Ok, so it has been nearly a month since my last post. If people are still out there reading, let me tell you about some changes. I have gotten truly a little tired blogging about chess. There isn't much to talk about in regards to scholastic chess over the summer, and there are other things that I would like to talk about.
First, the 4th Billy Colias Memorial is next weekend. I will try to post updates on that each day while it is going on. For those of you not familiar with Billy, he was perhaps the strongest player to be homegrown in the midwest. He also was an outstanding chess teacher, and one of the more fun, interesting, and gregarious players I ever met. My favorite thing about Billy was watching him analyze games. I saw one game where he played an 1100 who blundered a queen horribly and went over it with the player. they got to the position where the queen was dropped, and Billy paused for a second. He then said wow, this is interesting, was your idea to do this? He then constructed a kingside attacking plan that was viable. The opponent perked up as Billy started talking about how creative an idea his opponent had. The opponent walked away feeling like a million bucks, and thats how many of us felt hanging out with Billy.
One of my absolute favorite things to follow is baseball. I am a bit of a junky, so I watch a lot of it. So this week when I read one of the dumber things ever by analyst and broadcaster Joe Morgan, I wanted to share it. According to Joe, on his ESPN chat, run differential is an overrated statistic. Yeah, it is really overrated to score more runs than your opponents. That has nothing to do with winning.
Glenn
4 comments:
I remember Billy well. He had spent some time hanging out in NY. One of my best chess lessons was one that he sat in on, and made lots of really good suggestions. Sigh as the Billy Joel song goes "Only the Good Die Young."
Run differential stat being over rated; Kind of like checkmate not having anything to do with winning?
I like the proposed changes to your blog and look very forward to playing in the Colias Memorial Tournament. You're right, Billy was "the salt of the earth" and like Woody Guthrie said in his song about FDR: "This world was lucky to see him born." Thank you for being the tireless and selfless organizer of this tournament over the years. It is a testimony of how important loyalty and friendship are to you. Illinois chess and the chess world at large owe you a great deal of gratitude for organizing this tournament for one of the best people who ever played the game.
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