Considering how close I was with my mom, I was shocked by how little pain I felt after her death this January, and by how easily I was able to return to normal life, work and fun.

She would have wanted it that way. More than anyone I ever met, my mother detested funerals and other formal events like graduations. Though she was not rich, she would rather cut a check for the expenses of a funeral for a friend in need than to formally confront a subject that she felt made life less fun: dying.

My mom was so good at life, she didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about death. I’m a bit more morbid. Here are some of the surprising things I learned about myself, life, love and death through her sudden and premature departure.

1. Death gave me a chance to feel Love is Not Linear: Time is linear, but love is not. When my mother died, I cried myself to sleep that night and couldn’t get out of bed the next morning. I thought it may be like that for weeks. The next day I leaped out of bed, rather to attack the mountain of work that comes with the death of a loved one. In the weeks that came, I tried to figure out why a daughter so close to her mom could start smiling, eating, giving chess lectures, playing poker, drinking with friends so quickly. I realized that as cheesy as it sounds, I hadn’t really lost a mother. I still had a great mom, I just couldn’t call her anymore.

2. Atheism Didn’t Hurt Me: I thought the optimistic line of thought described above was reserved for the religious, who may believe that they’ll actually get a chance to see the departed again. I identify as Jewish but don’t really believe in god and do not think I will ever be able to hug or see my mom again, except in dreams. And yet I still felt immediate solace that she lingers on in her work- she was one of the first female chemistry professors at Drexel University, and founded a program to bring cutting edge science equipment to under-funded Philadelphia schools. Mom was always so devoted to gender and racial equality and I love this drawing, which a student drew after one of her grand displays of chemistry experiments to schoolchildren.

Her friends and family will always remember her “open door policy”, her seemingly boundless generosity and her passion for sports and cooking.

I felt like a different person right after her death and I think I instantly became more like her. At least the guests at her wake said my rendition of her coconut custard pie tasted more like something Sally would make than my own notorious cooking.

3. I’m no Longer Afraid of Dying, Especially on Planes: My mom hated flying and always wanted me to call her after landing. A couple months after her death, I was on a particularly turbulent flight and realized that I was far less afraid of dying than before, both on that plane and in general. One of my biggest nightmares before mom’s death was perishing in some freak accident and then imagining my mother finding out about it. No longer a problem! This may sound twisted & morbid (sorry dad!), but this lighter feeling is not all bad.

4. I’m lucky have Greg: It’s great if you have the same thoughts on death, money, property and other related issues as your siblings. Since that’s nearly impossible, it’s good to get along so that when disagreements arise, you can deal without resentment and with love. I was never more grateful for my friendship with my brother than after the death of my mother. My dad was also great- we were all so proud to see over a hundred girls participate in the Dr. Sally Solomon Memorial chess tournament held at Drexel this April.


5. I’ll Say Something Next Time: I was so happy about the outpouring of support from friends, co-workers and family, many of whom had never met my mother. Before my mom died, I sometimes debated whether I knew someone well enough to offer condolences, and occasionally decided that approaching the subject may make the person feel uncomfortable. Now I’ll always err on the side of saying something, even if it’s just a stock “my thoughts are with you.” Most people call in the first days or send notes in the first days or weeks, so if you forget, you can be a friend to talk to when there are not as many around.

6. Small Things Didn’t Nag Me: On January 16, I was at a friend’s house just two blocks away from my mom’s place, eating sushi and catching up with my best friends’ lives. We wrapped up around 10. I thought about walking over and saying hi to Mom—she was a nightowl and always liked it when I dropped in unannounced especially when armed with leftover California rolls. I thought again. I was starting to feel a bit sick and I knew Mom had just gotten over a flu, and didn’t want to give her another bug. I went straight home.

My mom died the next day.

One of the things my mom’s death taught me was that it’s not important for everyone to “say goodbye”. I thought the sushi story would bother me for a while, but again, logic prevailed and rather than haunted, I was consoled that I lived in Philadelphia for her final years, and was able to see her so frequently.

As spring finally bloomed, the same friends I met that bitter winter night posited, this time over beers, that my life in games helped me approach the worst event of my life with optimism. There’s no sense in dwelling over a poor chess move or an untimely bluff, especially when you are in the midst of the struggle.

I think mom would have smiled to see how fully I share her belief that life is too short for formalities you don’t believe in, or to play along with grief that you don’t actually feel. I smiled rather than cried thinking of Mom this Mother’s Day and I thank her for passing on to me whatever combination of strength and serotonin made that possible.

Another highlight was visiting the Innovative Concept Academy (ICA) for a special event co-hosted by Hip Hop Chess Federation and the World Chess Hall of Fame merging music, martial arts and chess instruction. The ICA is a last chance school for kids who appeared in founder Judge Jimmie Edwards courtroom, in lieu of juvenile detention center. Read more about the ICA visit & STL activities on my US Chess blog and also see a report with lots of photos by Daaim Shabazz the chessdrum.

As a board member of the World Chess Hall of Fame, I’m very excited to return to Saint Louis for the “Queen Within: Adorned Archetypes, Fashion & Chess.” the biggest show yet since the institution moved from Miami to Saint Louis in 2011. The first event is a preview at Christie’s on June 4, and I plan to wear another shiny chess dress.

After a quick jaunt to New York, I’m off to Vegas for the National Open and the WSOP. Follow me on twitter to stay up to date on my busy summer!

Last fall, I was on a game theory panel with poker champion and financial analyst Bill Chen and Eric Maskin, Nobel Laureate in economics at the “Adventures of the Mind” conference for talented high school students. My alma mater NYU hosted this edition. Also in late 2012, I spoke at the Philadelphia Art Museum’s Art After Five series on Duchamp and chess, which I wrote about on Chess Life Online.

Most recently, I went to MIT to give a one and a half hour lecture on poker and chess for Will Ma’s second annual intensive for credit poker class. You can watch Part I below and find Part II on YouTube.

Currently, I’m in Saint Louis where I’m doing a series of lectures at the STL Chess Club for various levels. Many of the classes are uploaded to YouTube, and the topics range from Double Attack for beginners to analysis of the beautiful Aronian-Anand game for more advanced players.

More to come! I’ll keep you posted here, and more promptly, on twitter.

This may seem minor, but can make traveling expensive, lonely and in some places, even dangerous. Having a single room can be wonderful, allowing for privacy and maximum zzzzz’s. And that’s a luxury I often enjoy now, but it’s not always possible.

I hosted a Q+A for the critically acclaimed documentary Brooklyn Castle last month at the Ritz in Philadelphia and was struck by a storyline featuring Rochelle Ballantyne, who aspires to be the first African-American master in the history of chess (she’s about 120 points away). When I lived in Brooklyn, I worked with Rochelle at IS 318, the junior high school championship team that the movie focuses on. After graduating from IS 318, Rochelle wanted to go to the State Championships, but didn’t have any girls to room with, because so few compete in tournaments- she ended up rooming with the vivacious and supportive Latisha Williams, mother of chess champion Justus Williams (one of the stars of Extreme “X Chess” Championships.)

In this frame, Latisha explains to Rochelle that if she wants to become a master, she’ll have to fully commit herself to the goal. While closing in on the title, Rochelle plans to attend Stanford University next fall (on scholarship!), and I’m so happy for her.

Women in fields like chess and poker may get more attention and opportunities but things like hotels are why it’s so much more complicated than “It’s better (or worse) to be a woman in chess (or poker.)” It’s harder in some ways and easier in others.

I’ve mostly had a great time traveling around the world and sleeping in a wide variety of lodgments from a bizarre hostel in the suburbs of Prague, to a palatial suite in
Udaipur to the historic Chase Hotel, which hosts the US Chess Championship players in Saint Louis. I like overtly feminine design that counteract the default masculine vibe I associate with most hotels. The Chelsea in AC is one of my favorites- we shot part of Cin II there.

In less than two weeks, I’m headed to the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. I inquired back in November to a few friends about chopping a room, but no one, including the Grindettes, were planning to attend. A few weeks ago, I found a great deal on CheapCaribbean and Jamie Kerstetter changed her mind, so we are headed to the Bahamas, together. What luck!

Find out more about my PCA schedule hereand follow me on twitter for more on my adventures.

I’m playing a series of events at the PCA, carefully selecting tournaments I think I’ll have the best equity in. I presold ~40% of my action and am keeping 40% for myself. I’d like to sell an additional ">20% 0% (updated 12/27, 10 AM), preferably in a minimum of 5% increments. I’m open to smaller pieces if you’ve invested in the past or know me in person. The mark-up averages out to 1.19 for a total package of $6050, so a 5% piece is 360 and 10% is $720. You can see a summary of the events in this Google Document, and find explanation about my tournament selection below.

1. $1100 PCA Ladies Event- Ladies tournaments are traditionally softer than mixed events of equivalent buy-ins. I believe this will be less true than usual, since many PokerStars Pros & female pros in town for the PCA Main will enter. Still, I expect enough soft spots for the tournament to be good value. Because I have done so much work in promoting women in poker media and make a point about being friendly to other women in poker, I tend to know more of my opponents in ladies events than other players, which helps.

2. Two $1100 satellites to the Main Event- My skill set is well-suited to satellites. I won two out of four $750 satellites to $3500 tournaments at the Borgata. I was also the first person to qualify for the last two PokerStars Women live events before Black Friday, 2011 PCA and the EPT Grand Finale in Madrid. This is obviously an absurdly small sample size, only worth quoting because I could tell from gameplay how well these events suited me and vowed to play in more live supersats.

I started out in poker with Sit N Gos, which helped me understand how flatter payout structures changes overall strategy at various stages of satellites. I’m also personable at tables, key in satellites because there are so many situations in which a bigger stack is guaranteed a seat and his disposition to you will determine whether he takes a shot at busting you or not.

3. Super Turbo Bounty ($2150) – This is one of my favorite tournament formats. In the highest stakes Super-bounty I played in (€ 500+ € 500) in EPT Grand Finale in Monaco, I made the final two tables, scoring three bounties along the way. (see my article on the trip on the PokerStars Blog.)

I enjoy that the variance is much lower than a typical 2K when bounties are in play. Some backers prefer to only back for the non-bounty portion of such events, but that would make no sense here because so much of the strategy is BASED on bounty-hunting. So you have to trust I’ll declare all bounties, which should be easy if you know me at all.

4. Nightlies- I’ll play two nightly $300 Turbo events.

There will also be an opt-in or opt-out option for reasonable substitutions. See google doc for details and email me at jenshahade@gmail.com for info on payment methods or any questions. Thanks for reading and follow me on twitter for updates on the PCA & other adventures.
Happy 2013, Jennifer

Catch a glimpse of the lesson below and read more on Chess Life Online.

The Raven from Poker Fairy Tale on Vimeo.

The excerpt from our interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s supernatural poem about a man in mourning plays on voyeurism, feminism and how social media enables the descent into modern madness. @Edgar_Allan_Poe himself tweeted as we unveiled the piece, “You cannot be fully dead if you still receive email.”

A day after we posted it, I got the following voicemail from my dad, with a rendition of his own.

It made me understand that classic poems like the Raven, much like chess, has cross-generational power. I read this poem in high school, so did my dad, and I think (?) children still do. And yes, my dad is available for voiceover hire. He’d be perfect for Haunted House gigs.

Chess and chance are in the air. Cardplayer just published my “Poker Player’s Guide to Chess Gambling.” I led with the famous “$50,000 game” between my brother and Tom Dwan. I moved on to chess-poker hybrids from poker chess to roulette chess to Chinese Poker Chess (see video below!). I also wrote a piece on chess and chance for the STL Beacon on my way to a roulette chess performance at the World Chess Hall of Fame. If you have any thoughts on betting on bishops, comment or tweet at me.

I awoke on Friday, August 17th to a photo of the greatest chess player in history, Garry Kasparov, restrained by three police outside the Pussy Riot trial in Moscow (Photo by Olaf Koens). Pussy Riot, a punk rock feminist band, were given two years for singing an anti-Putin song inside a church. I was surprised by how angry the verdict and the images and video of Kasparov made me feel. It made a lot of people feel that way. Kasparov was released later that day, but is being charged for “biting” an officer, which Kasparov vehemently denies.

When I was a kid first reading about Kasparov, I was inspired by his moves and life but irked by chauvinistic explanations for women’s relative lack of success in the chess world: “A women’s train of thought can be broken more easily by extraneous events, such as a baby crying upstairs.” When I met him in 2005, he was already turning a corner–he told me that to promote chess in America, it was critical to address the feminist concern over segregated women’s tournaments. And now, he fights heroically alongside a feminist group with a common goal to unseat Putin.

Poster by artist Molly Crabapple

In Vice Magazine, Pussy Riot sited radical feminist and vocal anti-porn activist Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) as an influence. They channel Dworkin in explaining their name: “A female sex organ, which is supposed to be receiving and shapeless, suddenly starts a radical rebellion against the cultural order.”

Dworkin is too often reduced as the obese feminist in overalls who thought that all sex was rape. Though I don’t believe any serious reader of her work could come to that conclusion, I don’t align myself with Dworkin’s anti-porn stance. If anything, I’m more enamored than ever of beautiful female surfaces from photography to fashion, like the work and erotic portraiture of “MissKacieMarie.” I worked with Kacie on several projects, including X Chess and Cinderella. My own vanity is evident in my aggressive promotion of only the most flattering photographs of myself. As I joked on twitter, I ask myself often: “At what point does a vain American woman stop trying to look hot, and just try to look rich?” Also see my earlier post on poker, art and the passage of time.

Beyond “pro-sex” and “anti-sex”, I’m entranced by Dworkin’s writing and feel a compulsion to share it with you guys. So after re-reading Dworkin’s artful book Intercourse, I did a literary mash-up of it with the poorly written but hot best-seller, Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L James.

Dworkin is the most masterfully rhythmic writer I’ve ever read–that rhythm is seductive, and sexy, even if she challenges sex itself. In contrast, the trite writing and simplistic character sketches in Fifty Shades of Grey make some of the pornographic scenes cartoonish, like a strip club with flourescent lighting and no music or alcohol.

Dworkin & Fifty Shades Mashed

Fifty Shades in italics, Dworkin in bold italics

Sometimes the skin comes off in sex. The people merge, skinless. The body loses its boundaries. We are each in these separate bodies; and then, with someone and not with someone else, the skin dissolves altogether; and what touches is unspeakably, grotesquely visceral, not inside language or conceptualization, not inside time; raw, blood and fat and muscle and bone, unmediated by form or formal limits.

“There’s a very fine line between pleasure and pain, Anastasia. They are two sides of the same coin, one not existing without the other. I can show you how pleasurable pain can be. Again, it comes down to trust….Do you trust me, Ana?”

“My heart was open to you,” says a man obsessively in love in the Face of Another by Kobo Abe, “quite as if the front of it had been sliced away.” This skinless sex is a fever, but fever is too small. It is obsession, but obsession is too psychological. It becomes life, and as such, it is a state of being, a metaphysical reality for those in it, for whom no one else exists. It ends when the skin comes back into being as a boundary.

His skin is so smooth and velvety….and hard….hmmm, what a delicious combination. “Stop Ana, stop. I don’t want to come.” I sit up…..My inner goddess looks like someone snatched her ice cream.

Inside a person, sexual desire-or need or compulsion is sometimes experienced as a stigma, as if it marks the person, as if it can be seen; a great aura emanating from inside; an interior play of light and shadow, vitality and death, wanting and being used up; an identifying mark that is indelible; a badge of desire or experience; a sign that differentiates the individual carrying it, both attracting and repelling others, in the end isolating the marked one, who is destroyed by the intensity and ultimate hopelessness of a sexual calling.

My inner goddess frowns at me. You can do this, she coaxes—play this sex god at his own game….picking up a spear of asparagus, I gaze at him and bit my lip. Then very slowly put the tip of my cold asparagus in my mouth and suck it.

Am I saying that I know more than men about fucking? Yes, I am. Not just different: more and better, deeper and wider, the way anyone used knows the user.

“Christian. You use sex as a weapon. It really isn’t fair”…He raises his eyebrows surprised and I see he’s considering my words.

Sexual Intercourse is not intrinsically banal, though pop culture magazine like Esquire and Cosmopolitan would suggest that it is. It is intense, often desperate. The internal landscape is violent upheaval, a wild and ultimately cruel disregard of human individuality, a brazen, high-strung wanting that is absolute and imperishable, not attached to personality, no respecter of boundaries; ending not in sexual climax but in a human tragedy of failed relationships, vengeful bitterness in an aftermath of sexual heat, personality corroded by too much endurance of undesired, habitual intercourse, conflict, a wearing away of vitality in the numbness finally of habit or compulsion or the loneliness of separation.

I don’t even know how to categorize him. If I do this thing…..will he be my boyfriend?…The truth is I don’t think he will.

Having an interior life of wanting, needing, gives fucking human meaning in a human context. Being stigmatized by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.

I did follow my heart, and I have a sore ass and an anguished, broken spirit to show for it.

In Amerika, there is the nearly universal conviction or so it appears- that sex (fucking) is good and that liking it is right: morally right; a sign of human health; nearly a standard for citizenship.

But I’m not sure I have the stomach to be his submissive—deep down, it’s the canes and whips that put me off.

In fucking, one’s insides are on the line; and the fragile and unique intimacy of going for broke makes communion possible, in human reach—not transcendental and otherworldy, but an experience in flesh and love.

“You are not buying me a car.”
He glowers at me, his jaw tense.
“We’ll see,” he says tightly.

And crossing on that high and rotting and shaking bridge to identity, with whatever degree or quality of fear or courage is the ordeal that makes empathy possible: not a false sympathy of abstract self-indulgence, a liberal condescension, but a way of seeing others for what they are by seeing what their own lives have cost them.

In related news, Rachel Kranz wrote a piece on the Grindettes for Poker Pro Magazine.She writes about the changing image of women in poker, furthered by female success at this year’s WSOP.

Katie Stone is quoted in the article on the sub-forum on twoplustwo that she started, “That’s What She Said” (TWSS),

There have been so many women who have posted in our forum, who say, ‘I’ve been lurking for years, reading for years, but I’ve never dared…writing anything because I would just get trashed or get trolled.’ She hopes that the experience of posting in a women’s forum may help women become more comfortable with posting in open forums, just as the experience of playing in a women’s tournament may help women become more comfortable playing in open events.

Read the full article (pdf) here.