Gigantic

Busy! In the New Year, I am continuing the work that I started after Christmas, processing enormous quantities of GM Classic games. This is in addition to the 3 games that I view every day, and of course 5 on a weekend or day off from work. Hundreds of games. Let me explain:

I decided to add in the games from 2002 to 2007 shown at Informant@chessCafe.com, adding those to already abundantly saved games from various high level chess stored in my chessbase in the last year to six months, then went back through Damsky's [1] lovely book 'Chess Briliancy' which selects many of the best games from the very first issues of Informants to as late as 1996...

You get the idea. It just goes on and on and on. But I don't just copy the games. Sometimes they are not in my megabase, and have to find them in chessGames.com, or on rare occcassion, even enter them by hand. Games don't just grow on trees...
















Polly, Ms. Polly...

Then discrepancies. Sometimes game collections add in a few moves or miss a move, and, of course, I check those. It is my nature to do so. My collections have good data. It is my badge of honor.

So why quit there? I am now going through and adding games voted on by 7 out of 10 Informant judges, or 30 out of 100 points and above. This, too, involves a lot of checking. I do so by going through the book by Informant: Chess Informant, 640 Golden Games (the ten best games from the first 64 issues, 1966 to 1995). I kiss this book. I treasure this book. I love this book. I worship this book. What, pray tell, of modern chess is not inside this book? [2]

Needless to say, I still do CTS (I am one day from 87.9% at 37,100 tries) and read Euwe-Kramer's Middlegame, Volume II, which is almost done. I now can go quite a ways in my head without a board, and the muscles get stronger....

First it was 941 games, then adding GM-Ram, Krabbe's Classic Games [3], Soltis Greatest Games, Reti Masters of the Chessboard, and that came to 1,735 games. I haven't missed much.
















Sweltering Seas of humans, sweltering seas of GM Classic Games....

But as such, what I add, falls clearly inbetween, and now I have 2,600 games, and after adding Fine's The World's Greatest Chess Games, Alekhine's 107 Great Chess Battles 1939-1945, Tartakowers lesser known 100 Master Games of Modern Chess [4], this aught to be 3,200 or so.

This is not just mere collecting. It goes in my brain. It seaps in. And, of course, I actaully look at them.

As I add them, I tile the 1,735 games adjacent to the next 865 games, so as I go deeper and deeper, I say to myself: "I don't need that one, that one, or that one. This one is new. Add that'. So each major new classic becomes harder and harder to find, and it aggregates to where each gap becomes all the more crystal clear. You have so many Spassky-Fischer, Tal-Botvinnik, Petrosian-Spassky, Karpov-Kasparov, Anand-Shirov, etc, that when you find a game you think is there but is not there, such as Spassky-Petrosian, or some Kasparov-Karpov game, that you have to blink to make sure! They all start to sound alike, and, as such, other persons who have compiled games missed games... if you follow. There are major games not widely discussed or published.

But by overlapping collection after collection and book after books, I have filled many holes in the ordinary view or erudition and what it is to know history in chess [5].

It becomes a matter of finding what is missing rather than adding what is missing; rather than find exception after exception of missing parts, the exceptions now are finding the exceptions!

On a personal front, I am meditating twice a day 'religously' now, and this is my new years commitment. Since I don't drink coffee or consume any alcohol, nor eat lactose or gluten, I am filling myself with good stuff. As this occurs, we become more senative but also less tolerant of crap in the emotional sphere or moral sphere or physicals sphere. I am also holding back on a very senative physical energy area, and saving that special energy too, and the meditation supports that, so that major shifts are happening. The top of my head is liable to burst instead of my... some other hydraulics. :) Wait till I come back to blitz 2/12! Unleash a torrent on some unsuspecting soul.

Love dk















A more balanced visual approach in 2008!

[1] This is the same author who wrote, Attack With Mikhail Tal.

[2] Attentive readers notice the review is for the soon to be reissued volume, but with 1,000 games. Not to be missed!

[3[ See Tim Krabbe's 'Chess Curiosities' or Open Chess Diary here. Anyone thereby bored needs to quit the game of chess!

[4] Of course, this follows his classic 500 Master Games, which is probably prefatory to any deep repatorte work, or antecident to system selection, in knowing the old traps, and seeing how we get to modern chess by negative inference.

[5] Seriously please: no one write me and say 'hey DK, do you have xyz book or game collection?' I have seen them all, and don' t need more data! Fair enough I hope to the kind reader.