No chess commercials, but I did see a pretty good chess-themed scene of Hogan's Heroes recently, in which Hogan and Klink are playing chess. Klink is studying the board and lecturing about how concenctration is the key to the game, and how you have to be aware of everything going on around you. Meanwhile, Hogan is eating his dinner, stealing his cigars, and drinking his brandy. Klink wins the game, but can't understand why he doesn't remember eating his chicken. "Well, your concentration was so intense that you just ate it without thinking, sir." Carter comes in, hears that Hogan has lost again, and says "Gee, you're an embarrassment to our side, sir." Really funny, and rare for a TV show to do a chess scene without doing anything that would make real chess players cringe.

Here's an interesting medium speed game I played recently:

[Event "Friendly Game, 10m + 5s"]
[Site "Café"]
[Date "2012.08.09"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Guest1108081 (Petrosianic)"]
[Black "Guest1107841"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "A42"]
[Annotator "Cree,Graeme"]
[PlyCount "117"]
[EventDate "2012.08.09"]
[TimeControl "600+5"]

1. c4 {2} g6 {4} 2. d4 {2} Bg7 {2} 3. Nc3 {2} c6 {3} 4. Nf3 {12} Qc7 {2} 5. e4
{4} d6 {2} 6. Be3 {24} e5 {2} 7. Rc1 {39} Ne7 {9} 8. Be2 {20} f5 {3} 9. dxe5 {
21} dxe5 {11} 10. exf5 {32} Nxf5 {10} 11. Qd2 {96} O-O {23} 12. Ne4 {22} Rd8 {6
} 13. Qc3 {9} Nd4 {20} 14. Rd1 {57} c5 {35} 15. Rd2 {12} Nbc6 {14} 16. O-O {11}
b6 {6} 17. Rfd1 {12} Bb7 {16} 18. Qc1 {42} Nb4 {13} 19. Nc3 {84} Nxf3+ {11} 20.
Bxf3 {2} Bxf3 {3} 21. Rxd8+ {1} Rxd8 {3} 22. Rxd8+ {1} Qxd8 {4} 23. gxf3 {0}
Nc6 {33} 24. Nd5 {13} Nd4 {5} 25. Kg2 {9} Qf8 {8} 26. Bxd4 {3} exd4 {7} 27. Qf4
{1} Qxf4 {8} 28. Nxf4 {0} Kf7 {10} 29. Nd3 {30} Ke6 {8} 30. Kg3 {15} Kf5 {15}
31. h3 {46} g5 {16} 32. Kg2 {13} h5 {4} 33. Kg3 {8} Bf8 {24} 34. Kg2 {8} Bd6 {5
} 35. Kf1 {3} Bf4 {14} 36. Kg2 {2} Bd2 {44} 37. Kg3 {9} Bf4+ {14} 38. Kg2 {15}
Ke6 {16} 39. Kf1 {55} Kd6 {3} 40. Ke2 {17} Kc6 {5} 41. Kd1 {1} b5 {4} 42. b3 {2
} a5 {3} 43. a4 {3} bxa4 {13} 44. bxa4 {1} Kd6 {17} 45. Ke2 {2} Ke6 {11} 46.
Nxc5+ {3} Kd6 {8} 47. Nb3 {13} Kc6 {23} 48. Nxa5+ {10} Kc5 {3} 49. Kd3 {1} Kb4
{2} 50. Nc6+ {4} Kxa4 {5} 51. Nxd4 {1} Kb4 {5} 52. Ne6 {12} Bc1 {3} 53. Ng7 {5}
h4 {6} 54. Ne6 {18} Ka5 {13} 55. Kd4 {4} Kb6 {3} 56. Ke5 {7} Kc6 {9} 57. Kf5 {3
} Bd2 {4} 58. Nxg5 {5} Kc5 {3} 59. Ne4+ {
Guest1107841 gibt auf (Lag: Av=1.19s, max=12.6s) 2} 1-0


Ignore my sloppy opening play (I was doing three things at once, as usual). And ignore the fact that Black somehow contrived to lose this game (that's just totally insane). What I'm most interested in is the position after 20...Bxf3. It looks like White has gotten himself into serious trouble here. And he probably had, Black probably had some crusher at some point that he overlooked.

The point is that after 20...Bxf3, my "positional judgment said two things:

1) Get the rooks off, before they're used against the doubled f pawns.

2) It's okay to exchange the queens off too, AND give Black a protected passed pawn on d4.

Honestly, I instantly felt that despite White's awful pawn structure and Black's protected passer, that White would have little difficulty in holding the ending because the Bishop usually isn't that good in "endings of this sort" (whatever that means) and because the blockader Knight at d3 would make the fortress impenetrable. Black throws away any winning chances he might have had with 42...a5, and throws away the game with 45...Ke6, which just makes me feel even stupider for having been in trouble against such a player in the first place. But the interesting part had already happened earlier.

Four Bears Break Into Cabin; Drink 100 Beers

One of the beers was too hot, one was too cold, but the other 98 were just right.

Last year a bear with good taste broke into our 'secure' food bin. He ate the "just peanuts" peanut butter, the organic peanut butter, but didn't eat the Kraft peanut butter. He ate the multigrain bread, but left the white bread. He ate my good home-made trail mix, left the store bought stuff. He broke open the package of Pilot biscuits, but didn't eat them.

Not that I blame him for that last one. Those things double as heat tiles on the now defunct shuttle. We took turns whipping them out across the lake where they sailed for quite a distance before knifing into the water and probably severing a fish in half.

He did open a pack of chocolate bars for dessert, ate three and left one sitting very nicely in the open. He shared. How considerate.

He was too polite to eat the last one. I wonder if this was Yogi that broke in.

Don't know where to put this, but it's a puzzling story: There's a minor political scandal in Germany about a sponsorship request for a planned Kramnik-Deep Fritz match in Bonn in 2006. Peer Steinbrück, who was finance minister at the time, asked the partly state-owned Telekom and Post corporations to finance the match (which they declined), using his official letterhead (report in German here).

The background information given is sketchy, but it sounds rather odd. Apparently a private organizer named Josef Resch had made the sponsorship for Kramnik-Deep Fritz a condition for holding a world championship match in Bonn. I don't recall ever having heard about plans for a Kramnik-Fritz rematch - although it's hard to keep track of the various cancelled matches, will have to look in the ChessBase archives. There was, as far as I remember, a bid to hold the Kramnik-Topalov match in Germany (which FIDE rejected), and of course Anand-Kramnik took place in Bonn in 2008 (with other sponsors, Evonik and Gazprom - the former probably brought in by Steinbrück). Don't know who this Resch guy is and how he fits in.

Oh, I forgot that Kramnik-Deep Fritz did take place in 2006. Got a little confused because some reports incorrectly stated that the match for which Steinbrück was trying to find sponsors was cancelled. Not sure what any of this had to do with a world championship match. The German bid for Kramnik-Topalov was already on the table in 2005.

So, how many big name matches have been held? I remember Kramnik vs. Fritz, and I remember a Kasparov-Fritz match around 2004-ish, in which Kaspy lost a game to the Quart Grip, and then came back and won an embarrassing game the next day in which the computer had no idea what to do except move pieces back and forth. Both matches were draws. Has the human actually won since Kasparov vs. Deep Blue I?

I don't think so. There was Kramnik-Fritz in 2002 (which ended 4-4), Kasparov-Junior (3-3) and Kasparov-Fritz (2-2) in 2003 and Kramnik-Fritz (2-4) in 2006. There were also human-computer team matches in Bilbao in 2004 and 2005, both convincingly won by the computers. Seems like the whole concept has been pretty much abandoned after Kramnik's loss to Fritz in 2006.

Too bad, because that Kramnik-Fritz match wasn't exactly decisive, despite the score, was it? My recollection is that Kramnik lost one game he was near winning because he overlooked a mate on g7 (somehow he hallucinated that the Knight on e8 couldn't protect backwards). And he played a Sicilian and went all out for a win in the last game, and blew that too.