I was ready to throw some hands (virtually)

I’m gonna go for about 1600-1800 lichess, just because Nh5 from black feels a bit of a nothing move, and while 15. Rad1 for white gives a discovered attack with the pawn recapture, it gives an isolated pawn and the queen can just move.

What time control was this? Important factor in decision making. Also, don’t suppose you could post the PGN – I hate not being able to flick back and forward

Holy shit. That seems so helpful

I use it to scrape up all the stuff once I’ve chopped it. Chop onion, use spine of blade to scrape onto this, dump in pot. Saves lifting heavy chopping board, or scraping onto thin knife.

Just move to the UK. This is the norm.

Inability to take a compliment is tied to the general cultural dislike of ‘people who get above themselves’. Arrogance is the cardinal sin, and so in receiving a compliment you either a) accept it (meaning you agree with them that you’re great, which is a sign of arrogance!) or b) deny it (false modesty! A sign of even greater arrogance!). The only acceptable response is to sputter and turn red with embarrassment.

Ulcerative colitis

For sure: there are some pretty good rules of thumb for when to attack.

Generally you want to develop your pieces first. What does that mean? It means you want to get your pieces on squares that aren’t the row closest to you.

Often players will start attacking without having moved some of their pieces. This is often a mistake. Think of it this way: your opponent has all their pieces near their king to begin with, so automatically has more defenders than you have attackers. You need to get yours out to have a decent chance of delivering a checkmate.

There’s also a good rule of thumb in terms of the order you get them out in. Major pieces (queen and rook) are worth more than minor pieces (knight and bishop). So if you get your queen out early on a square it can be attacked, that leaves it vulnerable to being chased round the board, letting your opponent develop their pieces while attacking your queen. All of a sudden your opponent has all their minor pieces out, while all you’ve done is shuffle your queen.

Another key piece of advice is to control the centre of the board. A piece in the centre is much more powerful and controls more squares. Think of it like the high ground on a battlefield. In general in the opening you want to control this centre with your pawns, and minor pieces (knights and bishops) one way or another

So: in terms of the order you want to do things, most often you want to play a central pawn forward, develop your knights, then your bishops, then castle (keeping your king safe and bringing a rook towards the centre), then start looking for where you can develop your queen to start generating pressure.

The final piece of advice I’ll give is that tactics (checkmate or being able to take your opponent’s pieces) stems from having a good position: that is, having your pieces on squares where they are eyeing up the enemy position. You want to put your opponent under pressure, at which point tactics will start to appear to you.

If you want further resources, there’s a wealth of chess on YouTube. I’d highly recommend Daniel Naroditsky’s speedruns (starting at the beginning, in your case). He plays opponents of increasing skill levels over the course of many videos, so the early videos explain the basics of how to play chess according to sensible principles. Good luck, and have fun!

It happens. Best advice is to play some blitz with friends otb; get used to having to recognise positions quickly. Good luck!

Edit: on the off chance this was Bristol, hi!

Sort of – it’s more middlegame than opening. That is, more understanding the pawn structure and what it’s aiming for. Daniel Naroditsky is a good youtuber to watch to get a flavour of these kinds of ideas.

Personally, I find blitz is less about pure tactics, and more about making and enforcing a plan, and then the tactics stem from that. A lot of new blitz players will get into the middlegame and not really know what they should be looking for, especially when there simply aren’t any tactics in the position, and that’s where having an opening you know the rough middlegame plans for comes in handy.

For me, as black I play the Pirc or the Czech Benoni. Generally, I know that I’m going to be pushing on the kingside once I’ve closed the position, so I go into it having a clear plan and largely sticking to it. If I blitz those moves out, then suddenly I have more time when I get to the critical position.

I’d compare it to a set play in a sport (e.g. rugby, or American football). The attackers have rehearsed a move to break open the defense and gain an advantage (opening/middlegame strategy), but also need the ability to improvise when they spot a defensive error (tactics), which they can then convert into a score (endgame)

Hopefully that makes sense – feel free to ask if I’ve been unclear.

Perfect: you have pretty much the exact same style as me. In that case I’d very much recommend the Czech Benoni against d4 (hanging pawns has a good video on it). A very positional game plan with less theory and more ideas. Alternatively you could do the king’s Indian, which has much more theory. Against e4 I quite like the pirc (there’s videos on that by Rob Ramirez), which I can also give example games to see the style involved if desired. Finally, with white I really like the colle-zukertort system (Naroditsky and Ramirez have I think both covered it, though I came across it after having seen the colle in a book).

What all these have in common is that there’s relatively little theory required (with the pirc needing the most), and they’re more focussed on ideas – the pawn breaks each is going for, and where on the board you would like to draw focus. I’d be happy to play a couple of rapid games and talk though the ideas if desired (though I’m on lichess rather than chess.com).

What’s your kind of style?

Who are these games against? If it’s otb, I’d strongly encourage talking it through with the opponent BEFORE putting it into the computer. There’s a lot of ideas in chess (weak squares, pawn structure commitments, etc.) that are very hard for you to understand from a computer analysis, and conversely there may be moves you might make that are, at a human level, pretty reasonable, but that a computer sees leads to a highly complex tactical mistake.

Fundamentally, you want to be playing humans, and so you need to learn how to play well against humans. So analyse what the plans and ideas that you and your opponent were trying to enact. What were the key pawn pushes that shaped the areas of battle?

A book that has often been recommended is ‘logical chess move by move’, and I think that’s a good place to look for how to analyse games. The author explains the ideas white and black are playing for with each move, both in the short and long term, for humans.

Obviously this is very detailed, and only worth going over for games with longer time controls, where you have the time to develop more complex ideas than just ‘this looks good’.

A final thing that might be worth your while is (if you have the chance) finding a group of people you can play chess games with and talk to about your games on a casual basis. I play for a club, but also go along to a ‘pub chess’ night (the closest thing the UK has to coffee house chess!) that just has informal games among people of all ages and abilities. I’d highly recommend finding a space like this to play and chat. Good luck!

For sure. Systems engineering is a way of trying to apply more rigid thinking to what are known as ‘wicked’ problems. There’s a whole bunch of tools that come under the discipline, but to pick one specific example, causal loop diagrams are often used to help understand why complex phenomena happen. An example:

This shows a causal loop diagram for an energy network. The pluses indicate positive causation in the direction of the arrows, the minuses negative causation. If you were tasked with coming up with all the causes and impacts of fluctuations in energy demand, you might find it difficult to show (e.g.) positive and negative feedback loops

You might find the discipline of systems engineering of interest.

Glad it’s not just me that becomes mega camp. For some reason I go full Joe Lycett in voice and mannerisms.

Not a US citizen, and very much in favour of gun control, but I don’t think this argument holds much water.

Consider yourself a wannabe tyrannical dictator, but your population is heavily armed and might rebel against your takeover. How do you go about preparing your takeover? The answer: you slowly restrict gun usage. You make purchasing a gun more difficult, restrict the spaces you are permitted to carry a weapon, introduce buyback schemes to reduce the number of guns on the streets, etc., to ensure you have a monopoly on violence.

If you look at it from this standpoint, then the response is obvious; as a gun activist, you must vehemently oppose all restrictions on gun purchasing, because any restriction paves the way for yet more restrictions.

Laxatives?

Edit: for the latter

Or possibly footsteps

Elephant Sessions, Kan, Peatbog Faeries, Monster Ceilidh Band, Flook. Peatbog Faeries have a new album out now that’s great, but it is their first album with some vocal samples (not with many words though). All Celtic fusion bands to a greater or lesser degree.