“When you see a good move, look for a better one” -- Emanuel Lasker

Life I've just written the following:

"After reading about the death of Bobby Fisher over the weekend, as well as reflecting on how for some of us eccentricity can overcome talent, I realised that I haven’t played chess in years. My Dad got me interested when I was very young and we worked through hundreds of games until I became a teenager. I think he preferred it because unlike Monopoly in which I’d usually end up buying Mayfair and Park Lane and simply sit on them until he we bankrupt, in Chess we had a game in which we were fairly equally matched although he tended to beat me. We played using a set and board he’d used when he was my age.

I bought the books and magazines and crucially watched Play Chess, the kids programme, which, would you believe was broadcast throughout the school holidays just before Why Don’t You (etc). This studio bound programme (video-taped on what looked like the same set as Blue Peter) featured giant chess pieces and a grand master patiently taking us kids through a range of chess games using wiz bang 8-bit computer electronics, with history interludes and the like. It was probably the first place I heard names like Karpov, Kasperov and Fisher, all of whom I idolised.

Then when I reached secondary school, joined the Chess Club and tried playing against people who really could play chess and lost the knack. Turned out I simply haven’t got the kind of brain which can survey a board and work out the many hundreds of combinations and outcomes, although I was oddly quite good at speed chess, presumably because it’s somewhat based on instinct and I’m somewhat good at that. Eventually I took up playing against a computer but in the end I found it slightly more interesting to put two different bits of software up against one another to see who would be a victor, underling that I’m always the spectator never the doer."

Then looked for something similar to link to and read this. I've almost but not quite repeated what I said in 2006, the first time in five and half years. That's not bad going, I think. Will try harder though.