Saturday, November 29, 2008

Chess

Straight-up chess, or chess played on a wall! I wonder how the match is going between the crew of the International Space Station and ground control and others?

And...has the internet killed "postal chess" or has it just all gone online?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Acoustic chess versus digital chess?

Strictly on a practical basis, playing chess over the Internet beats postal chess six ways from Sunday. I know very few people who play chess, so I have to get my fix over the Intertubes. Being part of the Internet Chess Club allows me to play speed-chess variants like Blitz, which is obviously not possible with postal play.

My pops was a postal chess addict. He had a portfolio-style cardboard album with several pages to allow for multiple play. Each square had a little slot to hold the pieces. Once he let the thing slip off the table and nearly lost the thread of some tense games.

I heard somewhere once that J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller played lengthy games by memory, calling out moves in chess notation at odd moments. That's about the lowest-tech form of chess I know.