Distovagal

Today I had the chance to browse through one of my old books, "Ajedrez brillante" (Brilliant chess) by Máximo Borrell, which I bought for a few cents more than twenty years ago. I found this ad in page 93. It is about some kind of medicine. Distovagal: estabilizador del equilibrio emocional. (Distovagal: stabilizer of emotional balance).

European economy

I will not comment much on this one, as if we could evade the crisis by ignoring it. The idea under the hats is that there are more liabilities than assets, more debt than money.... and again we come across with an example in which the dark square is on the wrong right corner.

Vertical chess

My friend Jordi emailed me some pictures taken in a rural holiday home somewhere in Catalonia. There was this nice wall chess. Not very practical for playing but enjoyable as a piece of art.

Borges

In their solemn corner, the players move
The slow pieces. The board detains them
Until the dawn in its severe world
In which two colors hate each other.
Within the forms irradiates magic
Strictness: Homeric rook, swift
Knight, armed queen, crucial king,
Oblique bishop and aggressive pawns.
Once the players have finally left,
Once time has devoured them,
Surely the ritual will not have ended.
In the orient like this very war flared up
Whose amphitheater today is the earth entire.
Like the other, the game is infinite.

Obama chess arbiter between Israel and Palestine

A nice one by Shlomo Cohen

Mind Games

I like this one by Tony Lurie, but how much of a game has already been determined without even moving the first pawn? My current opinion is that a lot of it.

Dublin: Chess at the Point

This morning I walked to the Point, where there is an interesting street market at the weekends. You can find it at the end of the Luas line, between the O2 Point Theatre and the new Hotel Gibson. There are stalls with different products on offer and a few other things to entertain the passers by. One of those is a chess set that I would not call a giant chess set. Two girls were playing with the pieces. Not exactly playing chess.

Kiev ; Playing chess in the park

I saw this group of citizens of Kiev (or Kyiv) playing chess in a park close to the university.
They were using the old soviet Yantaz clocks. A nice way to spend the morning.

Chess pressure

Comic strip by Mordillo, in which he plays with the idea of chess sides and races. Today Anand and Topalov are playing in Sofia. It is the second game of their match for the World Championship. Indeed, the audience favours the Bulgarian, and there will not be quite half of them supporting Anand. It may be that playing at home turns a disadvantage due to an excess of pressure, but the unequal situation reminded me of this vignette.

Evolution in Modern Ideas in Chess

I see the book by Richard Réti has been published in a new edition. I kind of like the motif in the cover of the book. It is maybe not very polished, but it is a nice idea anyway. In the end, I supposed the Darwinian idea of evolution can apply to chess ideas, as the fittest of them survive while the unfit are discarded and pass to the bin of the history.

Fox Playing Hen

I cannot see much of the chessboard. It is so dark in the burrow. It is a 6x6 chessboard. The fox is playing as White and the hen moves the Black pieces. The fox reminds me of Firefox.
I saw the image in this nice Fox tale posted at Poemas del Río Wang.

Chess club in Wrocław

Last month I spent a weekend in the Lower Silesian capital, the Polish city of Wrocław In the past, it used to belong to Germany and its name was Breslau. This fact is relevant for chess players, as Breslau was the birthplace in 1818, of Adolf Anderssen. Anderssen was one of the most importan players of the 19th century and will always be remembered by his Immortal Game. His tomb can still be visited in the cemetery of Osobowicki, to where I did not have time to go.

Walking past the Market Square (Rynek) by a street named Wita Stwosza I came across this chess club. I liked their logo a lot (if the mouth biting a pawn is the logo) and the pictures with which they covered the shop windows. The design is youthful and fresh and spins around the idea that chess is good fun. Well done, guys.

Working hard

I came across this picture in flickr, and I loved it. It reminds me of my boss a lot. He always says that working hard always pays off in the long term, but for sure he is thinking that he will be beneficiary of our tolling in the short or middle term. I would say the small piece is a Bishop rather than a pawn. No doubt the big figure is a King. Maybe Hugh does not know a lot about chess, as only pawns are entitled to metamorphose change after arriving to the eight file, and even with that, the only piece they cannot become is the King. Anyway, I love the image.

Drinking Chess

image credit: puyol5 at http://weblog.ch/ (seen here)

Not sure if this thing exists or not. The simple rule would be: you drink as many shots as enemy pieces you take.

Chess has an intimate relationship with alcohol, and there are many good examples in the history of our game. We do not endorse any abuse here, though. Just a funny thing.

Berlin Alexanderplatz

 

Berlin Alexanderplatz. January 2007. A table in a café. 4x4 chessboard which includes every single piece, but the Rook appears twice. It is hard to determine the colour of some of the pieces as only the Bishop and the Knight are totally White.