To be honest, I've never really understood why so many New Yorkers choose to leave the city on summer weekends. Frankly, the summer is the only time that the city is tolerable (ok, more than tolerable). If I had the means and the time, I'd be jetting to Austin, Miami, LA, and San Francisco every weekend during the winter, and if I had the luxury, I'd avoid leaving the city at all during the sumer. Today was one of those perfect summer days that makes the city awesome. It helps when the whether borders on nirvana.
Having some time to kill, I ambled over to the chess corner of Washington Square Park. The city may be shutting down poker clubs left and right, but fortunately the cops turn a blind eye to the $5-to-the-winner chess games going on in various parks. I guess at that low stakes, nobody sees the harm. Plus, chess is a game of skill and poker... oh wait. I've had some crazy experiences playing in the park. At one point, I kept losing, and stupidly kept accepting my opponent's offer of a double-or-nothing rematch. We started at $1 and before long I was $128 in the whole. But, I managed to squeeze out a victory before it went to $256, which was a miracle. But here's the crazy part. I then got back on the roller coaster, and it went up to $64 in the hole, before winning what may have been one of my best all-time blitz games, with a daring bishop sacrifice, from which he never recovered. Today's exploits were far more modest. We played four games at $5 a pop, and we split them 2-2, so no money exchanged hands. Oddly, we both won when playing black. Not sure what that was all about. Fact is, he played a strong Sicilian Defense to my e4 openings, and I played some improvised hyper-modern nonsense in response to his d4. By sliding my queen down to A8 behind a rook on A7 and a fianchettoed bishop, I avoided his attempt at a suffocating bear hug by attacking along some sharp lines. I haven't been playing much chess lately, so the two wins were nice confidence boosters, as unlike in poker, any given player can't beat any given player on any given day.
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In addition to the chess, I picked up a couple books at the Strand, which should be fun. The two books, one on horse handicapping and another on options valuation, were purchased in the hopes that they may revive the long-dormant quantitative side of my brain. When I was young, I loved math. I could count by sevens faster than most people could count by twos, and I could multiply numbers that most people couldn't add. But by the time high school came around, and math became something that I could no longer do in my head, I started to let my interest in it atrophy. So this is an attempt to revive that, by exploring a couple quantitative topic that I find interesting.
Finally, I walked to Chinatown and had some pig intestine and hot pepper in a black bean and ginger sauce. Quite delicious.
Now could I have done any of that in the Hamptons?
I think I know someone who can count by sevens faster than you.
Posted by: David A | June 25, 2007 at 04:00 PM