Nova Daily - 28 April 2025
Hi!
We dress up in our pyjamas and like punching our friends.
- Iain Abernethy
We chess-players are a very strange lot. We have a wooden board of 64 squares with 32 pieces divided into two equal teams of 16, and we're scarred for life. We get all heated up about it, become super frustrated if we lose, ecstatic if we win, and in the end the pieces just go back in the box. And then we do it again.
Paul Morphy was onto something when he coined the phrase "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." Still I respectfully and wholeheartedly disagree with him. This is because by now, approximately 150 years later, we chess-players have come to see what it really is. Some may get insane, but insanity is a quality that we all possess. We don't have to be rational all the time. That'd take all the fun out of it. Rather, we have to acknowledge and appreciate the fifth point of Iain Abernethy's podcast "10 things the martial arts should have taught you about life." This is:
5. It's okay to be weird.
Of all the things mentioned within Iain Abernethy's podcast, this is the one that's the most relatable for everyone that will ever read anything that I write here on the site.
There's a very serious note to it, though. Everyone is unique: your DNA and the experiences that shape your personality will never be repeated in the history or future of the universe. You are unique. And you have your own unique thoughts. Enjoy them, cultivate them, and don't be ashamed to be the oddball within the group. The people who can let go of societal constraints and be unapologetically themselves are the people that inspire, that will be talked about for a long time to come.
Is it possible to score 0% accuracy?
One quirk that some of us have is the desire to find out how far we can stretch the limits of the games we play. The longest known OTB game is 272 moves; the shortest didn't even start. What's the quickest way to get yourself killed in every Super Mario game? Can you soft-lock yourself in Pokémon? Can you beat all the Dark Souls games without getting hit even once? And can you score 0% accuracy?
This last question came up in BlogChamps. I've decided to see if I could get this done. To get 0%, you'd need to play the worst move on every turn. Essentially we're getting black into allowing Fool's Mate.
The first thing I did is to switch on my ChessBase and increase the number of engine lines to 21. This would show all legal moves from black throughout the entire game. White starts with 1.e4:
The worst move that black can play is 1...g5. After this move, white plays 2.d4 to give us this situation:
So, there we have it. We've established black's worst game: 1.e4 g5?? 2.d4 f5?? 3.Qh5#. However, when you enter these moves into the Review, it doesn't give black any percentage.
That's disappointing. But it was worth the try.
The game
Today's game was my 100th rapid game of the calendar year. It started with a variation I had studied a couple of months ago. It was a refresher, but my opponent made a blunder and I managed to obtain a winning position straight away. The conversion may have been sloppy, but it was good enough.
My thoughts:
I quite like how this conversion went. The rest of the analysis will come tomorrow; I'm looking forward to dissect this game further.
Now, if you'd do me one small favour, please: make a goofy face in the mirror, laugh at yourself, and enjoy the rest of your day 
