Links to all my chess videos

Jacob Wagner vs David Balash USCF tournament game
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8061619294337323195&hl=en




http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5020404794811255869
Jacob Wagner vs. Jay Harmon USCF tournament



http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3823543606122860429
Chess Tactics



http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7195913708542388139
Blue devil knight vs ferad ICC



http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1822647337083644693
Jacob Wagner vs ferad ICC



I have created a few annotated chess videos (free of course). To my suprise if you type 'annotated chess videos' on google one of them will be very high up in the page rankings.

All of my videos combined had over 11,000 views, though the reports page now shows all videos at "0". Hmm.

I will keep this blog entry up to date with links to all the videos I create. I also plan to make a video podcast available. If in doubt, go to google video and search for "Zenchess". (I am uploading one as we speak and it should be live in a couple hours).

The video I'm uploading now is against David Balash, check for that soon. The chess tactics instructional video does not have the greatest audio - the original copy I have has great audio, except google video keeps messing this one up. I should be able to fix this soon. Note that even though the video says "better audio" in reality, the audio is still bad. When I fix it I guess I'll name it "fixed audio".

My lectures usually focus on ideas and observations that I think would be helpful to lower-rated players, although occasionally I will say something that I think stronger players could benefit from as well. It is very possible and likely that I have made mistakes in my analysis. I do NOT prepare these analysis sessions with computers. In fact, I think computer analysis is highly over-rated and is far distanced from real human chess and understanding. In other words, when I analyze a game, I try to give advice that a real human could follow during a game. I do not analyze millions of moves per second or have an assistant computer do that so therefore I do not recommend you play moves that only computers would find.

I am available to give lessons for serious students. Go to chess.com and search for zenchess for more info, or drop me a message at zenchess.com (click on forum). My rates are very reasonable.

Moving to new blog

While browsing chess related sites, somehow I stumbled upon a new site, that launched in July or something, called Chess.com.

I will be moving this blog to there.

It's kind of a chess community site, where you can have a blog, participate in forum discussions, upload videos, play chess, and probably some other things I don't know about.

The main reason that I am moving to that site is that blogging about chess will be MUCH easier than using blogger. Chess.com blogs have a nice little 'chessboard' icon that you can click on, to insert a picture of a position, a position setup, or a complete game. In other words, you no longer have to go through a tedious process of uploading files, entering urls into your blogger posts etc. You just click on the chessboard and setup the position and you're done. That is a huge improvement over my current blog.

So, if you would like to continue seeing my chess posts, head on over to:

http://blog.chess.com/Zenchess

I will not be abandoning this blog however, since I have taken up Go again, and I don't think there is a similar site for go blogging. Playing go is interesting - and after playing go I think differently while playing chess. It's a very interesting feeling and I recommend it to everyone. Basically, I start thinking of the whole board more after playing go and think less about tactics and more about overall strategy. For instance in go, you might often sacrifice a stone or a few stones to get something somewhere else on the board, and yes of course there are sacrifices in chess but these more positional, give up this area to get that area is what I've been focusing more on my chess games.

I think I have been improving at chess as well. I have been thinking more about strategy lately and reading more of my system. I consciously think about central control, and more than just 'i have pawns in the center' or 'my pieces attack the center', but what the effect of the center is on the game, which pieces can move through the center, etc. Controlling the center from the flanks.

I also recommend everyone read the book 'the art of learning' by Joshua Waitzkin. It is one of the best books I've ever read, and directly applies to any competetive game like chess.

I am the champion!

I won the city championship! I went 4-0 to win it. Sounds good, but in round 3 I was in a very bad situation after my opponent sacrificed his bishop on h7.

At first I thought I was mated, but then I realized I could stick my bishop between his queen and rook which were about to mate me, and then play Qh6, stopping the mating threat.

That's not the end of the story however, as I still remain 2 pawns down. Somehow my opponent managed to blunder many times and I ended up winning the game. Just goes to show you not to resign too early, especially against ~1400 players!

In the end, I gained about 20 rating points, and won the $60 prize. Not too shabby!

Here are the games:

First round: Victory!

Ok, this is not too exciting, as my opponent was rated 1300, and as expected, did not play too well. The game is below. You'll notice that he did nothing to contain my queenside expansion, which gave me nice space and squares for my pieces. His development was lacking, since he lost time in trades on the d-file, and never developed his c1 bishop (did it have a good square to go to?).

Then I played g5, giving me alot of play and threatening various things on the g-file and the a8-h1 diagonal. I don't know exactly how it would play it had he defended better but I would have figured something out if he did. I think my position was better if not winning and trying to survive g-file tricks combined with my knight and bishop entering his game I think would be impossible. I'll look at some variations later and post some analysis. Instead of defending with something like g3, he just walked into the attack with Kf2. I have no idea why someone would play that, completely missing the fact that I could check on d3.

Here's a tip: if you're rated 1300, look for knight checks before you make your move, especially when you have plenty of time on the clock. Inefficient time management is not good. See some dan heisman articles for more discussion on this.


So I got an easy win in round 1, but who will be the eventual omaha city champion tomorrow? Will david balash show up tomorrow and register late in order to defend his title? Will Don Shenum, who has a half point bye, take me down in the last round?

Chess fans, stay tuned. This is serious nebraska chess!

Tal's Winning Chess Combinations

The title of this post is a book which I recently acquired. It came highly recommended, with rave reviews about how it really taught tactical themes well.
"Best" book on learning tactics seemed to be thrown about a bit.

I haven't read much of the book, but what I've read so far has been good. The book is ordered in sections based on pieces instead of themes, such as 'rook + bishop' combos etc. Actually I can't give much of a review until I spend more time with it but I suggest you check out the reviews, at amazon or a google search.

Unfortunately, this book is out of print and at amazon it sells for over $100! I've heard that you can find it electronically as well, but *ahem* I don't know anything about that.

Anyways, here's a great chess position for you to ponder. If you need to see the solution, hit the forwards arrow key. It's a beautiful combination, I only hope that some day I can play something like this. In the book, easier examples with the same theme (back rank weakness) are given to kind of build you up to this one.

The combination comes from the game Adams-Torre 1921.

2 Reviews: Playing on ICC with chess assistant 9, and Chesslectures.com first impressions

I play on ICC alot, and switched from blitzin to dasher. The main reason for the switch was the piece-set, which I consider very important because it is your view into the chess world. An ugly piece set just feels wrong.

By random I found out about an interface to ICC I wasn't aware of, called chess assistant. In the screenshots, there was a nice piece-set being used. Normally I do not like convekta products much because their default piece-set is absolutely horrible.
Look below in my screenshot to see what my piece-set setup looks like (there are other sets you can use as well. I had to download this piece-set from chessassistance.com

Well, chess assistant 9 is a very nice database program, and has tons of features, and seems easier to use than chessbase, which is confusing. However, I'll get right to the point why I think chess assistant is so revolutionary when used with ICC. The reason is that without switching programs you can immediately get full, easy-to-play thorough analysis of your games. How that works is that chess assistant will analyze your game as you are playing. When the game is finished, if you want to add annotations to it, you right click on the move list and click on 'comment game'. That's it.

Then you have nice comments, and you can click on a variation in the notation window, and see the computer's analysis right on the board, immediately. You can use uci-engines, like rybka (the strongest chess engine available), however the program comes with shredder.

This is so revolutionary that I think I'll repeat it: you get instant feedback on games and blunders that you just played. No need to open up another database program, set to analysis, wait 5 minutes, and then finally look at your mistakes. With that lengthy of a process, who is to say you will do it for all your games? With chess assistant, it's so easy that you can quickly do it for all your games. You can change the analysis style, so that it only tells you about your blunders, or recommends strong moves you could have played, etc.

I won't elaborate much on the other features, of which there are many and are quite good. Suffice to say that having your icc program and database program all-in-one is quite nice and saves you time.

To top it off for icc players, there's actually another really nice feature, which is opening training similar to chess position trainer, or bookup. I haven't used that feature yet, so I won't comment on it, but I know that you can set it so the computer will not only test you in your opening variations, but it will at some point actually play against you. I can state from experience (using other programs clumsily setting them up to play in the preferred line) that you learn alot about your opening by having a computer play against you. I think you can even modify the engine's strength if you don't want to get crushed every game.

One more feature: after you have played a game, and say your opponent went out of your book and you're wondering what to do, you can immediately get a nice 'tree' of possible moves in the position, which shows you the win percentage, number of games, and elo of the players who played that move. All of these things you can do with chessbase products, however it just takes longer, you have to do reference searches, which take much longer, and it just seems easier in chess assistant.

Here is a screenshot of my icc interface + the instant analysis that was generated while I was playing:




As to the downsides, I've found a couple so far: #1No premove. This really bugs me, but the other features are so nice I've decided to dispense with premove.

#2: It does not appear to be possible to draw arrows while examining a game on icc.

Aparently there is a feature where it will send comments and arrows to people who are examining a game that is previously annotated (of which I don't know how to do either), but the window where you can draw lines and stuff with does not show up when examining a game. I also believe that even if it did, which might be possible somehow through the settings, it would not be as easy as dasher, blitzin, or playchess where you can just right-click drag from square to square, or hold alt and drag from square to square as in playchess. The manual merely says 'type arrow and the square to and from'. Highly inconvenient.

These are serious drawbacks imo, and it would make it pretty difficult to teach on icc without using arrows, even though you'd be tempted to still use chess assistant due to its nice analysis features.

Oh yeah, and then there's the price, I believe chess assistant 9 by itself costs around $70, or you can get it with a big database for around $100.

One neat feature, if you do get the program with the database, is that you can get your database updated with new games regularly. This is important if you want to stay on top of the latest theory. On that note, I think correspondence databases are really important too, and I'd like to know how to get access to the latest games.

In other chess related news, I'll be playing a tournament for the 'omaha city championship' tomorrow and the next day, so I'll be sure to post and maybe analyze the games.

Oh yeah: chesslecture.com.

I signed up for this service about 2 days ago. At first I didn't sign up because their 'trial video' was about the fried liver attack, and was very basic. Later I realized that it was marked 'beginner' level, and there are actually 'intermediate' and 'advanced' level videos as well.

I won't do a full review because I don't know enough about the site yet, but I can say that I have had a blast searching for my favorite players and watching videos of games they play. The annotations have been fairly good, sticking to the main variations and explaining them reasonably well. I haven't seen any 'and if black does this, er, gee, well maybe he can just do that' type analysis, so it looks like so far they have their material fairly well covered, or at least they have their variation-trees at-hand :)

So I would recommend chesslecture.com to all levels of players, for different reasons, maybe you want to learn an opening system (learn being a relative term there, you will get 'introduced' to it, or you want to watch some entertaining lectures of famous player's games.

Im scalp and a fun game

I got another IM scalp today. It was a game on playchess, he was rated 2600 blitz there, a 3 1 game (3 minutes and 1 second increment).

To be honest though he kind of fubarred the opening, allowing me to advance my center pawn to e5, and get a nice bind on the c5 square.

The game was for ducats, the playchess currency. If it wasn't for those ducats, I'd never get a game against a player of that caliber. The game cost 5 ducats, so that's about 50 cents. I played him a total of 2 games, and it only cost me 50 cents. I suggest people try this to get experience against strong humans. We can all get experience against strong computers but of course humans play differently.

Here is the game:

On a humorous note, I played a game recently that I really like. First a series of events happened which resulted in my opponent getting a piece stuck on h4 locked in by his pawn on g5. That bishop wasn't going anywhere so eventually I was able to threaten to take it out of the game (with win of a pawn).

After that, my opponent tried to open the a-file by pushing his a-pawn down the board. Instead of exchanging the pawn, I allowed the pawn to get all the way to a2! From there it was a simple matter of playing Ra1-Rxa2. It's interesting how my position turned from being totally defensive to mating the opponent.

Lots of people don't like playing defensively, but punish your opponents mistakes however you can!

A new and improved chess tactics server

"Chess is 99% tactics." "Solve lots of tactics problems". "De la maza did it, you can too!"

I offer a link to a site I wasn't aware of previously, which lets you solve tactics.

It is similar to "chess tactics server" at: http://chess.emrald.net

This new one is called chess tempo and can be found at: http://chesstempo.com



The new one I found however is much nicer. One of the biggest problems with chess tactics server is the chessboard interface. In order to solve a tactic, you have to click on a piece, then click on the destination. That's great if that's what you're used to, but I am used to dragging a piece to its destination. That is how I play on chess servers like ICC or FICS or playchess.

This new place allows you to drag the pieces like most of us are probably used to. It also sports a nifty board and piece-set, which is miles ahead of chess emrald.
Check out the previous post to see what the board and pieces look like when solving tactics. Another neat feature is that you can choose whether to solve tactics in 'standard' or 'blitz' mode. In blitz mode, the faster you solve the tactic, the more rating points you get for the problem (take too long, and you'll lose points!). In standard mode, time is not a factor, so you can take your time and really pretend like you are in a tournament game and solve the tactic without worrying about speed.

Another very neat feature is that when you solve a tactic, it shows you in the upper left your rating change. It looks kind of like a roleplaying game +120 XP! Except it's "Rating +120".

Yes, there's more! This new server lets you play out the computer analysis for each tactic (which goes pretty deep on the ones I tried), so if you don't understand why the final position is winning, you can keep pressing the forwards arrow key and see how the computer would finish off his opponent.

There is also a comment system and rating system for the tactics, except it is better implemented.

In case you aren't familiar with these chess tactics websites, basically they take real games and run them through a computer engine to generate tactics problems. Sometimes they come up with silly ones: Capture a piece and you win. However according to the rating system, problems like that will only be presented to beginners. Each player gets a rating and each problem gets a rating. Sometimes you get problems that don't make sense, but there are mechanisms in place for you to report the problem and they will remove it.

So to all the de la maza knights out there: this is the perfect site for you.


And don't forget to register, so it can track your stats!

Man vs machine continues: Jacob vs Rybka 2.3!

I played against rybka 2.3 today. I've noticed that lately when I've been playing against engines I seem to do alot better, although I still lose. Whereas before I would get absolutely crushed, this time I would last many moves and just seem to get built-up on and finally executed. Maybe I'm making less tactical mistakes, or perhaps I have the settings messed up. In any case, here's the game, and a test of a new pgn viewer I'm trying out, which comes from http://www.chesstempo.com