Stanley Kubrick on Chess

I was listening to the included Interview on the Kubrick Archives (apparently one of the only recorded interviews that exists) when a the conversation turned to chess.

In the days when Stanley was trying to put together his first documentaries he used to play chess in New York for a quarter a game. He would make a couple of dollars a day which in his words "goes a long way when you are only paying for food". At times he would play for up to 12 hours a day which in the summer led to a certain level of timing to secure a table in the shade during the day and one near a light at night.

In the article How does the game of chess relate to Kubrick's world-view he says, "Among a great many other things that chess teaches you is to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good. It trains you to think before grabbing, and to think just as objectively when you're in trouble."

The section of the interview where chess is discussed can be downloaded here http://www.2shared.com/file/2142281/94f8fd10/06_Chess.html 

All of this talk of chess got me wanting a game. I entered the word "chess" into google and chess.com was the first website that I was presented with. I thought it  would probably be a resource site rather than one for on-line game playing.

However within seconds of the page loading up I realised I had stumbled upon a fantastically coded website which was being actively developed. I was pleased to see that only minimal details were required on registration (I hate sites that want as many details as possible; they say that they won't sell them but if this is true why do they want them?) and that there were so many features.

The website is so pleasant to use, and I truly admire the amount of code time that must have gone into it. A lot of the coding is extremely slick with lots of real time server-client interactions.

I found a recent blog entry which documents the journey of chess.com so far

called Building Chess.com: Part 1 - Getting Started I really look forward to reading the rest of this series and hope that they will write about some of the technical challenges they faced and any open source projects which helped them.

Whilst I have been writting this I have been playing my first game which it is looking like I will win (famous last words). 

Chess.com -  what a find!