Hunting Butterflies in Chess

A couple of days back, I played otb chess with a friend, who happens to be a very ardent and strong opponent. As the game progressed into the middle stage, we were at a critical situation for both sides. At this position, we sat at the board for over 30 mins without saying a word or making a move. Finally, I asked him rather quizzically, "have you moved?", and he being heroically patient said, "It's your move".

I guess, I would had been hunting butterflies otb in the chess maze when I lost the sense of time. Is this normal? Has Chess taken over me, making me way too assertive? What do GM's hunt for in Chess?

You're mind was obviously somewhere else if you weren't even aware that it was your move! Assertiveness doesn't really come into it.

yup, ofcourse. the game was Draw.

maybe you were tricked to move lol jk that is bad if you were staring at the board and didn't see your friend move, you probably need glasses

@FlowerFlowers: I was seeing the connections between the chess pieces, right from the opening move. All pieces were connected during the initial game with some pieces having more than one connections. In the particular position, one piece from each side was disconnected from both the sides. If the role of this piece is really important then the game is generally draw if the opponent doesn't makes any mistakes, which got me thinking to convert this draw to win.

You're in good company - I heard a story from the 1800s where Morphy was playing Paulsen, who just sat there for hours until Morphy politely said "Excuse me, but why don't you move?", to which Paulsen replied "Oh - is it really my move?" Later, clocks were introduced...

If a grandmaster read your post, manavendra, they would be hunting for the reason you even brought up being assertive

mana... yea.. but you'd think between seeing those connections.. you'd notice a human's hand moving one of those pieces between your deep scrutinization of the board ... know what I'm sayin' buddy.

Paul211 ... what a wonderful picture of a butterfly! very nice

Gilgandel LOL of course, makes perfect sense, necessity is the mother... dot dot dot.

(I'm not sure why, but I'm still pretty sure Mana -- that you were tricked into moving when it wasn't your turn lol)

@trysts - the bounty hunter

What I meant by hunting was "the activity of looking thoroughly in order to find something or someone". What you are trying to refer to is "the pursuit and killing or capture of wild butterflies regarded as a sport" which makes me think of Chess as the most insane game ever created. And, all hunters are assertive.

lol, you almost convinced me with your assertions. Maybe i was expecting only the best move from my opponent at that position, and forgot about all his other moves, which he might have made possibly when I looked at a beautiful butterfly outside the window. Am not sure, as we were not writing the move sequence. Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?

From wikipedia, The butterfly effect is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions (the opening moves in Chess) in chaos theory; namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. Although this may appear to be an esoteric and unusual behavior, it is exhibited by very simple systems (including chess): for example, a ball  placed at the crest of a hill might roll into any of several valleys depending on slight differences in initial position. The butterfly effect is a common trope in fiction when presenting scenarios involving time travel and with "what if" scenarios where one storyline diverges at the moment of a seemingly minor event resulting in two significantly different outcomes.

@Estragon: If it was indeed apocryphal, then I believe Paulsen must had been hunting for sharks in his games with Morphy. The importance of sight in shark hunting behavior is debated.

That would be Elijah Williams, "the Bristol Sloth"; Staunton suspected Williams did it on purpose to sap his opponents' willingness to play on, and exercised excessive sitzfleisch even when there was nothing in the position to warrant it.