chess fun

Writing breaks this time have mostly consisted in playing around on the following website:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=54641

This one is Karpov vs. Korchnoi 1978, but from the pull-down menu you can choose from all kinds of championship matches. By clicking on individual games, you can even watch them unfold one by one with the right arrow key on your computer. I’ve seen some amazing things on the chessboard this way.

And I do this purely as a spectator, since I can’t concentrate in the right way to be even a mediocre player myself; I’m just plain bad. But that makes it more fun to watch, since it’s pure spectacle and I’m never tempted to make pompous commentary even in my own head. It’s a good example of a critique-free experience. Not that we’d want to have such experiences all or even most of the time, but there’s a certain enjoyment to be had simply from watching things happen.