Chess Club Live Blog

 Artificial Intelligence experts will have you believe that when a Chess Computer neural network makes a move it has a higher value in the context of consciousness than if a brute force engine makes a move. Well, they are both the same, mindless unconscious and totally determinant. What is so sad is that this confidence trick peddled by computer scientists and software developers is incentivized by the prospect of huge sponsorship deals with tech firms desperate to be the first to harness this new area of technology. I went to Imperial College and studied Electrical and Electronic Engineering under the tutelage of Professor Igor Aleksander the co-inventor of the world's first standalone artificial intelligence neural network built for pattern recognition. Professor Igor Aleksander had a particular specialism in the area of artificial consciousness, machine consciousness, synthetic consciousness, perceived consciousness, and "Qualia". I   Garry Kasparov and Elon Musk are t...

 The Queen's Gambit has made it cool to obsess over chess. You see everyone going nuts for Chess, even if they don't know anything about the game, especially if they don't know anything about the game. It has been fantastic for chess content creators as we have been posting about one thing since October 2020 and getting props for it. What will we do when the hysteria ebbs away and we are left with the reality that Chess is boring. Is Chess boring? Yes, it is really boring. Don't get me wrong I love the game and have spent large proportions of my time watching chess events in the flesh and online but the game is pretty dull. The actual miracle here is the actress, Anya Taylor-Joy directed by Scott Frank following an adaptation co-created by Allan Scott and Scott Frank of a novel by the greatest sports novelist of all time, Walter Tevis captured the zeitgeist and propelled Chess, warts and all into the limelight. How long will it take those new fans of Chess to realize th...

 Fide Online Arena is the amazing online chess platform for FIDE members to play on and receive legit FIDE online ratings and titles. It was one of those phenomenally good ideas that former FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov came up with that changed the perception of chess competency and titles forever. FIDE decided to devalue its own chess titles by offering for a price the chance for hopefully weak chess players the chance to become an "Arena Master" which basically means not a master at all but a weak player with a badge. I am the proud owner of an AFM title (Arena FIDE Master) which means I was able to attain a 1400 elo performance in 100 games on the FIDE Online Arena platform. That is no mean feat but it is definitely not a FIDE master performance.  So why is FIDE devaluing its own respected esteemed and valued titles by promoting a parallel competency hierarchy that lacks credibility and actual competency? Answers on a postcard please!

 My name is Michael.  I did the following things in Chess:  I co-founded the world's biggest grassroots chess community which is solely based on social networking and not a playing server. I organized the 2013 World Chess Championship venue tour of Chennai for Magnus Carlsen that enabled Magnus to sign the agreement with FIDE for the 2013 WCC final in Chennai. I invented a chess app you all know as puzzle rush. I popularised a format of chess social media in which news is posted as and when it happens. I created a new rating system (Chess Futures) based on a cryptocurrency for chess called ChessCash. You might wonder why I am not famous and have a huge job with Chess24, Chess.com ChessBase, Chessable or PlayMagnus. You might be curious to understand why neither Chess Club Live or any of my chess products and services are written about on chess websites, talked about on chess podcasts and chess Youtube, or even written about on Wikipedia. The reason is simple I'm black and...

 I first had to deal with a young enterprising man called Antonio Radić when I began working with Chess photographers on a photo gallery for sale, licensing, and distribution of chess photos on a now-defunct chess website called Chesshot. He had heard of my ambitious project and began asking me to provide him with photos of all current top grandmasters in the world! Agadmator (Antonio Radić) was a charming and driven young man and he got his photos for a reasonable price and all the earnings went to the photographer, as my Chesshot project was a non-profit effort. I'd like to think that the service I provided Agadmator helped him to then later become the world's greatest chess YouTube star but chances are there were many other things that he did that made this achievement possible. He is probably the best social media content creator in the chess world today, and I thought I was chess hot also, but my work is on tool making and feature innovation not pure content creation like ...

 Anish Giri is in some ways the most perfect chess player on earth today because he understands the very nature of the chess struggle. He is practical and ready to accept reality, not some distorted contorted discombobulated fairy tale of Chess. He has proved better at this than the current World Chess Champion, Magnus Carlsen. Super Grandmaster Anish Giri's recent result bears testament to his supreme ability to maximize the reality on the board and translate that into winnable positions which he invested in winning but not ideologically committed to winning. This proclivity does lead him open to the cliched jibes of drawmaster but Anish is as far from a drawmaster as you can ever get. His starting point is that the starting condition of Chess is essentially drawn with the best play and all other factors being equal and he strives with every part of his being to move the needle of balance his way but he has respect for the game and the process to accept the inevitable. Does he get...

  The Queen's Gambit a book by Walter Tevis and a huge Netflix Limited Series is the greatest story ever told about chess. Beth Harmon, the lead character in the story is also probably the single most famous chess personality fictional or otherwise. The interest in Chess has been resurgent and seems to know no bounds as chess set sales skyrocket and everybody seems to have either discovered chess can be cool or has rediscovered the game they left years before and proudly state that they used to play. Anya Taylor-Joy, the Golden Globe winning actress who played Beth Harmon did an incredible job with the character. I have watched and rewatched the show several times and when I see her move the pieces I am convinced she knows how to play chess and is genuinely the chess-playing prodigy she claims to be. Beth's nonchalant attitude and indefatigable determination to succeed was irresistible to watch and seems to have energised and powered the enthusiasm we see for all things Chess n...

 Play Magnus is now the most powerful force in the chess universe. Their CEO and Chess Superman, has acquired a lot of cool chess assets, these consist of the New In Chess business, Chessable, and employing several high profile chess content creators. What is the Play Magnus corporate strategy? I have not got the slightest clue, I guess if you buy up all the good people who create content then your competition has nothing.  Play Magnus has floated on the stock market and is the first chess company to have had a successful IPO. This is surprising given that Chessbase and Chess.com were market leaders for so long and basically sat on their market monopolies for so long without capitalising on it to go to an IPO. What is slightly weird is Chess.com is still courting Magnus Carlsen by paying him to play in their august online chess competitions. Don't they realise he is their competition? Penny hasn't dropped yet. Chessbase is fine they don't really want chess world domination ...

 Okay straight off the bat I was like didn't Grandmaster Lev Alburt already do a book about these 300 most important positions?  Yes, he did and this was a re-imagining of his book. So the positions and the categorisation of the positions are very different. This works really well. If you are as busy as me, I am a fully time Fintech programmer, Co-Founder of the world's biggest grassroots chess community, and app developer and Netflix binger. So not much time.  The question is if you study these positions will you become super strong? The answer is categorically NO, but if you get an ML (machine learning) algorithm to search for all the similar positions and you train your neural network (brain) on those positions night and day in a deep learning training system you will be unbeatable. I can. I have a couple of hundred million master-level positions in a searchable database and I can specify each of those themes IM Thomas Engqvist has highlighted and can build a flashcard...