I've Got A Chess Biscuit Tin!

Please tell me you didn't pay £8 for that tin!

50p and it was a while back, only just re-discovered it.

That's a relief.

I must have played over a thousand OTB games in my life but I don't think I've ever played in the same room as a parrot. Pipe smokers are pretty thin on the ground nowadays as well. When I first started playing it was common practice for the pipe smoker to blow smoke over the board and indeed straight into your face if things were going badly for him. It made the board seem more like a real battlefield.

@mynameisklint

In the mid '70's the board one at Witney was a pipe smoker. I don't know the tobacco brand he used but the smoke always seemed to sink downwards onto the board! I remember one match where an Oxford team pitched their cigar man against him and the smoke swirled round the pieces on the board and then sank off the edges of their table onto the floor. Very surreal. Our guy with the pipe lost and showed me the finish:- he was white in a Queen's Indian and was inveigled into taking the a8 rook with his g2 bishop and the smoke clouds failed to mask the weak squares round his king. Nowadays people have to resort to eating pickles etc to gain the upper hand at OTB.

@Ragwort

Our paths nearly crossed then. I used to play against Witney regularly from the mid 1990s until a few years ago.

@mynameisklint

I played my last match for them in about 1978 before leaving the area to seek my fortune. The pipe guy (now a professor emeritus) is still around writing about opera, but I can't find any evidence that he played much after that era himself.

@greenpawn34 said

I have a new biscuit tin (thought I’d share.)

A picture of ZorroTheFox making his two millionth move on RHP.

A retro puzzle that should have appeared on the last blog.
(that was the one about Rook and Knight mating patterns.)

[fen] rnbq1bnr/ppppkppp/8/4R3/4N3/8/1PPPPPPP/2BQKBNR b K - 0 5[/fen]
White has just played 5.Rxe5 mate. You have to recon ...[text shortened]... puzzles.

A recent game of mine where I fluke a win.

Blog Post 444

@bigdoggproblem said
Not bad.

Wonder if we can force the move order with a stipulation like "Find the game starting with 1.Nc3 and ending with 5.RxP#".

@bigdoggproblem said
Nope.

[pgn]1. Nc3 e5 2. h4 Qxh4 3. Ne4 Qd8 4. Rh5 Ke7 5. Rxe5#[/pgn]

@deepthought said
Simply give the problem in descriptive notation and specify that the initial move is 1. N-QB3 (or 1. QRP-QRP3) and that the final move is 5. QRxP.

@greenpawn34 said
I have a new biscuit tin (thought I’d share.)

@greenpawn34

Oh, by the way...

Ook!?