Just Plain Chips

My left elbow and forearm are killing me. I had a hockey game last night but I don’t think I got hit in the arm or anything. But I had played a bunch of Guitar Hero on Saturday and then again last night after hockey. Maybe hockey and Guitar Hero don’t mix. I certainly have been known to tense my muscles up while jamming. And this weekend I managed to pass a number of the more difficult songs on the “Hard” difficulty level.

Anyway. Hockey went much better last night than it did three weeks ago. I have been a little sick over the last couple weeks. But I was able to get lots of Dance Dance Revolution in. While DDR may not be the most strenuous workout, it keeps the body moving and it’s fun, so I don’t have a problem doing it almost every day. So being in a little better shape last night helped a lot. We won the game 8-3 and I was +2 on the night with an assist. Not too shabby.

Don’t you hate when you’re mad but there’s really no reason to be mad? And then just the fact that you’re mad makes you even more mad? That’s what’s going on with me.

Okay, because Graham asked nicely, I’ll tell the story of that last chess game I mentioned.

Let me set up the entire situation. I was in 8th grade and I was playing black in this game. My opponent was a little 7th grade girl from Glen Rose, TX, who was rated only about 1000 to my rating of 1300. Why was I playing a girl from Texas in a junior high chess game? Why, I was at the National Junior High Chess Championships, that’s why. This particular game was in the last round of the tournament.

Being in 8th grade instead of 9th and not being all that great I was playing in the Junior Varsity section of the tournament, which was mostly 7th and 8th graders. Not only are there prizes for being one of the top scorers in the tourney, there are team prizes as well. Every team takes their op four scorers in the tourney and compares them to the top four from all the other teams. The team with the highest score from their top four is the champion. In this particular tournament, in this JV section, our team was a pretty good one. We had a couple players that were top scorers overall and a bunch others that were doing pretty well, too.

Back to my game. I remember being uneasy with the position. I certainly didn’t seem to really have any advantage and like my friend Jay said, my bishop was on the wrong colored square to help protect my advanced pawn. And, at this stage in my career I was really uncomfortable in the end game; I had screwed up more even games than had I won.

So I was nervous, I didn’t want to lose to a girl rated 1000, and I was in the last round of the nation tournament. Let’s see, what else? Oh yeah. About the time my opponent made her last move (34. b4) my coach came up with a tournament official. The official was there to make sure my coach wasn’t going to give me any help with the game or any advice. He had a piece of news to give me. The news was: “If you draw or win this game, we (our team, Metcalf Jr. High) will clinch the team National Championship.”

Okay, no pressure. Just don’t lose this game you don’t know if you can win and your team won’t hate you. I thanked him for the news and sat back down at my game and stared at that board. I went through everything to see if there was some way I could pull off a win. After a while I looked across the board and asked my opponent “Do you want a draw?”. She agreed and Metcalf won the National JV Championship.

(If I get some good comments about this, I’ll let you know something very special and interesting about this game. It holds a very special place in my heart, even above the huge upset I talked about. )

Okay, I want my expert friends to examine one more chess position.

White just moved:

34. b5

Who has the upper hand, and what should black and then white do?

Okay, if you haven’t at least taken a look at my last post, you should do so now.
But if you’re one of my intrepid commenters, please forge ahead…
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In case you don’t know, I used to be kind of nerdy. (I know what you’re saying: “used to be?”) I was a member of the chess club throughout all of Junior High, 7th through 9th grades. And I was captain of the chess team my 9th grade year. I had a great time all three years and I have great memories from them. Anyway…

I won’t go into the whole story, but last night in some internet surfing I came across the home page of a guy I beat in the Minnesota Junior High State chess tournament in 9th grade. I happen to remember the name and the game because he was the 2nd highest rated player in the tournament at the time I beat him and thus a big and memorable upset for me.

A link on his site brought me to the homepage of the US Chess Federation. After some mucking around I found my membership data which was also linked to the results of a number of tournaments I played in during my 9th grade year, including the state tourney where I had that huge upset.

In a wave of nostalgia I looked through some of the tounaments. Probably my best one was where I scored 3.5 points out of 4 to tie for 2nd place. In the tournament I beat some unrated guy; my good friend Jay, who was rated higher than me (1519 vs 1264); another kid who was rated even higher than Jay (1738); and I scored a draw against another highly rated guy (1636). I don’t know what I had for breakfast that morning, but I should never have tried anything else.

After looking through my digital results I wondered if I could find something more concrete to look through. Being a pack-rat, I was able to dig through a few piles of stuff and bring out my old scorebooks where I kept notation of all of my chess games. They are little spiral notebooks where you write down all of the moves you do in a chess game. It is meant both as a way to slow yourself down so you don’t make a hasty mistake and also as a learning tool so you can go back over what you did right and wrong during the game. I was able to find the particular game I was thinking about. It was played on April 4th, 1992.

If you don’t know algebraic notation or much about chess, the rest of this probably won’t be very interesting.
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That post title is a take on a mistranslation from some Nintendo game from my youth. I can’t remember what it was, but when you won something it told you “A winner is you!”

Because I told him I would, I thought I’d let you in on my night last night. I hung out with my buddy Chris and his daughter Lauren. His wife was out of town and he was getting his car worked on, so I was the ride from and back to the dealership. I got dinner and fun out of the deal, so I’m pretty sure I came out ahead.

Anyway, I’ve mentioned before how Chris beat me in bocce ball and how he pretty much beats me at everything. Well, last night we had the bocce ball rematch. And I actually won 2 games to 3. I was pretty excited about it, though I hope he wasn’t letting me win to be nice. (I don’t think he’s that nice) And he does have a broken foot in a walking cast–so that could have affected him as well. Afterwards he taught me a card game called Cross Crib, though we played it without the fancy board and scoring tablets. It’s a pretty neat and easy and the games go really quickly. I actually beat him 3 out of 5 games in that event. So being 2 for 2 against Chris in one night was pretty huge for me.

If you’re a fan of The Legend of Zelda series of video games and you like sushi, then this might be the greatest thing you’ve ever seen. If not, it might be one of the scariest things you’ve ever seen.

Edit (4:51pm): The site I got this link from, kotaku.com, posted a correction about the picture saying that someone who could read Japanese said that the dish is supposed to look like Peter Pan and Wendy, which I will admit it does. But I think it still kind of looks like Link and Zelda as well.

Picture from Ricoco Blog (in Japanese)

I am going to bed early tonight. It’s only 9:20 but I don’t care. I’ve been up too late two nights in a row. Last night was the earlier of the two and it was late. Of course, you’re never going to have an early night when you start a game of Monopoly at 9:30pm or so. I’ll get to Friday night later. (hence this is called part 2)

After having our other plans shot down by a series of mishaps, Paul, Laura, Chey, and I headed back to Paul and Laura’s house for some kind of game. After a bit of prodding by her husband, Laura finally relented and we got out Monopoly. The game was going quite slowly for a while with no one owning a Monopoly until Chey came away with Baltic and Mediterranean. And those two properties just aren’t going to put people out of business. The cash was flowing easily with our two house rules: the always popular $500+ for Free Parking, and a rule I’d never heard before–$400 for landing directly on Go.

So something needed to be done. Laura is one of those players who is not a wheeler-dealer. But Paul and Chey ganged up to give her the best outcome of a three person deal. Laura ended up with Boardwalk and Park Place while Chey got the Light Blues and Paul ended up with the Magentas. Houses and hotels were thrown up and the game began in earnest.

I at the time had 4 properties. A veritable anti-bounty. It was unbelievable. But everyone decided that we needed to make some shady deals so that everyone could have some fun. Paul ended up with almost all of the Yellows and a few extra Railroads, Chey got a little bit of money, and I ended up with the Greens. More houses and soon hotels were built.

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(Holy crap–two in one day? What’s going on?)

I enjoy video games. I enjoy funny things. I enjoy movies.

I also happen to enjoy funny movies with a video game theme. The boys at Mega64.com have put together a bunch of videos reenacting scenes from video games out in real life. I had seen their Shenmue and Metal Gear Solid videos and I just watched their tetris video, they’re all hilarious. Though maybe not as hilarious if you don’t know what the particular game is about.

I thought this was kind of cool, in a video game geek sort of way.

It is one person’s opinion on how many of the video game controllers have evolved and how they are related to each other.

Of course, if I was really a video game and blogging geek I would have come up with this idea on my own and posted it here. Alas.