Daily Rome Shot 723

Four hours of OTB yesterday brought experiences good and better. Good were those in which playing black I overwhelmed strong opponents in QGD and others. Better were games with a very strong players who used the Italian Game and another who threw wild stuff at me with white like the Fried Liver and King’s Gambit. I handled the openings, losing by not being able to convert and then blundering a piece. It’s a pattern.  I come into the middle game strong and don’t convert.  The second, in two runs (at my request) again, I got the upper hand only to a) again blunder and b) get outplayed.  With each lose I try to figure out where I went wrong, not just concretely but inside my head.  All were with a clock – 15/3. I am not used to a clock, which was part of the point.  I want to get used to the rhyme of moving and recording and also being forced to play faster and not move without due consideration.

Here is a puzzle. White to move and mate in 3.

NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.

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The Prague Chess Festival is beginning.

To demonstrate that chess is on the rise, chess.com was included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential companies.  In this I learned that Chris Prat is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son-in-law, and that Prat has not yet beaten him in chess.  Both are avid.

Also, playing chess is getting so popular among kids that some school districts are banning chess.com.

“The New York Times also reported on Chess.com’s “Stealth Campaign That’s Getting Your Kids Hooked On Chess.””

College friends Erik and Jay bought the Chess.com domain for $55,000 in 2005.

Imagine.

Chess.com has hit number 1 on both Google Play and the U.S. iOS app store. In May, Chess.com’s membership went past 140 million worldwide, which represents a 355% increase since January 2020, with 150,000 new users registered each day. The site also had more than 57 million monthly active users playing 840 million games during the month, up 550% since January 2020. Chess.com is the 114th-ranked site on the internet.

I keep pounding away about learning to play and teaching your children.   Some of my best memories of my grandfather stem from our playing chess together.

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