Sideproject for the future

Take a look at this:

Full report how to build a cabinet yourself can be found here. This might be something I can build together with my father, he is the right person for such projects. It’s cheaper than buying a used pinball machine and I am really not confident that I can maintain it! A home made cabinet based on virtual tables saves a lot of troubles.

Btw, the original poster left a hillarious quote:

I’m not sure how long it took to complete but I almost forgot what my wife looked like, which was somewhat of a good thing.

Ouch!

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Chess training revival; and this and that

Life is hard. When you don’t do any kind of chess training for some time, it’s almost back to start. Mistakes start to creep in again and things that worked smooth last year don’t work out anymore. This is no reason to despair though and together with my chess buddies I have started a new trainings season. Nothing really special but we found a good way to keep us motivated and to do some serious work.

Let’s see if the results get better! I can definitely need it, almost lost against a 1280er last night after too many piece exchanges and trying to hard to win. The endgame was actually even lost for me but I managed to squeeze out a win.

This position is won for Black if he plays 48…Ke5. The point is to slowly push back White’s king and to win the g-pawn under favorable circumstances. Fortunately my opponent fell for the trap and played 48…Kg4. What’s the difference? After 49. b4 Black will promote earlier but White is in time and does it with a check.

A perpetual can’t be avoided and I was almost ready to offer a draw but then I thought that my opponent might be a bit annoyed by missing this variation. I decided to play on to see if he makes another mistake. The point in this position is that if the king can be pushed to the queen side and if Black allows the exchange of queens by a careless king move, White will win. The h-pawn is  doomed and having the g-pawn on g2 gives the required tempo to get the opposition.

And this is exactly what happened (the opposition wasn’t needed, the king was already too far away to stop the pawn). A very lucky win!

 

It’s Hugo time again! The Hugo is one of the most important awards in the Science Fiction scene. Similar to last year I will try to read all the nominees for short fiction. You can find the reviews and also the past reviews on this special page.

Finally, after a long time in the making, Pinball Arcade is out for many platforms. Virtual pinball never looked better and I am looking forward to many new tables that will be released in the next months.

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Playoffs

With a nice win in round 5 my Dreadful Knights are clear first in their Team4545 division and we can enjoy the last round. The game was very tactical and after an early blunder we finally reached the following position:

After 29. Kf4 Black could capture the rook on f1 but endless hours on ChessTempo have prepared me for such situations. Queen and rook work together in a terrific way even when other pieces are around so I looked and found a quick mate.

I hope that I can spend some time on chess study after christmas. Two long games per week are enough to satisfy my appetite at the moment and I don’t look at anything else.

There would have been some time but I rather tried to “summon a disaster on the unbelievers” on the Shaman table in ZEN pinball on the PS3. It took me more than 3 hours until I finally managed to win this trophy. With the upcoming release of Vengeance and Virtue I am afraid I will spend even more time playing pinball. The trailer looks gorgeous:

When it comes to virtual pinball though, nothing beats the Williams Hall of Fame collection. Great ball physics makes the game a unique experience and Medieval Madness is a blast:

Let’s hope that my interest will slow down in the next weeks so that I can focus on chess again.

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