Some might say chess is not a good spectator sport but that will depend on how interested you are.If you don't read the chess columns in the newspapers it is unlikely you'd know thaat the world championship is on at the moment and has, not quite literally, caught fire as it reaches its climax.
Sergei Karjakin, the pretender, had gone one up after surviving a few maulings from Magnus Carlsen but Carlsen couldn't quite put him away. But, from a position in which Carlsen harried and pursued a small but perceptible advantage, the match was levelled at 5-5, which means one win each really, with two games to go.
My Recommended site is moving from Spark Chess, where I'd reached the 2000 rating after which you need to register to go higher, to the very excellent Chess24, on which you can try out your own moves in the current position and see by how much you can ruin the position for one player or the other in one daft guess. It makes it much more interesting than thinking you can see what to do without realizing quite how far ahead of you they are.
Also, on this site, one can enter tournaments and so I've played six games in an hour or less with time limits of three or five minutes or four minutes with two seconds added per move. My results have been flattering when I've been gifted a couple of games but 4 out of 7, 15th out of 45, LWWLWLW, over 4+2 last night and 4/6, WWLWLW, over 5 the night before were good enough to make me realize already that I ought not to let it become habit forming.
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The verdicts in the Year's Best categories have become clearer with due consideration but it would be most unfair on Nemanja Radulović to announce any results before his performance of the Khachaturian violin concerto with the BSO because the likely fireworks could be a contender for the Best Event award. He looks a bit like Prince. I'm not expecting him to be inhibited.
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Meanwhile, the art of writing a good novel is clearly always going to be beyond me but, at 42% of the way towards 50 000 words, I think I will have achieved the ambition of completing one, however abominable it is, sometime in 2017. All that stuff about getting to know your characters, it is true. Whether anybody reading it would do is entirely another matter.
I knew all along that novelist was a proper job and poet was not.
