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Tournament Chess Reports (how
terrible and predictable they are)
Don’t you just hate tournament
reports in chess magazines.
They are all the bloody same.
A page and a half lifted from
the travel brochure describing the
place and how to get there complete with a tarted
up picture postcard
and a slice of local history.
The chess playing
resort of Zotganlinski on the Baltic Sea..
The ruins of Zotganlinski Castle are in the background.
After reading this fawny
gibberish we get onto the games.
Game 1
This is always the writer’s own game and
always a loss.
Chess players love winning,
failing that they love to give excuses
as to why they lost. Here the guy has a ready made excuse.
Travelling to the venue was a
nightmare.
He got lost, his luggage is on it’s way to Argentina and a mad taxi
driver took him 70 kilometres in the wrong direction when he
left the airport.
Game 2
In which the writer delights in telling
us he lost because his hotel
room is infested with insect beasts the size of small cats, the
walls are paper thin and food is awful.
So we get shown a position
from another player’s game with a cute
combination in it that Fritz cannot find. (because it is totally
unsound).
Or we get shown a position
where Fritz finds a 16 move mate which
the players somehow missed.
Game 3
We are not told the result of the
writer’s 3rd. game (another loss) this space
is reserved for the best round 3 game from the tournament bulletin,
from which
most of his article game notes have been copied. (very often word for
word.)
Game 4
At last the writer shows us one of his
wins.
Totally failing to add by now he is playing some other sad Charlie
who is also on P.3. W0. D0 L3.
The tournament bulletin found
this win so dreary and uninteresting they did
not add notes so at last, four games in, our reporter is going to
write something
not fleeced from elsewhere else.
We should not have held our
breath.
Game notes straight from the
‘The How to Annotate a Game of Chess’ correspondence
course. (5 lessons £10 each, 6th lesson is free!!)
Basically he plugs it into a
computer and re-hashes it’s notes.
Adding somewhere he prepared a TN for this lad on his lab top but OTB
his opponent played the very interesting (really crap) move which
ruined his
pre-game analysis.
Our lad now delights in
telling you he is on his own and how every
obvious move in a clearly won position was difficult to find over the
board.
Show cunning trap set by
opponent when he should have resigned to
give false impression this lad could really play chess.
evades trap, wins. then adds how proud he is of this game.
Game 5
He gives a game by tournament winner
again with notes straight
from the tournament bulletin or website.
Thanks organisers, find
something about the playing conditions he did
like but states he will be back next year.
The End.
Why don’t these guys give it
some bullet.
Here….It should start
something like this.
I’ve always hated the smell of
wet paint.
It always reminds me of a really miserable time in my life when
I was only 7 years old.
My mother and father ran off
together to live as sheep herders in Lapland
and I was given to the local orphanage which had just been
re-decorated.
The smell of fresh paint was over powering.
I lay in bed on that first
lonely night not knowing if I was crying
or was it the bitter fumes that were smarting my eyes.
The chess playing venue at
Zotganlinski had just been re-painted….
Now that is how to start off
the report of a chess tournament.
Ah, my glass is empty, your shout I think.
Geoff
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