Oh please god let Kevin become a recurring character. Maybe he already is – I admit that my PA fandom was late to the party.

But in the years that I’ve been reading, here’s what I’ve observed – it’s becoming increasingly difficult to place Gabe in the role of dunce. He’s just not anymore. He’s grown. He’s made valid points.

We need a good old fashioned jackass back. Enter Kevin.

On the topic of the comic itself (and the related belief in the cloud), it’s becoming increasingly apparent to the mucky mucks of the gaming universe that Steve Jobs is a goddamn genius. Amazon made the same play with the Kindle to universal applause. Now the Kindle-less murmur that they may use a different platform because of open formats, and the people with Kindles (and they vastly outnumber the smattering of people who care about stuff like this) go “yeah yeah, blah blah, pardon me while I read a book on my Kindle.”

When the market is closed, or even if the market is open but tightly controlled, you make more money. When mere punks can run to GameBarn and get a used copy of your thing, it’s less appealing. Indies, as a rule, cannot survive without the “one paid copy per customer” model, so like Jerry I come down firmly on the side of shackles and overlords.

At the end of the day, it’s a sort of indie-litism on my part. “If you can make money peddling wrestling then the consumers deserve what they get.” Meanwhile, things like World of Goo continue to be made.

So to follow up on my previous post about the relative strength of the competition on Chess with Friends: It’s low.

I’ve actually deleted the app from my phone. At one point I think I was juggling about fifteen games, and it was a little like doing a simultaneous exhibition in a mental institution. And there’s the horrible truth of chess, that playing someone too high above your level is demoralizing for you and boring for them. I’m no great shakes, but I can say I was bored.

I looked up my old haunt, PlayChess.de, and it appears to be plugging along. A quick search through the chess-on-the-Internet universe, however, made it clear that Chess.com is the center of that universe. It has a lot of grandmasters playing and writing, a weekly column from one of my favorite chess authors (the American IM Jeremy Silman), and a number of “social” features that make it an excellent service.

There’s even a Portland, Oregon group – although it’s a bit small and sad right now. That’s where you come in. Go create a membership (it’s a freemium service) and get connected on the Portland group – or any group that strikes your fancy. We can be friends and braid each other’s hair and stuff.

Best of all, you can leverage all the delightful resources that they have for people who want to actually improve at chess.

If you’d rather just live vicariously through me, the widget to the right should be your huckleberry. That 1672 rating is good enough to be in the top tenth of the players on the site, and roughly equivalent to my (now horribly out-of-date) USCF ranking.

NB: Facing a chess board from White’s point of view, the board can be divided into a grid, with rows numbered 1-8 and columns lettered A-H…so the white queen, for example, sits at d1 in the starting position. In such a schema, “e2-e4″ means “the pawn in front of the white king moves forward two spaces,” while “Bf1-c4″ means “the bishop to the right of the king moves four squares to the square c4.” Such notation will appear (infrequently) in this blog post.

I had such high hopes for Chess with Friends. Throughout college and well into my life down in San Francisco I played correspondence chess (of a sort) at PlayChess.de. The players were good, the server was stable, and there was always some sort of round robin or Swiss system tournament starting. Sometimes the tournaments were themed, so you could drink your fill of the King’s Gambit or other thought-provoking openings.

Chess with Friends places the ancient game in the hands of the iPhone/Touch gaming populace, some of whom are known for newbie methodologies. Except where newbies might still hit it big in a Scrabble clone multiplayer crossword tile game, the same person in a chess match with a person like, well, me, is going to have a hard time. And be – unknown to them and in the sweetest possible way – cursed at for being a dunce.

So, in an effort to assist those of you who downloaded the app because it was FREE ZOMG LOLZ, allow me to offer some tips.

This does not work.

Man, This Takes Me Back

Ah, the Scholar’s Mate. Boon companion to many a fourth grader. The Scholar’s Mate is some sort of ancient predecessor to the Rickroll. I don’t know how the lineage worked in between, but this little baby might be the world’s oldest gotcha. The point, as Wikipedia deftly states, is to capitalize on the weakest square in the starting position – f2 for White or f7 for Black. It’s possible to trap someone once, maybe, if they’re brand new at the game. Otherwise, it’s unlikely to secure you a win.

On the other hand, I just pointed out that the opposition on Chess with Friends is very soft – maybe this will net you a point here and there! Okay, fine – consider a world where this particular killer combo did get you a win, maybe even more than one. Is this what you want to accomplish? I’ll let you in on a secret: the first step in learning chess isn’t about winning. It’s about not sucking. Once you get past that stage, you can begin to consider mating your opponent. This opening is either rubbish because it is, in fact, rubbish, or it’s rubbish because it gets you results and keeps you off the path of learning the game.

There are no cheat codes in chess. It’s tears and headaches all the way down.

Think before you submit.

You have the rare and precious opportunity in Chess with Friends to move a piece, remove your virtual hand, and look at the position that might result. What do you suppose black would have done if they had given the position a second glance here?

What's Going to Happen Next?

Given half a second, they might have noticed that by moving the bishop to e6, they invited the white pawn to march forward and “fork” (attack two or more pieces at once) the bishop and knight. There are all kinds of reasons to review your move before you submit it, not least of which is that you can begin avoiding blunders like this one.

You have an opponent.

I know it’s crazy talk, but a lot of errors or positional gaffes occur because people fail to ask themselves, “why did my esteemed opponent make that move? What sort of nefarious plan is (s)he hatching?” I will give you an insanely obvious example, also based on a fork:

Put Yourself in Black's Shoes

Remember our Scholar? The attack has been rebuffed and Black has just moved his knight to d4. This attacks the Queen, but it also attacks the pawn at c2 with an eye toward the rook at a1. The rook is currently immobile, so in order to stop the knight from taking the rook we must stop the knight from taking the pawn. The White Queen, after many adventures and disappointments, can return home to d1 and stop both threats. Or she can shuffle across to d3 or c3, with the same result. The point is that you can’t just see the threat to the queen, you must also see a little way down the road of your opponent’s thoughts.

Napoleon burned the boats.

Actually, I don’t think he did. But you do, every time you move a pawn.

Oh the Humanity!

This is ridiculous on so many levels. Black went through the trouble of sticking his bishop in the pocket (aka fianchetto) and then blocked the bishop’s line of sight with a pawn. The kingside pawns are all on light squares, meaning that I can run roughshod over the dark squares with bishop and queen. Those same gaps are also great places to stick a knight (get a knight close to the fighting and all sorts of horrible and unexpected things can start to occur). A knight nestled into d6 cannot be chased away by a pawn – and pawns are about the only things that can reliably dislodge a knight.

Napoleon deployed forces.

This one I’m more sure of. Dude didn’t just send out a scout, willy nilly and hither and yon, hoping something would come of it. He mobilized entire armies, based on preplanned strategies. He organized the battlefield to his liking. As a chess player, you have to do the same. Everything needs to move according to a common design. In competitive chess, lots of attention is devoted to opening theory. That’s all well and good, but not essential – you shouldn’t have to memorize gobs of “they move here then I move here then they can either move here or here and in the first case I’ll…” to enjoy a game of chess. However, you do need to begin building your repertoire of “stuff I know about the first five-to-ten moves of a chess game.”

Possessing such a repertoire is such an invaluable gift that I will give you some starting nuggets here and now: