Dancing, Chess and Laughter

A few days ago I had the opportunity to see the Imperial Russian Dance Company's Flying Tsars at Panthers. This is a troupe that has everything -- fabulous costumes, brilliant colours, traditional music, dancers so agile and daring that you wonder what the attrition rate must be in each performance, and, oh yeah, comedy. In between the periods when the audience was totally spellbound by the dancers there was lots of laughter.

In a way it reminded me of my final game in the SIO. My opponent, we'll call him Mr Anonymous, was forty minutes late which left him fifty minutes plus thirty seconds a move to complete his game. He's a strong, resourceful player and that shouldn't have been insurmountable for him but he apparently decided to throw me off stride by adopting an outrageous opening. That's where the comedy came in. After his fourth move I burst out laughing. I thought, "This guy's having a lend of me."

Who knows? Had we been playing lightning it might have worked but I wasn't the one who was short of time.

As chess games go it isn't much to look at, but it's shown here just for the first four moves: