Message of the Week A large backlog of chess games is on the way (I think I have 6 or 7 now...) and soon a few pop physics and history book reviews.
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April 14, 2010, at 7:50 am - Annotated Games I had white last night in round 2 of the April MCC tournament against Mark Fins. I’ve seen Mark around for a while but haven’t met him before. He did win the under 2000 section last month though, so I knew he was a solid player.
Once again I continued my pattern of getting good to winning middlegame positions on the white side of the closed Sicilian, but I just can’t seem to find a way to finish. At least in the past few games I’ve been drawing these positions, were about 6 weeks ago I would find ways to lose them.
Continue reading Wollkind – Fins, 1/2 – 1/2
April 7, 2010, at 10:13 pm - Annotated Games Last night in the first round of the April tournament in Natick I had one of my best chess games so far. I didn’t have that many opportunities to go wrong though, as the game lasted only 19 moves before my opponent blundered a piece in a tough position.
This was my first time playing against the English. I’ve spent a little bit of time thinking about how I’d meet it, but this was the first time I had to do so. I think I need to sit down and figure that out a little more. My plan morphed from trying to tempt my opponent into d4 territory familiar to me into playing a reversed closed Sicilian, which worked out ok, but looking at the database I was in positions where white scores 65% or better.
After the game, my opponent told me that this was the first time he had encountered the plan that I put into action. A bit of luck, and more points from “the attack that plays itself” for me….
Continue reading Thompson – Wollkind, 0-1
April 1, 2010, at 7:14 am - Photography Here is an interesting article from the New York Times about the difficulties that professional photographers are facing in a world saturated with good cameras at low prices.
Basically, there are now armies of people (like me) who are amateur, hobbyist photographers creating millions of images, but with modern cameras (and digital as opposed to film) you don’t have to be that good at what you’re doing to make a few nice images here and there. Further, amateurs are often thrilled to be asked to do photography for someone, whether they get paid or not. For certain sorts of photography now, the pros are radically undersold by the amateurs, and the amateurs aren’t producing work that’s so different from pro caliber. This, combined with the increasing acceptance of stock (rather than commissioned) photography, has pro photographers really feeling squeezed.
The article doesn’t really spend too much time on the long term implications of this phenomenon, but I think that’s what is more interesting. I don’t think the pro photographer will ever disappear: commercial and advertising photography will always be there, and these companies are going to pay to have the best work that they can get, but I think it’s going to keep getting harder to make a living off of photography.
Further, I wonder how this trend will affect camera development, if at all. The big camera makers have always made really high end gear for the high end users, but as the numbers of those dwindle, and the mid range cameras take better and better photos, will we stop seeing a clear difference between “pro” and “consumer” quality technology? Some have even predicted that with the rapid increase in quality of the point and shoot cameras that we’ll see the end of the SLR within our lifetimes, but I’m skeptical. It’s too hard to engineer a high quality do-it-all lens, and until we have that, we’ll need interchangeable lens systems.
I think of these issues as similar to the challenges that the news media now face: the modern age is making it easier than ever for amateurs to mimic the pros, and get noticed. The pros have to improve or find new niches that the amateurs can’t easily occupy, but either way, the bloggers and weekend photographers are here to stay, and except for the fact that it further reduces viability of photography as an alternate career path for someone like me, I think it’s probably a good thing.
March 3, 2010, at 6:19 pm - Annotated Games After going 4-0 and winning the Under 1700 section in January, I decided to move up into the Under 2000 section for February. This isn’t so absurd, as my rating after the January tournament went up to 1601, but due to the way the USCF ratings system works the ratings lag by about 2 weeks, so my official printed rating for February was 1491. The only real affect that this has is that if you are at the bottom of the group you are more likely to be forced to take a bye if there are an odd number of players, and indeed, in round 2 I was paired out of my section (receiving a full point bye) and had a side game (still rated but doesn’t contribute to tournament standings) against George Callahan. I’ll post that game later.
Continue reading Adventures in U2000
February 7, 2010, at 12:54 pm - Annotated Games I went into this last round game for the January Metrowest Chess Club tournament with 3/3 points and a chance to win the section if I won this game. I’d been playing pretty good chess all month so I was hopeful. I was outrated, but not by so much that I was intimidated.
Continue reading Schnair – Wollkind 0-1
February 4, 2010, at 6:06 pm - Photography  angles by Stephen Gray When I started this version of my blog, one of my ideas was to do a series of interviews with photographers whose work I’ve liked, especially those that have made me think differently about photography.
Stephen Gray, xgray on Flickr, has totally altered the way I think about photography. His work forces me to see the world around me differently, and completely changed the way I think about composition. Shadows and negative space also figure prominently in his work, and it is his photos with brilliant sunlight and deep shadows cutting across the frame that most capture my imagination. xgray is also a master of the found scene and taking simple, mundane objects and making the viewer look at them in a different way. This is also the first photographer whose work I have seen and then consciously tried to emulate. I’m sure that if I can learn to see the world like he does, which is very much how the camera sees it, I will be a better photographer.
I sent him a few questions and his answers are below, along with a handful of my favorite images he’s produced.
You can see more shots that I feel best represent what I find fascinating about Stephen Gray’s work in a Flickr gallery I created here and you can find my (so far limited) experimentation with doing work like this here.
Continue reading Photographer Interview – Stephen Gray (xgray)
February 1, 2010, at 11:52 pm - Annotated Games Having won the first two games of the January tournament, I was paired against a strong player in round 3. Larry Kleine, 1651. I’ve only played a few games in my chess career against players over 1600, but with white I’ve now scored 4.5/7 against them, which is respectable. (Interestingly, I’ve never beaten a player rated over 1550 as black…) As is often the case against the stronger players this was a pretty clean and well played game. Sadly, the ending is somewhat marred by the fact that on my last move I turned a winning position into a draw, and that my opponent didn’t recognize this and resigned anyway.
Continue reading Wollkind – Kleine, 1-0
January 13, 2010, at 2:58 pm - Annotated Games This was my fourth encounter with Mr. Hong. In our previous 3 games I had managed a measly half a point, but last night I got the better of him. I don’t think we were playing on even footing though: he had an unexpectedly complicated evening and arrived late and a bit frazzled. In the past he’s shown himself to be an extremely solid player.
Continue reading Hong – Wollkind, 0-1
January 6, 2010, at 1:02 pm - Annotated Games, Chess A long day at work finished with a zany commute home and barely getting to the tournament site on time combined with a month long layoff from competitive chess is a recipe for disaster, and disaster found me quickly in this one. Fortunately I was able to trap my opponent’s queen and swindle a win.
Continue reading Shapiro – Wollkind, 0-1
December 9, 2009, at 10:37 am - Annotated Games Round 2 of the MCC Holiday Swiss tournament happened last night and I was paired with Alex Fauman, the youngest member of a chess playing family that are regulars at the tournaments in Natick. I’m not a good judge of ages, but I’d put him in the 6-8 year old range. Don’t laugh: Danny Angermeier, who is rapidly becoming one of the best players at the club, and I suspect will eventually be one of the best in the state, turned 10 last night….
This was sort of a strange little game, and I’m starting to think that a lot of these games that I’m going to be playing on the black side of the Modern Defense are going to look, well, not like your usual chess game. At least I got a win and broke my 3 game losing streak.
Continue reading Fauman – Wollkind, 0-1
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