As the year ends, the natural tendency is to look back and re-evaluate. I’m not immune to it. Some observations:

1) I may not be cut out to be a chess coach, but I can be a chess teacher. The difference? The amount of time you spend with individual children. I’m finding it personally draining to be talking/teaching chess with kids who only look at the game as something to pass time and get their parents off their backs. That attitude I can handle if my job is just to teach them, as the average contact with each one is just a few minutes a week. But when I’m working with them for hours several times a week, trying to get them ready for matches, trying to help them recover from losses and win the next one, having to put up with the headgames some of them want to play is just not worth the personal expenditure.

2) Having spent several months over the course of the year working with both, Chess Assistant is, at the root of it, a better design and a better approach to chess databases than ChessBase, but the execution behind it limits its utility. For example, the export functions for publication have all sorts of wonderful options and the software has ways of working with many more fonts than ChessBase has, but these features are a little buggy, so not as useful as they could be. (In the interests of fairness, some of the bugs I’ve encountered don’t seem to show up on other installations, so perhaps there’s just something about the combination of hardware and software I use — I don’t like Windows and use it only as much as I absolutely have to — that triggers these bugs.) Unlike ChessBase, ChessAssistant can spot transpositions in openings, making it more useful in openings research, though ChessBase has an “Opening Report”feature that packs a lot of information (information is data plus meaning). Also, I’ve found that when Chessbase merges games, it does so at the point in the game where it wants to, not necessarily where I want it to. Chess Assistant is better behaved, in that respect.

3) Chess in Milwaukee is on the rise again, but the rise may not include the USCF. I’m trying to find a way the USCF can make itself relevant to the growing chess scene, but frankly, I’m not coming up with enough benefits to justify the cost. Either we’re going to have to find some more benefits to offer, such as an improved magazine, or we’re going to have to cut membership dues.

4) I need to write more about chess history. I have the material, I just haven’t done the writing. I have literally thousands of games played in many venues involving Wisconsin players, or at Wisconsin events. My apologies to you all for failing in that.

5) Youth chess is rising, in both quality and quantity. For the first time one of my students has placed on the national top 100 list for his age group. Alex Betaneli, as usual, has several. Wisconsin has 2 of the top 10 of the kids 8 and under, as well as at least one representative in almost all the other age lists for boys (no women or girls, yet, alas). Slowly we’re coming back into our historical position as one of the nation’s chess centers.

6) The lack of a regular club here in Milwaukee is getting to be a handicap, instead of just an inconvenience. We need a site to meet at. I’d like to hear from readers involved in other clubs as to how they pay for sites, what they pay, if they pay, where their clubs can meet. We’re stymied at the moment.

Where does The Chessmill go from here? Pages From a Patzer’s Notebook will return, though perhaps not in the same old form. I chose the name because it was goingto be my games; if I start doing HS league games, I’ll probably change it; while I have no problem with being called a patzer, I’m not comfortable calling other people that, no matter how you might argue the truth of the appelation.

Martz Annotates will become a more regular feature as well, once I iron out the kinks in getting the game displays to work. I dislike heartily the HTML export features of every database I’ve tried. None of them produce HTML that I can look at without cringing. The java applet I’ve been using is creaking, showing its age. PalView is probably the best I’ve used, but it has problems that I’ve promised to help on. Look for more interactive game displays to begin showing up by midyear, probably.

I still have hundreds of master games, still unpublished, played over the last half-decade, to publish. And I have three interviews booked, with more to come. And some people have talked to me about spawning a hardcopy version as well. We’ll see.

As I become more familiar with WordPress, I’ll either rework the site or give up on WP.

That’s where we are and where we’re going. Hope to have you along. If I don’t see you before then, I wish you all a very merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a joyous Kwanzaa. And in the new year, may all your sacrifices be sound (except against me).

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 18th, 2005 at 9:26 am and is filed under Chess History, Chess Software, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.