Sports Bar
Edited Nov 28, 2007 6:58 pm
(823 previous messages)
- Jul 11, 2010 12:32 am (#824 of 834)
Congrats to the Deutschlanders here.
Some chess grandmaster, I can't remember who, wrote in some book warning about the beginner's mistake of confusing check with checkmate. Good advice. They are two very different things, and you can weaken your game by being too concerned with checking. I'm reminded of that often, as I was just now, playing on the Free Internet Chess Server against a player rated a little lower than I. Over the course of our game, 45 moves long, he checked me 17 times, playing White, including 11 straight times from his 33rd to his 43rd move. It was getting to be pretty predictable. I finally got my King to a place where I couldn't be checked the next move, checked him for the 1st time on my 44th move and checkmated him on the 45th. I had managed to sneak a pawn up to h3, next his fianchetto of pawns at f2, g3 and h2 and his King at h1. I had my Queen at f5, all I had to do was hold on to that Queen and that pawn and wait to finally get out of check, and then, as long as his Queen wasn't guarding the long white diagonal, it was ...Qf3+ and ...Qg2#.
Good thing for me that the winner isn't the one who checks his opponent the most times. Good thing for me also that that opponent wasn't good at using his pieces in combination, and that he apparently missed the importance of my having both my Queen and that pawn at h3.
- Jul 16, 2010 3:13 pm (#826 of 834)
I've been reading about Kasparov and Fischer.
Interesting men.
Fischer was very eccentric. Tinfoil-hat eccentric. But a lot of other top chess players have been pretty cuckoo, as well. Kasparov is a lot more like a normal sensible person, from what I've heard.
Cuckoo or not, though, Fischer was a brilliant player. At the top levels of chess, most games are drawn. A long time ago I got a book about Fischer, and one of the contributors to this book, analyzing Fischer's playing style, commented that Fischer played in order to win every game. At the time I didn't understand, I thought the comment was a little odd. I thought, sure he always wants to win. Anybody who gets very far in any sport always wants to win.
Then later, I understood that lots of players may play defensively in a lot of games, and gladly settle for draws, rather than overextending themselves and losing if they play too aggressively. Playing too aggressively on offense often weakens the defense.
Fischer had a run of 20 consecutive wins against the best of the other contenders to challenge Spassky for the World Championship. That sort of winning streak just doesn't happen in top-level chess. (It happens rarely enough in low-level chess.) The last known comparable streak had been a run of 25 wins by Steinitz about a century before. That's an example of someone being head and shoulders over everybody else in a sport, like when Kenny Roberts was sent to the back of the field before the start of a 1977 AMA Grand National road race because his bike was leaking oil, and went from the back to the lead in four laps, or when Michael Jordan was making over 80% of his free throws even though he had his eyes closed when he took a lot of those shots because there were so many flashbulbs going off.
- Jul 22, 2010 9:59 pm (#828 of 834)
Good.
Baseball Minor Leagues Will Test for H.G.H. Immediately
Excerpt:
Blood testing for human growth hormone will begin immediately in the minor leagues, Bud Selig, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, announced on Thursday. It is the first time a professional sports league in North America will test for the substance.
The move puts baseball, which has been widely criticized for moving slowly on the issue of performance-enhancing drugs, ahead of the N.F.L., which has not been criticized nearly as much about the issue.
“The implementation of blood testing in the minor leagues represents a significant step in the detection of the illegal use of human growth hormone,” Selig said in a written statement. “The minor league program employs state of the art testing procedures and the addition of H.G.H. testing provides an example for all of our drug policies in the future.”
Players who test positive for H.G.H. will face a 50-game suspension, the same penalty for a positive steroid test. Those players selected for testing will have their blood taken after games from their nondominant arm. The blood samples will be shipped to the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory in Salt Lake City for analysis.
Selig could implement the testing without the approval of the players’ association because the vast majority of minor league players are not on major league rosters, and thus not represented by the players’ union.
- Jul 22, 2010 10:12 pm (#829 of 834)
For what it's worth, the rumors about this test coming have been around ever since a similar test was used to catch a rugby player using HGH.
Also for what it's worth, I believe that the rumors that this test were coming are the reason that offense is at a 20 year low in baseball right now. The last time fewer runs per game were being scored was in the early 80s, well before the onset of the Steroid Era in the late 90s. I believe that HGH use is still rampant in baseball, and since players saw what happened to Barry Bonds (an old sample was retested using new technology, and then tested positive for PEDs) I think a lot of folks are gunshy.
This has been touted as the Year of the Pitcher because of the number of no-hitters and perfect games, but if you go into the statistics (at a place like www.baseball-reference.com) and look you will see that the biggest difference in the numbers is that while offense is down across the board, and most down in home runs, doubles are up. To a sabermetrician, that means that offense is down and more long balls are dropping in for doubles, which typically means that hitters aren't hitting the ball as hard.
Another thing that sabermetricians will tell you is that it's actually pretty hard for pitchers to control the amount of HRs vs doubles that they give up, so it's even more suggestive that this is less The Year of the Pitcher and more just A Bad Year for Hitting.
- Aug 5, 2010 4:18 am (#830 of 834)
Parkour style catch!
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/blog/big_league_stew/post/The-most-amazing-catch-we-ll-see-all-season?urn=mlb-260247
- Aug 19, 2010 5:32 am (#831 of 834)
Amazing!
- Aug 19, 2010 8:13 am (#832 of 834)
That's on a par with professional juggling.
I've just achieved my highest blitz chess rating so far on FICS, 1303. My previous best had been 1301 back in February. 1303 puts me in the top 13,000 out of over 21,000 active players. So, this isn't earth-shattering news for chess nerds. But for me it's nice. I've won about 20 games in a row. That's unusual -- not just for me, for anybody playing closely-matched opponents. My rating has tended to go up and down to an unusual degree. It'd be nice if I could maintain the level of play I've been at and keep this winning sreak going for a while, keep that rating climbing higher. In the past, however, my winning streaks have often been followed by huge losing streaks.
- Aug 23, 2010 9:00 am (#834 of 834)
Jurrah grabs a beauty!
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