Tag: Campfire Chess
Starting this blog back in 2014 was not the first time I had journeyed into the world of blogging. In 2006 I started a nonprofit astronomy education blog and outreach program called nightShifted Astronomy that ran successfully from 2006-2014 when I retired the website and decided to focus my attention on chess. The featured image on this post was the header image for the blog for over half of the eight years that nightShifted Astronomy existed.
A few days ago I was browsing through some archived design files and found the Photoshop PSD files for the header image and wondered if there was any trace of nightShifted Astronomy out there after all of these years. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my pride and joy for all that time remains in some places forever immortalized!
The archived edition I was able to recover includes a cool mini-press release for when I was asked to write astronomy and philosophy articles for a metaphysical magazine. Although the publication did not last very long, it was an exceptional experience.
Click here to view the full-sized archive (6 MB).
Life has been so busy lately that it was almost lost to me that 2016 is a leap year! For many people that only means another day to wait for their paycheck or one more day of putting their nose to the grind at the work to finish a big project. For me, it enabled me to squeeze out one more day at the gym before my physical fitness test. My job requires that I maintain a high level of physical fitness which is tested regularly throughout the year. To make this one special, I decided that I would take it on leap day. And, since this is a chess blog and chess players (typically) enjoy odd facts and history, I thought it would be nice to look into the origins of February 29th. Plus, it gave me a reason to post today…
An Imperfect Path Around the Sun
There have been many calendars throughout history including the Lunar, Julian, and the Gregorian Calendars. Most of us learn very early in school that the Earth orbits the Sun in a semi-perfect circle. Typically we celebrate a new year around the world every 365 days, but scientists observed that during the use of the old Lunar Calendar that seasons would shift drastically over time. This indicated that the calendar’s basic system for tracking the length of time it took for the Earth to orbit the Sun was inaccurate. Can you imagine having a snowstorm in Texas in July? If we still used the Julian Calendar, it is highly likely.
It takes the Earth on average, approximately 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds long (365.242189 days) to complete one full orbit around the Sun.1 To compensate for this seasonal shift, it was determined that an extra day was needed every so often to balance out the inaccuracy of the calendar. Julius Caesar’s Julian Calendar introduced the concept of the leap year, but its calculations were still not enough to compensate for the full effect of the uneven orbit. This was because the only rule used to calculate the need for a leap year was that the year had to be evenly divisible by four.
Here are some interesting facts about the error rates in our common, Western calendars:
- 365-day Calendar (with no leap years calculated).
- Length: 365 Days
- Error Value: 6 hours/year (1 day in 4 years).
- Julian Calendar
- Length: 365.25 Days
- Error Value: 11 min/year (1 day in 128 years).
- Gregorian Calendar
- Length: 365.2425 Days
- Error Value: 27 sec/year (1 day in 3236 years).
- Mayan Calendar <– not saying it was aliens, but…
- Length: 365.242036 Days
- Error Value: 13 sec/year (1 day in 6500 years).
(hope you read that in the guy’s voice)
The Vatican Steps In
Pope Gregory XIII realized the problems with the Julian Calendar and comissioned a new calendar to be created that would fix the leap year issues. The result was a calendar adopted in 1582 in Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain known as the Gregorian Calendar. It is the most widely used calendar in the world today. Here are some specifics:
- The Gregorian Calendar is a 365-day, solar calendar divided into 12 months of irregular lengths.
- 11 of the months have 30 or 31 days, while February has only 28 days during a common year.
- Nearly every four years is a leap year where one extra day is added to February (which is today), making the calendar 366 days long.
- The formula for calculating leap days is much more complex than the old Julian Calendar, which makes the Gregorian Calendar far more accurate.
- The year is evenly divisble by 4.
- If the year can be evenly divided by 100, it is NOT a leap year, unless (see third rule)
- The year is also evenly divisible by 400.
So, campers! Enjoy this extra day because it only comes around so often! Kiss your girl (or guy), phone a friend, play some chess, and enjoy it because you can bet that summer will be arriving at the same time it did last year thanks to the hard work of the people who watched the skies throughout history and helped us create one of the most essential tools in existence: our calendar.
-w.s.
-
“Julian Calendar,” Time and Date.com, accessed February 28, 2016, http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/julian-calendar.html. ↩
Wow! What a demanding few weeks this has been! I thought that I would struggle not to write or work on the blog during my self-imposed exile, but that turned out to be much easier than I expected given the amount of work I had to do for school and for my everyday job. Yet, I am happy to say that things are starting to wind down and I am ready to get back into writing regularly here on Campfire Chess. To start out for now, I would like to point everyone to the updated downloads page where there are many new wallpaper sizes for some of the older wallpapers and a brand new wallpaper featuring the Campfire Chess logo and a beautiful, misty forest background.
I am working on fixing some display problems with the site as well as eliminating the clutter that has gathered on the server over the last two years to make the campfire experience much more streamlined. There are also some exciting new projects on the horizon, so keep those chess pieces moving!
w.s.
I have decided to take about 2-4 weeks off from writing here on Campfire Chess or even playing chess online. Part of it is to give myself a chance to relax, rest, and recover, but mostly it is because I am starting the final courses for my Masters of Divinity at Liberty University today and need to focus my energies on finishing those requirements. The amazing Tata Steel Chess Tournament is currently underway and I will be following it closely, but the best place to get tournament updates and general chess information for now is Chessbase or The Week in Chess.
See you all in a few weeks!
May 24 will mark the second anniversary of my dedicated attempts to improve at chess, but I noticed over the holiday season that I have yet to participate in a time-honored tradition enjoyed by countless chess enthusiasts around the world: a tournament. I have passed on several opportunities to play in local tournaments with the San Antonio Chess Club and playing with that group is the closest I have come to developing a 2016 New Year’s Resolution. Earlier this week I was about to play a 15-minute slow game on Chess.com when I noticed that a tournament for the same time control was starting within 10 minutes. I joined the tournament and spent the next 2 and 1/2 hours playing in my first chess tournament! I was skeptical of the online tournament format but was pleasantly surprised by the energy of the players and the fierceness of the competition. I finished 2nd overall with a 4/5 score. The loss was disappointing but it strengthened my resolve to play through.
I was thrilled to see that many of the games played in this little tournament were exceptional. Games where White or Black was winning with an enormous amount of material and excellent positional play were turned upside down with smart tactics and devastating blunders. It was during the first round as I watched a game in progress where Black was steamrolling his opponent until the chess gods intervened…
Suffice to say that all of the kibitzers in the room were excited about this game and I felt a little nervous knowing that a player like tg-13 was in the mix and able to turn the tables on a dime. I copied down the ID number for the game and stored it in a text file called Never Say Die so that I could come back post-tournament and write this entry. Unfortunately the psychological effect of that game caused more harm than good as I faced tg-13 in the second round and was lured into an early trap, lost my Queen, and the game soon afterwards. The next exceptional game came in the second round.
Black was in control of the game but missing a simple tactic cost him bigtime. It was fun to watch magab001 in his other games because he played some very complicated and nailbiting positions. I had planned not to annotate any of my own games from the tournament but the next game was too good to pass up.
I chose to annotate that game mostly because of 26.Nb6 because it was a high-stakes gamble that paid off in dividends. This was in the third round immediately following my earlier defeat so it helped to boost my confidence and carry me on to the end. The final game I want to show was played near the end of the tournament around the time that my eyelids were growing heavy and the fight for the top three positions had come down to the wire. It features magab001 from the one of the earlier annotated games.
So, what’s the verdict on this tournament and the whole of chess tournaments on the site? I found the Chess.com tournament experience to be much more pleasant than I had expected. The kibitzing with other participants was a lot of fun and it took a lot of the emphasis away from ELOs and put all emphasis on individual performance. A 900 ELO player could defeat a 1200 ELO player and vice versa, so tournaments on Chess.com are an excellent way to wade into the world of competitive chess. Besides, it is free to enter these tournaments and there are even some cool trophies to display on your Chess.com profile page.
Final Tournament Standings
| Rank | Player | Rating | Record | Tie |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | TheChessierGuy (16) | 1014 | 5/5 | 8.5 |
| 2 | AmishHacker (5) | 1151 | 4/5 | 7 |
| 3 | AestheticFit (6) | 1134 | 3/5 | 4 |
| 4 | yanakap (17) | 965 | 3/5 | 3.5 |
| 5 | magab001 (3) | 1126 | 2/5 | 1.5 |
| 6 | ChronoTheCode (10) | 1069 | 1.5/5 | 0.25 |
Attention, campers! This is your Camp Director speaking! Christmas is right around the corner and that means worship, family fun, personal reflection, and more sweet treats than most people can handle. My family and I take Christmas very seriously and do what we can to enjoy it to the fullest. We celebrate the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ and ensure that we spend as much time as possible with each other. Additionally, I am preparing to start the final three classes for my Masters of Divinity program at Liberty University! With these things in mind, regular posts will start winding down effective today. I have programmed a post for Christmas and New Year’s Day, but regular postings will be few and far between until 2016 rolls around.
Please accept my sincerest gratitude for the continued love and support of this website over the last year and a half. I remain hopefully optimistic about the future of Campfire Chess and the prospect of a long future with this website, my local chess group, and the growing popularity of chess around the world. May the grace and love of Jesus Christ bless you and your family this holiday season!
Sincerely, Wesley Surber
December is here and that means Christmas is just around the corner! It is hard for me to believe that so much time has gone by! Campfire Chess will celebrate its 2-year anniversary in May and we’ve averaged around 50 visitors a day since August of this year! If the internet could be imagined as a city then Campfire Chess is like a novelty comic book shop in a strip mall. Even Best Buy and some of the most successful businesses in the world started out small, so we are on our way! November was a lot of fun for me because my chess activities were up-and-down as usual but ended on a very high note. I closed out the month of November 2015 with a win that gave me my highest online ELO ever: 1073! I am very excited with the level of improvement I have gained in the last 2 years of tracking my chess studies. My online ELO was around 650 in May 2014 when I opened Campfire Chess as Off My Chess. 1073 represents almost a 100% improvement which is not too shabby for a guy who is going to university full time, raising two kids, working full time, and supporting a family. In addition, my chess studies and improvement are without the assistance of an OTB coach although I am utilizing the Tactics Trainer and Chess Mentor over at Chess.com.
In reflecting on this milestone I would like to share two of my favorite annotated games from November. The first game is an 9 move game that could be described as an assasination…
I am attending a school in Philly, so the next game was annotated on an American Airlines 737 from Dallas to Philadelphia earlier this week. This game was a lot of fun and had me on the edge of my seat several times throughout.
I anticipate completing my Masters of Divinity in March so I hope to devote more attention to the rest of the blog. I recently began reworking the reading list this week and plan to add the movie list which has been in production since July 2014. Chess is growing around the world and 2016 looks to be even better than this year! Stay tuned!
Campfire Chess would like to extend a heartfelt Thank You to the men and women serving or those who have served in the Armed Forces. May God continue to bless and keep you and your families.
Back in 2014 when I started this blog I decided to start compiling some of my favorite and most popular posts into a PDF publication called *Off My Chess Quarterly*. Eventually that publication evolved into *Campfire Chess Magazine*. Recently I retooled the publication to eliminate the PDF publication and move to a an interactive format combination of JavaScript and HTML5. However, maintaining the blog and a publication like *Campfire Chess Magazine* creates too much demand for productivity in various directions. In turn quality suffers on both ends, so I have decided to cease publication of *Campfire Chess Magazine* to devote more time to focusing on the blog and other elements of the site.
Instead, I invite you to check out Campfire Chess on Facebook, Twitter, and now a curated magazine on Flipboard.