The Anatomy of a Comeback: How to win after making a really bad mistake

Sometimes in life things come very easily and sometimes you mess up. Last night I played one of the worst moves I've ever made in a long chess game--long meaning 90 minute + 30 second increment. In short, I had no excuse for making this mistake. So, with no further ado, let's see what can be learned from such a blunder.

White: Frank Johnson (2352)
Black: Reed Russell (2037)

1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 g6 5. Nc3 Bg7 6.Be3 Nf6 7. Bc4 Qa5 8. O-O Ng4?!

Position after 8...Ng4?!

This is a bit of a mistake and I rightfully punish it.
9. Qxg4 Nxd4 10. Nd5!

Position after 10. Nd5!

10...e6 11. Qd1 Qc5

Position after 11...Qc5

So we reach the position of my undoing. I've actually played flawlessly to this point. Any number of moves are good here, but the simplest is 12. Bb3! exd5 13. c3 when the computer gives me almost 2 pawns advantage. I saw that line and thought it looked good, but I also thought I saw something better. I actually made two mistakes here in one move, because what I thought I saw could have been easily achieved by playing 12. Bxd4 Bxd4 13. Nc7+ which would have been simple enough; however, that still isn't as good as Bb3. So what did I play?

12. Nc7+??

A second after I played it I realized my mistake.

12...Qxc7 13. Bxd4 e5

And I lose a piece.

Position after 13...e5

At this point I had a choice. I honestly thought about resigning and heading home. It was the last round and I couldn't believe my mistake. Instead, I settled in and hoped for a miracle.

Step 1: Calm down

14. Bxf7+ Kxf7 15. Bc3 Qc5 16. Kh1 Re8 17. Qd2

Position after 17. Qd2

I have a pawn and his king in the center of the board for my piece. Not nearly enough, but it's something. It would have been easy to play moves like f4 right away, but Qd2 is a more solid move because it creates multiple ideas. The more my opponent has to think about, the more chance I have at him falling apart.

Step 2: Create threats

17...a5 18. f4 Kg8 19. f5

Position after 19.f5

The idea is f6-f7. The biggest thing was to create problems, any problems. My opponent was thinking hard. I had around 50 minutes remaining, he had around 20.

Step 3: Think on his time
The following moves were played almost immediately by me, because I guessed what he was going to play and thought about my move on his time...

19...Ra6 20. Rad1 gxf5 21. exf5 Bh6 22. Qe2 Rf6 23.Rd3 Qe7 24. g4 b6 25. h4 Bb7+ 26. Kh2

Position after 26. Kh2

At this point black is still much better. In fact, there's a line that basically wins. 26...Bf4! because if 27. Rxf4 Qxe7 28. Rxe7 Bxf6 29. Re1!! white has no adequate way to stop mate. This would have won, but here's the thing: He had to calculate several moves in a line that looks on the surface to be suspect. In short, he's going to have to earn his victory. If he sees that line but doesn't find 29.Re1 then the whole idea doesn't work, which brings me to...

Step 4: Calculate the critical position.

26...Rd6

Spend a good deal of time in the critical position and come up with a clean choice. Then don't turn back. I thought for over ten minutes here and came up with a line. Then I played follow-up moves practically instantaneously. All of this put my opponent in more time pressure.

27. g5 Rxd3 28. cxd3 Qd6?

Position after 28...Qd6?

Finally he breaks! 28...Bf8 was holding but difficult to play because 29. f6 Qf7 30. h5 looks intimidating. In fact, white may have enough to draw now regardless.

Step 5: Don't let up the pressure!

Just because I am equal now doesn't give me an excuse to let up!

Step 6: Psychological Warfare

My opponent had stopped notating. He was under five minutes but with increment you must keep notating the whole game; no exceptions. I could have pointed this out to him immediately, but instead I decided to think about my move and decide what I would play. Then I got up and notified the TD to tell my opponent to keep notating and immediately I moved. Thus I put the maximum pressure on him. I didn't do it meanly; I even gave him my scoresheet to help him update, but I'm sure it rattled him and it cost him 30 seconds.

29. gxh6 Qxh6 30. Qg4+ Kf7 31. f6 Bc6

Step 7: Calculate to the end

32. Be1!

Position after 32.Be1

I give this move an exclamation point for a simple reason: other moves were much easier to calculate. Was this theoretically the best move on the board? No. In fact, after this move black is slightly better if he plays 32...Qg6. And yet, I didn't care. This move embodies all the principles I wrote about up to now:  it is patient and calculated. I counted on him playing Rg8 and I would have immediately followed up with Qc4+ Kf8 Bb4+ ab4 Qxb4+ Kf7 Qe7+ Kg6 Rg1+ Kf5 Rf1+ with a draw. If he saw this, he earned it. But it was not so easy to find.

I got up and went to restroom after Be1 and returned a minute or so later to find 32...Rg8 on the board, but more importantly I noticed immediately that my opponent's flag was down. He had taken too much time calculating it and somehow I had come back and won this game.

Once Upon a Time: There is hope yet for television!

As movies have gotten more formulaic and... well... bad, television has gotten more formulaic and... well... bad. It's a strange thing, because movies have an opportunity to offer something really entertaining, deep and meaningful in a short amount of time that doesn't allow for fluff. Inception is a great example of a movie that understood this, was written well, and widened the audience's perception of the world. It got people talking. Tree of Life has done the same thing in a very different way. Even if a film is unpopular it hardly can have an excuse for being unthoughtful. Yet, we have Green Lantern, Hangover II, and a barrage of other crappy movies that don't so much make you think as they kill your brain cells with mindless action and a plot that seems thrown together at the last second.

Television has the opposite problem. This is because it is built to be repetitive. Every week a show comes on and many of the ones that work have to follow some sort of structure. Seinfeld was a brilliant show because it didn't pretend to be more than it was: funny situations in the ordinary lives of some eccentric but not unbelievable people. The Simpsons has been doing a similar thing now for over twenty years. The reason so much of television is so awful is because it has now adapted this repetitive model and tried to be more than it is--which often isn't much to start with.

The really ambitious televisions series are ones that understand the structure and say, "Hey, we can be better than that!" LOST is probably the best example, though in the end it failed to be coherent. J.J. Abrams understood how to make a "mystery box" but he could not finally demonstrate that the LOST mystery box had anything substantive inside.

I became disenchanted not just with LOST but all of television when that series came to a close. I thought that maybe it was impossible for a show to actually offer the kind of deep meaning that I'm looking for; it seemed that all television series can do is make money and go on and on until they are no longer appealing. In such a desert-landscape, one might as well watch The Real World or Basketball Wives--it is certainly as meaningful as much of anything you'll see on network television. Maybe television was never meant to make us think; maybe it was just meant to entertain. That seems to be the overwhelming sentiment among couch potatoes these days.

So here I was in this muck. Lately I've been watching TV again--too much TV in fact--and I've been disappointed. Some is entertaining; most is somewhere between awful and unwatchable. But in this period I've been holding out hope and searching for something that gives me more, something that feeds me. It didn't seem likely this season. Terra Nova is entertaining but lacks depth; House is fun but doesn't get me thinking; Survivor is, well, Survivor. Warehouse 13 was my favorite discovery by far, but its brilliant characters don't make up for being a sci-fi series for whom depth takes a backseat to techno-wizardry (albeit in a unique and surely brilliant way).

Then, yesterday, I found it. A friend pointed me to imdb.com where they had the series premiere of Once Upon a Time in full the day before it airs (Sunday on NBC). I watched, skeptical for about half the episode, before realizing that this was brilliant. The project of a couple of the writers from LOST, Once Upon a Time doesn't work with an empty mystery box--you may very well guess the ending from the first episode! Instead, it does what fairy tales do best: it allows us the opportunity to reflect on the truth of their stories. Yes, it's entertaining; yes, it's well-acted and the filmography is wonderful; but it's even more than that. It has the potential to be a television program with heart that isn't afraid to tackle a big question: "In what do we hope?"

Watch it. Share it. Think about it.

The appeal of chance

Kate and I stopped by The Source: Comics and Games store on Larpenteur yesterday to pick up a game to play. Inside, the store was bustling with something called "Friday Night Magic," which is basically a Magic: The Gathering tournament. Magic is a collectable card game that follows a narrative somewhat like Dungeons and Dragons, though it is not role-play. In short, it's a game that involves a fair deal of preparation, work, money and, of course, chance.

My first observation about Friday Night Magic was that it is popular; in fact, I couldn't believe how popular it was. My second, related, observation was that this is a kind of strange thing. More than anything else, Magic is a bit of a paradox. It attracts the kinds of people who have long, scraggly beards and are into video games and comic books, but it's also expensive. Seriously, very expensive. In order to stay up on things, a person has to constantly be purchasing new cards. Only a handful of people in the world turn their Magic-playing into money. The rest are into it for the sheer joy of the game. And winning, I dare say.

Poker is one thing, because poker has the excuse of being a money-maker. Many people can and do make money on poker (though it should be noted that that money is always at the expense of somebody else). Yet, Magic is popular--maybe not as popular as poker but in the same neighborhood--and there really isn't money in it. So, my real question after thinking about this is 'Why?'

I used to play Magic and I sometimes play poker, so I'm not completely out of the loop. Magic is a creative kind of game--this is certainly part of the popularity--but I think the real appeal is for a rather simple reason: there is chance. You can spend and spend and spend, and all you are doing is giving yourself a better chance. In poker and Magic both, you can play brilliantly--in fact, you can make the best possible decisions--and you can still lose. This is why both games are frustrating and also very attractive.

Our culture loves games of chance. Actually, I think human beings in general, love games of chance. Incredibly, we hardly even care when the odds are stacked against us. If I told you and three of your friends to give me $1 and randomly one of you would win $2, most people wouldn't do it. But if I tell you and your 50 million friends to give me $1, and one of you would win $20 million many will be all over it. Super-charge the odds and suddenly games become more attractive. It is the power of the 'What if?'

I say this all because I enjoyed Magic and I enjoy poker, but neither works for me. I've played enough games of chance to realize that somebody's going to win, more are going to lose and I feel like I'm wasting my time. These are the kinds of things I love to do with friends on Friday night--almost any board game is a game of chance. But if I'm going to invest my time in something I want it to be something for which I have nobody to blame but myself. This is why I enjoy chess. It's also why I look at a roomful of Magic players and think, "Man, I wish more people cared enough to work at something that is both meaningful and hard." Pick up an instrument, put on some running shoes, crack open a math textbook, or do a science experiment. For me, it's chess. Maybe it doesn't make the world a better place, but I can think of no better way to challenge myself. The appeal of chance has past: time to get back to work.

In Defense of My Generation

Today I'm piggy-backing off my buddy, Eric Clapp's, post defending our generation, though in some ways I don't want to. The proliferation of social media has made my generation's faults all the more evident. Our politics is often narrow and far too idealistic--whether on the right or the left. We are the generation of people like Lindsay Lohan and Michael "The Situation" Sorrentino. We're brash and inexperienced, captive to technology, lazy and often shortsighted. We treat the internet like our playground and become captive by the vastness of it. So often we'd rather just watch tv than change the world.

Some call us the "boomerang generation"

But then again...

We are a generation with fresh eyes, who sees the world's problems and has the capability of saying, "Nah, I think we can do better." We love to give away. We're willing to think for ourselves. We know what's going on in the world--even if our opinions on it are subject to change. We don't carry the burden of hatred that is not easily shed by earlier generations. At our best, we're more than tolerant--we're respectful and interested.

All of this is to say that we are like every generation that has gone before. We are considered immature by the same people we consider dated, and in forty or fifty years we'll be the dated ones grumbling over the immaturity of those to come. Everything I've said above is true, at least in part. We are all sorts of good and bad because we stand on the shoulders of all the good and bad who have gone before. We're different--technology, economics and social structures have made us so. But just because things change doesn't mean that we reject the past. The past lives on through us, and the more we hear about it the more we can learn from it.

Eric says that he thinks we are going to do just fine. I think it can be even better than that. As the world is changing, we have the ability to be the next greatest generation: a generation that helps to end famine, to shed hatred, to fix an economic structure that pits the least against the greatest, to change how we view energy, to revolutionize science and technology all over again, to demonstrate what is beautiful about the human spirit, to vanquish diseases, to answer tough social questions, to love each other for our differences, and to pass off to the next generation the burden that they stand on the shoulders of giants.

I hope we can do it.

Death and resurrection in Hollywood

I was watching the trailer for Marvel's movie, The Avengers, today when it hit me that there are two things we most desperately want. 1) An ongoing story, and 2) a conclusion. Unfortunately, these two are diametrically opposed and so we are left with movies like Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides or The Land Before Time 86, or anything to that effect. All the while we want some grand conclusion... but only if it doesn't ruin the possibility of the story continuing on.

I'm actually excited about The Avengers largely because it isn't the formulaic sequel that Hollywood has been giving us for far too long, which is to say it isn't the same story in a different, and probably exotic, location (read: Hangover II, Sex and the City II, Mighty Ducks II... mmm, just about everything II). But I digress, this isn't just about what we look for in a movie. Box office numbers have shown that even when a movie is crappy we still go, and I don't think it's because people are complete dummies. I think, by and large, we're looking for a narrative that gives our lives larger meaning even if sometimes we don't always go to the right place to find it.

This has implications, however, for far more than movies. We want a narrative that's ongoing and one that is final. Good, effective preaching has to feed both. Mostly we fail in contributing to the ongoing narrative, evidenced enough by the number of church-goers who don't see any connection between the sermon and their daily lives. Other times we try too hard to connect with lives and miss the endgame--the gospel. Good stories do both, but they're hard to come by. On the one hand it's enough to preach the Gospel and on the other it's insufficient (if it doesn't live in an ongoing narrative).

This is the difficulty in bringing the old to life and putting the new to death, and it takes somebody like Jesus to actually show us how. The power of the Gospels isn't just in promise but in death AND resurrection. Sometimes death is the only way to get there. Sometimes Hollywood has to kill something in order to give it power. Too much of a good thing isn't really a good thing at all.

That is Gospel.

Chess tournament preparation and exercise

For the last two years, I have spent much of my free time doing two different things: exercising and studying or playing chess. Over the course of that time I have been charting my chess performance and correlating it with the kind of physical preparation I've had. The results have been a mix, but some trends have emerged.

The up-shot of this is important for chess players certainly, but I think it's also important for studying anything. If you want to improve--whether at chess or anything that requires a degree of mental exertion--the best way is to study or practice. None of what I'm about to say should take away from any of that. What proper physical preparation does is not increase your knowledge or strength; instead, it maximizes the strength that you already have.

Some of the people I have learned the most from are triathletes, because they know how to prepare themselves both mentally and physically for race day. Over time I've come to realize that preparation for a chess tournament is not so different. You can play chess completely out of shape, and yet an in-shape person will be more consistent and overall a better player than the same person out-of-shape.

So here's my advice: prepare for a chess tournament physically as well as mentally. Chess is a workout--even if it's not the kind that will make your legs sore in the morning. To prepare for a tournament, exercise regularly with particular emphasis on the time a week before the first game. Peak in your workouts sometime around 3 days before the tournament. You can workout up to the day before (and you should), but don't push yourself too hard on Friday if you're going to be playing 2-3 games on Saturday.

On the day of a chess tournament don't exercise unless you feel the need to do something light in the morning--say, take a walk or do light weight lifting. Don't do cardio on the same day that you play chess! The more lactic acid you build up in your legs the more your body will have to detox and that's going to make you tired; if your body is tired your brain is not functioning at full capacity.

Next, diet is crucial. Eat well, especially the day before. Fruits, vegetables and grains are all very good. You don't need to carb-load like a triathlete because you're not going to need to burn that many calories, but that's no excuse to pound down a Big Mac, fries and a shake. Not only will this keep you from getting sick, but it will also give your body the needed vitamins and minerals to give you a clear mind.

Most importantly: hydrate. If there is a single thing that even a couch potato can do to improve your physical preparation for a chess game it is this. Hydration is crucial in determining whether you have energy after a long weekend chess tournament. Hydrate while you are playing, but even more importantly the day before. You should be guzzling water the day before a chess tournament. When I go on a run or a long bike ride the difficulty is almost always proportional to how much I hydrated the day before. Water is your friend.

And this brings me to my final point: stay away from caffeine leading up to a tournament. Energy drinks are a big no-no. The day of a tournament is a different story. Everybody is affected by caffeine differently. Personally, I find it difficult to say if the benefits of the rush associated with caffeine outweigh the slightly altered state of mind, but I can understand if you feel the need to have an energy drink before the third game in a day or coffee to wake up in the morning. The problem is in coming down from that high. While runners and bicyclists might not think twice about caffeine, you have to remember that their mental focus need only be on going forward; the chess player needs to be able to process quickly and slowly, with restraint and with accurate calculation.

I hope this has been helpful. If you have any further insight I'd love to hear it!

On being a Minnesota sports fan: Hockey edition

I woke up this morning with one thought in my head, "Hockey! Hockey! Hockey!"

It's Wild season!

So here I am getting stoked about another team that has little real chance of success, but this is also how it always works. We are very excited about the potential... until it's actualized. Then, we are left with the inevitable fruits of the Vikings, Twins, Wolves, Gophers, and even the Wild. It'll probably be a losing season. Actually, in hockey because of the ridiculous scoring where you get points for overtime losses, it might not look like a losing season.

40-32-10 looks a lot better than 40-42. In the NHL they're basically the same.

Still, it's hockey season and my fantasy league of Canadians and other hockey wonks is up and running. I'm looking forward to defending my title, looking forward to pretending the Wild will contend and ready to return to the X where the Wild are undefeated in games I've attended... now I just need to have gone more than twice.

Fearless prediction: Wild finish 2nd in the NW Division with a record of 42-33-7 but miss the playoffs by something like one point (because that is how we roll)