online-go.com/ is good, clean interface, live and correspondence games. Also some good learning resources.
I’ve also used an app called Tsumego Pro (for Android), which has daily “life and death” problems.
The learning curve is steep, but the payoff is worth it.
Cheers carleas I’ll give it a go.
Oh yeah? Well, I beat Deep Blue!
Back about 30 years ago, yikes, 40, saw Bobby Fisher play in Santa Monica.
Then followed his career. Remember when he was homeless in Los Angeles
then when he got a million bucks for defying the president by going to Belgrade to play a championship, then to the Phillippines and married there for a while, then to Budapest staying with a woman national champion, then finally to Iceland dying there, Iceland being the only country that have him asylum.
He was near the most highly rated player, his mom or was a Hungarian immigrant.
He was not a happy human being, his life excluded anything but the game.
An interesting bio, it appears.l to be, of a troubled grand master.
Tab just watched you crush a 1900 player and had him run off from the table. Nice!
I did see that last king-pin coming.
Saw earlier that you said you were a junior master. Don’t find it hard to believe.
Yeah, that was close to a perfect game 
, everything just popped, mind you the guy did throw away his queen for a rook for no real reason I could see.
By the way, you and Carleas have sort of dulled the lustre of Chess in my mind by comparing it to tic tac toe, and Tetris. Unfortunately there is some truth to it.
Which is, also, why probably super-masters at it become rather limited personalities. Its not really a terrifically important exercise of the mind.
Hmm.
Not sure how to feel about that.
Once you get into the habit of ‘seeing’ what’s going on most players are transparant. You have to try and break their game. After that they start screwing up.
I’m very good at a certain type of chess game, and bad at others. Being able to take a breath, and see a weird move to make is golden.
It’s worth becoming decent at it tbh. It’s just not as hard as the media tropes pretend it is. I always laugh when I watch a film where the protagonists play chess against each other. The deep thought… the wrinkled brows… the epiphanies… Aha!!! Mr Bond etc. Lol.
Sounds a lot like poker, maybe. Players should adopt wearing shades to become less transparent.
Ive recognized that, too.
The most absurdly brilliant destabilizing moves Ive seen came from a man claiming to be Fischer.
youtu.be/8T3WRf-yOs8?t=40
Yes. And in such movies, the genius eureka move is always something like queen takes rook with mate. AH!
Ok so I sank really deep below 1500, now halfway 1400s.
Curiously, and this was the fifth time, after I had suddenly started losing matches and it had gone on for three days I wondered what, is Mercury retrograde again? And lo, it had started retrograding exactly when I began to lose. As said, this was the fifth time this happened.
Me losing inexplicably and then wondering oh darn its Mercury again and checking and having it verified.
The guy goes direct in a week or so. I expect to be crushing it by then.
My worst times are usually weekends, I can drop 100 points sometimes. Then build back up in the week. The ratings are not always a great indicator I think. The 1600+ players are often better than the 1700+ I think because some of them play more, once over 1750 I wonder if there aren’t a lot of people who’ve plateaued out and try to sit on their laurels getting rusty.
I found the games below 1400 to be a fucking jungle. Just no telling what random attack the opponent would suddenly materialize out of pure chaos. It got more relaxed above 1400.
Meanwhile the world champion has entered another one of these.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lwKvIWSqRI[/youtube]