Thanks very much for the presentation most enjoyable.

part 1: re article..

BG wrote>"Anyone see a pattern?"

I now see a pattern! [in the discovered-check variations] -
and I now see how many wins I missed at blitz...

(and for people who must have tried those against me - or opened themselves into the  trap - at standard time controls or in informal games, well I think each time I reinvented the wheel... smelling cramped position- just looked for threats --- but I never connected the dots - never realised I was reinventing the wheel again and again...)

I see that blitz - played in the right spirit as I said elsewhere - has further advantages: e.g. you can play 100 games at a sitting - I've often done it on fics - if one does 'set automail 1' and  'set pgn 1' then all games you play are mailed to you as soon as they are completed... so one can get a prelim. fell for new opening-vars, see the traps you missed [only if you fell for the trap! If you had a trap presented to you but didnt recognise it then analysing 100 games/day IS painful... actually not - I used to have crafty analyse the first 12 moves of my blitz games - say 100 at a time - before going to bed -- had analysis ready by the time I had done with breakfast the next day...

The painful part is reading a text file with computer-analysis of 100 games... [if only programs could analyse well enough to say -- "you probably blundered away a win within the first 10 moves in game nos. 5,7,11, 18, 56, 91 and 99..." ]

*Now* I'll show all those centre-counter Queen-retreaters and sundry other N-pinners-with-B-or-else-they-take-my-Q-ers at 3-minute/game blitz!

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part 2: re pgn ...

For info only:

Some pgn-viewers do not accept pgn unless it is in sort-of-standard format , specially if it doesn't conform to "has the seven 'compulsory' headers before any other header" rule. True, any number of pgn utilities will convert any almost collection of movelists into a 'sort-of-standard' multigame pgn, still..

The pgn standard is written in legal jargon so I'll just quote from wikipedia the summary of the relevant part:

"PGN data for archival storage is required to provide seven bracketed fields, referred to as "tags" and together known as the STR (Seven Tag Roster). In export format, the STR tag pairs must appear before any other tag pairs that may appear, and in this order:

1. Event: the name of the tournament or match event.
2. Site: the location of the event. This is in "City, Region COUNTRY" format, where COUNTRY is the 3-letter International Olympic Committee code for the country. An example is "New York City, NY USA".
3. Date: the starting date of the game, in YYYY.MM.DD form. "??" are used for unknown values.
4. Round: the playing round ordinal of the game within the event.
5. White: the player of the white pieces, in "last name, first name" format.
6. Black: the player of the black pieces, same format as White.
7. Result: the result of the game. This can only have four possible values: "1-0" (White won), "0-1" (Black won), "1/2-1/2" (Draw), or "*" (other, e.g., the game is ongoing).
   
   

"

Well all pgn viewers I've seen will be satisfied with those 7 tags as long as the 'round' tag contans a number and nothing else, and as long as the 'white' and 'black' tags contain strings with at least one non-whitespace char - eg they complain if you have [White ""] or [White " "] - I havent checked if they accept [White "."] - but  that's ok - NN is the time honoured default player to occupy the place beween those quotes.. [White "NN"] [Black "NN"]

When storing pgns with less than 10 games , I just manually type in the missing tags , if any...

I know, I know, the standard is silly - for a non-tournament game one needs to compulsarily put in 'event' and 'round' and 'site' ----

okay, 'event' and 'site' can be used to put in descriptions of what one is illustrating , e.g. while copying the Saulson-Phillips game in the article I replaced the posted 'site' tag with '[Site "Legall Mate - dis ch var 1"] -

but usually the 'round' thing is annoying - one has to put in a number there, nothing else...

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ha! very nice traps, thought it would never happen in one of my games, maybe there is a chance yet...

The Legall's Mate, a Queen for a King. (It seems fair)

ADK