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A Shogi Champion Turns to Chess
FFriedel writes "Michael Jordan tried it with baseball, and it, like, didn't work out too well for him. But what about a professional Shogi champion switching to chess? Yoshiharu Habu, one of the most gifted players in the history of the ancient Japanese game, has taken a casual interest in chess - and already reached IM strength. He is currently playing in a tournament in Paris, where chess grandmaster Joel Lautier interviewed him." Shogi is a very odd game if you're used to chess. Most of the pieces have biases toward forward motion, and when you capture an enemy piece, you can bring it back into play for your side.
03:30, AMSTERDAM, HOLLAND
I was standing at the bar in the Blue Cafe in Dam Square. The first thing I noticed was her hair. It was blonde, shoulder length, and had a slightly teased style. Two young Dutch boys were competing for her. They were in her face. She was getting high off the attention but the odds were in her favor tonight; it was late and she was one of three females left in the cafe. She was halfway decent looking too. An hour ago she had gone unnoticed; now she was beautiful. She was at least ten years older than the Dutch boys. I studied her face as she listened to them speak, here and there a line went crooked, the beginnings of a jowl quivered slightly.
I was in love with her.
My friend Mimi was tending bar. Her hair was straw like and receding. She was around thirty and had a face that had seen many nights without sleep. She leaned toward me over the bar. Her eyes were small and paranoid. She was tweaking badly. "It's here," she said.
"Where?"
"On top of the rubber machine next to the ladies room."
"How much?"
"One hundred fifty a gram."
It was expensive but it was late. It was nearly impossible to score gack after eleven in Amsterdam. I reached into my pocket to get the money but Mimi motioned for me to put it away. "Go try it out in the toilet first, then you pay me," she said. Mimi was always straight up with me. Mimi was a good woman. The rest rooms were on the second level. I moved toward the narrow, steep staircase at the front of the cafe and came close to the blonde and her two Dutch boys. Our eyes met for a second. She gave me a half smile and one of the Dutch boys turned and looked at me with suspicion. I continued toward the staircase.
I made it to the rubber machine and reached on top with my right hand and there it was: two neat bundles in a zip lock bag. A smile stretched across my face. The men's toilet was empty. There was only one stall but it had a real door with a lock. I moved into the stall and locked the door and quickly chopped up a line on the toilet paper dispenser, then rolled up a twenty-five guilder bill and sucked up the line. It didn't taste too good. I waited. Then the sweet sensation came to my bowels, like someone stroking my large intestine, playing me like a cello.
On the way back to the bar I didn't look at the blonde, although I wanted her now more than ever. Mimi put a Heineken on the bar for me. "How is it?" she asked.
'O.K. Thanks again." She nodded and I gave her the money. I was just looking up from my beer when I spotted the blonde heading my way. I couldn't get over her hair. I gave her a small smile and lit up a cigarette.
"Hello," she said.
"Hi, what's your name?"
"Margaret."
First post claimed in the name of HOWARD STERN. If you have a fucking problem with this then you need to request permission to suck my dick.
"What do you want from me?"
"I want you to admit it."
"Admit what?"
"That I'm beautiful. I am beautiful and you know it."
"You're about as beautiful as an empty fifty gallon drum."
"Bullshit. You want it and that's a fact."
"I just want to be left alone"
"You're not a man. You're pathetic."
"That angle won't work here: I don't have any respect for myself let alone the male animal."
"Well, that says it all -- you don't even respect yourself."
"Fuck respect. I'm not interested in it. I'm not afraid of losing it."
"You're afraid of me aren't you?"
"You're not even an issue."
"I can get any one I want."
"Not this one."
"That's because you're a coward."
"You know something? If you were interesting enough to justify it I would give a good portion of myself just to be there that broken and colorless morning when you get out of bed and look in the mirror only to discover that your precious skin is sagging off your cheeks and chin, and your tits are flattened, empty sacks of blue veins and bruises and your ass crack no longer looks like a crack but more like a streak of shit, and the only chance at beauty you have left is in your eyes but there was never any beauty there to begin with, and you finely come to that long anticipated revelation that you are nothing -- that you have always been nothing."
She smacks me hard across the face. "Who the fuck do you think you are? You don't know me!
"I know you. You're about as complicated as a bicycle with training wheels."
She is angry but to my surprise she doesn't move away. She sits on my chest and waits for me to exhale. Then she whispers into my ear, "You can't get away from me. You think you can but you never will. I run your life and you can't even admit it."
"I'll admit that I'm afraid of you but that's it. Now get away from me."
"If I really left you alone. If I never so much as glanced at you you'd feel so worthless you'd kill yourself. And after you were dead and nobody gave a shit somebody else would take me."
"Is that supposed to change my mind about you?"
"You just don't get it, do you? I expect nothing of you."
She drops on the bed and pulls me down with her. "Why do you hate me so much?" she asks.
"I don't hate you. I hate the way you use yourself."
"There's no such thing," she says.
I'm too tired to fight now. We are silent for a long time. The room falls dark and I begin to relax. She is close now, yet I am unaroused. Then she begins to whisper things. Everything around me becomes soft and weightless. She speaks of strange places that are warm and delicate and I don't understand. It doesn't bother me that I don't understand. I just know that the words are beautiful and I don't want them to end. Then I am being drawn half into her. For a moment I am frightened and try to pull back. All the time, all the energy, all the wars I've had with her in the past. Always fighting, grasping, always chaos. Convinced if I gave in I would be devoured. Always feeling ugly and dwarfed by her. I'd look into her eyes and see the reflection of my own failure. When she reached out to me with an open hand I saw a trick, a ploy that smelled of sex and manipulation and ulterior motives. But I had never given her enough recognition. I had never looked away from my own insanity's long enough to see her for what she was. She was cool and pale and sweet and full of insecurities, weaknesses, misconceptions, but you would never know it by looking at her. She would never know it by looking at her self. When I concentrated and she came full circle in my mind she really wasn't a bad creature, just lovely and ugly and scared and lonely like the rest of us. Now, there is a brief window, a disarmament brought on by exhaustion. I can no longer resist. Pieces of me begin to fall away and she washes over them with a deep light, and for a moment I feel as if this is the place I'd been struggling toward my entire life. I feel as if this is the place I have been trying to speak of -- and for once I feel I am worthy of it. For once I feel that I have always been worthy of it.
And she sings and sings.
And I listen.
For a brief moment, I listen.
No kidding, you notice how the weather is totalled fucked up this year? It seems like the weather's 2 motnhs behind schedule, or something like that. Doesn't seem isolated to just Canada either. I've heard China's having the same problem too.
Think it's just a freak year, or a new trend?
As I'm putting the stuff away Paul opens the sliding door to the back lounge and sticks his head in.
There is hope in his eyes. "What do you have?" he asks.
"Meth."
He looks down at the bag in my hand. "I don't know anything about that stuff. What does it do?"
"It's an amphetamine, like coke, only it's a lot more powerful. But the initial euphoria is not as intense."
"What do you mean it's more powerful?"
"One good line will keep you up till morning." I hold the bag out to him. "This stuff is a commitment."
He rolls his eyes. "Forget it. I can't go through that again." He enters the back lounge and kicks off his boots.
On my way out I turn back to him. "Just tell me if you want anything." I say without moving my jaw, my back teeth clenched. When I get to the front lounge Jake is sitting there alone, curled up in the corner of the couch, smoking a cigarette. "What do you got Jack?" He asks, his eyebrows raised high, his eyes fixed directly on mine.
"Meth."
"That shit is going to kill you."
"I know."
"How can you do thaaat?" he asks, the tone of his last word steadily descending. "Doesn't that stuff make you feel like crap?"
"Believe me, I don't want this shit, but I'm not going to find coke in Bismarck tonight so I'll take what I can get."
Jake shakes his head. "I can't even think about doing that garbage. I don't need drugs to induce insomnia; I have it naturally!"
"Nobodies asking you to do it."
"I just can't understand why anyone would want to stay up for days."
"That part of it is just a symptom. Stick to your Zanex and don't worry about me."
I sit down at the table and light up a smoke. I will stop drinking now, for as long as I have the drug. I'm still partially social but I will soon want to disappear from sight. Anyhow, the word is out. The fiends will soon be showing up at my door.
I cut out another line for myself. This is where I go wrong. One line of this crap will last for two hours, but I am craving the shudder of coke, that moment when I sprout wings and ejaculate, and even though I know this will not happen I still do the meth every fifteen to twenty minutes as if it is coke, struggling to catch that feeling and just missing every time.
Then, a knock at the door. I look at Jake. "Answer that, please -- it's probably the rest of the fiends."
Jake answers the door. Ray enters with his stomach jutting out in front of him. Ray is an asshole but he is honest about it and I can tolerate an asshole that is at least honest about it. He looks down at me, his eyes slightly bulging. "What do you got, peanut butter?"
"Yeah."
"Let me see."
"I thought you didn't do this white trash crap?"
"I just want to take a look at it."
I understand. Ray does coke exclusively. He is strict about it. He feels that meth will somehow make him a lower class junky. He just wants to look at it because he knows he isn't getting high tonight. He just wants to imagine without touching, that's how much of a fiend he is.
I take the bag out and hand it to him. Then another knock at the door. This time Todd walks in. Todd is a good person -- honest, professional. He is also an old speed fiend. He was hooked for ten years and then quit but it left him with some permanent damage to the nervous system: twitching and mumbling; sometimes you can catch him talking to his luggage. Now he only dabbles. He dabbles every day but he won't do more than a tiny bit. He is too cheap to buy so he always grubs. He doesn't say anything to me, he just stands there with his hands in his pockets, his eyes darting about the room but never falling on me.
I take the bag back from Ray and remove the brick. "You want some Todd?" I ask without looking up from the table. "Ah, ah, yea, yea...just a little bit though, just a little bit. Don't need much." I cut a little out and look up at him. "Is that good?"
"Oh...yea, yea, yea, that's fine. That's great. That's great." He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a ready-made bindle. "Ah, just scoop it into here for me. Please."
I fill his bindle and they leave.
The drug is kicking in hard. My jaw is cemented closed and my guts shift. Perversions flash through my mind: doing things to woman, unseemly things. It's time for me to disappear. I get up silently and go to the bunk area. I kick off my boots and climb into my bunk. Images of woman blind me for a moment. Images of the openings in there bodies, penetrated, engulfing, making guttural sounds that seem inches from my ear. I reach down to the foot of my bunk and grab Celine's Journey. It is a soft cover edition and the cover is black and white, mostly black, which makes it easier to see the drug as I use the book as a cutting surface. I reach behind me and flick on my bunk light, then pull my curtain closed. My imagination is testing the physical limits of the female rectum. Without blood, without resistance the impossible is accomplished. I turn on my side, facing the wall, and chop out a line on Celine. I consume the line and then quickly flick off the light and lay on my back.
The engine cranks over and the walls of the bus rattle.
At the deepest level there is always failure; every creature, every blade of grass, every millisecond of time harbors the innate seed of failure. Life has made a quixotic attempt and it has failed. Humanity has failed. Art is exposed and proven impotent. The masses cannibalize each other. They murder everything that moves and everything that does not move, driven to insanity as they grope for some form of comfort, of purpose, of value in the cold eye of existence. I do another line and it paralyzes me. I am now dead, only my eyes are open and I can still see, and my blood somehow circulates and there is the possibility of the next breath. The walls of the bus seem to disintegrate around me and suddenly I am being shot through the frigid night, the elements peeling away the layers of my skin as if they have been waiting for this opportunity since the moment of my birth. The drug is pushing my heart through my chest. Tomorrow is lost. A minute from now is lost. I hold on for the next breath.
No way! I talk to 14 year old girls, and they talk in a completely normal way. Maybe 8 year olds do talk like that.
Once upon a time in Tony Blairworld, there was a fugal man called FreeBSD McHazy Maze Cave. Remember that he was interested in fallow screenshots, and led a peaceful life until he started to love dodgy facts. Shortly after, his ethnocentric knackers stopped working, and he died of sexism. The end!
If Shogi is too complicated for you to learn, there is the other far east variant called kung fu chess. Where the martial arts meets with chess.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Judging by how little activity there's been on this topic so far, I'd say that moderating as "redundant" my link above to a description of the game merely indicates that the moderator is the only one for whom a description is redundant.
some one mod this OT karma whore down
In the final round, I fell apart completely. Resigned after ~20 moves. I'd played my oppenent before that tournament, and after it, and I'm much better than he is, but the weekend caught up with me. Still my favorite tourney ever though.
Thanks for the link, that explained a lot. I'll be looking for the moron that moderated you redundant in metamod.
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