"Tip the king"

Ted Cox on Ron's death.

Photos from Ron Washington memorial

Many people shared many decades of memories of Ron.  Attendees included a couple National Masters, a member of the 1969 World Champion Boston Celtics, and others who loved Ron and who miss him.

The last two people who saw Ron alive spoke: he was going in "for a dip" with everything but shoes on ("I'll dry out in a minute").  The gentleman who was in the water with him turned around to head back to shore, and Ron was gone. He and others tried to save Ron, but it was too late.

Sorry I couldn't stay for food and blitz...but here are a few photos.

Rest in peace, Ron.

Game-30 event at North Shore Chess Center (and blogger travel) tomorrow

Details here.

I won't be there, as I'm flying to Portland tomorrow morning and playing in my first U.S. Open in twenty-three years! (Let's see, I played in the 1974 Canadian Open (11 rounds, Montréal, Place Bonaventure), the 1979 U.S. Open (12 rounds, Chicago, Palmer House), and the 1989 U.S. Open (9 rounds, Rosemont, O'Hare Expo Center). So this is only the fourth one-game-per-day event I've played in 45 years of tournament chess.

 The host city is Vancouver, WA, within striking distance of Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helen's, Multomnah Falls and the Columbia River Gorge, Powell's City of Books, and the dream of the 90s....


And yeah, I know I'm staying at a Hilton in the burbs, with the I-5 bridge between the chess players and Portlandia....

Ron Washington memorial at Chess Pavilion

No official word, but I believe that folks are doing something at the North Avenue Beach pavilion at 5 p.m. today.

Hope to see you there as we pay respects to Ron's memory.

Not my g-g-generation, but maybe yours

And not strictly speaking a chess post, but hey, it came up in the Google feed, and even this geezer knows who GZA is (if only via Dave Chappelle and Jim Jarmusch). 

From Consequence of Sound:

This fall, GZA will embark on “The 64 Squares Tour” (named after his affinity for chess)....

GZA's knight's tour of the USA lands on the Chicago square at Metro this September 19th. Hmm, maybe the Piatigorsky Cup will be replaced by the Wu-Tang Clan Cup.

Brooklyn Castle at Siskel Center August 26th and August 30th

The chess documentary Brooklyn Castle (about the junior high students who, after this film was made, won the National High School Championship) is a featured film in the Black Harvest Film Festival 2012.  Read more about it in Time Out Chicago.

The Gene Siskel Film Center is at 164 N. State Street: call (312) 846-2800 for info.

Illinois Open in Oak Brook this Labor Day weekend!

Grandmasters Gurevich and Mitkov are among the preregistrants: action begins one month from today!


Sept 1-3. 2012 Illinois Open State Championship. 6R-SS. Open Section (40/90 SD/30 + 30/sec incr). Reserve and Booster Sections (G/90 + 30/sec incr). Doubletree Hotel 1909 Spring Road Oak Brook, IL 60523 - Phone 630-472-6000. $8500 Guaranteed + $250 Isaac Braswell Fighting Chess Award in Open Section. 


3 sections: Open, Reserve (U1800), Booster (U1400). Prizes (non-IL players eligible for max 3rd place in Overall Prizes and 2nd place prize for rating bracket prizes: Open - Overall: $1600-1000-300, (2399-2200): $350-275-200; (2199-2100): $250-200; (2099-2000): $200-100; (1999-1900): $200-100; (1899-1800): $200-100; Reserve (U1800) - Overall: $750-450-225; (1699-1600): $250-200-150; (1599-150): $150-100; (1499-1400): $150-100; Booster (U1400) - Overall: $250-125-75; (1299-1200) - $100-50; (1199-1100): $100-50. Open & Reserve FIDE Rated. Free Entry for IL FIDE titled players (WFM & above). 


EF: $64 by 08/04/2012, $96 by 08/18/2012, $128 thereafter and on-site. No checks at site, credit cards ok. Online registration preferred. No phone entries. Re-entry: $60 with 1/2 pt in first two rds only. Rd 6 bye must committ by end of Rd 2 otherwise zero pt. Players in contention for prizes must play final rd or have 1/2 pt bye committed to by the end of Rd 2 otherwise ineligible for prizes. Special Rules for Playing Up: $10 more if 150 pts or less from cut off of section, $25 more if 151-300 pts from cut-off, $50 more if 301+ pts from cut-off (Example: 1620 wants to play in open, 180 pts from cut-off, pay $25 more to play up).NOTE: Playing up fee paid in cash at the door - players will be registered in their normal rating section unless you come to the TD room to request playing up. 


Schedule: 10am and 4pm each day. Mailed entries: North American Chess Association 4957 Oakton Street Suite 113 Skokie IL 60077. All mailed entries must be received by 8/24/2012. Questions: sevan@nachess.org. No Phone Calls. Advance entries and online registration at: http://www.nachess.org/ilopen2012. 


Hotel: $91/night + tax. Ask for Chess Rate. 


Boards, Sets, Clocks Provided. Must use organizer provided equipment. Chess vendor onsite. August Rating Supplement. Special Workshops: Chess in Education plus TD/Rules Workshop. 1-day Scholastic Event. For registration on the 1-day scholastic event please visit http://chessforlife.com/chess/wint11/scholastic.html. 


USCF and ICA mbrshp required for main event.

Thinking: Fast and Slow

I'm about two-thirds through the audiobook version of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking: Fast and Slow.  This book is a useful corrective to Malcolm Gladwell's recent bestsellers Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and Outliers: The Story of Success. Kahneman doesn't deny the usefulness of intuition, but argues that intuition has its limits, even for experts.  (For example, even the most experienced pediatrician assessing a newborn's health may be better off relying on the routine of the Apgar score than a subjective evaluation, even though that subjective evaluation is itself generally very accurate.)

Outliers popularized the 10,000-hour rule: years of deliberate practice in chess (or guitar, or corporate taxation, or...) will allow one to develop an expert's intution.  Kahneman (a behavioral psycholgist, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics) doesn't discount the usefulness of the grandmaster's intuition, but in summarizing his body of research for a popular audience, he argues that such intutition is a type of "fast thinking" that is wrong far more often than experts care to admit. Chess is a concrete game, and software engines have repeatedly proved the value of colorless algorithms over romantic intuition. (Botvinnik's highest praise for his archrival was—I paraphrase— "Smyslov had a very strong algorithm in the 1950s.")

But humans play chess with a clock, and in human-vs.-human play, we don't have time to figure everything out. (We try to do that in the post-mortem, and then at home, and after that we feed our analysis to the computer to check our results.)  So the intuition of a Capablanca, Kramnik, or Carlsen is a very good thing for human players to have.

How to translate these insights into studying chess and teaching chess? Algorithms are essential in pawn endings, but knowing general principles about the outside passed pawn, protected passed pawn, and the opposition are pretty darn important, too.  And knowing the general principles of rook endings (defending king belongs on the short side, checking distance, recognizing the preconditions for a successful frontal defense) is important, but sometimes you gotta calculate, too.

Thinking: Fast and Slow is strongly recommended reading for folks in business and the social sciences. It might even be tangentially useful to chess players, though I'm not sure how....

"Chicago's Ron Washington, 1951-2012"

Daaim Shabazz remembers Ron (click to read) .

Ron in 2007; swiped from The Knights of Castle Kimbark

9-year-old beats Grandmaster in tournament play!

Awonder Liang and his brother Adream have been playing a "killer" tournament schedule this summer: the Chicago Open, the Philadelphia International, the World Open, and (right now) the Washington International.

Yesterday, Awonder defeated his first Grandmaster!  The current World 8-and-Under Champion defeated the former World Senior Champion, GM Larry Kaufman, in Round 3 of the Washington International.

Proud papa Will Liang writes:

Awonder has become the record holder for the youngest chess player in the United States to have beaten a Grand Master in a tournament game of chess. The new record Awonder has just established is 9 years 3 months and 20 days. The previous record was established by now super GM and world number 8th chess player Fabiana Caruana on September 28, 2002. Caruana's record was 10 years one month and 29 days. Awonder has broken Caruana's record by 10 months and 9 days.

The very next round, Awonder drew with three-time U.S. Champion Joel Benjamin in the kind of technical ending that GMs routinely win against experienced International Masters.

To assuage Grandmaster Kaufman's pain, buy his wonderful book The Kaufman Repertoire for Black and White: A Complete, Sound and User-friendly Chess Opening Repertoire.  It's a wonderful one-volume reference for ambitious tournament players with limited time to study. But you may want to consider 8...Ba6 against the Scotch.

Cloud Gate cityscape

The talented Anna Yakimenko reimagines the "Bean."

"Chess hustler of North Ave. Beach drowned in Lake Michigan"

7-18-06 Chess Pavilion on the Lakefront at North Avenue. Ron Washington (Left) and Daniel Jones (Right) enjoy an evening of warm weather and chess as citizens come out and play and take to the bike paths. Photo by Scott Stewart/Sun-Times

Photo and story (follow this link) copyright Chicago Sun-Times.

Ron Washington: Gone but not forgotten

This impromptu memorial was set up at the Pavilion today:

And here are a few of Ron's friends who gathered to honor his memory today:

David Franklin, who sent these photos, writes, "Another, bigger, memorial will take place this coming Friday, August 3, 5 p.m. at the pavilion at North Avenue Beach." It's likely that there will be another memorial service on Saturday at Christian Funeral Home (3100 W. Irving Park), but that's only tentative...more tomorrow.

Chess in Lake Wobegon

Not that much to do with chess, but we could use a smile. Hat tip to Colleen Devlin.

Sad news

Updated 2:46 p.m.  it's confirmed that our friend Ron Washington drowned in Lake Michigan on Friday.

At 2 p.m., [North Avenue Beach] lifeguards attempted to rescue 61-year-old Ronald Washington, a former collegiate hoopster and self-described chess “hustler” who for years had been a fixture near the beach.

Washington, of the 100 block of West Maple Street, was fully clothed when a lifeguard pulled him from the water near 1400 N. Lake Shore Drive, according to police and park district spokespeople.

Washington was pronounced dead at 4:30 p.m. at Northwestern Hospital.

Earlier report (without Ron's name) on the WGNTV website.

Much more later: enjoy your summer day, but please enjoy it safely.

Chicago Class: Class D recap

Congratulations to two Illinois players, David Sye and Terrence Aguinaldo, who tied for first in Class D with 4½-½ scores. (Sye's prize was limited to $500 because he had recently had a rating more than thirty points over the class ceiling; Aguinaldo won a full $1,000.)  Another local player, Ga Luang Liu, shared third place with Hongbin Chen of Michigan and Sean Cramer of Ohio: each won $166.67.

David Sye shares nice analysis of what could have occurred in his pawn ending in the money round in his post on chess.com.

(David titles his post "A complicated endgame position from the Chicago Class," but really, the position is easy if you've taken the time to learn some basic tricks--and there are several cute finesses in this simple-looking position. There might even be lines that David correctly doesn't mention because they're not Black's best try, but are still worth looking at....)

  Class D crosstable is here!

HAL 2000 plays chess

Albert Chow reminds us that yesterday would have been the late Stanley Kubrick's 84th birthday. Here's the most famous chess scene from a Kubrick film:



And here's a nice recap of the game that was the basis of HAL's combination:



For a scene from the noir masterpiece The Killing, see this earlier post.

The scene in The Killing is based on the Chess and Checker Club of New York, also known as the "Flea House," frequented by Kubrick, Bobby Fischer, and many dubious characters. As an innocent teenager visiting Manhattan in the 1970s, I stumbled across the Flea House. On my way up the stairs, I passed a gentleman and two ladies leaving the Flea House attired in such a way that I assumed the "Chess and Checker Club" was a cover name for a house of ill repute. (It was a Saturday night: who knows, I might have been right.) So I turned around and went back down the stairs....

Mesgen Amanov lecture & simul at North Shore Chess Center tomorrow!

Dutch grandmaster Loek Van Wely had to postpone his lecture, but the winner of the 2012 Chicago Class is a more than capable pinch-hitter. Mesgen is not just a great player, but a wonderful teacher! To spend six hours with a grandmaster for the bargain-basement price of $16.67 per hour is a wonderful deal. Details here!

Self-analysis is cheaper than psychotherapy

I had narrowly escaped against NM Nolan Hendrickson at King's Island last year: one would think that I would have learned not to challenge him in an objectively dead-drawn ending.  (Right around the time I made the losing blunder, I told Albert Chow that the game would be over soon: I was right about the timing, but wrong about the result.)

Chicago Class recap: Master Section

You know it's a tough event when you beat a GM and finish out of the money.  WGM Anna Sharevich knocked off GM Nikola Mitkov in round 4, but lost to GM Mesgen Amanov in round 2 and IM Qignam Liu in the final round: ridiculously difficult pairings.  And Gopal Menon defanged GM Mitkov's Grand Prix attack and drew IM Angelo Young in the first two rounds, but had less fun on Saturday night, as he got ground down by GM Dmitry Gurevich in a rather harmless-looking ending. You have just joined a very large club, Gopal.

Oh yes, prizewinners.  GM Amanov converted against IM Young in the last round and made his 4-1 first place on tiebreaks ($1,366.67) look routine.  FM Carl Boor continues to impress: he beat GM Gurevich's pet anti-Catalan system, grinding the grinder down in an ending (no mean feat). IM Qignam Liu also had a very steady event, highlighted by his last-round win against WGM Sharevich.  Both Boor and Qignam Liu won $1,266.67.

I had the pleasure of losing to Guijue Zhou in round 4: in the postmortem, she had the most kind and tactful way of suggesting to me the stupidity of my middlegame planning.  She, Matthew Marsh of Tennessee, and super-junior Kevin Cao of Missouri each won $466.67.