean, knowing one or two things about woodworking might have resulted in a better board, but more likely, I would have read up on that stuff, realized it's really difficult, and not built the board at all, and because a flawed board is better than no board, clearly, avoiding demotivational instructions was the way to success, here... XD) I definitely learned some things about wood veneer while making this, so, it's all good. XDDD





The board runs nicely, too: I've tested it by running through some variations of the Ruy Lopez opening (purely for emotional reasons) and despite its size and its numerous crafting f*ck-ups inaccuracies, it feels almost like a tournament board. A bit low on contrast between light and dark squares for my taste, but, uh, I tend to prefer extreme contrasts, so this is probably not a problem for most players - it feels very normal, anyway.





Oh, and of course, the square b4 is my absolute favorite! XDDD I managed to break a piece out of it while polishing - have I mentioned that I learned a lot while doing this thing? - and I fixed it with acrylics, and it looks almost okay now! XDDD I'm (irrationally) super proud of b4! LOL

I just had an extremely interesting game! This time, I'm not going to show a fascinating tactical win - although those are usually more fun - but a fascinating tactical rescue into a draw.

I'm playing Black; Black to move.





What's happened so far?

My opponent, a guy (I'm saying guy not just because of statistics but because he used a male name, so...) with a higher rating than I (about 60 points higher, which is a not quite crushing but definitely existent difference in playing strength) clearly knew the opening better than I did.

It was the Sicilian - so, an opening I actually know reasonably well, playing it myself - and he managed to out-theory me in a super-rare variation. (I just looked the thing up. It's interesting enough - I'll just not give the theoretical discussion here because I'm trying to keep things beginner-friendly. Let's just say I'm glad this happened in online chess and not in an actual tournament!) As a result, I lost the fight over the center, lost a pawn, lost another pawn, and... Uh, frankly, the position looks like I'm going to lose the game.

I'm two pawns down without any positional compensation, and if my opponent manages to simplify, there's no way in hell I'll survive an endgame. Once enough material is exchanged, the passed white d-pawn will be unstoppable.

Except... I'm kinda sorta good at tactics. I can defend this. XD

(I'm presenting this after checking the variations extremely carefully with computer help. Of course, the slightest mistake would have been deadly...)

31. ... Rxg3 LOL

MUAHAHAHA! Another crazy rook sacrifice! :D And it works.

I suppose I should mention there were actually, according to the computer, two ways to hold this game a draw, the other being the excellent
31. ... g5!
32. Nf3 Re6!
33. Qa8 Re8!
which is an easy and obvious draw... The queen is chased and forth between a6 and a8 (because anything else just loses for White: the queen doesn't have any other squares, and losing the queen is not an option), and after the third repetition of the same position, the game is a draw...

I wish I could tell you now that in the game I'd seen both ways and just decided on the more fun one - but I didn't. It's that g5 simply didn't occur to me... Rxg3 was literally the only move that jumped at me (I don't know why, considering how absurd it looks - it might be lingering damage from watching too many Tal games...), and once I was sure that yes, it's going to work, I didn't look at other moves anymore. I think for most other players g5 would have been much more obvious! But anyway... Why simple when you can make it really, really complicated? XD So, I captured on g3.

32. Kxg3 Qc7+!

This is kind of the point of the rook sacrifice: the white king is now in the open, and cannot flee back behind his own pawns anymore.

33. Kf2

The only reasonable square, unless he wants to get himself checkmated, for example by
33. Kg4 Qf4+
34. Kh5 Qg5#

33. ... Qf4+

And now there is nothing White can do to prevent the draw! To confirm this, we'll have to look at all three possible variations:

34. Kg1 Be3+
35. Kh1 Qxh4 and now material is suddenly equal again...
36. Qxb5 Nd2
...and yeah, the black attack on the white king is so strong that White doesn't have any better choice than giving perpetual check with Qd7+ and so on.

34. Nf3 Qe3+
35. Kg3 Qf4+
36. Kf2 Qe3+ and now White can either repeat moves and draw that way, or try
37. Kf1 Qd3+
38. Kf2 Qe3+ and repeat positions that way.
(Note that 38. Kg1 fails because of 38. ... Be3+ with Black winning the white rook on d1!)

34. Ke2 Qe3+
35. Kf1 with the same things happening as in the variation before this one: perpetual check with a repetition of positions.

So,
1/2 - 1/2

Isn't this absolutely crazy? I mean, not just that I found this - but also that I didn't see the much simpler method to achieve the same end? :D




Oh, and before this game, I had another crazy encounter: a won game, which I'm not going to show here - but anyway, it was an endgame with pawns and kings. It was theoretically won. (Which I knew, because heck, I had endgame technique classes with one of the leading experts in endgame theory. I may prefer creative chess, but there's nothing wrong with my technique; I'll be bored, but I can handle pawn endgames just fine...) My opponent... could have resigned, but didn't.

Of course I... won that thing. It wasn't particularly interesting chess, it was, literally, pure technique, and I was actually a bit annoyed: this is obviously won; does my opponent think I'm an idiot? But then, I figured he was actually thinking. Also, he offered draw twice, which would have been insulting unless he really thought the position were a theoretical draw. Which was surprising because he had a fairly high rating, but he clearly had no idea what was happening. So I had to play that thing almost to the bitter end - he only resigned when it became really obvious that yes, I'm going to queen that pawn in something like four moves and he can't do sh*t about it.

We chatted a bit after the game. He turned out to be this perfectly nice guy from Iran, and yeah, he wasn't sure what had just happened to him. He was all, like, "nice win of that drawn position, where exactly did I make the mistake?", and I had to answer him, "no, man, you played that perfectly fine, except it was theoretically lost something like 40 moves ago", and then he was like, "OHNOI'MSOSORRY!!!" Because, yeah, a bit awkward, that. XD I assured him it was far from a trivial endgame - I mean, yeah, I thought it was kinda trivial, but it's entirely possible I've just been coached better-than-average when it comes to dumb but efficient endgame technique... LOL Anyway, we had a nice relaxed conversation about endgames after that. Very pleasant.

The making of a chessboard! :)

These figures still needed a board... I'm working on it. It's easy. Just slow, because I'm doing it entirely in my work breaks. Fortunately the task is mindless enough that it actually helps me relax!

I really decided on cream and wine red paper. And thank all the listening deities for those paper punch thingies! (I bought them in several sizes because it's already obvious this is not going to be my last selfmade board. There are so many travel sets to be saved!)



That made it easy and fast to obtain 64 little squares. Before I glued them together, though, I had to add ferro foil for the magnets to stick on.



Because my board is 30x30 cm, the foil was a bit small and I had to use two pieces. No problem, though: its handling was easy and unproblematic. And then all I had to do was glue it all together.



For the border, I used grey paper that I'm going to offset with black boundary lines. So, the board not quite finished yet - it still needs protective varnish as well, and I also want to add little letters and numbers - but it already looks like a chessboard! YAY!!!

With the prompt "A Game Begins", it was clear I'd draw something involving chess! Here, two characters from one of my stories are just starting one of their games. Anhai, my favorite demon general, is losing against his sort-of-girlfriend Yora. I mean, they've only played one move so far, but Anhai is totally losing. :D I've just noticed that I draw Yora-playing-chess a lot (here's another pic of her) and that most other pics I have of her are NSFW stuff involving her and Anhai. (And no, I haven't posted that anywhere, and I don't intend to.) Anyway... This was fun. I like how the light turned out.