Nova Daily - 22 February 2025
Hi!
Earlier today the chat in BlogChamps exploded. One of the members had a lot of questions to ask, and the rest provided with a wealth of different and good answers. The questions were of many different sorts, but one question stood out to me:
How am I supposed to know if my blog is good?
Mistakes
In the 2014 movie X+Y one of the young talented mathematicians named Luke tries to reenact Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch in front of his classmates. His memorisation of the exact text is phenomenal, but the entire sketch fell completely flat on his audience. And he couldn't understand why.
Let's not judge Luke too harshly. His failure to get his peers to crack up is very relatable. Luke thought, like many others, that the essence of a joke lies in the text. Most if not all people I know have tried to crack a joke in public at least once and failed precisely because of this.
On 12 October 1990, former prime minister Margaret Thatcher surprised the Conservative Party Conference by incorporating the Dead Parrot sketch in her speech. This sent waves of laughter through the audience as the Iron Lady recited one idiom from the sketch after another. Word has it that the rehearsals for exactly this segment of the speech took an excruciatingly long time.
The text is certainly important, but it's only a very small portion of what gets people to laugh. The delivery is much more than getting the text out of your face correctly. Facial expressions, vocal inflection, tempo, articulation, and other aspects of body language all contribute to the delivery. The context is also important: John Cleese's character frustratedly tries to get a point across to a shopkeeper who refuses to listen to him in an absurd comedic situation. Thatcher mocks a political rival party and celebrates the British cultural heritage.
If you compare the Dead Parrot sketch from Monty Python with the X+Y scene and Thatcher's monologue, it's blatantly obvious why Luke fails and why Thatcher and Cleese succeed. All of the elements of body language and vocal tonality are missing in the X+Y interpretation.
If I hadn't seen the X+Y interpretation, maybe I wouldn't have understood what makes the Dead Parrot sketch as good as it is. In seeing what's not there it becomes clear. The mistakes reveal what the right way is. Much of the process towards mastery is identifying mistakes and preventing them in the future. So that's how you can see when your blogs are good: learn about mistakes and avoid them.
You can see what makes something good when you see it being imitated poorly. Keep that in mind whenever you watch a talent show of sorts.
In my own journey towards mastery I encounter many mistakes. I hope to find them, learn from them, and eradicate them from my mistakes.
The game
In one of last week's games I faced the 4.dxc5 line of the Advance variation for the first time. My opponent played a poor game and threw in the towel at move 11. In my analysis I briefly touched upon most of white's 5th-move alternatives except for the main line 5.a3, noting that it needs its own investigation. Sooner or later I'd face this move. And that's today.
My thoughts:
I wasn't completely sure about my opening play, which is unsurprising as I hadn't properly studied this variation at all. I felt that once I had navigated through the opening and obtained a good position with an extra pawn, the game went smooth.
Model games:
To sum up the strategic fundamentals that underlie the theory in a nutshell:
White played e4-e5 and created a pawn chain. It's vitally important for white to maintain control over the e5-square, and 5.a3 helps with this in a strange way: b2-b4 followed by Bb2.
To contest white's dark-square control in the centre, black should be aware of the resource f7-f6.
The two model games I chose for this section are one in which black's strategy failed, and one in which black's strategy succeeded.
In the first game, black succeeded in making white's centre fall. He got a great position out of the opening with an IQP and the bishop pair. White had to fight for equality. The current #1 rated Indian player managed to pose enough problems to steal the win in the endgame, but the opening battle was clearly won by black: https://www.chess.com/games/view/17479231
In the second game, white was able to maintain control over the e5-square, keeping black's pawn on e6. The passivity of black's bishop remained a problem far into the game. Although the game wasn't exactly free of mistakes from either side, the kind of troubles that black found herself in are very typical for this kind of position, and this game could serve as a warning there. https://www.chess.com/games/view/16869967
The analysis:
White had no counterplay after the trade of queens and was steadily pushed off the board. However, this game couldn't fit the question from my fellow BlogChamps member better. The mistakes show the way, and that was very, very clear in this game. Neither side knew what the purpose of the opening was. Both sides missed the critical ideas throughout the whole game, and the result is that the game is a model game of how not to play this line. I consider this an important milestone in my adventures with the Caro-Kann, and I learned more from the analysis of this line than I learned from many other games that I played.
What can I take away from this game?
- The purpose of 5.a3 in the Advance with 4.dxc5 is to get b2-b4 and Bc1-b2 in. White's control over the e5-square is important, and from b2 the bishop is on its ideal diagonal. Moreover the bishop doesn't stand in the way of white's other pieces.
- An important pawn break for white is c2-c4 to challenge black's control over the light squares in general and the d5-pawn in particular. This break becomes especially important if white were to lose the battle over the e5-square.
- Black has to keep two important pawn moves in mind. The first is f7-f6 to directly challenge white's e5-pawn. It's smart for black to maintain the tension until the full forces are behind it (Nb8-d7, Ng8-h6-f7), as white isn't keen on trading on f6.
- Black's other important pawn move is a7-a5 to wrest control over the c5-square. Black will most likely push the pawn to b5. While this limits the damage inflicted to white's pawn structure, it plugs any of white's ideas against the light squares on black's queenside.
