ChessBase Light or Euclid (Part Two)

Things come in fads, and in the late 80's writer Stewart Wilde was one of them.  He focused on empowerment, manifestation, and did so with the wry, cleaver mark of a man who made himself out of nothing with not a small dose of street smarts.

What makes the mark of a fad?  At the time his books-- each and every one of them--seemed essential to read.  At the time they helped me a lot, but would never read them again and quite confident he is no longer topical, if not nearly forgotten now as far as best selling goes.

Very much like Dr. Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra [1], and most particularly, Carlos Castinada, the work was very good, and as promised to inspire, was both very effective and worthwhile.  Dyer knew how to incent the baby steps of self realization, Chopra early on was very clear about the approach to treating the temple of our body with respect, and Castinada guided the way to showing how mundane life was within arms reach of real magic.  OK.

But what each and every one of them did was try to turn this into a money machine.  Lets be clear.  Making money is OK.  But they had other roles, and spoke to things from those roles, until they supplanted message making as and end in itself into a business--to the point of over-saturating the marketplace, diluting early, very primary work.


Now, lets be clear.  I am not saying this about ChessBase.  Quite the contrary.  They have come a very long ways from the clunky little nascent windows driven environment of version six, to the svelt and sophisticated tools of taking the Cloud to your chess desktop, allowing one to take raw chess data and compare and categorize games according to history, results, pawn structure, and motif.  Good for ChessBase, and staying in business and handily deserve they do.  Back to heuristics, before we get back to chess.

Despite Wild's loosing his imprimatur, this does not mean that he didn't say a lot of very wise things.  The most memorable on was:  'The trick about money is having some', well neigh the title of a book.

What this means is that you can talk all you want about investment selection, growth, asset classes, and diversification, but you just plain need money to start out.  And if you don't, getting it is the first step, whereby no amount of manipulation or magical thinking can create large energy out of little to no energy.

So the first step is to have your games recorded, and it is to that, to which our next post, Part Three turns.  After that, we will discuss where to do it and how.  And most of all--and I say this as a veteret ChessBase user--this means knowing what other alternatives exist, some while not as sophisticated are a lot cheaper.  I don't recommend that route, but I will need to show you other options.

[1] How very far he got off track.  His first book, Return of the Rishi was written by a practicing physician, steeped in the work of Ayurveda [2].  He went from the focus of medicine with messaging, to messaging with medicine.  At some point, given enough Oprah and Dr. Phil the message gets sadly cheapened.  Tapes, trainings, meetings, credentialing, consultations.  A real fu_kign money machine which becomes the focus of attention.

[2] Sanskrit: आयुर्वेद; Āyurveda, "the knowledge for long life"