A parody of chess blogs

Rationality: Well, it looks like it's a new fad in Malaysian chess blogs to poke fun at other blogs, so I'm gonna do one because I'm probably better at it than most of you.

First GM: I think Mas should have played on against that 2700 English GM. He has to break through that psychological fear. The mind plays an important role in chess.

First GM: That's a lousy parody of me. Here's how it should be done:

First GM: Hey guys, I have an idea, I think I know why we are still in the same spot after 30 years. I think we have damaged our spirit. I think that may be a clue to why we dont do well after U12. It's about imagined fears. It's about the inner child. It's about us neglecting the other 3 parts of the components of chess.

Jimmy: We have covered this over 10 years ago.

First GM: Really? Sheesh, I only finished this work a few years ago. Even the American war veterans Association wrote in to learn more about it. Wah! you really advanced man. Sorry about that. But can I still write about it so others can also learn? They may not have the same resource as you have.

Jimmy: Stick to what you know. This is Malaysian chess. Here we only look at technical.

First GM: But hey, NJ just said maybe even all of his loses not due to technical.

Rationality: Let me demonstrate how we strong chess players think. Let me analyse Mas's, draw.

First GM: Great! But what about Qe3?......(Confusion, some back peddling).

Chess Ninja: Hey guys, you are missing the point. It's about Hamid. He is a grandmaster you know. I know even though I am blind folded....(In case you missed that, that means I can play blind folded chess).

First GM: Did anyone of you even read before you threw out what I am saying?

Jimmy, Rationality and chess ninja: Cannot read lah. Read means must acknowledge you are on to something.

Jimmy: Dubai our best Olympiad.

First GM: We have nothing to lose. Any of you guys got a suggestion? None of you are engaging the information.

Jimmy, Rationality: No. Dont want to listen. We are closing our ears. We like complaining. Who wants solutions? Besides if anyone listens to you, we wont look "terror" anymore.

Jimmy: Damn it! Did anyone check out Dubai?

First GM: What is the point? That is in the past. We are looking for solutions in the here and now.

Terminator: Raymond Siew is a liar. Listen to me. I know even though I am hiding behind a pseudonym. Please believe me. I may be a crook, a criminal but ignore that. I am working with someone in MCF and PICA. See, I can say these things. So I must be in the know.

First GM: Hey man. Show yourself. I am sure you are a credible source of information. It is tough on this blog. Even when the evidence is shown people are still slow to engage. These are chess people. They are thinkers. So show yourself. Present your credentials and the evidence. I wish you luck. Do a good job. Then you will be the best terminator you can be.

Jimmy and Rationality: We have had enough. We are going to strike you off our blog roll.

Chess Ninja: I'm telling you guys its Hamid. Blame it on Hamid.

Terminator: Lets attack the women and children guys. We know that Raymond gets upset when we attack the children. We saw it in Perak. That is his weak chink. His Achilles heel. Why dont you guys do that and I'll take it to the next level. I'll attack the women. Trust me guys. This will work. We need to shut him up. He is making us look bad.

Ilham: We are the champions, my friend. And we'll keep on fighting to the end.....

First GM: Sheesh, and all I said was examine the evidence. You have tried technical only and you have not got far. In fact you are still in the same spot. Hasnt anyone noticed that?

The unknown: Hey guys try NLP. They are the experts not this Raymond Siew guy. I dont know how to read. This is the "penultimate" opinion. But believe me. I too need to hide because otherwise you will know that I dont know anything.

First GM: The noise level going up. Now someone who can just about identify the letters NLP has joined the fray.

Chess Ninja: It's Hamid I tell you. He is a grandmaster, he can do funny things. I saw that through my blind fold.

First GM: Hey this is starting to sound like what went on inside my mind while I was writing my inner child work. Why my mind resisted me and tried to prevent me from growing up. Thanks guys, you are the best. Thank you for helping me see this. So if you are right, this work can also be applied to the chess community. All this noise is because you guys dont want to grow up. Hmmmmmm

Ninja, look at the tricks applied over these years, if it was Hamid that is. There are no new ideas. It is the same trick over and over again. No accounts, use your fears against you, smear their good name etc. If Hamid was all that smart, he would have brought us to the next level. Stop fighting this demon. Let it go. A GM has many many ideas. So go out and find some more ideas. Stop this stuck tape. He is no grandmaster. We have been stupid. And there is a world of difference between the 2 conclusions.

Think about it. If we can be fooled by the same tricks again and again by a not so clever guy, then where are we really?

Jimmy: Hey check out Dubai please....I'll give you a clue. See who was on the team.

Ilham: We will we will rock you.........

First GM: Chess is a mind sport. Check out the mind. If you make a dumb mistake because of the chatter, technical wont help. If you stop fighting because of a failure in courage, technical wont help. Look at the evidence. Our strongest chess minds are even afraid to engage in new information. That is where we have gone wrong. The mind is often called the last frontier. Some even argue it holds more complexity than outer space. It is much much much much bigger than the 64 square puzzle. Still the mind and those puzzles will reveal itself. Stop running away. Focus on the problem.

First GM:[Propaganda tone, enacted by Rationality] I hope you also realize that I did not include GilaChess, Hairulov, Ilham because they are not among the blogs which I intend to attack. I just gave Ilham one line so that it won't be so obvious that the whole point of my parody was just to attack 3 people, and sort of halfway attack a 4th. [End of propaganda tone. Reset to impersonation tone]. Now, having said that, I sincerely hope that the situation that we are facing now in Malaysian chess is crystal clear to every one of you now. You see, when bloggers who have a rather high tendency to speak negatively, such as Jimmy and Rationality, our minds will narrow. We will become pessimistic. Then we also have people like Terminator, who are the cancer within our minds, whom must be eliminated from Malaysian chess. Please read all of my previous posts. Understand that all this is important to our development in chess. I'm going to tell you about my experience I've had as a mind coach, and tell you how it is fully applicable in chess. Focus on improving as a player. It is alright if not everyone knows about what is going on at the administrative level. What matters is that some 100 people know, and that's good enough. These people care, you care. Having said that, I'm going to write out a 3-part story about something that happened between me and PICA for everyone to read, because it is very important that everyone knows what happened. I was abused, and then fooled. Everyone should know the true story, and what really happened. Now, I'm planning to organize a trip to this year's ASEAN tournament. The air tickets will be sponsored by AirAsia, but you must pay an extra RM1000 to attend training to prepare you for the tournament. It is strongly recommended, although my previous sentence suggests that you don't really have a choice. It is no point going to a tournament completely unprepared, because it defeats its purpose. Back on topic, it is important to know that chess is more than just technicalities. It is about the mind. When playing, the body should stay completely still. Don't walk around or make unnecessary movements, because it is the mind that is at work. It does not matter if you have been sitting at the table for 3 hours, and blood has been pooling in your legs. [Propaganda tone again, despite that I've forgotten to include this phrase numerous times in this paragraph:] No, I do not realize that every 99.99% of the chess players in the world this, and the top players are not from that remaining 0.01%. [Back to impersonation tone:] As I was saying, you may notice that many people like to challenge my views. Just because I have zero technical knowledge on chess, it does not bar me from making in-depth suggestions regarding the game which are usually related to technicalities [Damn! That tone keeps coming out without being asked!]. Some people like to make these vicious attacks against me. These attacks come from a traumatised mind. One of the reasons I find it so difficult to counsel people like these is because they, the patient, fight back. It's also imperative that everybody understands that by this, I am implying that I know everything that I talk about, and have never been wrong in a single one of my 400 posts. Everyone who thinks otherwise is wrong.[Alright, you know what, I'm not giving any more 'propagandic' tone warnings]. Yes, I may contradict everything I say [I stress that this is actually true. Please challenge me if you feel like it, and I'll show you 5 contradictory posts (because I don't have the time to find the other 95+. I've wasted an hour of my life writing this post, and if there's anything I could wish for, it's that I could have it back)]. Back onto my subject of discussion, remember that when, given a situation, it is important to join the dots. In doing so, dsfbljbuwyrnjkh9632t472qfasfalkmdklaf sdgfbawlhr sdfblkjbaqiekaf465s6 65sdg5646s5g4sd te65sd4ge5t4 sdfgshihiushf9e89sdnf sdjfjksdfsagfagodasho jksjakjfhasukfidsfasudasdnklasdas;ldaskdwopriawf safasfuiwer7878asdjhdaskjnokthatsenough.

YOU ACTUALLY READ UP TO THIS POINT?! I'm disappointed in you, and probably myself for failing to get the point across.(Just so we're clear, the parody is itself the unnecessarily elaborate, dense wall of boring text which you're not supposed to be willing to read)

Message to all the bloggers whom I made fun of in this post: Stick to your serious tone. You sound funnier when you're not trying to crack jokes.

Olympiad 2010

It has been clearly proven this year that as far as the Olympiad is concerned, MCF does more harm than good. They could not afford to pay for Greg's accommodation, so they sent him as a reserve player to have it paid for. Correct me if I'm wrong (you probably can't, though), but the only reason Greg went was to vote for the next FIDE president.

Is it so difficult to just let someone else on the team make the vote? Is the secrecy of your vote so important that you are willing to fill a valuable slot in our team with someone only for the sole purpose of casting a single vote? Get your priorities straight, fools. What use is it to protect your international political stance, when your local image to the non-blind is like shit? And I stress: this one vote came at the cost of a player for our team. A player who might have contributed greatly to the team's progress. Allowing us to meet stronger teams, get better games. Let our players learn more by playing with good opposition. Look at this; we met good teams up to round 4. It went downhill from there on.

Next question: How did you people select our team?

Well, that question was obviously rhetorical; you took the 2 highest rated players in the country, the winner of this year's National Championship and the first strong player to raise his hand. I don't blame any of the players for this. Given the opportunity, who would pass the chance to qualify to play in the Olympiad with minimal effort?

Compare this to 2008. I forgot the primary selection criteria (probably because it never really existed), but there was a round-robin tournament between some players to pick a representative. At least that is more decent than this year. We might as well have selected our players with a dartboard.

Perhaps I'm wrong about the "2 highest rated players in the country" as selection criteria. Mas and Mok might have been chosen because of their result in the 2009 Malaysian Masters. But then again, playing in the Olympiad was not explicitly stated in the details of that tournament as far as I know. And, it was a knockout tournament. Anyone with a level of intelligence above borderline retardation can tell that a KO tournament only produces a first place. Everything below that cannot be ranked accurately.

The National Championship? Perhaps it is prestigious (though it does not have the country's top players participating), but if I'm not mistaken, in 2008 (and only 2008 if my memory serves me well), the winner still had to play in the round-robin. This year, Tan Khai Boon automatically qualified.

The fourth is by far the most ridiculous. Yes, maybe we had run out of strong players to pick from. Peter volunteered himself as a last resort. Apparently MCF skipped the hundred options before that and saw this as an instant resolution to the problem.

Just wondering, what happened to the juniors? No need to elaborate much on this; how are we going to progress if we keep sending a team fully composed of the 'experienced' elite to the Olympiad every time? We have some strong juniors, in particular, one who is still studying in primary school. Looks like the MCF "selection committee" have never heard of him.

Anyway, so we had our lineup:

1. Malaysian #1 rated

2. Malaysian #2 rated

3. Wildcard!

4. National Championship winner

5. Vote carrier

Does anyone notice that the players from boards 1/2, 3, 4 and 5 were chosen from totally different pools of players? To MCF's credit, at least I can tell with 100% certainty that they picked the right 5th board player. Greg is definitely better than Hamid...

Please, selecting people to represent Malaysia in the Olympiad is not like selecting countries that qualify to play in the FIFA World Cup. This team looks like the chess equivalent of Rojak. It may be an identity to our country, but we don't have to demonstrate it in the selection criteria. Besides, Rojak is foodstuff. Let's keep it that way.

Who am I?

Honestly, I don't know why some of you guys keep speculating about who I really am. Does it really matter? Well, maybe it's none of my business either. Actually, I'm rather flattered that people continue to talk about me despite the fact that I've only made like, at most, 10 posts with some substance over the last 6 months.

I find it rather incredible that some people think they know who I am, considering the fact that even I have problems answering that question myself sometimes. First it was just the small time lurkers and bloggers, then slightly more well-known people, e.g. Lim Tse Pin who implies that I'm Lim Yee Weng by dropping obvious "hints", and others who just make random guesses: Joseph Toh, Najib Wahab, Collin Madhavan, Christie Hon...I'll die of old age before I complete the list. Here's something to consider: there is a chance that one of you are right; the only question is, if that's the case, which one of you are?

Don't forget that your earlier guesses were Gregory Lau and Peter Long. I had to make a comment on Jimmy's blog while they were playing for everyone to be actually convinced that I'm not Peter or Greg. To add to that, may I remind you that a handful of you were so confident that I was Peter because of my writing style.

It's ridiculous; recently our famous Hairul claimed that he knows who I am (and that I am still playing chess), but will not say in fear that I still stop writing, and that's bad because he enjoys reading what I have to say. Well, to this, I can only ask you to stop insulting my ability to think, and tell you, that while you may enjoy my posts, you've obviously not fully understood what I've said (read the last paragraph). Bro, I have my own defense mechanism if I ever feel myself get exposed. Don't worry about me. Just think of your ego once you turn out to be wrong. Think about it too though; if I really thought that anyone knew who I am with 100% certainty (unlike the apparent 99% which is demonstrated by most), would I really continue to write? I would just stop, and build up my deniability. Don't try to say you're protecting me or something similar. I don't need it. Goddamn it too, it's like a freaking paradox. If you're really trying to protect me, don't tell anyone that you know who I am.

If you think you know who I am, spit it out, or shut the fuck up. It's like deciding what to do with your vomit. You either keep it in or let it out. Unless you enjoy gargling it.

And looking at that, let's make a small detour too; a message for most of you bloggers out there: your overconfidence just makes you look dumber than you really are. You post your analyses of your shitty games. You even have the ego to annotate a blitz game you played online. In other words, you spent more time annotating a game than playing it. And then you even post the dry crap that you played in a small-time local tournament. Maybe you thought it was a good game. Wake up call: It wasn't. It's nonsense that makes me shit bricks if I ever see people comment on it in the real world. Then to make your commentary more interesting (or rather, make any sense at all), your "analysis" is "assisted" by a chess engine. FYI, the inverted commas are to represent sarcasm; all of your "analysis" is taken straight from the engine's recommendation. Nobody takes interest in what your engine thinks, or Fritz/Rybka opening book says. The rest of us have a computer and access to pirated software too. In addition to that, your variations are unnecessarily long. I know what's going to happen to my queen when you put a rook between her and my king. You don't need to tell me that "white is winning" after showing the next 7 moves. And your commentary is stuff of Captain Obvious. I know that black is going to lose an exchange when white played Nxc7+.

Back on topic, here's some things I can bet that most of you guys have never considered:

1. Was I really giving you real information in my introductory post? Who knows, maybe I'm unrated, both on and off FIDE.

2. Am I only one person?

3. Am I still living in Malaysia? Am I still Malaysian? Was I even Malaysian at any point?

4. Do I even have a job? I seem to make posts at totally random times of the day, many of which are during working hours.

It's also incredibly intriguing that every single one of you make your "deduction" with such confidence, when all but one of your guesses from an endless list of names will be wrong. But one thing, honestly, boils the hell out of my curiosity: What are your guesses based on? My style of writing? Come on, that stuff doesn't work. Professionals do stuff like this for the FBI, and they almost never lead to breakthroughs. There are usually better things to go on. Besides, my writing style changes with every few posts, in case you didn't realize.

Here's some outside help for you guys. It's what your guesses about my identity are based on. And this will be too, though I still have infinite confidence of my anonymity thanks to your gullibility.

Yes, I am mocking your attempts to guess who I am.

P/S: Are you guys going to suggest that I'm Raymond Siew this time, based on the second last paragraph?

The problem with us

I find it stupid when people try to defend our team's overall disastrous performance in this year's Olympiad. Really people, stop trying to be nice. Our players played like shit. Stop sucking up to them by giving them excuses for losing. And if you want to defend them, at least blame it on the fact that we have no reserve players. I cannot stand people who try to be Mr. Nice Guy. Yes, maybe your dick-sucking words to our poor players will make them feel better. But you know what else it makes them feel? Adequate. You make them think that it was perfectly acceptable to lose. Guess what: it's not.

Someone blundered in time trouble. It's not their fault? Then whose is it? The clock, for not reminding our players to play faster? Open your eyes, my friends; did nobody tell you that time management was a skill in chess?

"Don't criticize each other's performance...", etc. Phrases like these make me want to kill someone. Why can't we criticize each other's performance? Are we only allowed to praise them? "Wow, Greg, nice comeback after a 8-year hiatus!" is willingly said by many, but yet, nobody wants to say, "Greg, what the hell were you doing in your second game in this tournament? Were you fatigued after your first?". Do you know what happens when you count the hits but not the misses? You believe in paranormal things. Psychics. Pseudoscience. Crap like that.

"They were doing their best"? Seriously, do you think about anything you say? In case you didn't click on it, we're ranked 106 with 1 round to go. That's 20 ranks below our initial seeding. If that's really our best, then it means we're overrated. Do you think we're overrated? No? Then they weren't doing their best.

We need to give them a break? Yeah, you know what a break is? Not playing. That's a break. There's competition for their places out there. It's also what drives them to perform.

And the worse thing about it is that our players probably know that they played badly. Your fucking excuses are not going to do anything, except make yourself feel like the angel of conscience. What your lame, unnecessary excuses will do is cause people to unconsciously think that it came from the players themselves. And you know what happens when someone gives you a lame excuse? You scold them more. So to the Mr.-Nice-Guy-political-assholes: Shut the fuck up. Your detrimental words of kindness are just going to cause our players more shit.

In case it's not apparent yet, I just want to highlight: The only reason why you're defending our team's performance is because you want to feel good. You never bring up the bad points because most people don't like the truth, and you want people to like you just as much as you don't want people to dislike you.

And you know what else? There's a 99.9% chance that you're just a fucking hypocrite if you talk like that. How much are you willing to bet that you are the type of person who never scolds his teammates in team tournaments if they underperform? That's a rhetorical question, mind you.

So now that I'm done beating (or smashing/blasting/f-bombing) around the bush: What's our problem (apart from these...)? It's the attitude. Plain and simple. We keep on making excuses for ourselves when we lose. And when we don't, some nice guy out there makes them for us. And in case it's not clear yet, excuses are bad.

Sheesh.

P/S: I care so much about what you think of "me". And I don't need to enable comments, Hairul. I already know what comments I'm going to get. Do none of you actually digest my posts? [Spoiler: read here]

P-P/S: You don't like my usage of vulgarities or not-so-nice words? Are you joking? This isn't fucking poetry. If you want to see beautiful language, go read Shakespeare.

Olympiad R10

For Round 10, we are paired with Wales. I still don't think Greg should be subbed in now. I would normally expect 3-1 with the team's strength. but given their current performance, I can only predict a 2.5-1.5 win for us, with Mas and Peter winning the point and Mok taking a half. Alternatively, we might get a draw since I'm not confident that Mas will be able to take the full point from his opponent.

But if Greg were to play...well, it depends on who is subbed out. If he does play, I am rather sure that Khai Boon will be rested, as I can safely speculate that his team is rather unhappy with his disastrous performance. My prediction would still remain the same in that case, unless Wales fields their 2009-rated 45-year old player.

All in all, I can safely say the chances are somewhat split 50-50 between a draw and a win. This match is going to depend on Mas' game.

So it was 2-2. I guess prediction is not one of my specialties. Greg played worse than I had expected, though it does not surprise me. As for Peter...I honestly don't know where he went wrong. His play looked somewhat innocent until his opponent had a forcing sequence coming out of nowhere, and then suddenly white had a strategically lost position. Mok and Mas simply outplayed their opponents.