“You can’t stop the future; You can’t rewind the past. The only way to learn the secret…is to press play.”  —― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

‘Hired!’

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TODAY’S WINNING SELFIE

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AS BIG AS A HOUSE…

Some of our toys–over the years– have gotten smaller and faster and smarter…

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W T F ??

…and some NEVER change!

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3 DAYS AND COUNTING!

GM Dr.Jonathan Rowson has , for the third time in recent months, tried to reduce his twittering. (Not so successful the first two attempts). Today is DAY 3.  Jonathan seems to mean business this time…

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Just when you thought Vlad could NOT fuck-up anyworse…

TODAY I received the LATEST issue of the CFC magazine:

The December 2014 issue! Today is May 14, 2015.

But actually I did NOT  receive the magazine per se, INSTEAD I was sent the following email along with a download link 

And to make matters even more ridiculous, the link DID NOT WORK! I kept getting an error message…and was only able to recover fragments of the pdf file.  From what I could salvage, I noted that there were some games from January 2014!  My God!  Six-year olds can NOT do worse… (PS: since writing this the link problem has been remedied, thx)

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MORO on the Russian team … and CHEATING!

The excellent–and sometimes controversial–website CHESS-NEWS.ru earlier today published excerpts of a recent interview with the legendary Alexander Morozevich.  The substance of this interview were his thoughtful (and sometimes surprising) reflections on how to manage the Russian powerhouse, especially for the next Olympiad.

I suggest the reader to take a look!  Myself being both a player and a team coach/trainer for a number of the world’s top players–past and present–I found Alexander’s insights to be sober, informed and discriminating.

Especially, my eye caught his comments on cheating today:

‘Apparently, with the blessing of Caissa, FIDE, the organizers and players themselves have persistently turned a blind eye to the problem, the size of which can already be compared to an epidemic. In one of the tournaments, where I played, meeting with the “crooks brigade” cost us our chances for 1st place. The cheats do it against others too, but in this case, we were the ones who suffered.’

I remind my readers of my comments last week on the subject of cheating (though in a slightly different context), where I wrote that I felt that FIDE had dropped the ball in dealing with tournament cheats.  I also indicated that cheating was today a VERY common thing and that only 1 in 20 actually gets caught.

Ofcourse, given the virtual impossibility to catch said cheaters without sophisticated hardware at your disposal, some might criticize Moro for having made ‘unproven’ allegations…but this just serves to encourage cheaters!  Infact, some might even go so far as saying that Steve is blaming the victims for…being victims!?