Monday 27 November 2017

Getting around to it

About 3 years ago I had some free time on my hands, and decided to draw up a list of projects to do. One of those projects was to clean up my study/library/office, which had become a bit of a death trap. I'm proud to say that  I actually began working on that task today!
While sorting through the various boxes of stuff, I cam across some of my old chess computers. The most ancient one was a Scisys computer, which was featured in a blog post over 10 years ago. Also in this lot were a Novag, an Excalibur, a Tandy, and a slightly more modern Scisys.
One of the things I liked about old Scisys was that it wasn't very good (at least at the old levels). I've already described how I used it to improve my chess when starting out, and even today I still use some of the games I played against it in my coaching lessons.
My favourite game (as White) was 1.e4 e5 2.d4 ed 3.c3 dc 4.Bc4 cb 5.Qf3??!!   On the easiest level it fell into my trap and played 5. ... bxa1(Q) allowing 5.Qxf7# However the next level up saw it instead find the best move, which was 5. ... bxc1(Q)+ refuting my less than cunning play.

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