Musings on chess, and lesser things
For roving chess players, nostalgia is usually an emotion felt about time, not space. Wistful longing for the days of classical time controls, adjournments, and high quality endgames are common. And it’s also not that rare to hear an experienced player complain about how databases and computer programs have destroyed a lot of the magic …
“Chess is life”, Bobby Fischer once famously quipped. Not to be confused with the distinct yet uncannily similar view of his arch-rival, Borris Spassky: “Chess is like life.” Perhaps both are captured in yet another World Champion’s opinion, that of Fischer’s successor, Anatoly Karpov: “Chess is everything.” What got me thinking about such depths of …
March 8 was International Women’s Day, a day when (largely Western) society can come together to reflect on the advances made towards gender equality and the empowerment of women, and identify plans to pursue these ideals further. (March 8 is also International Pancake-Flipping Day, but this fact often gets lost in the day’s priority issue. …
Unfortunately, the lost bank cards proved to be the most insignificant of the blows dealt to me last week. So here is a post I wrote a while ago but never got around to uploading. Why is it that chess players in fiction are always painted as crazy, or evil, or both? I remember reading …
So it transpires that this blog is the first hit if you Google-search “david smerdon”. And, hopefully, this stroke of good luck will help return all of my cards that were, shall we say, ‘misplaced’ from my wallet.
Last night I attended Canberra’s Multicultural Festival, a quite respectable display of international stalls, community performances, overpriced but extremely tasty cuisines, and the occasional B-grade celebrity.
Unfortunately, in a double financial blow after paying an exorbitant premium for some nondescript “meat on a stick” (my friend likes to refer to the festival as Canberra’s Meat-On-A-Stick Day, which usually causes more confusion than it clears), my wallet came home empty.
Well, not quite. It still contained my laminated Queensland driver’s licence, which, as cruel Fate would have it, expires today.
So consider this a public call to any potential discoverer (or reformed robber) of a credit card, medibank card, Commonwealth Bank debit card and (most notably) Gold Entertainment Card: please return my plastic!
Potential card-saviors and sadistic pranksters can email me at: 
[Ed: Tritty wrote this for me after four rounds of the tournament, but my slackness from within the depths of chesstacular failure has led me to only post this now. Apologies. It also has a lot of inside jokes, as any great adventure of four twenty-somethings to a new country should. Nonetheless, it paints a …
Unfortunately, to top off the Kiwi series of mis-adventures, I’ve come down with a rather embarrassing cold. So instead of being back at work in the land of normality and no chess boards, I’m at home, licking my chess wounds in a snot-infested grump. Humpf. I do have to say thanks to the very nice …
Chess can be the most beautiful of princesses, or the most of the most treacherous of mistresses. Unfortunately, there’s been no fairytale for me this tournament. Zong-Yuan Zhao convincingly showed why he is clearly the strongest player in Oceania, completing an emphatic tournament victory with an amazing 8.5 out of 9. He put the competition …
I once got a piece of advice from Manuel Weeks for how to deal with round robins and put together an opening repertoire – ‘Draw with black, win with white!’. Basically, a player should structure his openings so that he can comfortably equalise with the black pieces, while push for an opening advantage in the …
