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Peter Svidler and Patrick Leonard will team up to play chess and poker against a rival team consisting of Alexander Grischuk and Isaac Haxton. Patrick and Isaac are as famous in the poker world as Peter and Sasha are in the chess world! We're also launching a Freeroll Series that you can play, each Sunday of March and April, on partypoker.

On Wednesday, March 10 at 8 pm CET, Peter Svidler will give a streamed chess lesson to his partner Patrick Leonard and will receive a poker lesson in exchange.

8-time Russian Chess Champion Peter Svidler started to play poker in 2010 and used to play a lot, but has done so less in the last couple of years. He describes himself as a "bad regular"... which is exactly what a humble "good regular" would say!

Patrick used to be World n1 on the PocketFives rating and is part ofTeam partypoker.

The day after, on Thursday, March 11 at 8 pm CET, it will be the turn of Alexander Grischuk and Isaac Haxton to train each other in order to get ready for the Battle.

You might remember from my articleGreat minds: 10 players who excel at both chess and pokerthat World n6 Alexander Grischuk made 8 cashes in the last World Series of Poker, including a 6th place for $30k!

As good in poker as Sasha might be, he will probably have a thing or two to learn from his partner, the great Isaac Haxton.

Also part of Team partypoker, Isaac is n16 on the All-Time Money List with $28 million in earnings! He is regarded as one of the best Heads-Up specialists in the world... and that's exactly what they are going to play.

The Battle will take place on Friday, March 12 at 8 pm CET.Team Peter and Patrick will face Team Alexander and Isaac.

Here's a quick summary of the format:

If you want to know the details:

As exciting as watching the world's best players can be, nothing compares with playing yourself!

That is why we are launching the Battle of the Minds Freeroll Series that starts this Sunday, March 7.

The whole competition is entirely free and while there are no cash prizes, you can still win some nice prizes.

One freeroll each Sunday of March and April at 8 pm CET/CEST.

All the freerolls are 6-max No-Limit Holdem Tournaments - only the speed changes, alternating between Turbo and Hyper.

In each Freeroll you can win:

At the end of April, after 8 tournaments, the top 4 on the leaderboard will play a knockout Heads-Up tournament and compete for these prizes:

4th place

3rd place

2nd place

1st place

Let's answer a few questions you might have:

Is it really free?There are no fees at all. However, you need a valid account with a deposit.

Where does the competition take place?On partypoker.com

Who can participate?All adults over 18 years old, who are living in a country where partypoker.com operates. This includes: Russia, UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Canada, Holland, LATAM

How to participate?Go to partypoker.com and register if you don't already have an account. In the lobby, find the tourney named Battle of the Minds Freeroll Series #1. A password is needed: Chessparty

We will publish the leaderboard soon after the end of the tournament. Good luck!

See the original post:
Battle of the Minds: 4 legends compete in chess and poker - chess24

Chess is undoubtedly a game of the mind. Sadly, some of the nuances are lost when you play on a computer screen. When a game is tactile, it carries a different gravity. Look at a poker player shuffling chips, and youll see that when a physical object is on the line, you play for keeps. [Matou], who is no stranger to 3D printing, wanted that tactility, but he didnt stop at 3D printed pieces. He made parts to transform his Creality Ender 3 Pro into a chess-playing robot.

To convert his printer, [Matou] designed a kit that fits over the print head to turn a hotend into a cool gripper. The extruder motor now pulls a string to close the claw, which is a darn clever way to repurpose the mechanism. A webcam watches the action, while machine vision determines what the player is doing, then queries a chess AI, and sends the next move to OctoPrint on a connected RasPi. If two people had similar setups, it should be no trouble to play tactile chess from opposite ends of the globe.

Physical chess pieces and computers have mixed for a while and probably claimed equal time for design and gameplay. There are a couple of approaches to automating movement from lifting like [Matou], or you can keep them in contact with the board and move them from below.

Original post:
Print Chess Pieces, Then Defeat The Chess-Playing Printer - Hackaday

As a guide to the late twentieth century culture wars, Hartman is unrivalled. War for the Soul of America features incisive portraits of individual players in the culture wars dramas, ranging from legal scholar Robert Bork and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, to dissident feminist Camille Paglia and artist Andres Serrano of Piss Christ fame; cogent discussions of the culture wars' major texts, including The Closing of the American Mind (Allan Bloom, 1987), Gender Trouble (Judith Butler, 1990) and The Bell Curve (Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, 1994); and revealing presentations of the signal culture wars controversies, including the 1985 porn rock congressional hearings spurred on by Tipper Gore, the heady controversy about changes to Stanford Universitys Western Civilization curriculum (students marched and chanted, Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western cultures got to go), and the early 1990s dust up about the Smithsonian Air and Space Museums allegedly offensive-to-veterans curating plans for the display of the Enola Gay Hiroshima bomber plane. If you lived through the 80s and 90s and paid attention to the news (or were anywhere near a college campus), reading Hartman sometimes feels like debriefing with friends after a raucous night out, an experience punctuated by laughter, head-scratching, and moments of regret for the excesses involved.

There are no more genuine culture wars firestorms like those outlined above today, according to Hartman, only passing flare-ups that are more farcical than poignant. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Hartman says, memories of an Ozzie and Harriet normative America had faded. A growing majority of Americans now accept and even embrace the cultural change wrought by the 60s. This argument is attractive, especially if you lean left. New peoplesblacks and other racial minorities, immigrants from strange lands, Catholics, Jews and other non-Christians, atheists, women, gays, lesbians, the disabledlaid claim to the nation, met with fierce resistance but eventually triumphed. The culture fractured but was then reconstituted into a more diverse and inclusive whole.

This explanation is neat but ultimately unsatisfying. In asserting that the culture wars were a temporary adjustment period, Hartman overlooks the extent to which they have been institutionalized into the very fabric of American society. Fox News, for example, has provided a non-stop, 24-hour televised arena for the culture wars ever since 1996. (MSNBC, on the Left, serves a similar, if less influential and pugnacious, function.) Take note also of our political primary system, in which the extremes of both parties have an outsize role in selecting candidates and shaping political platforms. Hartman points to changing attitudes about homosexuality to support his contention that the culture wars are finished. Homophobia is on the wane and public support for gay marriage is up, dramatically so. Hartman is undeniably right that homosexuality is no longer such a divisive subject in our national conversations but it is worth making a distinction between culture wars issues that may be blunted and others that will always be sharp.

Most important of all, arguably, are the controversies that linger in public education. We have a radically decentralized educational system, as historian David Labaree has pointed out, with some 14,000 individual school districts interacting with the local, state, and federal governments. Under these conditions, the capacity for passionate disagreement about what to teach the 50 million children and adolescents enrolled in public school is enormous. As I write, the Louisiana Senate Education Committee is considering the repeal of the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act signed by Governor Bobby Jindal, which gives cover to teach intelligent design [and] creationism. Jindal, who majored in biology at Brown University, said, I don't want any facts or theories or explanations to be withheld from [students] because of political correctness. Last week, aftermonths of rancorous debate,the Acalanes Union High School District school board in Lafayette, California, reaffirmed its commitment to working with Planned Parenthood educators to deliver its high school sex education curriculum. The school board was not swayed by the arguments made by the NOISE (No to Irresponsible Sex Education) Coalition that Planned Parenthood is a business that sells sex. Two months ago, the Oklahoma legislature introduced a bill that would ban funding for AP U.S. History courses in light of the College Boards new curriculum guidelines. The bills author, Republican Representative Dan Fisher, said the redesigned framework emphasized what is bad about America, while neglecting American exceptionalism. Schools are much more than conveyor belts for academic contentthey are also critical sites for the transmission of beliefs and values from one generation to the next. Curriculum disputes in the culture wars idiom are not going away anytime soon.

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War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars ...

Besides the Champions Chess Tour, aVidit Chess Tour is taking place as a qualifying event for the tour organized by the Magnus Carlsen Group.This online tournament is being played as a knockout on March 4-7 with 16 playersfrom Indiaon the chess24 platform. The participants qualified to the event by playingpreliminaryblitz tournaments. The first two players from each blitz open tournament qualified tothe knockout tournament.

In the knockout, two games are played per round with a time limit of 15 minutes plus 10 seconds per move four games will take place in the final. In case of a draw, an Armageddon decider will be played.

The first prize is 1,000 US dollars. The top eight players will get an invitation to the Indian qualifying tournament for the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour.

Gukesh and Aronyak reached the final. The former defeated Vishnu Prassana, Mitrabha Guha and Narayanan S. L. on his way to the deciding match; while the latter got the better of Abhijeet Gupta, Harsha Bharathakoti andErigaisi Arjun to reach the final.

The Fashionable Caro-Kann Vol.1 and 2

The Caro Kann is a very tricky opening. Blacks play is based on controlling and fighting for key light squares. It is a line which was very fashionable in late 90s and early 2000s due to the successes of greats like Karpov, Anand, Dreev etc. Recently due to strong engines lot of key developments have been made and some new lines have been introduced, while others have been refuted altogether. I have analyzed the new trends carefully and found some new ideas for Black.

Commentary by Srinath Narayanan and Vidit Gujrathi

The qualifier events took place on February 21-28 on Tornelo. The time control for each event was 3 minutes for the games plus2-second increments.

Here are the results:

Original post:
Vidit Chess Tour: Aronyak and Gukesh in the final - Chessbase News

Vernon Thorpe on Is the Gospel Hate Speech?

Dana Pavlick on Is Adherence to Logos Anti-Semitism?

E. Michael Jones on Is Christian Anti-Semitism Responsible for the Poway Synagogue Shooting?

To have a .pdf copy of the June issue e-mailed toyour inbox during our business hours, use this button. The cost is $4.

Is Christian Anti-Semitism Responsible for the Poway Synagogue Shooting? by E. Michael Jones. On Saturday, April 27, John Earnest walked into a synagogue in Poway, California and opened fire wounding two people and killing one. Two days later, Israels UN ambassador, Danny Danon, announced: The time for talking and having a conversation is over, and demanded that anti-Semitism be a criminal offense. Earnest clearly agreed with Ambassador Danons assessment that the time for talking and having a conversation is over, and the result was tragic. Soon after the attack, Dr. Michael L. Brown, a Jewish follower of Jesus, exploited Earnests inability to combine white racism and Christianity by blaming the attack on Christian anti-Semitism. If Ambassador Danon has his way and anti-Semitism becomes a crime, any time a person disagrees with a Jew, he will break the law. This will mean the end of free speech in America. It also will be the end of religious freedom because Dr. Brown has made it clear that any Christian who disagrees with his understanding of Scripture as it relates to the Jews is a Christian anti-Semite.$6.99, paperback; $3.19 e-book. Read More/Buy

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Culture Wars Magazine and Fidelity Press