I played as Black in the following chess game.
The opening I'm using is the Englund-Soller gambit.
It gives up not one but two pawns to reverse the innate "turn" or tempo advantage White always has at the start of any normal chess game and makes it so Black has initiative and rapid development.
I suppose I should say that it does all that when played correctly.
And I DID secure 1st castling rights.
Unfortunately, I also set myself up for a costly knight-fork from my opponent:
I make matters worse by trying to delay the inevitable with counter-threats.
Luckily, I took my medicine before it cost me the game, but the delay cost me dearly. Before the following sequence, my opponent merely threatened to deliver a forking check that would require my rook to sacrifice himself to save my queen. Because I didn't man up when I should have, I lost my bishop and rook AND Queen:
A lot of people would probably give up at this point, but, even if it weren't my habit to avoid ever doing that in any normal chess game, I'm too curious to see if I can reverse things.
First I pretend I'm interested in taking a "free" pawn from my opponent with my knight, as seen in the prior entry.
He defends of course:
Then I move my rook to protect my queen's bishop pawn.
My opponent sees I'm moving to trap that knight of his, which dealt me so much damage after I castled. He sends his other knight along with a pawn to try and save it, but I don't give him that option. Soon I've forced him to give up that knight AND his castling rights:
Though my bishop is imperiled, I know I need to target his king; down so much material from the gambit itself and my blunder, I won't have much chance of winning otherwise. So first I zap him with a check from my OWN knight, as alluded to above ...
... and then I save my bishop.
My opponent apparently sees pawn promotion as his path to victory.
He starts pushing them forward.
He's inexperienced, though.
He doesn't realize I can capture with a special move called "en passant".
Opponent comes after me with his own king after that point:
When I was single-digits young, nearly all images of Florida OR California made those places look like SUCH visions of heaven ...
I've never actually seen what acai berry looks like in real life; I think In fact, it is supposed to be the red wine colored yogurt substance seen in most bowls featuring it as I text this, but the bright "taste-able" feeling of California and Florida from my similarly colorful puzzle map of the U.S. from my childhood, nearly always comes to mind when I see those ...
Originally posted by Wonder Man
California has the bigger ocean. You could swim backwards and pretend to be reliving your youth.
It's funny -- I've been to California at least 2 or 3 times in my life, Florida only once. California 1st for a conference that included a trip to Disneyland, much later a convention flown to with my grandfather to Los Angeles.
I never swam the ocean there, but I did in Florida, perhaps 10 years prior to that Los Angeles trip. Florida, the reality, didn't get enchanting until pretty much the last day, when I discovered our hotel not only had an AMAZING acre-sprawling pool, but friendly interactive guests to go with it.
(I am of course excepting those little lizards that dart around everywhere.
Those were cool from day one.)
I DID swim the ocean in Florida, but, except for being able to say now that I've had that experience, I can't say I really liked it. Sun was too hot. Sand was too hot. I seem to remember even the water being too hot, but my memories might be colored by remembering how people later on at Disneyworld just seemed to wilt as they walked around. Above all, though, even though I experimented with surfing that day, I primarily remember the INCREDIBLY salty taste of the water.
Somewhere I've got a Choose Your Own Adventure book that features a choice where you may get stranded adrift at sea. There, succumbing to thirst, you have the option of drinking from the water surrounding you. If you do, you die, but I'm thinking now no one who has ever once tasted the ocean in real life would swallow the stuff unless there senses were dulled. Hard to describe what a shock that was ...
While I'm thinking of it, it took half of forever to find that scan of Longshot sharing my predicament. The reason is that it was featured in one of the lesser known mini-series of the 1980s, not an expected main title like Uncanny X-Men.
It was, in fact, the first issue of the Fantastic Four versus that same group ...
("The Big Wet -- it tastes awful!"😉
