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The De Kring art society in Amsterdam hosted the closing ceremony of the Max Euwe Memorial on November 20th. I played against three nude opponents as the prize-giving commenced. In addition to referencing Marcel Duchamp, the striking visuals showed two important themes. Firstly, it was a humorous take on the many tourists who come to Amsterdam for sex and drugs. Here we had a show that was only sexual on the surface but at heart cerebral. Secondly, it played off the general theme of simultaneous exhibitions, which are so common in the chess world. The master or grandmaster giving the simul is in a position of power and by defeating numerous opponents at once, the public and the media is informed of her dominance.

More photos are on the official site–the piece was also featured in the Amsterdam Daily “Het Parool” and inspired the following drawing by Edgar Jansen.

Short Stacked Shamus of Hard Boiled Poker wrote a blog on strip poker and art about a recent installation in New York, “I’ll Raise You Once” by Zefrey Throwell. Shamus also touched on naked chess:

The strip poker piece reminds me of a similar but more interesting work, a short film titled “Naked” in which poker pro and chess champ Jennifer Shahade plays chess against a nude male amateur, Jason Bretz. That piece plays off of a famous photo of Marcel Duchamp (a big influence on the Fluxus crowd), reversing the roles of the man and woman to make a comment on the relationship of the sexes.

Naked Checkmate from Poker Fairy Tale on Vimeo.

The Max Euwe Memorial tournament itself was also very exciting, featuring a combination of veterans, strong young players and inspiring female players such as Pia Cramling, one of the first women to earn the Grandmaster title. Find more information on the event on the official website which also features more details on my other appearances in Amsterdam and the closing ceremony.

Collusion is rampant in live super satellites and it is very tricky to draw the line between lack of incentives toward taking risks and actual cheating. On the softer end of the spectrum, if you have a friendly dynamic with the table throughout a super-satellite, players with large stacks may fold to you in spots where they have correct odds but gain very little from calling a shove or three-betting (re-raising) a minraise. This is certainly not cheating but it does point to some inherent flaws with live supers. This tournament was pretty extreme though, as one entire table folded to the big blind for over an hour. The situation got so out of hand that the tournament directors redrew for seats.

The Borgata Main was a grueling, deep-stacked event and some of my tables were quite tough. Mostly I felt happy that I combined long stretches of patience (we played ten-handed for most of the event) with well-timed aggression. However, in my latest piece for PokerStars Women, I touch on a poorly played hand against David Williams and how I was able to recover quickly from “Mistake Tilt.” This type of tilt refers to be really hard on yourself when you make an error in-game. I was made more aware of how destructive it can be in the excellent book, The Mental Game of Poker by Jared Tendler and Barry Carter.

After being eliminated from the Main, I stayed for a guest spot at the Borgata Poker Blog. I enjoyed reporting quick profiles and hand recaps, including an online turned live pro that doesn’t fit the typical profile, a controversial hand and the final two women in the tournament.

Soon after AC, I was off to London for a short trip. Not much time for much sight-seeing or boozing as I booked a slew of meetings, PokerStars Women interviews as well as quality poker time. On the chess end, I met some great people including Sabrina Chevannes of the Chevannes Chess Academy and Malcolm Pein, organizer of one the greatest chess events in the World, the London Chess Classic.

Sabrina Chevannes with Magnus Carlsen. Let the record state I made her pose with him!

I also got in touch with some people who have common interests in the artistic side of chess, including Etan Itfeld, owner of Tenderpixel Gallery and organizer of the Mind Sports Games and Tom Hackney, an artist who paints abstractions based on chess games.

At the London Bridge and Games Shop signing a copy of Play Like a Girl

I’m going to write up my British Chess Adventures in an article in Chess Life Magazine, so look out for that.

I busted the £550 PS Women Live Event in London in disappointing fashion but had some interesting experiences and will be writing a piece on it for PokerStars Women. I was happy to see Jan Combes aka JamJars take down the event for £8,700. Earlier this year, when I could still play on PokerStars I beat her to win a package to the EPT Madrid Ladies Event and felt a twinge of sympathy since she started that battle with a significant chip lead. She was radiant as she took down this London event and I thought it was cute that she posed for the winner’s photo (by Mickey May) with her son. Congrats.

I’m really into twitter these days (the max length I can be funny at is 140 characters), so follow me there as well as my sister accounts, USChess & The Grindettes.

Greg, Daniel and I are also going to be unveiling episodes for a new reality chess TV show in the next weeks and if you follow us at XtremeChessChamps you won’t miss a thing. On that note, I leave you with the host of our new show, Kacie Marie, with a quickie chess refresher.

Crowning the exciting chess week in Saint Louis was the unveiling of the chess Merit badge for the Boy Scouts. With over a million scouts across the US, I really believe this could push chess over the tipping point. Play Like a Girl was mentioned in a recent BBC article about glass ceilings yet to be shattered, and I hope the Girl Scouts will take the cue and start chessing as well!

I’m also staying pretty active in poker. Recent articles for PokerStars Women include an interview with Canadian pro Xuan Liu and a feature on women of the Big Game. (which happens to be my all-time favorite poker TV show.) I also contributed a photo essay to Woman Poker Player about PokerFairyTale. Finally, The Grindettes have a new facebook and twitter page so please follow both!

Sadly, since Black Friday I haven’t been able to play much internet poker, though I did win an online MTT. Tomorrow I’m off to the Borgata for a few events in conjunction with the WPT event there. It looks like I’ll also be doing some guest work for the Borgata Poker Blog, so keep your eyes open for my writing and my chip counts

Enjoy my favorite season!

While in Orlando, I also played in the Fischer Random side event, which was a lot of fun. For those of you who don’t know, Fischer Random chess shuffles the pieces on the back row into one of 960 possible positions, hence the name by which Fischer Random goes by in Europe, “Chess 960″. Just like in chess, the game begins symmetrically.

I’d never played any Fischer Random chess except for blitz games, and my initial impressions after the event was very positive. Because my opening preparation is pretty rusty, it was relaxing to be on a level playing field. I also enjoyed having to come up with original opening concepts from move one, rather than following well-trodden paths. I’ll definitely be writing an article on CLO about the event and my games in it, so look out for that.

One of the reasons I played in the event is I’m an organizer and commentator for the upcoming K v. Q: Battle of the Sexes event coming up in Saint Louis. The event, also known as Kings vs. Queens, will feature both “regular” rapid and Fischer Random rapid games. K v. Q will coincide with the opening of the World Chess Hall of Fame on September 9th. Should be a very exciting week for me as I’m also on the board of directors for the World Chess HOF- check out our snazzy new website!

Everyone’s favorite American chess dynamo GM Hikaru Nakamura is surprisingly playing in Orlando, a huge treat for his many fans here. The last time I saw Hikaru, we were having a ball at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. That was less than a month ago, but somehow it feels like another eon. Follow the Orlando chess action on uschess.org/clo and Monroi.com.

One of the most exciting moments in chess was coinciding with one of the ugliest in poker, quickly coined “Black Friday.” I had to get my mind back on the 64 squares so I shut out my sadness and joined GM Maurice Ashley in calling the play of 24 of the best chess minds in America.

They were playing at the beautiful Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis, the host of the US Championship and the US Women’s Championship for the past three years. Many of the players in the competition had also dabbled in poker, hoping to follow the example of players such as original November niner, Ylon Schwartz and chess prodigy turned poker phenom Jeff Sarwer. A number of chessplayers had great success switching to poker, while just as many others had failed. But this time, chess players were having all the fun. As the most important and richest chess competition in the nation got underway, another tribe of gamesplayers was in panic mode.

It’s not just online poker that I’ll miss- I have a gut feeling that it will be back sooner than we think. I am terribly sad for all the professional players who have lost their incomes overnight, with no warning and just before tax day. I am also deeply saddened about Poker Stars in particular. Oftentimes when I told members of the poker industry about my accomplishments in chess and writing, I felt eyes glazing over—models and athletes dabbling in poker were stories, a chess master & author with books like Chess Bitch and Play Like a Girl was predictable. I’d seen disinterest by so many in the poker world that I was not terribly optimistic when I applied for a writing gig for Poker Stars Women, an initiative to bring more females into the game. So I was thrilled when Poker Stars did hire me as a member of the new writing team. The positive reinforcement leaked into my game, as I began to play better than ever, going deep in the Sunday Million several times in a row, and qualifying for a package to the Ladies PCA event in the beautiful Atlantis resort. I was spending more and more time on Poker Stars. When I was done with my “real work” for the day, I enjoyed nothing more than to log in and join my favorite tournaments. I looked forward to Sundays all week.

Poker Stars was the sponsor of one of the greatest innovations in American chess, the US Chess League. Some may call that previous statement biased, as the United States Chess League, now in its sixth season, was founded by my brother, an online poker pro and a Supernova on Stars. But the facts support my claim-the USCL featured the dozens of the strongest players in the country, from World #7 Hikaru Nakamura to reigning US Women’s Champion Irina Krush. The exciting structure and convenient schedule of the USCL also brought players many players out of retirement, including GM Patrick Wolff, who recently started a Bay Area hedge fund called Grandmaster Capital Management.

My heart dropped when I saw Poker Stars on the list of shut down sites and Isai Scheinberg on list of the indicted. Poker Stars’ readiness to support chess, women in poker along with aggressive anti-cheating measures and top-notch customer support gave me a soft spot for the company. I didn’t care if other players said the games on Stars were tougher than on other sites- it meant more to me to win there.

It’s always been clear to me that both chess and poker are games of skill. Listening to Shaun Deeb on timing tells is as fascinating to me as American World Championship candidate Gata Kamsky’s thought process in evaluating a knight sacrifice. Great poker and chessplayers go to creative depths to inch past their opposition, and such detail-oriented analysis has helped me as an artist and a thinker.

Games like chess and poker challenge us to confront our weaknesses. If I play a chess game or a hand badly, I have no one to blame but myself, and the hand history or game score is a reminder. One of my own weaknesses in both games is a discomfort with tension-my raises veer toward oversize and my chess style is very aggressive, in some cases overly so. As a chronic self-analyzer, I was always good at identifying such leaks, but the challenge was to fix them before tendency turned into habit.

Without trivializing the financial and logistical hardships that many players and members of the poker industry now face, I’m sure opportunities lay beyond the black clouds. Draconian legislation can do a lot of damage, but it can’t erase the vast online poker market. This may be a good time for me to learn to enjoy tension.

Even though I’m hardly a make-up fiend, I was able to find 70% of the pieces in mostly abandoned make-up bags and vanity drawers.

Finding sixteen of one item was the main problem, but lipstick was the clear aesthetic and conceptual choice. A thirty dollar Chanel lipstick, purchased because I cannot afford anything else Chanel, co-mingled with one buck steals at the drugstore bargain bin. A pawn is still just a pawn.

Enjoy some stills from the shoot and pick up a copy of the book on 9queens.org, amazon, Mongoosepress or USCF Sales.