I play at Chess Hotel. They have a free membership, but I always play as a guest. When you log in you are assigned a meaningless rating of 1200 and it is only for that session. Sign out and back in and you are at 1200 again.
The rating, of course, means nothing but I like the site because you can select from the following options:
Bullet (1 minute)
Bullet (2 minutes + 1 second)
Blitz (3 minutes) Blitz (5 minutes)
Blitz (5 minutes + 2 seconds)
Rapid (10 minutes)
Rapid (15 minutes)
Chess960 (8 minutes)
Custom (set your own time limits)
You never know if you’re going to play, a rank beginner or a pretty decent player, but for the most part I have gotten opponents strong enough to make the game challenging.
What amazes me is that with games and ratings so absolutely meaningless there exists a class of player that you run into occasionally who, when they get into a lost position, either refuse to move and let their time run out or just leave the site. At least when they leave the site you are credited with the win without having to wait.
Such people must have a very delicate psyche. Nobody likes being wrong or losing, but research shows the more rigid (and less adaptive) your personality, the more difficulty you will have in dealing with those situations.
Chess players can be interesting. Several years ago on a forum there was a discussion on “red books.” They were a German series of hardcover books with red cloth bindings and algebraic notation (before it was popular in the United States) and had a diagram every five moves. Players included were Lasker, Petrosian, Capablanca, Chigorin, Steinitz, Anderssen,Tal etc. These were pre-database game collections which had almost all known games of the players.
Anyway, somebody on the forum asked if anybody was familiar with the series and one person wrote yes and directed the poster to a link where they could buy the book on Spassky. The ad said something to the effect that this was the book Fischer carried around as he prepared for his match with Spassky.
Believe it or not, one forum poster went on a diatribe claiming the ad was a lie and a scam because how could the seller prove it was THE book owned by Fischer? When several people tried to point out to him that the seller didn’t mean it was the actual book in Fischer’s possession, the poor guy still didn’t understand. Like I said, some chess players are just weird.
For reasons that I can’t explain, I have developed morbid fascination with inferior openings and defenses. I suspect the reason is boredom with normal openings and the fact that losing an anonymous 10 minute game on line doesn’t mean anything, so why not experiment and/or just have some fun?
One favorite is the Barnes Opening (1.f3) named after Thomas Wilson Barnes (1825–1874), an English player who had an impressive eight wins over Paul Morphy, including one game with the Barnes Defense (1...f6).
Having long been a fan of the Grob Attack (1.g4), I have also been experimenting with that most horrible of all defenses, the Reverse Grob (1.e4 g5). Sometimes it’s also called the Borg (Grob spelled backwards) Defense or the Basman Defense. Bad as it is, I have managed to score quite well with it, including one win against a player rated 1768 on the old Instant Chess site, now known as Lichess.
Why do these hideous openings and defenses work? When they do, it’s always the same old story. They are met with disdain by players who think there is an immediate refutation and so they can abandon solid opening principles that would give them an advantage.
Of course in many cases the loss can be attributed to later tactical errors, or as in the case of a couple of the games, bad endgame play. Studying endings is the chess equivalent of eating your vegetables, but they can be fun! Besides that, serious players must master basic endgames.
One of the things that makes it difficult to get motivated to study endings is that there is no guarantee that knowing such things as the opposition or related square theory will ever be useful.
I never bothered to study how to mate with a B+N against a lone K because it never happens, right? But, did you know that in the 2009 New York State Championship a master named Alec Getz (white) outplayed GM Alex Lenderman and reached the following position?
It’s black’s move and Lenderman knew 38...Nxc6 39.Bxc6 was hopelessly lost, so what did he do? He played 38...Nxd3 eliminating white’s P and knowing that after his own remaining Ps fell, he would put Getz’s endgame knowledge to the test by forcing him to mate with a B+N. Getz was up to the task!
If you don’t think studying endings can be fun, try working on either K+P or Rook endings...they can be quite challenging.
Here’s an interesting Reveres Grob that shows why these bad openings often work.
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