Stick's Picks

Audo: "Weezer (The Red Album)," by Weezer

The Stickness: Weezer is just one of those bands. You know what I'm talking about. They put out their first album and maybe the In Crowd loves them, or maybe your friends dig them, but all you can do is shrug your shoulders and say, "Meh." A while later the band puts out their second album. Again you say, "Meh." Maybe you don't shrug this time. And so it goes for a few more cycles until one day a new album is out by the aforementioned band and suddenly you say, "Now I get it," or maybe "Now they get it."

Weezer is just such a band for me, and I'm quite enjoying the new release from them. Not surprisingly to most, I like the more rockin' tunes on this album best, but it's all good stuff. Even the lyrics are very clever.

Video: Wallstrip.com

The Stickess: Think "The Daily Show with John Stuart," except that it's about the stock market and it's hosted by a cute chick.

Textuo: Tumblr.com

The Stickness: This isn't really a pick so much as it is a question. Tumblr is sort of like Twitter on steroids. I think the term the Tumblr folks use is "micro-blogging," So, my question is: would you actually use this sort of thing? I got a Twitter account just to see what the buzz was all about, and I barely ever think to check the Twitter feed, never mind actually use the thing. I can't imagine I'd do any better with Tumblr.

So these are my questions: Do you Twitter? Do you Tumbl? Would you Tumbl?

Stick's Picks

Audio: "Indestructible," by Disturbed

The Stickness: This album is good stuff. It makes me think of Dream Theatre if DT had any aptitude for songwriting. To be fair, DT's "A Change of Seasons" is one of my all-time favorite tunes, but the rest of their songs ... not so much. Disturbed doesn't reach the heights of instrumental mastery that Dream Theater possesses, but really, how many people on this entire planet can match technical wizardry with DT, anyway? Never the less, I have little time for virtuosic wankery if the songs aren't any good, so Disturbed wins against Dream Theatre.

Maybe a better comparison would be saying that Disturbed is like a heavier version of Queensryche before the Q went all loopy on us.

The current single from "Indestructible." "Inside The Fire," is particularly baddass.

Video: MobLogic.tv

The Stickness: Admittedly this video podcast is very US-centric, but that makes it no less interesting. The chick that puts this thing together goes out onto the streets to interview folks about their takes on various topics. Always interesting and occasionally quite insightful. And, let's face it, if something is going on in the States, you can be pretty sure it will have some sort of bleed-over into Canada, so you should at least check it out.

Textuo: Edward Osborne Wilson

The Stickness: Check his entry in Wikipedia. I saw a recent program about this guy and it kinda blew me away. Originally, he became the foremost authority on ants, and in particular, the social and behavioral aspects of ant colonies. Since then he has branched out, applying his knowledge to other systems of creatures, some of his studies being about mass extinction. If you are the sort that concerns themselves about where our crazy species is headed, you really need to give this guy's work a look-see.

Spectacular Finish

Here's a cool game I recently played on chess.com. I played a surprisingly good bunch of tactic in this game, and I'm unusually happy with the checkmate: a combination with a bishop sacrifice. Check it out.

Book Review: Winning Chess Strategies

Following on the heels of Winning Chess Tactics, Winning Chess Strategies is the third book in Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan’s seven book Winning Chess series.

If you are going to play chess, ya gotta have a plan. Some would argue that even a bad plan is better than no plan. At least with a bad plan you have some sort of metric to determine how well (or poorly) things are going, and gives you an opportunity to switch plans if necessary. At the very least, if your plan fails horribly you can vow to never repeat the mistake in future games.

While tactics generally attempt to gain dynamic advantage in a game, Seirawan defines strategies as methods of gaining static advantages. Let’s be a bit more concrete with these notions. Say you manage to castle before your opponents has the opportunity to do the same. You could now claim an advantage over your opponent, but only until he manages to tuck away his own king. So, between the move on which you castle and the move on which your opponents castles, you have a dynamic advantage. On the other hand, setting up a strong pawn structure would be considered a static advantage. Because pawns move slowly and can never move backwards, once the structure is solidified it is unlikely to change in a hurry.

In that light, Seirawan explains much about things like counterplay, correct positioning of the peices and pawns, proper use of material advantage, creating targets and more. I found the chapter on space, “Territorial Domination,” to be particularly enlightening. He adds in a chapter about bad strategy practices in hopes that you will not repeat the mistakes of chess players that have come before you. Not surprisingly, there is a chapter concerned with the great chess strategists of days-gone-by.

“Winning Chess Strategies” is a fair departure from previous books in this series. The discussion tends to be less crystalized than earlier books, and there are very few tests. More annoyingly, even the solutions to the tests struck me as a bit airy-fairy. Initially, I found these issues irritating. However, as I proceeded through the chapters, I realized that the style of the book was induced by the nature of the beast. Tactics can easily be described through very specific patterns, while strategies are not so clear-cut and therefore require more discussion and fewer specifics.

With that in mind, I tried to cut Seirawan a bit of slack when it came to the section on history’s greatest chess strategists. The example games are, to be sure, very interesting, but it was often not at all clear as to what class of strategy they were intended to display. I suspect that a more advanced player than myself will find these games more useful and, most likely, I will gain more insight from them as my own chess-fu increases.

Overall, I’m not quite as stoked about this book as I am with its predecessors. On the other hand, I’m very much looking forward to attacking it for the second time. I learned many useful strategies to consider in my chess games, and I’m quite sure future study with this book will reap many benefits. If, like me, you want to get your foot wet in the waters of positional play, reading this book would be a good strategy.

Book Review: Winning Chess Tactics

Winning Chess Tactics is the follow-up book in Yasser Seirawan's Winning Chess series. WCT picks up where the sections on tactics in Play Winning Chess left off. Not too surprisingly, WCT details more subtle or less obvious points about the tactical issues of chess.

The author continues the discussion of the usual suspects such as forks, pins, skewers, and so on, and then explains specific subtypes of these tactics. For instance, in the chapter on pins, Seirawan explains the concept of both absolute pins and relative pins.

An important theme in this book is the notion of combinations and sacrifices. While PWC spoke to the basic tactics, WCT explains how to produce positions in which the basic tactics can be used. For instance, you may recognize on the board the potential for a devastating fork, but what do you need to do to actually attain that position? The text develops the topic of combinations, and how they can be used to reduce the game position to a known pattern, which forces an opponent into a losing position. This amounts to the use of sacrifices, decoys, et al. to produce an advantageous board position.

Although the topics in this book are more difficult to grasp than those laid out in PWC, the writing is still clear and understandable, although Seirawan has a bad habit of trying to be "cute" with his pros. That, however, is merely a minor annoyance and should in no way prevent you from reading this book.

An important part of this book is the copious number of tests. Be prepared to spend a lot of time over the board or with your favorite chess program. The real meat of WCT is contained in the tests, and without working through all of them, you really won't get much out of this book. Many of the concepts that Seirawan attempts to express are found only in the tests. This might sound a bit nasty, but it actually worked for me quite well.

Admittedly, the first couple of chapters were rather tough going, mostly because I found the tests to be very difficult and rather less than transparent. After slogging though the tests in the early chapters, things got better. The big problem I had was figuring out what, exactly, the damn questions were talking about. But, with some perseverance, it wasn't long before I passed that hurdle. That isn't to say that the later tests were easy, but at least they made more sense to me.

After the discussion of specific tactics come seven chapters dedicated to the games of some of the greatest chess tacticians of history. What can I say about this? These games are, in short, mind-boggling, beautiful, and testosterone injected feats of tactical brilliance. There's not much point in me describing them, so I'll simply point you to one of these historic games for you to evaluate yourself: Paul Morphy vs Duke Karl / Count Isouard .

Although this book is the second in a series of books, it is designed to be readable independently from the other books. However, if you haven't yet read Play Winning Chess or some similar introductory chess text, you may be in over your depth with WCT.

Arguably, I haven't actually finished my first pass of WCT. The last three chapters are nothing but tests, and I'm working through them a few at a time while I dig into Seirawan's third book.

At any rate, I learned quite a lot from Winning Chess Tactics and it will take several more go-rounds (at least) before I've plumbed the depths of this book. I highly recommend WCT to anyone that is willing to get their hands dirty at the chess board.

McChess: Chessmaster 9000

With any luck, this is the first in a series of chess software reviews. I should state up-front that, at the moment, the only operating system I use is OS X. So, although many of the programs that I will review have versions that run on other operating systems, I will only speak to those that run on OS X, and I won’t say much about the Linux and Windows versions.

So, I’ll press onward. Chessmaster has plenty of flaws, some of which are pretty nasty. First of all, its user interface is a bit of a horror show. In fact, it’s so screwy that I’m not sure how to describe it except to say that it is entirely out of place on OS X. The menus don’t follow any of the conventions common to most OS X software so finding the menu items you want can be a bit of a chore.

Some of the interface is just plain broken. The most annoying manifestations of this problem are the occasional invisible buttons. This is incredibly irritating and makes some of the dialog boxes completely unusable.

CM9k insists on chewing up CPU cycles even when it’s not doing anything. There is an option to tell CM9k to use fewer cycles when it runs in the background. As it turns out, this makes things worse, rather than better. Without this option selected, CM9k uses up processing whether or not it is running in the foreground. However, with this option turned on, CM9k uses all possible cycles on one CPU core when it’s running in the foreground. When it’s in the background it uses no cycles, but the messages sent to it by the OS pile up. So, when you eventually bring it back to the foreground it takes forever to respond to user input.

There are other UI related problems, but you get the idea. I think that much of this can be explained best by a brief history lesson about Chessmaster.

The Chessmaster franchise is owned by Ubisoft. CM started out life as a Windows program, and by all accounts the Windows version of CM suffers from none of the problems that I have just described. In fact, many of it’s users consider CM to be the best bit of chess software available for that platform.

The problems with CM began when Ubisoft decided it wanted to have a version of CM running on the Mac. Not unreasonably, Ubisoft decided to farm out the Mac port of CM to a company that specializes in such platform-related conversions. Unfortunately for us poor Mac users, Ubisoft chose Feral Interactive to do the conversion. Feral Interactive decided that instead of doing a proper job of this port, they would do the minimal amount of work to get CM running on OS X. Hence the incredibly shitty interface, and all types of other nasty bugs. In fact, from reading forum posts from irate CM9k users, for many people it took a couple of years before Feral Interactive produced enough patches to even get CM9k running on some machines. Yikes.

Here’s another little piece of bullshit: Chessmaster is one of those annoying games that requires the CD to run. Once CM9k has started, you can eject the CD, but you’ll have to drag it around with your laptop if you are going mobile.

Me, being the diligent sort that I am, did my research and knew about all this crap before purchasing a copy of Chessmaster. Considering all the nasty problems with Chessmaster on the Mac, you may be wondering why I didn’t just skip CM9k altogether. Despite all the cons, I figured that the pros were sufficient for me to take the plunge. There are actually many good reasons for using CM9k.

The first of such reasons is the inclusion of many learning aids. CM9k has a veritable cornucopia of tutorials, exercises, drills, and more. It also has a database of important historical games from which to study. For me, these features alone were enough to make me purchase CM9k.

Chessmaster’s analysis is fairly decent. Unlike most chess software, CM9k’s analysis includes auto-annotation that attempts to give plain language descriptions of its analysis. This is at least sometimes helpful with deciphering the analyses.

Another feature that I find useful is the tournament mode. At first, I considered this bit rather useless, but I’ve since changed my mind. If you play rated games in CM9k, it keeps track of your ratings, which, for me, is a great feature. I don’t really care much about my rating except that it is a good indicator of how well (or not so well) I am progressing as a chess player.

Speaking of ratings, another little nicety is the ability to choose your opponent’s skill level by category rather than by a numerical rating. You can choose from Beginner, Novice, Club Player, Strong Opponent, and Grandmaster, or “At My Level.” Particularly when I first started using Chessmaster this was a good bit of syntactic sugar because, well, what the hell is an Elo rating, anyway? Of course, I can answer that question now, but at the time I didn’t know what it was and I certainly didn’t know what *my* Elo rating was.

CM9k has a list of “personalities” against which you can play. This is something else that I originally thought was pretty goofy. It turns out that this idea of personalities is actually fairly powerful and an interesting concept. Each of the preloaded personalities not only have their own chess rating, but they also have a variety of other characteristics. For instance, some personalities are more aggressive than others, some prefer to keep their King safe, while others willingly bring their King into the fray. Some personalities prefer Bishop play over Knights. You get the idea. Better yet, you can create your own personalities against which to play. Like the strength ratings, this is surprisingly useful. If you find yourself having trouble playing in the real world against certain types of players, you can simulate them in Chessmaster and then get some decent practice in before you play your nemesis in your next grudge match.

There are options to ask CM9k to give you hints and advice, but I haven’t used those much yet, so I can’t really say if they are useful or not.

CM9k includes the usual stuff for a chess program, such as saving games, setting up board positions, and so on, as well as customizing the look of the board and the chess set.

Something that might be interesting to some folks is the option to play games in 3D. Personally, I can’t stand this feature because selecting the pieces is always a bit annoying on 3D boards. I find this is a problem with all chess software, so it’s not a fault that is particular to CM9k. I don’t like it, so I don’t use it, but it’s there if you are the sort that likes that kind of thing.

Overall, even with it’s glaring faults and warts, I have found Chessmaster 9000 to be a useful tool in my chess arsenal. If you think you can put up with the more irritating bits, it’s probably a useful addition to your software collection.

Book Review: Play Winning Chess

First, a bit of backstory is in order.

I started taking chess semi-seriously about three months ago when I started playing Facebook Chess. I decided I would do some reading and get my learn on. Of course, I started with reading whatever I could find on the web that seemed relevant. There's lots of good information for the beginner out there, but most of it is poorly organized and difficult to collect into some sort of coherent whole. To attempt to solve that problem, I went to the library to borrow and read two books, Chess for Dummies and The Chess Player's Bible. I didn't borrow these books for any other reason than they seemed like the least crappy books that my local library had to offer.

Both book are decent. Chess for Dummies is actually pretty good for the chess newcomer, and I will recommend it to folks looking to take a first shot at chess. However, it is not a book you are likely to refer to ever again after your first reading, so I suggest you do as I did and just borrow it from somebody.

I only bring up the issue of my web reading and book reading to show that I have at least a little bit of context on which to base my review of Play Winning Chess.

I will also mention that in my search for some modicum of chess skill, I bought a copy of Chessmaster 9000, which has oodles of good drills, exercises, and tutorials. Some of these tutorials were written by Yasser Seirawan, the author of Play Winning Chess (PWC). The tutorials he wrote were so helpful I decided I would read some of his books, and PWC is the first in a series of seven books called Winning Chess.

Now, to the issue at hand. PWC begins with an introduction to chess. It describes the board, the pieces, the legal moves, algebraic notation, and so on. Pretty much what you would expect for an introduction to chess. Seirawan injects information about the origins of the game and about the evolution of chess into what it has become today.

The real meat of the book comes next, where Seirawan breaks down chess play into four main topics: force, time, space and pawn structure.

Force, as the author describes it, is a measure of the pieces on the whole board, or on a section of the board (material on the kingside, for example). Along with showing how to calculate force, Seirawan shows ways to use force, or to increase relative force. There are some subtleties to calculating and using force, such as doubled pawns, the risks of developing the queen too early, and so on.

Time is a somewhat more ephemeral subject, but Seirawan handles it quite well. He explains how important it is to develop your pieces quickly and he explains ways to increase your time advantages with various tactical plays. He also describes how to successfully use an advantage in time once you have gained it.

Next comes a section on space. As with force, there is a description of how to calculate spacial advantage. And as with force, there are additional subtleties that tag along with the spacial count. I found this section particularly enlightening as I had not previously seen a good treatment on the subject of space.

The fourth section is on pawn structure. The author explains the types of pawn structures, such as pawn chains, pawn islands, passed pawns, backward pawns and so on, and he shows how they are important in relation to he abilities of the other pieces. He also shows the importance of the pawns during both the middlegame and the endgame.

After all of that, Sierawan sets out to use examples from real chess games to show the applications for force, space, time and pawn structure. Whether or not they are famous games, I have no idea. However, they are excellent examples never the less.

PWC is shot throughout with short sections about historic chess players as well as quizzes and tests to puzzle your by-now-squishy brains. You really must run through the quizzes and tests if you want to get the most out of this book as they will give you at least as much incite into the game of chess as the annotated games.

You've probably guessed by now that I think this book is great. The writing is well organized and clear, which tends to be rare among technical books. The writing style is also quite light, so those of you that are allergic to dry tomes of knowledge shouldn't be scared off by this book. Beyond all that, unlike Chess for Dummies, you will likely continue to refer back to this book for quite a while into the future.

PWC, along with Seirawan's tutorials from CM9k, have given me a fair bit of faith in his writing, so I've begun reading the second book in the Winning Chess series. It, however, is about an order of magnitude more difficult to digest than PWC, so don't expect a review any time soon ...