Nova Daily - 3 July 2025: Return
Hi!
According to the Merriam-Webster publishing company's website, the English language knows roughly a million different words. Of course, an official count has never really been established, and this is quite a strange task in itself. As it is, languages are not static things. Vocabularies expand in several ways, for example by incorporating words from different languages that are used very often. The English chess vocabulary already knows several words from different languages, such as the German "Zwischenzug" and "Zugzwang" (in German, all nouns begin with a capital), the Italian "intermezzo" and "isolano", and the French "en passant."
Words are fascinating. Even with the overload of words that are already in existence, some of those words even have more than one meaning. According to the QI show, the word that has the greatest number of different meanings is the simple word "set." As Stephen Fry notes, "it goes on for pages and pages."
One of those many meanings is a collection of games in a tennis match. And although I don't often watch tennis (or any other sports for that matter), one other term in tennis has a lot of different meanings in the English dictionary.
Return
Within tennis, a return is the situation when the non-serving player hits the ball back. In this sense it's perhaps one of the most boring meanings. In a football knockout tournament such as the Champions League (football is a topic that's hard to escape especially today; rest in peace Diogo and Andre), a pre-finale pairing consists of two matches, the second of which is also called a return.
Pokémon has two definitions of the word "Return." The first is what happens when in a battle, a trainer opts to withdraw their active Pokémon for a different one. It's also the name for an attack that's introduced in Generation 2 in Gold and Silver. Return is a Normal-type attack that has the gimmick that it becomes stronger if your Pokémon likes you better. I really love this type of mechanic, because it compels you to be nice to your little pocket monsters and to see them as more than just vehicles to help you blast through the obstacles that you face in your journey.
In a nice way, the definition of the value of Return coincides with what the same word means in your chess training. With more investment of time and focused effort, your skills can grow stronger, and the return is a better output on the battlefield, whether a Pokémon battle or a game of chess.
Return has a counterpart in the move Frustration, which deals more damage if your Pokémon hates you more. The fortunate thing is that winning battles makes the Pokémon like you more, and that reduces the power of Frustration.
Even in such a small and confined world like Pokémon there's great lessons to be gained from such a small little portion of the game: never underestimate the powers of love and hate. Both are great forces that you can use for great constructive and destructive purposes.
An old Cherokee Indian chief was teaching his grandson about life.
He said, "A fight is going on inside me," he told the young boy, "a fight between two wolves.
The Dark one is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." He continued, "The Light Wolf is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you grandson…and inside of every other person on the face of this earth.”
The grandson ponders this for a moment and then asked, "Grandfather, which wolf will win?"
The old Cherokee smiled and simply said, "The one you feed".
- The Story of the Two Wolves
Some blitz chess for today
Next to providing several cool blogs with the feedback that I felt they deserved, I also still wanted to write my own blog and make good on the schedule that I posted on Sunday. So, today I have two games for you. The first is a strange and tedious blitz game that went many ways but ultimately ended in my favour in the time-scramble by flagging:
In the second game I had a promising position in the attack, but couldn't find a way to bring home the point, and I had to resort to the dirtiest trick in the book: flagging:
WFM Alessia Santeramo, who married GM Noël Studer only a few months ago, once remarked that the 3+0 game is ultimately bullet chess. After these two games I find it progressively harder to disagree with her.
Be that as it may, I won 15 rating points today, and a lot of my success in these two games can be attributed to having spent a lot of time over the last year studying the opening systems that I played here. My trainings are beginning to yield returns.
