Archive for the ‘Sport’ Category

Toss in the Moss 2005

Monday, August 29th, 2005

Toss in the Moss 2005 at Forsythe Park

For the second week-end in a row, I played in an Ultimate tournament, but this was the first in about two years that I actually traveled to. Our (former) masters team, THOR, decided to try “one last tournament”. We added some young talent and trekked to Savannah for the popular Toss in the Moss tournament.

I don’t know why they keep holding this tournament in the heat of August, but this year wasn’t so bad as the temps stayed in the 80’s at the cost of some occasional downpours. Forsythe Park, shown in the photo, is the primo location for playing, having great fields and a heart-of-the-city location. Unfortunately, 40-plus teams is way too many for the park, and we ended up playing most of our games at satellite fields.

We finished 2-2 the first day to land in the B division for Sunday, where we lost in the semis to a very fast team from Columbia, South America. We older players appreciated a comment overheard from the college team we beat in the quarterfinals, “they’re just too fast for us,” even if it was directed at our younger players.

We didn’t come away empty-handed. We won the Saturday-morning opening parade by chanting a Viking verse as we marched with plastic swords, hammers and home-made Viking helments.

Masters Hat Tournament

Sunday, August 21st, 2005

Dwayne in action at masters tournamentWith a heat index of 109° this must have been the worst week-end of the year to hold a masters tournament, but that’s where I was from 10:30 to 5:30 on Saturday. Fortunately, we were blessed with an afternoon shower to cool things off for a while. I didn’t feel too wiped out at the end of the day (just hungry), but I am sore today and my skinned knee looks a little worse.

Mark in action at masters tournamentIt was a hat tournament organized by Dave Kaminski with teams assigned semi-randomly, and I ended up a on well-balanced team. We went 3-0 through pool play, and, after some minor re-balancing of teams, we kept rolling through the semifinals only to run out of poise in the finals. All of our suppressed mistakes manifested themselves in the second half of the finals where we didn’t score a single goal.

Between games at masters tournamentOne thing about masters players (33+) is that they come prepared. We had plenty of shade tents, watermelon, first-aid supplies, etc. Though the fields were in excellent condition, we had to supply our own shade, as seen in the sideline photo.

Slip and slide at masters tournamentIt was Rich’s first masters event, so perhaps that accounts for the slip-n-slide. He’s making a diving catch onto the slide in the photo. He even went to the trouble of lugging a cooler full of water out to the fields just for the slip-n-slide. The cooler turned out to be very popular for dunking one’s head in to cool down.

High-Low at Durham Sectional

Monday, July 11th, 2005

Mom and I played every session of the recent Durham bridge sectional. Friday and Saturday we had an amazing run of finishing first overall for all four sessions. Well, “overall” for the 0-200 players, that is. That included a 70+% session on Saturday morning, which is pretty rare — 60% is often good enough to win. We collected about 9.5 masterpoints, which is almost as many as I’ve won all year before this.

Most of the competition wasn’t too strong, of course, but there was one quite good team that kept finishing second to us. They got their revenge on Sunday by handily winning the Sunday Swiss teams event, where you need a team of four players to compete. We drafted my friends Rob and Brad who are good players if a little rusty. They did fine, but Mom and I couldn’t get in sync for too many hands, and we ended up in last place out of 10 teams (except for the two teams that bailed out early).

The event was well-attended and stretched the resources of the organizers, but they were up to the challenge. For some sessions, they even had tables set up in the hallways. The location was the basement of Northgate Mall in Durham — a place I never knew existed. There’s nothing about the basement on the mall map except for a mention in the directory of the location “Office Area”, which includes a few service businesses.

Soccer Highlight

Thursday, June 2nd, 2005

I’m playing organized soccer for the first time in my life in a recreational (no score keeping) lunchtime league, and I finally scored a goal. And it was a header even. One of the few skilled players on our team made a perfect crossing lob in front of the goal, and I managed to stick my head in the way for the goal.

Actually, I had a goal a couple of weeks ago, but it was in the wrong net. I was playing racing an opposing forward to the ball in our territory, and our goalie was calling for me to pass it back to him. I didn’t have much control being on the run and kicked it perfectly into the top left corner of the goal.

Predictable Randomness

Tuesday, May 31st, 2005

One GNU Chess source file I didn’t port to Java was the random number generator, and that turned out to be a problem for processing the binary opening book files.

The board position hash codes are 64-bit numbers created by xor’ing a set of hash codes that come from the random number generator. These hash codes are written to the binary book file, so in order to read a binary book file, you have to get the exact same sequence of “random” numbers from your random number generator. So I ported over the random number algorithm and was then able to read the binary book files which allows the program to play moves from the opening book.

I also got PGN file reading working, so I don’t know of any remaining functional issues (except for the i/o handling, especially control-C, which I may just ignore).

I tried the program on the 300 “Win at Chess” problems. The Java version got 278 correct, and the C version got 284 correct. Both used 5 seconds per move on my Mac G5.

Final Round of Chess Tourney

Friday, May 27th, 2005

white to moveIs there any glory in winning the B division? That’s what it came down to in my final round game. I needed a win against Kevin to claim the “title” outright and a draw to tie for it. It looked doubtful for a while, but I got the win.

I traded queens early to force his king to recapture and lose its right to castle. At the first diagrammed position, I thought I saw an easy way to win a pawn–just trade away the knight at f6 and then take the now-unguarded pawn at h7. I regretted it immediately when he played g6 to trap my bishop. black to moveHowever, computer analysis says the capture was actually a good move, and it turned out I was able to hang onto the bishop for quite a while, partly due to threats against the king and other Black pieces.

Our moves weren’t always best, but they were usually in the top 5, according to Fritz. Until the position of the second diagram, that is, where Black blundered. Fritz recommends Bh6, threatening my knight, pawn, and king all on the same diagonal, but Black moved Rh8 allowing the knight fork. black to moveA few trades later, we arrived at the final diagrammed position where Black is tied down to watching over the advanced g-pawn and can’t keep the White king out of the center.

Chess Tourney Rounds 4 and 1

Tuesday, May 24th, 2005

White to moveI’ve uploaded PGN players for my round 4 and round 1 games. Both of these games were wins playing black, which gives me 3 wins and a draw with one round to go. The round 4 game got off to a quick start with all 8 minor pieces traded off by the 16th move. That was fine by me since it would reduce the chance of time trouble, and it left my opponent with doubled pawns, but it also cut down on the tactical possibilities. However, the rest of the game was not dull. Douglas put all his hopes on a king attack by lining up all three major pieces on the f-file. I thought I had it covered and took the opportunity to pick up a few neglected pawns. He made the best move in the diagrammed position, but after a sequence of less-than-perfect moves for both sides, I avoided trouble and started pushing my passed a-pawn to win.

Can White trap the queen?The round 1 game against Nancy had a couple of similarities. Both started with a Sicilian defence and with my queen venturing into enemy territory to pick up a pawn, but instead of counter-attacking like Douglas, Nancy made an effort to trap my queen. The net was getting pretty tight until she blundered and left a rook unguarded. Otherwise I think my queen can barely escape by giving back the pawn. The computer shows that my previous move (h7-h5) was a waste, and I should have moved my knight to d7 and then c5 instead with prospects for trading my queen for a rook and a bishop.