#LaGrave Field

[scholarofgloom]

[ballparksaroundtheworld]

LaGrave Field, Fort Worth, Texas, USA

[grayflannelsuit]

An American Airlines GMC truck sits outside the original LaGrave Field in Fort Worth, Texas. Circa 1950s.

[kumail-fan]

World Rapid And Blitz Success

World Rapid And Blitz Success  Yu Yangyi

Yu Played with a Great Deal of team Contests in 2016, including the Chinese Chess League, European Club Cup, along with Also the 42nd Chess Olympiad. This was his greatest quick result yet, but there was more to come.

Yu tied for first place (along with GMs Nakamura and David Anton Guijarro) in the 2017 Tradewise Gibraltar championship, before a field of 255 players, such as GMs Vachier-Lagrave, Michael Adams, Veselin Topalov, Boris Gelfand, Nigel Short, Fabiano Caruana, Vitiugov, along with Peter Svidler.

Yu continued his success in the World Blitz/Rapid occasions and drama 13.5/21, and he tied for sixth position at the 2017 World Blitz Championship with Ding, Mamedyarov, Svidler, as well as many others.

In 2018 Yu became a part of this PRO Chess League's Chengdu Pandas (he's still on the group, which is currently called the China Pandas) which made the finals.

In September 2018, Yu attained number-12 on the planet using a 2765 classical evaluation. He ended with 10/15 at the 2018 World Rapid Championship, tied for sixth position next to GMs Alireza Firouzja, Giri, Karjakin, Grischuk, along with many others. In the 2019 Norway Chess occasion, Yu tied for second place (along with GM Levon Aronian) supporting the winner Carlsen, but forward of GMs Thus, Caruana, Vachier-Lagrave, Viswanathan Anand, Ding, Mamedyarov, and Grischuk.

Aronian won the occasion, but Yu placed before GMs Karjakin, Carlsen, Richard Rapport, Caruana, Dominguez, and Mamedyarov. In one of Yu's blitz wins from this occasion against Carlsen, the entire world winner goes for an early and unsound piece forfeit against Yu's Petrov using 4. Nxf7?!

Carlsen does a fantastic job of having his bits busy and keeping his big lead in evolution, along with the game stays sharp throughout. Yu manages to swap small pieces to reevaluate the place, and Carlsen's initiative fizzles out. After 17... Bh6, Yu is in the driver's chair while he maneuvers his dark-squared bishop out of h6-f4-e5 (a movement worth remembering). After 21... Rfg8, Carlsen is only missing, and the last coup de grace of 25... Ne3 leaves a feeling too --Carlen will be down a rook free of compensation and an dangerous king.

The 2019 World Cup has been Yu's greatest yet. He conquered GMs Ehsan Ghaem-Maghami, Baskaran Adhiban, and Wei Yi, also angry Nepomniachtchi to achieve the quarterfinals (top eight). Yu defeated Vitiugov and subsequently dropped to his fellow countryman Ding from the semifinals. Yu dropped the third-place game to Vachier-Lagrave to get a fourth-place finish from the 128-player area.

Yu scored 10/15 from the 2019 World Rapid Championship, tieing for fifth location. In addition, he played well from the 2019 World Blitz Championship, finishing tied for sixth position --his FIDE blitz score reached 2808 following this occasion, which makes him the number-five blitz participant on earth at the moment.

Read more about  Yu Yangyi

[ulbinsideparis]

Clip of Fort Worth Cats’ mascot Dodger (from LaGrave Field).  Thanks to ULB fan Jimmy

[news24fresh]

Chess | Harikrishna set to debut on million-dollar Tour

Chess | Harikrishna set to debut on million-dollar Tour

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Grandmaster P. Harikrishna is set to debut on the million-dollar Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour by joining the game’s elite players in the $150,000 Chessable Masters beginning on June 20.

Carlsen leads the online 12-player field which included Fabiano Caruana, Ding Liren, Hikaru Nakamura, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Daniil Dubov, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Anish Giri, Alexander Grischuk, Teimour…

[vsplusonline]

China overcomes India

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/china-overcomes-india/

China overcomes India

India fought hard but could not deny top seed China a 2.5-1.5 victory in the ninth round of the FIDE Chess.com Online Nations Cup on Saturday.

Also read: Chess Online Nations Cup | Anand’s 17-move stunner in India’s 2-2 draw against Russia

On a day when Europe outwitted USA 2.5-1.5 and brightened its prospects of joining China in Sunday’s Superfinals, and Rest of the World (RoW) held Russia 2-2, Adhiban’s third loss in four games hurt India.

For India, Anand and Humpy took a drop while China rested Ding Liren, but chose to field top-ranked woman Hou Yifan.

Vidit, Harika play draws

Vidit drew with Wang Hao in just 28 moves in the first game, while Harika showed better time-management and defended well against Hou. Adhiban, playing white, lost to Yu Yangyi and Harikrishna held Wei Yi.

Late on Friday, India came close to upstaging Europe before Hari’s loss made it 2-2. After Anand proved equal to Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Humpy chose to draw while a struggling Vidit did his confidence a world of good by beating Levon Aronian.

Leading 2-1, India had reasons to hope for a win with Hari looking good to hold Jan-Krzysztof Duda. But Hari faltered in his bid to enlarge his advantage and Duda’s victory gave Europe an important match-point.

The results:

Ninth round: India lost to China 1.5-2.5 (Vidit Gujrathi drew with Wang Hao; P. Harikrishna drew with Wei Yi; B. Adhiban lost to Yu Yangyi; D. Harika drew with Hou Yifan); Europe bt USA 2.5-1.5; Russia drew with RoW 2-2.

Eighth round: Europe drew with India 2-2 (Maxime Vachier-Lagrave drew with Viswanathan Anand; Levon Aronian lost to Vidit; Jan-Krzysztof Duda bt Harikrishna; Anna Muzychuk drew with K. Humpy); China bt Russia 2.5-1.5; USA bt Rest of the World 3-1.

Standings (after nine rounds): 1. China (17 match-points), 2. Europe (12), 3. USA (11), 4. Russia (6), 5. India (5), 6. RoW(3).

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[fortworthcats]

NBCDFW News Clip About Possibility Of Cats Returning

While nothing concrete was mentioned, a recent NBCDFW.com (channel 5) news clip came out discussing the possibility of a return of baseball to LaGrave Field.  The news feature showed the significant damage to the stadium since the team last played in 2014.

In case you cannot see the embedded news clip below, here is the link: https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/sports/Fort-Worth-Cats-Could-Soon-Return-to-LaGrave-Field-482417041.html

All credit goes to NBCDFW.com for this video:

The post NBCDFW News Clip About Possibility Of Cats Returning appeared first on Fort Worth Business Directory And Memories Of Cats Baseball.

from Fort Worth Business Directory And Memories Of Cats Baseball http://www.fwcats.com/nbcdfw-news-clip-about-possibility-of-cats-returning/

[huv-photo-blog]

Day #105 of 365 day photo challenge - more urban exploration at the not so long ago abandoned LaGrave Field. It was the home of the Fort Worth Cats until the team was disbanded in 2014. Weeds and graffiti are much of what’s left now. ⚾️ • • • • • • #365dayphotochallenge #picoftheday #fortworth #fortworthtx #instaftworth #instadfw #fortworthwhile #fortworthphotographer #visitfortworth #fwlocals #graffiti #graffitiart #graffitiporn #tagging #urbanexploration #urbandecay #urbex #abandonedplaces #bando #lagravefield #baseball #ipulledoverforthis #illgrammers #moodygrams #inspiretexasnow #colorpop #nikon #nikonphotography (at LaGrave Field)

[jodyedgarus]

Chess’s New Best Player Is A Fearless, Swashbuckling Algorithm

Chess is an antique, about 1,500 years old, according to most historians. As a result, its evolution seems essentially complete, a hoary game now largely trudging along. That’s not to say that there haven’t been milestones. In medieval Europe, for example, they made the squares on the board alternate black and white. In the 15th century, the queen got her modern powers.1

And in the 20th century came the computer. Chess was simple enough (not many rules, smallish board) and complicated enough (many possible games) to make a fruitful test bed for artificial intelligence programs. This attracted engineering brains and corporate money. In 1997, they broke through: IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer defeated the world champion, Garry Kasparov. Humans don’t hold a candle to supercomputers, or even smartphones, in competition anymore. Top human players do, however, lean on computers in training, relying on them for guidance, analysis and insight. Computer engines now mold the way the game is played at its highest human levels: calculating, stodgy, defensive, careful.

Or at least that’s how it has been. But if you read headlines from the chess world last month, you’d think the game was jolted forward again by an unexpected quantum leap. But to where?

The revolutionary is known as AlphaZero. It’s a new neural network, reinforcement learning algorithm developed by DeepMind, Google’s secretive artificial intelligence subsidiary. Unlike other top programs, which receive extensive input and fine-tuning from programmers and chess masters, drawing on the wealth of accumulated human chess knowledge, AlphaZero is exclusively self-taught. It learned to play solely by playing against itself, over and over and over — 44 million games. If kept track of what strategies led to a win, favoring those, and which didn’t, casting those aside. After just four hours of this tabula rasa training, it clobbered the top chess program, an engine called Stockfish, winning 28 games, drawing 72 and losing zero. These results were described last month in a paper posted on arXiv, a repository of scientific research.

Within hours, the chess world descended, like the faithful to freshly chiseled tablets of stone, on the sample of 10 computer-versus-computer games published in the paper’s appendix. Two broad themes emerged: First, AlphaZero adopted an all-out attacking style, making many bold material sacrifices to set up positional advantages. Second, elite chess may therefore not be as prone to dull draws as we thought. It will still be calculating, yes, but not stodgy, defensive and careful. Chess may yet have some evolution to go.

For a taste of AlphaZero’s prowess, consider the following play from one of the published games. It’s worth emphasizing here just how good Stockfish, which is open source and was developed by a small team of programmers, is. It won the 2016 Top Chess Engine Championship, the premier computer tournament, and no human player who has ever lived would stand a chance against it in a match.

It was AlphaZero’s turn to move, armed with the white pieces, against Stockfish with the black, in the position below:

AlphaZero is already behind by two pawns, and its bishop is, in theory, less powerful than one of Stockfish’s rooks. It’s losing badly on paper. AlphaZero moved its pawn up a square, to g4 — innocuous enough. But now consider Stockfish’s black position. Any move it makes leaves it worse off than if it hadn’t moved at all! It can’t move its king, or its queen, without disaster. It can’t move its rooks because its f7 pawn would die and its king would be in mortal danger. It can’t move any of its other pawns without them being captured. It can’t do anything. But that’s the thing about chess: You have to move. This situation is known as zugzwang, German for “forced move.” AlphaZero watches while Stockfish walks off its own plank. Stockfish chose to move its pawn forward to d5; it was immediately captured by the white bishop as the attack closed further in.

You could make an argument that that game, and the other games between the two computers, were some of the strongest contests of chess, over hundreds of years and billions of games, ever played.

But were they fair? After the AlphaZero research paper was published, some wondered if the scales were tipped in AlphaZero’s favor. Chess.com received a lengthy comment from Tord Romstad, one of Stockfish’s creators. “The match results by themselves are not particularly meaningful,” Romstad said. He cited the fact that the games were played giving each program one minute per move — a rather odd decision, given that games get much more complicated as they go on and that Stockfish was programmed to be able to allocate its time wisely. Players are typically allowed to distribute their allotted time across their moves as they see fit, rather than being hemmed in to a specific amount of time per turn. Romstad also noted that an old version of Stockfish was used, with settings that hadn’t been properly tested and data structures insufficient for those settings.

Romstad called the comparison of Stockfish to AlphaZero “apples to orangutans.” A computer analysis of the zugzwang game, for example, reveals that Stockfish, according to Stockfish, made four inaccuracies, four mistakes and three blunders. Not all iterations of Stockfishes are created equal.

DeepMind declined to comment for this article, citing the fact that its AlphaZero research is under peer review.

Strong human players want to see more, ideally with the playing field more level. “I saw some amazing chess, but I also know we did not get the best possible,” Robert Hess, an American grandmaster, told me. “This holds true for human competition as well: If you gave Magnus [Carlsen] and Fabiano [Caruana] 24 hours per move, would there be any wins? How few mistakes? In being practical, we sacrifice perfection for efficiency.”

Chess.com surveyed a number of top grandmasters, who were assembled this month for a tournament in London (the home of DeepMind), about what AlphaZero means for their profession. Sergey Karjakin, the Russian world championship runner-up, said he’d pay “maybe $100,000” for access to the program. One chess commentator joked that Russian president Vladimir Putin might help Karjakin access the program to prepare for next year’s Candidates Tournament. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, the top French player, said it was “worth easily seven figures.” Wesley So, the U.S. national champion, joked that he’d call Rex Sinquefield, the wealthy financier and chess philanthropist, to see how much he’d pony up.

“I don’t think this changes the landscape of human chess much at all for the time being,” the grandmaster Hess told me. “We don’t have the ability to memorize everything, and the games themselves were more or less perfect models of mostly known concepts.”

In some aesthetic ways, though, AlphaZero represents a computer shift toward the human approach to chess. Stockfish evaluated 70 million positions per second, a brute-force number suitable to hardware, while AlphaZero evaluated only 80,000, relying on its “intuition,” like a human grandmaster would. Moreover, AlphaZero’s style of play — relentless aggression — was thought to be “refuted” by stodgy engines like Stockfish, leading to the careful and draw-prone style that currently dominates the top ranks of competitive chess.

But maybe it’s more illustrative to say that AlphaZero played like neither a human nor a computer, but like an alien — some sort of chess intelligence which we can barely fathom. “I find it very positive!” David Chalmers, a philosopher at NYU who studies AI and the singularity, told me. “Just because it’s alien to us now doesn’t mean it’s something that humans could never have gotten to.”

In the middle of the AlphaZero paper is a diagram called Table 2. It shows the 12 most popular chess openings played by humans, along with how frequently AlphaZero “discovered” and played those openings during its intense tabula rasa training. These openings are the result of extensive human study and trial — blood, sweat and tears — spread across the centuries and around the globe. AlphaZero taught itself them one by one: the English opening, the French, the Sicilian, the Queen’s gambit, the Caro-Kann.

The diagram is a haunting image, as if a superfast algorithm had taught itself English in an afternoon and then re-created, almost by accident, full stanzas of Keats. But it’s also reassuring. That we even have a theory of the opening moves in chess is an artifact of our status as imperfect beings. There is a single right and best way to begin a chess game. Mathematical theory tells us so. We just don’t know what it is. Neither does AlphaZero.

Yet.

DeepMind was also responsible for the program AlphaGo, which has bested the top humans in Go, that other, much more complex ancient board game, to much anguish and consternation. An early version of AlphaGo was trained, in part, by human experts’ games — tabula inscripta. Later versions, including AlphaZero, stripped out all traces of our history.

“For a while, for like two months, we could say to ourselves, ‘Well, the Go AI contains thousands of years of accumulated human thinking, all the rolled up knowledge of heuristics and proverbs and famous games,’” Frank Lantz, the director of NYU’s Game Center, told me. “We can’t tell that story anymore. If you don’t find this terrifying, at least a little, you are made of stronger stuff than me. I find it terrifying, but I also find it beautiful. Everything surprising is beautiful in a way.”

from News About Sports https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/chesss-new-best-player-is-a-fearless-swashbuckling-algorithm/

[zanystarlightcreator-blog]

Oscar De La Hoya: In My Prime, I'd Have Schooled Manny Pacquiao

Giving Mexican carriers regarding the Ough. S. locations beyond existing 25 mile commercial zones set up along the border in 1982 has too many risks for Rep. Hunter and Illinois Rep. Daniel Lipinski who sent a letter to Securities and exchange commission. LaHood on May 4 opposing the pilot. In the 1920's a girl allegedly committed suicide by jumping down a 3 story tall elevator base. The girl does not like men at all the. Some on the campus theorize if you have a boyfriend pushed her. She lets her presence be known by turning lights and computers on and off and leaving black hand prints on fences. Wayne Harrison Jr. of Fort Worth, an experienced promoter, took a financial beating yesterday at his card at LaGrave Field featuring Chap Huggins and Jose Orozco in separate fights. And of course, white is still in style and any time you insist on having a top-notch fashion designer there greater level of to select from. Some of the top wedding dress designers are Monique Lhuillier, Oscar mudancas internacionais Renta and Vera Wang. There are hundreds of choice and ten's of thousands of styles and cost points. In built we visited the Cathedral, a huge building, and of home loan houses cathedrals on the globe. It might be large, but it isn't that nice. There isn't any symmetry due to the con-stantly adding of parts, and there isn't much unity or atmosphere neither. Yet truly beautiful are the silver/diamond treasuries, the paintings, the ceilings and the grave of Columbus (recently declared pertaining to being the official one, after many years of dispute and, finally, a DNA research). After checking in, we walked to Casa Pilatos for a visit. It was early noon but the sun burned before. We paid empresas de mudancas sp for the ground floor only, which was wonderful. Some sweet patio gardens, ancient roman statues, great architecture, large wooden doors,. An important start of our stay in Se-ville. If you've made your for you to the visitor center, get your tickets of their double Decker bus. Are going to have the opportunity to tour the entire city rrnside the day. Within tour, could be in order to rent headsets to for you to guided voiced tours with each other own preferred language. transporte de mudancas sp The amount range is roughly 25-30 Euro, but the view and determining baby gender that if possible gain is undeniably costly. Unfortunately remarkable the likeliest pick-ups for that Rockies this offseason may be pitcher Jon Garland, who tossed for San Diego in 2009. In seasons in which Garland started at least 32 games he has had an ERA under numerous.00 only twice and 2009 was his second. During 2009 he finished a 3rd.47 ERA pitching in spacious Petco Park and diet plans . his first since 2005 with the White Sox. The only good thing about Garland is that she does consider the ball every fifth period. Since 2002 he initiated a policy of at least 32 games every august. The downside continually that the ball is in play a whole with Garland and at Coors Field that is not a point.

[ballparksaroundtheworld]

LaGrave Field, Fort Worth, Texas, USA

[flauntpage]

A Chess Grandmaster Predicted the Irving-for-Thomas Trade

The basketball world was lit ablaze by the megastar trade deal inked out by the Celtics and the Cavs yesterday. Former Cavs guard Kyrie Irving—who was desperately trying to smash his second fiddle to LeBron—was sent over to the Celtics in exchange for Boston's Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder, Ante Žižić, and a 2018 draft pick Boston had acquired from the Brooklyn Nets. In a league that already bears so much witness to superteam reconstructive surgery, this was a deep cut that seemingly came out of nowhere.

Though this wasn't exactly as on point as a couple of dudes with Butt-related names calling out the terms of the Jose Quintana deal between the Chicago Cubs and White sox, hours before the Kyri-IT trade actually went down, someone predicted it nearly to perfection. He said the Celtics should offer the Cleveland Cavaliers Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder, "and one of your 80,000 draft picks" for Kyrie Irving. The only things missing were specificity on the draft pick, and Žižić.

So what kind of omniscient genius could possibly have predicted this insane, left-field power swap, intricacies and all? What kind of person has the foresight, the knowledge of the pieces of the game, and the mind-reading ability to get inside opponents' heads? Why, a chess grandmaster...GM for short. Duh.

38-year-old chess Grand Master Jan Gustafsson of Germany called the trade while shooting the shit with an opponent on an online chess platform who he noticed had a Boston Celtics avatar. As a big NBA fan thanks to Dirk Nowitzki, he keeps up on all the news around the league and started talking about what the Celts were going to do with Thomas, when he just started spitballing his own personal theory. Hours later, his theory basically was the trade.

We decided to catch up with Gustafsson to chat about his prediction. Here are a few highlights from our conversation.

VICE Sports: How did you become an NBA fan?

Jan Gustafsson: I started watching games regularly thanks to our boy Dirk Nowitzki when Dallas was in the finals against LeBron in 2011, when a lot of people in Germany were watching all the finals. Ever since, I've been watching League Pass and listening to all the podcasts and reading all the sites, so I'm well informed on stuff.

...Chess players are very much into basketball, like much more than the average population. If you look at the top ten chess players, all the guys are heavily following basketball, and looking at stats. They're all serious experts. Like, World Champion Magnus Carlsen, Levon Aronian, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, all the world's best players—they're serious basketball nerds. So it's funny that we're all really into it, while people aren't that much into soccer, as you're supposed to be as a European.

VS: How on earth did you craft this prediction about I.T. and Kyrie Irving?

JG: I'm just a basketball fan, so I do all these regular chess streams, and I enjoy going off on some tangents and talking basketball. Had I not played a dude with a Celtics avatar, I don't think I would have talked about it during the show. But of course, I was as surprised as anybody when I woke up this morning and saw that this trade had actually happened. It was fun to see.

VS: Are you worried about becoming Paul, the wildly successful, German World Cup match-predicting octopus, stuck in a tank and choosing the fates of NBA teams for the rest of your life?

JG: I was just talking to my friend about Paul after my video got shared. The funny thing is that I'm a professional chess commentator, but I'm famous for being terrible at making predictions for chess games. So this is a new, welcome change.

VS: At the risk of overdoing it, do you have any other NBA predictions?

JG: I think I should rest on my laurels for a couple of days before I stretch my neck out with the next one. It's sort of a low-percentage game.

VS: If Isaiah Thomas and Kyrie Irving were chess pieces, which ones would they be?

JG: They gotta be the same piece, right? Both attackers, that defend very poorly. They're both not very tall. I gotta say, they're both pawns. And that's not meant offensively. But pawns can't move backwards in chess. I feel like these guys, they're not very good at defense. You have to choose guys who only move forward.

VS: I thought you were going to say they were bishops or knights or something—unpredictable, x-factors...

JG: No, a knight can jump over their opponents, and I've never seen Isaiah or Kyrie jump over anything.

A Chess Grandmaster Predicted the Irving-for-Thomas Trade published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[amtushinfosolutionspage]

A Chess Grandmaster Predicted the Irving-for-Thomas Trade

The basketball world was lit ablaze by the megastar trade deal inked out by the Celtics and the Cavs yesterday. Former Cavs guard Kyrie Irving—who was desperately trying to smash his second fiddle to LeBron—was sent over to the Celtics in exchange for Boston’s Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder, Ante Žižić, and a 2018 draft pick Boston had acquired from the Brooklyn Nets. In a league that already bears so much witness to superteam reconstructive surgery, this was a deep cut that seemingly came out of nowhere.

Though this wasn’t exactly as on point as a couple of dudes with Butt-related names calling out the terms of the Jose Quintana deal between the Chicago Cubs and White sox, hours before the Kyri-IT trade actually went down, someone predicted it nearly to perfection. He said the Celtics should offer the Cleveland Cavaliers Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder, “and one of your 80,000 draft picks” for Kyrie Irving. The only things missing were specificity on the draft pick, and Žižić.

So what kind of omniscient genius could possibly have predicted this insane, left-field power swap, intricacies and all? What kind of person has the foresight, the knowledge of the pieces of the game, and the mind-reading ability to get inside opponents’ heads? Why, a chess grandmaster…GM for short. Duh.

38-year-old chess Grand Master Jan Gustafsson of Germany called the trade while shooting the shit with an opponent on an online chess platform who he noticed had a Boston Celtics avatar. As a big NBA fan thanks to Dirk Nowitzki, he keeps up on all the news around the league and started talking about what the Celts were going to do with Thomas, when he just started spitballing his own personal theory. Hours later, his theory basically was the trade.

We decided to catch up with Gustafsson to chat about his prediction. Here are a few highlights from our conversation.

VICE Sports: How did you become an NBA fan?

Jan Gustafsson: I started watching games regularly thanks to our boy Dirk Nowitzki when Dallas was in the finals against LeBron in 2011, when a lot of people in Germany were watching all the finals. Ever since, I’ve been watching League Pass and listening to all the podcasts and reading all the sites, so I’m well informed on stuff.

…Chess players are very much into basketball, like much more than the average population. If you look at the top ten chess players, all the guys are heavily following basketball, and looking at stats. They’re all serious experts. Like, World Champion Magnus Carlsen, Levon Aronian, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, all the world’s best players—they’re serious basketball nerds. So it’s funny that we’re all really into it, while people aren’t that much into soccer, as you’re supposed to be as a European.

VS: How on earth did you craft this prediction about I.T. and Kyrie Irving?

JG: I’m just a basketball fan, so I do all these regular chess streams, and I enjoy going off on some tangents and talking basketball. Had I not played a dude with a Celtics avatar, I don’t think I would have talked about it during the show. But of course, I was as surprised as anybody when I woke up this morning and saw that this trade had actually happened. It was fun to see.

VS: Are you worried about becoming Paul, the wildly successful, German World Cup match-predicting octopus, stuck in a tank and choosing the fates of NBA teams for the rest of your life?

JG: I was just talking to my friend about Paul after my video got shared. The funny thing is that I’m a professional chess commentator, but I’m famous for being terrible at making predictions for chess games. So this is a new, welcome change.

VS: At the risk of overdoing it, do you have any other NBA predictions?

JG: I think I should rest on my laurels for a couple of days before I stretch my neck out with the next one. It’s sort of a low-percentage game.

VS: If Isaiah Thomas and Kyrie Irving were chess pieces, which ones would they be?

JG: They gotta be the same piece, right? Both attackers, that defend very poorly. They’re both not very tall. I gotta say, they’re both pawns. And that’s not meant offensively. But pawns can’t move backwards in chess. I feel like these guys, they’re not very good at defense. You have to choose guys who only move forward.

VS: I thought you were going to say they were bishops or knights or something—unpredictable, x-factors…

JG: No, a knight can jump over their opponents, and I’ve never seen Isaiah or Kyrie jump over anything.

A Chess Grandmaster Predicted the Irving-for-Thomas Trade syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6

[ulbinsideparis]

YouTube playlist of fans who sang at the Fort Worth Cats home games at LaGrave Field, many during the time that the Cats were in the ULB.  Thanks to fan Paul.

[primefirstinspections-blog]

Concession stand at LaGrave Field catches fire

Concession stand at LaGrave Field catches fire

A concession stand at LaGrave Field caught fire Wednesday night, officials said. Firefighters were dispatched to the vacant ballpark in the 800 block of North Main Street about 8 p.m. … Click to Continue »