Vunak's Top 50 Combat Secrets Ch. 19

Chapter 19 – The Power of the Fork

Not a pitch fork, not a spoon and fork, not a fork lift, not a fork in the road, but a fork in chess. This is an offensive move that, not only attacks one piece, but it attacks two pieces simultaneously. For all of you non chess players, imagine two pawns 20 feet apart, and a horse gallops right in the center, the horse is now 10 feet from each pawn. With one leap he could get either one. If the pawn on the east runs away, he hits the pawn on the west. If the pawn on the west runs away he hits the pawn on the east. The value of attacking two things simultaneously, is immense, deep and even profound. This concept is universal and immutable. Regardless if we are discussing business, chess, debate, or martial arts. And in martial arts, the style of kick boxing that truly illustrates this point is Savate. If a regular kick boxer kicks your thigh, they aim, point and kick, directly at your thigh. If that same regular kick boxer wants to kick your head, they will aim, point and kick, directly to your head. If a Savate man however, wants to execute the same moves, he will aim and point his knee in between the thigh and the head. This move will be executed in the form of a fake, and will evoke a reaction from the adversary. They will either guard their head, in which case the Savate man will kick their thigh, or they will guard their thigh, in which case the Savate man will kick their head. Not only does this make it difficult, it makes it down right impossible for the opponent to know which attack will be finally executed. The opponent would literally have to have a crystal ball. Now these forks that we are referring too, when executed be a true “savateur” are always done in combinations. Say two, three, and as many as four at a time.

To me the most amazing thing about watching a “Savateur” perform a combination of forks, is exactly how slow these fellas can pull this off, when they want too. When one is crafty enough, they can literally kick and land, at 25% speed (pinpointing the jaw, the groin, solar plexus, kidneys or thigh) ! There is literally no speed required when one uses a fork. This is why, in Savate, the best Savateurs are between 50 and 70!

And of course the Brazilians have their fork… The difference between a purple belt and a black belt, is how they attack. Both can attack in single direct attacks, both can attack in combination attacks. However what differentiates the two, is the black belt is executing the progressive indirect attack i.e. the fork. The black belt is always attacking two, sometimes 3 things at one time. I put in 6 hours of private wrestling with Rickson every week for 4 and half years. Sometimes literally meeting him at 5 in the morning. And I can honestly tell you, that in the thousands and thousands of times that I have tapped from that man, every single solitary time he faked me out!

He would attack my arm, I would defend my arm, and in a nanosecond he would be attacking my foot, I would pull my foot in, and within a nanosecond I would be tapping to a choke. I am one of the few people that have had the privilege of spending thousands of hours with most of the Gracie brothers, Rolyer, Royce, Rorion, and Rickson. Many people have subsequently asked me how do they differ ?

---

Please check the Table of Contents for links to other chapters of this Online Book.

Read More

THIS DATE IN HISTORY: March 24

A belated selective cut and pasted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_24:

Events

1868 - Metropolitan Life Insurance Company is formed.

1900 - New York City Mayor Robert Anderson Van Wyck breaks ground for a new underground "Rapid Transit Railroad" that would link Manhattan and Brooklyn.

1934 - U.S. Congress passes the Tydings-McDuffie Act allowing the Philippines to become a self-governing commonwealth.

1936 - The longest game in NHL history was played between Detroit and Montreal. Detroit scored at 16:30 of the sixth overtime and won the game 1-0.

1944 - World War II: In an event later dramatized in the movie The Great Escape, 76 prisoners begin breaking out of Stalag Luft III.

1958 - Elvis Presley is officially inducted into the U.S.Army.

1989 - Exxon Valdez oil spill: In Prince William Sound in Alaska, the Exxon Valdez spills 240,000 barrels (42,000 m³) of petroleum after running aground.

1999 - Kosovo War: NATO commences air bombardment against Yugoslavia, marking the first time NATO has attacked a sovereign country.

Births

1855 - Andrew Mellon, American financier (d. 1937)

1874 - Harry Houdini, (Weisz Erik), Hungarian-born magician (d. 1926)

1930 - Steve McQueen, American actor (d. 1980)

Coincidentally, Steve McQueen starred in THE GREAT ESCAPE as mentioned above in the Events section on this date. Of course, in a previous post about movie car chases, he starred in BULLITT.

1951 - Tommy Hilfiger, American fashion designer

1960 - Kelly LeBrock, American actress

Probably best known for THE WOMAN IN RED and WEIRD SCIENCE. Wonder if she is still married to Steven Seagal?

1960 - Barry Horowitz, American professional wrestler

Barry Horowitz aka Mr. Technical's official site.

1960 - Nena, German pop singer

99 RED BALLOONS is a staple of 1980's music!

1965 - The Undertaker, American professional wrestler

1970 - Lara Flynn Boyle, American actress

TWIN PEAKS and RED ROCK WEST are 2 of my fave Lara Flynn Boyle's work.

Deaths

1905 - Jules Verne, French author (b. 1828)

A giant in the Science Fiction genre. Required reading.

1946 - Alexander Alekhine, Russian chess player (b. 1892)

A giant in the history of Chess.

Read More

Mental workouts

i work with an equities trader who loves sudokus... i once asked him why he liked it so much... he had 2 answers, one of which may be the secret to trading and the other to long life... will let you guess which of the below is which.

he said he always wants to challenge his mind, he believes that if the mind is not used, as one gets older, alzheimer's and the like will set in easily. if you have mental workouts when younger, as you get older, you will still have your wits about you. i've not done any research into this, but intuitively this makes sense. if you don't physically workout, your body will deteoriate.

he also said, that sometimes, as he does sudokus (or crosswords) it occupies his time and he is less inclined to trade... in today's volatile markets, you may think a stock is cheap being down 5% in a day, and you buy it only to have it go down another 3%... so by occupying his attention and time, he is less inclined to trade... or get into bad trades... don't get me wrong, every few seconds, he checks the screens, the quotes, and sees how things are playing out. his attention is not fully on the sudoku/crossword.

chess for me is a great mental workout. recently i started playing a game with a friend via a forum. the start and stop of the play is a little disconcerting. nothing like having a live responsive opponent in front of you. but despite that, he is very challenging. i am rusty, very very rusty. last time i played seriously was on a net forum, i played 2 games vs an expert-class player, he outclassed me by about 3 levels... meaning he was expected to win.. he did. i also had the position wrong in one of the games... i guess that is to be expected of a game that is played via a forum post.

back during my college days, i played a lot. every friday night, the manhattan chess club had a tournament. my friends and i would play, of course i had almost zero chance of winning.. many experts and masters were there... they may have even been a grandmaster or 2. imagine getting to play experts, masters and grandmasters every friday night? and consistently getting whupped. no matter how much i played and thought i improved, it was an humbling experience.

like boxing or MMA, there is something about chess for me that is this awesome contest of wills. both players are trying to impose their game on their opponents. moves are calculated with your plans of attack in mind... you think a few moves ahead... calculating what you think is the best response on his part to your move... he of course is doing the same... it becomes a contest of wills to see who can impose their attack over their opponent first... who has to 'flinch' and react to their opponent's attack and postpone your own to go on the defensive.

win or lose, my friend is putting me through my paces, and i am enjoying this stimulating mental workout. after this game, i think i will start playing chessmaster again. got it for my kids for their nintendo ds... never really had time to play, but it will help me avoid alzheimer's and the like when i get old hopefully lol

Read More

NEWS: Chess great Bobby Fischer passed away last week

During my high school and college years...I was really really into chess...went so far as to compete in tournaments and represented my college along with my schoolmates. We, overall as a team, did fairly well...sadly I was second board...which meant I played the 2nd strongest player on the opposing team...it was a 4-man team. The first board was a super strong player, and the 3rd and 4th boards usually faced weaker opponents...it was pot luck who i got, sometimes they evened out the team in strength...most times, the opponents were top heavy and stacked their strongest on the first 2 boards and hoped one of the 3rd or 4th boards would win a game to take the match.

Despite the public perception of chess and chessplayers...I am glad I spent time to develop my chess game to a degree...it has helped me in thinking analytically at times and the one skill I have learned from chess is to be able to think ahead a few moves and the various permutations/combinations based off of my actions.

Bobby Fischer was an inspiration to me when I was into chess...the only U.S. World Champion (to date) and he was a genius. This post is for you Champ. May you rest in peace and meet the other world champions in heaven and show them you got game.

Follows is the NY Times obit:

Bobby Fischer, Chess Master, Dies at 64

By BRUCE WEBER
Published: January 18, 2008

Bobby Fischer, the iconoclastic genius who was one of the greatest chess players the world has ever seen, has died, a close family friend, Gardar Sverrisson, confirmed Friday.

He was 64 and died on Thursday in a hospital in Reykjavík, Iceland. No cause of death was given but he had suffered for some time from an unspecified illness.

Mr. Sverrisson, who lived in the same apartment building in Reykjavik as Mr. Fischer, said: “He was a close family friend and we all miss him very much.”

Mr. Fischer, the most powerful American player in history, had moved to Iceland in 2005. He had emerged briefly in 1992 from a mysterious seclusion that had lasted two decades and defied an American ban on conducting business in wartorn Yugoslavia to play a $5 million match against his old nemesis, the Russian-born grandmaster Boris Spassky.

After he won handily, he dropped out of sight again, living alone. He avoided arrest on American charges over his Yugoslavia appearance and stayed in touch with his few friends in the United States by telephone, compelling them to keep his secrets or risk his rejection.

He lived in Budapest -- and possibly the Philippines and Switzerland -- and emerged now and then on radio stations in Iceland, Hungary and the Philippines to rant in increasingly belligerent terms against the United States and against Jews.

Mr. Fischer’s 1992 victory against Mr. Spassky was a sad reprise of his most glorious triumph. It was in summer 1972, in a match played in Reykjavik, that Mr. Fischer wrested the world championship from Mr. Spassky, becoming the first — and as yet only — American to win the title, which Russian-born players had held for more than four decades.

Mr. Fischer won with such brilliance and dramatic flair that he became an icon, an unassailable representative of greatness in the world of competitive games, much as Babe Ruth had been and Michael Jordan would become.

“It was Bobby Fischer who had, single-handedly, made the world recognize that chess on its highest level was as competitive as football, as thrilling as a duel to the death, as esthetically satisfying as a fine work of art, as intellectually demanding as any form of human activity,” wrote Harold C. Schonberg, who reported on the Reykjavik match for The New York Times, in his 1973 book, “Grandmasters of Chess.”

In July 2004, he was seized by the Japanese authorities when he tried to board a plane from Japan to Manila and was accused of trying to leave the country on an invalid passport. He was detained in prison for nine months while the various governments, as well as a staunch group of supporters in the chess world, tried to resolve the issue.

In 1999, in a series of telephone interviews he gave to a radio station in the Philippines, he rambled angrily and profanely about an international Jewish conspiracy, which he said was bent on destroying him personally and the world generally.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he told a radio talk-show host in Baguio, the Philippines, that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were ”wonderful news,” adding he was wishing for a scenario “where the country will be taken over by the military, they’ll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews and secure hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.”

The world championship match against the elegant Spassky was an unforgettable spectacle, the cold war fought with chess pieces in an out-of-the-way place. Mr. Fischer’s characteristic petulance, loutishness and sense of outrage were the stuff of front page headlines all over the globe. Incensed by the conditions under which the match was to be played — he was particularly offended by the whirr of television cameras in the hall — he lost the first game, then forfeited the second and insisted the remaining games be played in an isolated room the size of a janitor’s closet. There, he roared back from what, in chess, is a sizable deficit, trouncing Mr. Spassky, 12 ½to 8 ½. (In championship chess, a victory is worth one point, a draw a half-point for each player.) In all, Mr. Fischer won 7 games, lost 3 (including the forfeit) and drew 11.

Through July and most of August, the attention of the world was riveted on the Spassky-Fischer match. Americans who didn’t know a Ruy Lopez from a Poisoned Pawn watched a hitherto unknown commentator named Shelby Lyman explain each game on public television. All this was Mr. Fischer’s doing. Bobby Fischer the rebel, the enfant-terrible, the tantrum-thrower, the uncompromising savage of the chess board, had captured the imagination of the world. Because of him, for the first time in the United States, the game, with all its arcana and intimations of nerdiness, was cool. And when it was over, he walked away with a winner’s purse of $250,000, a sum that staggered anyone ever associated with chess. When Mr. Spassky won the world championship, his prize was $1,400.

Mr. Fischer’s victory was widely seen as a symbolic triumph for Democracy over Communism, and it turned the new champion into an unlikely American hero. He was invited to the White House by President Richard M. Nixon, interviewed on television, hounded by journalists, wooed unsuccessfully by commercial interests. Sales of chess sets skyrocketed; so did fees for chess lessons, as scores of poverty-stricken chess players benefited from the cachet that Mr. Fischer had conferred on them.

“That’s really how chess teaching began,” recalled Bruce Pandolfini, whose career as a teacher and writer was launched after he appeared with Mr. Lyman on public television. “Chess teachers didn’t really exist before 1972, not in any real numbers, but people started calling in to PBS, and they gave me a list of names, about 300 people. I charged $15 an hour and I encouraged others to do the same. I went from shelving books at the Strand bookstore to being a well-paid chess teacher.”

But Mr. Fischer was incapable of sustaining himself in the limelight, and by the beginning of 1973, he had withdrawn into the weird, contrarian solitude he more or less maintained for the remainder of his life. Over the years, he turned down huge financial offers to play, among them a bid of $1.4 million from the Hilton Corporation to defend his title in Las Vegas and even larger sums from dictators like Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and the Shah of Iran to compete in their countries. He said the money wasn’t enough.

At the same time, he tithed to the Worldwide Church of God, a fringe church he had become involved with beginning in the early 1960s. The church followed Hebrew dietary laws and Sabbath proscriptions and believed in the imminent return of Jesus Christ. For a time, Mr. Fischer lived in Pasadena, Calif., the church’s home base, or nearby Los Angeles, where he was said to spend his time replaying chess games and reading Nazi literature. There were reports that he was destitute, though the state of Mr. Fischer’s finances was never very clear.

In chess circles, rumors surfaced intermittently that he was playing, that he was training, that he was about to make a comeback. He invented a new kind of chess clock, which automatically rewarded players for moving quickly toward the end of the game, restoring time each time a move is made. He began railing to other chess players that computers, with their ability to analyze deeply into a position, had ruined the mystery of chess, making it knowable. He advocated a variation on the game in which the pieces on the back rank, at the start, are lined up randomly rather than in their prescribed formation. But he did not emerge publicly until 1992, when he accepted the offer to play against Mr. Spassky again on an island in the Adriatic.

A man of narrow interests but great intellectual gifts — he reportedly had an I.Q. of 181 — Mr. Fischer was a hugely demanding personality (some said charismatic, some merely infuriating) who felt his prowess as a chess player entitled him to exorbitant privilege. For much of his life, he fought imperiously on behalf of that entitlement, demanding uncompromising loyalty from his supporters, concessions from his opponents, special treatment from tournament organizers and unalloyed respect from the world at large. It was an outlook that became ever more skewed as his life went on. In the end his self-involvement was his undoing, isolating him from all but the most obsequious chess-world worshipers.

Robert James Fischer was born in Chicago on March 9, 1943. His father, a German-born physicist named Gerard, Gerhard or Gerhardt Fischer — his name appears variously spelled — and his mother, the former Regina Wender, divorced when Bobby was 2. Shortly thereafter, the elder Fischer left the United States and his family for good, and Bobby and his older sister, Joan, were reared by their mother, a Swiss-born registered nurse and schoolteacher.

Regina Fischer moved her young family first to California and then to Arizona before settling in a Brooklyn walkup, where Bobby grew up. The strong-willed Mrs. Fischer, who would later study medicine and become a political activist on behalf of pacifist causes both in the United States and Europe, had an uneven influence on her willful son.

When he was a teenager, she tried to dissuade him from concentrating solely on chess. “She keeps in my hair and I don’t like people in my hair, so I had to get rid of her,” Mr. Fischer once told a reporter. But she also helped raise money for her son to compete in international tournaments and even picketed the White House in an appeal for aid to the American delegation at the 1960 Chess Olympics. Still, after the Spassky championship match, when her son spoke of his admiration for Mr. Nixon, she campaigned vigorously for Senator George S. McGovern, Mr. Nixon’s opponent in the 1972 Presidential election.

Mrs. Fischer was Jewish; her son developed a hatred against Jews that became more virulent as he grew older. Nonetheless, mother and son evidently kept in touch over the years, and when she died in 1997, Mr. Fischer was said to have been distraught. His sister died soon afterward, and acquaintances of Mr. Fischer speculated that the two losses further taxed his fragile hold on rationality. Having never married or had children, Bobby Fischer leaves no immediate survivors.

It was his sister Joan who bought Bobby, then age 6, his first chess set, and taught him the basic moves. By the age of 8 he was taking lessons at the Brooklyn Chess Club and by age 12 he was holding his own among America’s strongest players, who gathered at the Manhattan Chess Club and the Marshall Chess Club. His adult opponents called him “the Boy Robot” and, for his unwavering wardrobe and insatiable will to win, “the Corduroy Killer.”

He was fiercely competitive — some said he was driven by an abject fear of losing. At the chessboard he possessed the pitilessness of a tyrant — “I love to see them squirm,” he once said of his opponents. From early on, he buttressed his penchant for original thinking with monumental study, and he became known for his mastery of the game’s literature. “Practice! Study! Talent!” was his formula for success. In a short time he would become incomparable at all phases of chess, from openings to endgames, and though renowned as an attacker, he was, like Garry Kasparov after him, an underrated, even brilliant defensive strategist.

He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, but, indifferent to study and classes because they took time away from chess, he dropped out at 16. Mr. Pandolfini remembered: “When I was a kid, I’d go to the Marshall early in the morning, and Fischer would be there. There was a cabinet of filed games from the 19th century, thousands of games that someone, maybe a lot of people, had put on index cards and diagrammed by hand, and Fischer would be playing them, one at a time. I couldn’t understand why he was doing it. These were games using discarded ideas — the King’s Gambit and so on.”

The King’s Gambit — an opening strategy in which White sacrifices a kingside pawn to get a quick attack — had long been dismissed as too risky and romantic, seductive only to the blindly attack-minded.

Bobby Fischer, along with his contemporaries, favored other strategies, known by names like the Sicilian Defense (the epitome of a sharp counterattack by Black) or the Ruy Lopez (a slowly building game of maneuver for White). “But Fischer’s argument was that the old ideas were not necessarily bad ideas,” Mr. Pandolfini said. “They had merely fallen out of favor, and by injecting new thinking into an old idea, you created state-of-the-art logic.”

Graham Bowley contributed reporting.

Read More