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I just have a link to this and I think it will keep me from posting too many lame jokes here https://www.chess.com/forum/view/fun-with-chess/humoristic-funny-chess-pics-images-caricatures-etc

Endgame studies are the most beautiful chess problems, in my opinion, combining mathematical precision with elegant, surprising ideas while having a degree of practical realism. They also have great longevity. Problems a century old and more remain popular and fascinating. I particularly like when material is extremely reduced and yet the moves are difficult to find. Here is one of the very best examples. (Mattison, 1914)  

The Covid-19 is tragic, but still interesting, To me it is similar to a hurricane or terrible earthquake. It destroys lives and kills people and nobody can stop it. Governments do a lot to help, but governments don't have the answers. NOBODY has the answers. If health scientists and experts propose plans that ruin a nation's economy or national security or system of education they are speaking from the point of view of an outsider who isn't responsible for leading the economy or education or national security. We don't need plans that just don't work because they can't be done, People in the USA don't want to be locked up at home anymore. They just won't do it anymore. Many of them don't want to wear a mask or keep social distances. And that is in spite of current rates of infection being ten times worse that it was three months ago. So I can't see what is going to happen. Seems to me that Covid is winning right now.

In another club I have posted some of my photography and it has been well received. So I will not leave out the Intellectuals. Hope you enjoy. Unless otherwise noted, all these pics were made by me in the north Alabama area. A few year ago outside a local store.

just wondering if there is a certain factor that determines your personal performance.

I met someone who, when I mentioned my father is Buddhist, expressed some doubt that Buddhism is a religion. It would have been smarter to doubt whether my father is a real Buddhist. He's invented his own kind of Buddhism somehow. Religion is literally relevant to chess incidentally since some people play chess on Sundays and some people may also have a worship service to attend on Sundays. In that way, religion is relevant to chess for people who play chess, who also worship on Sundays. They just interfere with each other. But a more deep connection may be seen by some. How do Buddhism or other religions apply to chess? If I read the New English Bible and think about chess the whole time I am reading it, will I start to think of the characters as chess pieces? Is the religious figure of Christ the King related to the King in chess? Is human player like God to the chess pieces? In Zen Buddhism, what miracles might I achieve if I meditate deeply on chess? I also wondered the religious significance of promoting a pawn to another piece. Maybe what I am working towards really is a chess-based religion, but I can't quite see it yet. Maybe Caissa will communicate with me directly so that I can become a new world prophet! What about you?!

What is this? UWIYVKSPFONCBH [Hint: it is singularly unique] [P.S. I bet someone gets it right]

I was looking for 'brain training' on the interwebs in my copious amounts of leisure time, and here is this exercise that lets you see if you can figure out how a knight hops to every square on the board. I've never solved it before. I saw a diagram once about it but I failed to memorize it. It seems really nice for maybe getting my brain to comprehend knight movements a little better. When I do it now I am failing by a lot so far. I've tried it about 10 times without trying extremely hard and I get stuck in the 50s typically. maximum about 56 i think.http://www.brainmetrix.com/chess-knight/I have javascript blocker addon and I can see it has very few ads or blockers it uses!

Yesterday I had a coupon, where I can buy a Culver's Buttery Double Cheeseburger and get another one free, so of course, I had to do it! (I did it for a friend.) I ate one and put the other one in the fridge, and then I was discussing with my friend (the same one as before) that we could share it. So I imagined different ways to cut it. We could just cut it down the middle vertically like an ordinary sandwich cut in half. Or she could have one patty and I could have the other patty. Or if we couldn't decide then we could divide it top and bottom, and cut it vertically, and I could have the bottom of one half and the top of the other half. It would make a checker pattern, like a chess board. She ended up cutting it into quarters and she took two opposite quarters and gave me the other two. So it looked like a chess board. I started thinking, what if knights would rotate? Instead of just having a position, what if each chess piece would have more dimensions? Knights probably start facing forwards, but what if they rotate when they jump to another square? My mathematical imagination is not very specific at all about this, yet. But the chess board likely has some algebraic structures that I have not recognized yet, and may have never read about yet. I am trained, somewhat, as an applied mathematician, although I am out of practice. And I was not very careful or studious as a graduate student, and I did not focus on algebra as a discipline (there was scarcely any part of math that I can be said to have really focused on). But I think it would be great if quaternions or some algebraic structure could be applied over chess to represent the powers of each piece on the board, to enable smoother computations, rather than brute force computations. I wondered if anyone else would like to discuss it here. I tend to post out of pride or for entertainment. I've explained to someone in the past week that being entertaining is a matter of making up nonsense. So you are not obligated, as intellectuals, to participate. There are much more important things, like confronting Burma with the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas ... Cavatine

I’ve been playing chess here for a few years and I don’t want to imply that I haven’t taken Chess seriously, all these years, but my rating has not been all that important to me. I used to play 10-20 daily games at a time and whatever “live” time control I was in the mood for. Every since I learned that it is completely acceptable for members to use opening data bases I stopped playing daily games. I don’t have many openings memorized deeper than 3-4 moves and surely am not going to start studying now. When I joined this club I noticed “we” are highly ranked on the site so I figured if I am going to be here I better take the games here seriously and am somewhat relieved that it is ONLY vote chess we are playing now. At least any moves we make, and games we play, are not solely mine. I almost exclusively play 1 min time control with a random 3 or 5 minute game on occasion. Very recently I was perusing the stats of a player here in the group that has a very high rating and I thought “why can’t I get a rating like that”. My bullet rating shot up about 200 points over a couple day period, simply by focusing. I guess if you don’t study openings you’ll never get a big rating in daily chess.

Imagine someone secretly developed and ran a superior chess engine on a supercomputer that could baffle its contemporary engines (say it is 500 ELO higher than them) and decided to tell nobody about it. If analysts, cheat detection programs, and observers received only the moves of its games, would it look like a human was playing? Even with a large sample size of games, I think it would, as the analyses would fail to understand the depth of some of its moves. But still I wonder, would it agree with current engines enough to be caught?

I have a philosophical question. I am playing the game below and it is a current game so I don't want any comments about the game but it illustrates the question and the dilemma. I am looking at the Knight sacrifice and have spent several hours analyzing. I think the sacrifice is good but it is too complicated to verify even if I spent another several hours to justify. I am not afraid to make the move except here is the real question. If I make this move and it turns out to be good am I likely to be turned in for cheating? There are other good moves, I kinda like this one but don't want people to think I cheat, Worse yet I don't want Chess.com the think that. Once again, please only speak to the philosophical aspects of this.

Took my Grandson on a Float trip yesterday. We did pretty good. First pic is a double where we landed fish at the same time. The other two are a couple of the bigger ones my Grandson caught, It was a great day.

Hello Intellectuals. This will probably be a long story so I will not try to cover it all now. This will be the introduction and I will write more later. I live in north Alabama in an area called the Tennessee Valley - referring to the area around the Tennessee River in north Alabama. It is a beautiful area in terms of scenery and wildlife and opportunities to enjoy the outdoors and wildlife. I take advantage of it. Photography is one way I enjoy the outdoors and share it with others. As of the year 1980 the American Bald eagle was still on the endangered species list and there was not a single active eagle nest in Alabama. The state Department of Fish and Game starting releasing young eagles in Alabama around 1986. In the year 2000 I had never seen a bald eagle in the wild and never heard of any living in the Tennessee Valley area. However back in the 1980's one of our state parks, Lake Guntersville State Park, was getting lots of migratory eagles coming down from the north areas each winter. They started having special weekend events where they took people out to see eagles and also held educational events in at their lodge. That went on for years before I ever even heard of it. So somewhere around the year 2004 I heard about the park having eagles in the winter. So in 2006 I rode over there (about an hour and a half from my home) and saw my first bald eagle in a telescope on a Saturday morning. I started attending their weekend sessions. They usually had these special events for 6 weekends each Jan and Feb. Much closer to my home is a large river called Elk River. That is the area where I grew up hunting and fishing and swimming. In the winter of 2005 one of my brothers called me and said that while he was duck hunting on Elk River with my other brother, they had been watching a pair of eagles build a nest there. More later.

On Sunday nights I watch Anthony Bourdain, Parts Unknown on TV, channel CNN. The show is about different cultures around the world. It is a great show. Since Bourdain was a professional chef earlier in life, the show emphasizes food, but it also touches on music and politics and whatever. http://www.cnn.com/shows/anthony-bourdain-parts-unknown Have any of you ever watched it? And I must admit, one reason it is interesting is because the host, Anthony Bourdain, is my age. He is very intellectual.

I thought this one seemed relevant to chess. Anyone got any others? "Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good" - Bertolt Brecht

Post a chess related picture or comment on one here.