Challenger volume 24 number 1

Challenger is the magazine of the U.S. Braille Chess Association. A 2-year membership in the USBCA is $15.

1. From the Editor

Welcome to the January 2010 issue of Challenger. 2009 was a difficult year for many people. Let's hope for better in this new year. I want to thank Alan Dicey for a very good job of editing the June 2009 issue.

For many USBCA members, it is time to pay dues. Your dues should be sent to our treasurer, Alan Schlank. His postal address is 4019 N. River St. Arlington, VA 22207. Dues costs $15 for two years. Checks should be made out to the USBCA. If you completed the Hadley School courses recently, you have a free membership for two years.

This issue includes results of our 2009 correspondence tournaments and interesting articles on chess experiences by Donna Jodhan and Charles Rivard.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome. This is your magazine. What would you like to see in future issues? Do you have questions about any aspect of playing chess? What would you like to see the USBCA accomplish in the future? Let us hear from you.

Challenger is designed to be easy to read for everyone. Items are numbered, and you can search for the beginning of the next item, since each item is preceded by a line of asterisks.

This issue of Challenger is being sent to current USBCA members. If you are not a member, we invite you to join. If you do not wish to receive Challenger, just let us know.

2. A Message from the President

Dear Fellow USBCA Members, We all here in America have so much to be thankful for, perhaps some are like myself, and forget sometimes how many thousands and thousands of things we take for granted, things, well that we should be very thankful for!

I would hope many would agree with me that One of these things is our “adaptive Chess Sets” also known as the “Tactile Chess Set” which allows us to play the great sport of Chess, with not only other Blind or Visually Impaired Chess enthusiasts, but also with Sighted Chess players, on the most perfectly level playing field as any sport Blind or Visually Impaired people can play with Sighted people!

I believe we can also be very Thankful for this our esteemed group, the United States Braille Chess Association. A great group of folks who, although we are spread across our entire wonderful nation, have become good friends, shared great times, enjoyable time, playing Chess with each other!

I believe many of us can be Thankful for The Hadley School for the Blind, and those great Chess Courses, where many of our members were introduced to and learned how to play the great sport of Chess, yes and Mr. Bob Rathbun, the very kind, caring, Chess Course Instructor!

This reminds me to ask you all , Please mention to any Blind or Visually Impaired friends, or acquaintances, that they can very easily enroll in these Hadley School for the Blind Chess Courses, receive that Highest quality, full size, “adaptive Chess Set” all absolutely free of cost, by simply calling the Hadley School Student Services Department at 800-526-9909.

I believe we, as a group, had a very good year in 2009, having exciting Tournaments, and playing those Friendly Games, dramatically increasing our USBCA membership, and spreading the word to many Blind or Visually Impaired Folks, that Chess is a fantastic source of inexpensive exciting entertainment, a great hobby. And I am sure we will continue to do this and even more good things in 2010!

3. Real Time Chess

We now have a New Division for our USBCA, a "Real Time Games" Division, in addition to the "Correspondence Games" Division.

The USBCA has receive two "Chat Rooms" from the owner of the For-The-People organization, who donated them to us at absolutely no expense, or strings attached !

Playing "Real Time" Chess Games over the Internet, is almost exactly like playing Over-The-Board Chess, it is a fantastic exciting Fun experience! A game is played in a couple of hours. It is voice-chat over-the-board chess. It is not correspondence chess or email chess. You speak your moves to your opponent, using the same Algebraic Chess Notation we all use in Correspondence Chess Games! But it is just like if you were playing your opponent face to face!

You will need to plug a microphone into your computer, that you can purchase at so many stores, for less than 10 dollars!

You must be a USBCA member, friend of an USBCA member or a family member of an USBCA member to use the USBCA Chess Den chat room to play your chess games.

The room is password protected. To receive the “Password” contact any of the USBCA Executive Board of Officers.

You must also be a member of the For The People organization to gain access to the room. For-the-people.com is a set of voice chat rooms. It is absolutely free. To register for for-the-people, go to the web site, for-the-people.com, and follow the directions. the process of registering does take a few days. Unless you are registered, you will not be allowed to enter into the USBCA Chess Den chat room. So, to register, go to: http://www.for-the-people.com and click on "join" and follow the sign up process. Once registered, go to the For-The-People home page, click on "chatrooms", enter your username and password and click on the USBCA Chess Den chat room. It is easy to find and very easy to access. It is all screen reader and Braille display friendly!

If you have a problem in registering or in entering the USBCA Chess Den, e-mail FTPTechTeam@for-the-people.com.

Playing Real Time Chess is something many of our current members want to do! I believe it will be an additional concept in attracting Blind or Visually Impaired Chess enthusiasts to join our USBCA organization, as I must tell you, through the many List groups for Blind People I am subscribed to, I have met many Blind Chess players that simply do not wish to play "Correspondence" Chess, and they join other Internet Groups instead of our fine USBCA. There are dozens of Internet groups where they can go to play Chess!

If you have any questions regarding this "Real Time Games" Chess, of course please contact me.

My email address is: adicey@bellsouth.net.

4. USBCA Results, Ratings and Games

5. Why I Turned to Chess

Up until about six years ago, chess had just been a dream of mine; that is, all I wanted to do was just learn to play. I had bought a slim braille booklet on the basics and rudiments of chess back in the early 90s, along with an adapted chessboard. But, truth be told, I never really paid much attention to it until I lost most of my vision about six years ago.

Before turning to chess, I was very much of an outdoors sports person. I was heavily involved with such things as ice skating, swimming, and skiing, but, upon losing my vision, I became very nervous about navigating outdoors and I had to really push myself to keep up with my ice skating. However, I persevered and I am glad that I did. But something was missing. Something I wanted to add to my repertoire of hobbies to compensate for my vision loss.

I was born with very little vision, but when I was a teen I received a cornea transplant that enabled me to gain a fair amount of sight. But, I was still considered to be legally blind. With my new found sight, I took the opportunity to explore and learn much, and, this included exploring possibilities to learn board games. After buying my adapted chessboard, I spent a wee bit of time with it, but, it was not until 2002, just before losing my vision, that I really decided to get serious about entering the world of chess. In that year, I happened to meet a wonderful lady named Nadia Shishkina, a Russian lady, and a chess teacher.

It did not take much for Nadia to encourage me to start learning, and, just before losing my vision, I managed to learn enough from her to get started with the basics. I stayed in touch with Nadia and upon losing my vision it was she who encouraged me to get serious about my chess. It took about three years after losing my vision for me to really get going, and when I did, I did not stop. My first stop along the way was in Ottawa, Canada, with my friend Ray Barfitt. He patiently started to coach me and mentor me and he encouraged me to buy some Braille chess books from the Royal National Institute for Blind People (RNIB) in order to improve my skills.

I also took the plunge to expand my circle of chess friends at a local chess club, but this did not work very well for me. I ran into some chess instructors who felt that I should be playing with blind players instead of sighted ones. Nadia and Ray continued to push me to keep on going, and last year I took one big step forward when I signed up for the Hadley School's chess program. This all came about when an acquaintance put me in touch with Alan Dicey, a truly wonderful man and a true motivator. I completed the Hadley program in September, and since then, I have been playing in the Swiss division tournament as well as with others on the USBCA list.

Chess has opened up many doors for me. I continue to make many new friends. I am using chess to help me cultivate more patience, become more disciplined in my job as well as in my personal life, and most of all, I am using it to help others. I hope that I can find opportunities to travel to other countries in order to promote chess among blind persons.

I'd like to thank Nadia, Ray, and Alan for having been a part of my chess adventures, and I look forward to meeting many others like them.

6. My Chess Experience, Or Lack Thereof

Before getting into my chess experience, I’ll let you know that one of my passions is computer gaming.

When I have gotten the opportunity, and been fortunate enough to be selected to be a member of a beta-testing team, I’ve done my best to help debug computer games for blind people. There has been discussion on e-mail lists dealing with gaming, and some people will complain that some of the games are from the old days. They want something new. Every so often, someone will develop a game that is a version of a game that sighted people used to play in the 1980s. Pong is one of those games. Some gamers aren’t interested because it is one of those old behind-the-times games. What they don’t realize is that, although the game was popular a long time ago, it is a new game to blind people. Just because a game has been around for a long time, this does not mean that it is obsolete! If you have never played it before, it is new to you, and that’s what counts. Some games are only popular for a few years, and then they lose their replay value. Others are still popular after many, many years. Chess is one of those games that has withstood the test of time. It has great replay value. Think about this--have you seen games of chess that are exactly like others that have been played? I doubt it. Something always crops up during a chess battle that is a surprise. A game can be vastly in favor of one player. That player makes a blunder, or the other player makes a few brilliant unexpected moves, and the game is totally different than it was. This is just part of what makes chess such a great game.

Now for my experiences. Firstly, I have never been able to see. I’ve been totally blind since birth. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been interested in chess. Oddly enough, my Dad and older brother used to play the game once in a while, before I learned how. I got interested in the game because I liked the shapes of the pieces. I just thought they felt cool. This was when I was about five years old. I did not know that adapted chess sets existed.

I was not a good checker player, but I did play against the California state checker champion using an adapted set of checkers, and he suggested that I learn to play chess. He said that I had the mind for it, and that it was a great game. He said that there are chess sets that blind players can get, and he found a catalog of aids and appliances for the blind in which such a set was listed. I put it on the back burner of my mind, planning to learn the game one of these days.

Years later, I was visiting a friend and found a chess set adapted for the blind on his kitchen table. I asked him to show me the game. He wasn’t very good at it, and he had some rules that did not follow the international (FIDE) rules, but I sort of caught on to the basics of the game and found it very interesting.

I did some experimenting with a talking chess computer made by Fidelity Electronics called Chess Challenger, and got to where I could play a fairly good game on the intermediate level, using a separate board and men and making the moves as the computer told me where to move its men. The board on the machine was not accessible. Although it was magnetic, and the black squares were ridged, the magnets weren’t strong enough to keep the men in place as the board was explored by touch, and the men weren’t tactually marked for color identification. I thought that this could surely be improved upon. A blind friend bought an updated model of the one I had, featuring a pressure sensitive board. You pressed down on the square you were moving from, and pressed on the square you moved to. Then, the computer made its move and announced it. I bought some refrigerator magnets and cut them to the size of the squares and stuck them in place. I glued a magnet on the bottom of each chess piece and placed a bit of glue onto the top of each black piece. Now, we had modified an electronic chess opponent so that it could be used by a blind player without using a separate set of men and tactile board. It worked very well.

I bought a Radio Shack chess computer in 2000 that worked in the same way, but gave different beeps to indicate its moves instead of voicing them. I still have this chess computer, and find it something to take when I travel away for a weekend or longer. You don’t have to turn it on if you find a human opponent. Just use it as a chess board and men to play each other. If there is no human opponent, turn it on and have a game. I couldn’t beat the darned thing, though. I decided to try a different approach to improve my chess. Maybe I wasn’t using the right thought processes? So, on a whim, I signed up for the Hadley Chess Course for Beginners. Bob Rathbun is a great instructor, and I did get a surprise when the stuff came in the mail. There was a very nice adapted chess set along with the brailled course material! It didn’t take all that long to complete the first chess course, and I could already see improvement in my game. So I went on to the advanced course, which took me quite a bit longer to complete.

Although I am ranked low, I love the game, and wish I had more time to play. I like the fact that, regardless of whether you have a physical handicap or not, you can play chess. Over the phone, over the Internet, through e-mail, or through “snail mail”, your opponent won’t be aware of your handicap unless you choose to mention it during friendly chat during the game. Over-the-board, real time chess is my favorite method of play, because you can razz each other, if your opponent agrees that it is OK to do so, during the game. Gloat when he or she blows it! Receive good-natured ribbing when you blow it! It’s all in good fun. I have a tactile chess clock so that I can keep track of the time used by both players. I really like games that are “sudden death”. Set the clock for an hour, or an hour and a half for each player. If you don’t checkmate your opponent before the time runs out, you lose. I’m still working on not making hasty moves, and on looking at the board more closely during games, but I thought you’d like to see the last part of my completion of the second course from Hadley, in which you have to play a game against Bob Rathbun. Here it is, as I recorded it:

Chess is a game that anyone can play. If you haven’t tried it, go for broke, and begin to have a blast!