I looked at Donnie's blog to see how the LEPer tourney ended and was surprised to see myself on his zombie blog list. Not so much surprised about the fact that this blog here hasn't seen much activity lately, but more surprise because of his predictive powers. It is amazing what a small egg can do! This also bring us to the reason for taking a break from chess blogging: I lost all hope of becoming a decent chess player myself after losing every single game in the LEPer tourney. Therefore, I decided to create a chess player that beats ALL of you! On August 31, Sciurus Jr. uttered his first victory cry - I am a dad now. No kidding, my wife and I are having a baby and there is simply not much time for chess right now and even less time to write about it.

For now, I would like to thank all of you for reading my unqualified thoughts on chess. Special thanks go to everybody who bothered to leave a comment, played chess with me, and of course to all the chess bloggers out there. Without you I probably would have given up playing chess a long time ago. It was (and is!) great fun to 'meet' chess bloggers online to have a nice game of chess. I even had the honor to meet a few of you in real life and to play a couple of over the board games. I definitely plan to continue playing chess, but I won't have time anymore to write about it, play as often, or even spend time solving tactics puzzles.

Last but not least, there are rumors out there that the greatest loser of the LEPer II tourney - me - is too proud to accept the Mc D. coupon. While I am ready to admit that I don't want to be seen alive in a Mc D. 'restaurant' (my stomach revolts when I use the terms Mc D. and restaurant together). Well, I might have lost all my games but I had fun playing them! Anyhow, Donnie, I accept the coupon of shame and will donate a price for the next LEPer tourney!

The tournament of LEPers is in full swing and I have to say that I am already having fun despite having lost the first round. It was nice playing live chess again and 'meeting' other chess bloggers is - well - priceless. After some lively discussion of lease conditions with my landlord I arrived late for my game against Chessaholic. Luckily for me the game started relatively quiet, even though it seems that both of us had no clue about the opening (I only very recently started to experiment with the English Opening). In the end, I messed up and allowed Chessaholic to get two connected passed pawns, leaving me no chances (aside from the draw by repitition I overlooked...) in the end, see my analysis below. Anyhow, I try to focus more on the good things lately: I got an enjoyable hour of chess and met another fun guy I am looking forward to meeting again for a game or two. Next round this week against Blunderprone.

A while ago, Donnie from Liquid Egg Products organized a nice chess blogger tourney on FICS. He announced the second "Tournament of Lepers" late April and I signed up for it, provided that it wouldn't start before June because I was very busy in May. Well, I am still busy at work and with private matters and totally forgot about it - until yesterday, when my trusty RSS reader notified me of the first round, and I am "in".

My first reflex was to leave a comment saying something like "sorry, I am way too busy". After all, I have already trouble keeping up with my correspondence games at ChessWorld. But on second thought, I decided to play. May be a few nice games against fellow chess bloggers are just the thing I need to relax a little. I just have to remind myself to take it easy and NOT curse myself for an hour or so after I lose. Anyway, first round this week - I will play White against Chessaholic.

As I started playing chess online I thought this would be a rather unsocial hobby. While many chess players come and go and I hardly play more than a pair of games against the same person, I am always pleased to play chess with a few "regulars". DreadPirateJosh is one of the first persons I played chess with and I still remember that some of his encouraging words helped me not to give up. Here is a game from our latest encounter. Most of the pieces came off the board quickly and I found myself in a promising endgame position, one pawn up. After a few careful miscalculations, however, the pirate managed to sneak a pawn to promotion and I resigned. I tried my best to understand this endgame better. While I have now an idea where I went wrong, I still don't have the skill to convert my one pawn advantage into a victory (I tried a few times against the computer), but may be t=it was a draw in the first place, anyway. Comments, particularly from more experienced endgame aficionados, welcome! (hint, hint, ...)

I updated the chess games database I am using and put the new version in the downloads section. It is a collection of more than 578000 chess games I put together from various sources on the Internet. In particular, I'd like to acknowledge TWIC for the latest master games and the chess archive of the U Pittsburgh for older chess games. The database is available both in SCID and PGN format. The old version got a few hundred hits, so I hope some people who don't want to spend the money for one of the commercial databases might find this useful.