For my 3 or 4 readers who have played Starcraft. The meld between Starcraft and chess was strong in this one (in a sense).

The premise of this video is that one of the casters is playing a team game with a random stranger. The other caster gives the player some ridiculous restriction, often leading to fail and hilarity.

For you chess players, imagine playing bughouse. Except your friend can tell you something like “You can’t advance your pawns past the fourth rank” or “Your Knights can’t capture anything”. Plus your teammate is not aware of how you’ve been handicapped.

I have won my first 11 games on chess.com.

This must be the same feeling a middling college basketball team gets running up the record on weak non-conference opponents.

They know by the time March comes around, their conference record will be 8-8. And they’ll be praying that their single signature win is good enough to land them in the NCAA tournament.

Yeah, it’s getting old, but what the heck. Good for pretending I’m spending a bunch of time on new content.

In this month’s issue…

Aronian plotting to start World War 3

REVEALED: Aronian’s secret late-night strategy sessions with the spirit of Kim Jong -Il!

The secret agenda behind the Chess Blogger Carnival:
Don’t expect Pearson or BDK to tell you!

Prior Chess Enquirers:

Mar 2011
May 2010
January 2010
June 2008

A few months ago, I got an iPhone. The trackball, uncoolness and ringer problems of the Blackberry Bold were simply too frustrating.

Naturally, you end up looking through the App Store to see what’s interesting. There was this “Chess With Friends” app that lets you play…chess with friends.

Unless you are actually playing chess with friends, it’s horrible. Not the app, but the strangers. The majority of random opponents do not bother to finish their games. (And there’s no rating system). The only decent player said the competition sucked and advised me to use chess.com’s app.

So I did. Far better. If you are so inclined, hit me up for an online game, handle LiquidEggProduct. I promise not to cheat.

With the recent demise of Qaddafi/Gaddafi/Khadafi, USCF members everywhere muttered to themselves, “Yeah, yeah, but what does that have to do with my life as a chess player?”

Glad you asked! It turns out that the current FIDE President seems to have been a bit of a fan of the Libyan strongman:

And the eccentric Russian politician Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who is also the head of the World Chess Federation, said that Colonel Gaddafi’s death was a “tragedy” but that he died as a martyr and would be reincarnated.

Mr Ilyumzhinov made a surreal mission to Tripoli in June, where he met with Colonel Gaddafi as an unofficial mediator and played a game of chess with him. Yesterday, he said in a Russian newspaper interview that he had spoken to the Libyan leader numerous times on the phone since. He claimed that Colonel Gaddafi had not been scared of death: “Not a bit! He believed in reincarnation.”

Not that you’d expect anything else from someone who claims aliens visit him and let him on their spaceship and that chess originated from an alien civilization.

Source: Gaddafi’s death breached the law, says Russia

The last post had the wrong position, which Derek pointed out is a pretty easy draw for White.

I was definitely down a Knight for a Pawn, and the pawn structure is what gave me some hope. Black’s King had no quick access to the Kingside (via f8-g7), giving some sort of position like this (Black to play):

Does the extra Pawn and White’s pawns being not so far along make any difference?

If Black’s King could get to the Kingside, I would have been dead pretty quickly:

1. … Kf8 and it looks like White has nothing.

I was the king of chess in high school, losing only one game against schoolmates. This made me look like a complete baller. One of my friends knew another awesome player from a different school.

You must understand that “awesome” was a relative term; I was probably a low to mid class C at this point. Nonetheless, my friend wanted to see “The Clash of the Titans” and we finally got the opportunity one weekend.

My pride did not have a fun day. Despite having White, I never had any serious winning chances. We got down to roughly this position:

Unfortunately, we had to stop at this point. I argued that I had enough to draw the endgame, while my opponent thought he clearly had enough for a win. We never resolved this and it would have been nice to finish it off.

After over a decade, I still think Black can’t win. But endgames can be weird.

What do you think? And give Black the first move.

For those of you that have been living under a rock (meme-wise), a scene from the movie Downfall has been endlessly parodied on the Interwebs.

Here’s my unnecessary chess-related contribution to the babble. Just in time for the June Chess Carnival, which will be hosted by resurrected chess blogger Robert Pearson (aka, the chess personality formerly known as Wahrheit)

I can’t start this for another month or two, but I’m envisioning an actual Black Eggs Can’t Mate Flash movie, maybe 10 to 15 minutes long.

Would you be interested in a voice acting role? Let me know! Actual acting ability is completely optional.

Unfortunately, I don’t know any GM’s or IM’s to cast as the Russian grandmasters; that would be AWESOME. It would lend some credibility to the project (sort of). But it’s not like Hikaru Nakamura stops by LEP all the time or anything and would volunteer (and it’s not like he can do a convincing Russian accent anyway).

Once we get enough money, we’re making the movie “Black Eggs Can’t Mate” (click image for full size):

Synopsis: Chess hustlers make a living by winning bets off neighborhood games. Chess Expert Albert Chan (played by Egg Fu Yung) thinks he can be the best hustler in the ‘hood. But he’s fresh off the boat, and is having a tough start in a new country.

Albert stumbles upon struggling rapper Tyronez Bonez (played by Mr. E) and discovers a latent chess talent. The unlikely duo strike it rich on the chess hustling scene, because no one thinks black guys can play chess.

But when the National Bughouse Tournament comes to town, ghosts from the past threaten to destroy Albert and Tyronez. Will our chess hustler heroes thwart the plans of pasty white CEO Lars Melville (played by the Mascot)? Can they hang with those blasted Russian Grandmasters?