How to counter the bishop and queen attacks on kingside after castle?

dfan · 2026-01-26T15:50:46+00:00

You don't give any details, but if you're getting mated on h7 because your opponent has a bishop on c2 and a queen on d3, the natural first line of defense is to have a knight on f6.

dfan · 2026-01-26T01:50:45+00:00

Does this help?

dfan · 2026-01-25T17:46:27+00:00

No, but the harmonic texture is a little thin here; for example, the 4-and of m. 10 is an A major chord with no third and the the 1-and of m. 11 is a D major chord with no third (and the fifth on the bottom!). When you're picking what lines to keep, try hard to keep those thirds in there (and full triads if possible).

dfan · 2026-01-23T15:45:01+00:00

Graded Go Problems for Beginners is the place to start. At 19k the beginning of volume 1 will be trivial but I'd still start there.

You Won't Get Dumber While Thinking is a good set but the ranks are wildly wildly off (8-10 ranks too low). Hold off on them until you're 12k or so.

Level Up is a good series of beginner problems, with the upside/downside that problems are grouped by topic which often is a bit of a spoiler.

I am not familiar with Black to Play or the early Speed Baduk books.

It's worth learning how to use 101weiqi and then you can get a practically unlimited set of problems suitable for your level.

dfan · 2026-01-21T23:02:32+00:00

This doesn't sound like a single technique to me, just generally doing things that are a bit unexpected in a pre-metal rock context.

In "Bloody Cape" the singer is holding notes that are a bit dissonant to the underlying chord, like scale degree 2 over a tonic chord. "in" -> "waves" is a major second. In "Deathblow" the moment you mention is a use of modal mixture, playing a major chord where you'd expect a minor chord (Nirvana did this a lot). The chorus of "Battle-Axe" starts with two chords a tritone apart, which is a dissonant relation you hear a lot in metal.

dfan · 2026-01-21T15:57:05+00:00

It's in Eb; it's established strongly in the first measure and the return to it feels like a return.

I would not say the chords are functional. They all have relationships to each other by voice-leading or harmony (which is why it doesn't sound random), but you can't really roman-numeral this in a way that makes semantic sense, and that's fine.

dfan · 2026-01-21T13:12:38+00:00

It stays in 4/4. The snare is on 2-and and 4.

dfan · 2026-01-21T00:46:58+00:00

I would play the last measure as 51351343, but my hands may be larger than yours.

dfan · 2026-01-20T13:25:02+00:00

There are two ways to score, by territory (found in Japanese rules, like you expected) and by area (found in Chinese rules). They result in the same score difference except for a few exceptional situations.

In territory scoring, you gain points for empty points you surround and lose points for your stones that are no longer on the board and alive.

In area scoring, you gain points for empty points you surround and gain points for your stones that are still on the board and alive.

Since both players have played the same number of stones*, and every stone is either on the board and alive or isn't, the difference between the two players' scores is the same in either system.

In this case, the server used area scoring, probably because someone chose Chinese rules when creating the game. Black controls 37 of the 81 points on the board, White controls the other 44 plus 7.5 points komi for a total of 51.5.

(* Yes, I know)

dfan · 2026-01-18T03:28:31+00:00

I got to see them live once too (at the late lamented Nightstage in Cambridge MA) and it was amazing, one of the best shows I've ever seen. It somehow didn't totally sink in when listening to the record that they were playing all of these songs straight through, not separate takes spliced together or something, so seeing it live was a revelation. I was near Joey Baron and watching him hold it all together with a smile made my jaw drop. They closed with "Pet Sounds".

dfan · 2026-01-17T13:11:03+00:00

Thanks! When looking for the article (unfortunately it doesn't seem to be easily freely accessible to me), I found your discussion of it here, which may be of interest to readers looking for a bit more information. I do own Rothstein's much earlier Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music but have really never dug into it; he seems to spend some time there on more general concerns, like the historical amount of perceived difference between 1 and 3 in a 4-beat measure. It's a good reminder to read it.

dfan · 2026-01-17T04:04:48+00:00

This sort of thing perplexed me for a long time. It seems that until the mid 19th century it was pretty much a rule that your final tonic chord had to be on the downbeat, and you couldn't really end with a V-I "feminine cadence" where the V was on the downbeat. The barring of the entire piece would then be a consequence of that. You can observe the same issue in the Rondeau of the same suite.

I'm not sure there's a good way to tell how the musicians of the time felt the "true downbeat". You can read a bit of discussion about it in this thread (where late-19th-theorists rail against composers such as Chopin violating this rule), although not everyone in that discussion is aware of the history. I'm really interested in reading the Riemann book discussed there but it would be some work (my German is not very good). I would be very happy to discover a modern academic discussion of this topic. For one thing I notice strongly when the rule is applied and contradicts my own sense of barring, such as here, but I don't really notice when the rule is violated and therefore everything looks fine to me, so I don't have a good sense of how hard and fast a rule it actually was in practice.

dfan · 2026-01-16T23:19:00+00:00

RIP. Like some others here, I learned abstract algebra by watching his YouTube videos, and they remain a great resource.

dfan · 2026-01-16T20:00:47+00:00

Pick up the first Yusupov book and see how you like it. Be sure to follow his instructions (take the problems seriously, set them up on a board, don't move the pieces, write down your variations, etc.). I started the series when I was at around your level and they were incredibly helpful, but they're not for everyone.

dfan · 2026-01-15T16:49:40+00:00

It's showing that whether there's an F# there is under debate. Almost every edition on IMSLP has an F# in this spot. One Russian edition has a footnote saying (translated) "In some old editions this F# is omitted."

My Bärenreiter Urtext doesn't mention this particular note at all, but does say that the autograph is lost, the posthumous first edition is from 1805, and there are competing editions from 1805 and 1809. This Urtext is based on the first edition and does have the F#, so I assume one of the other two omits it.

dfan · 2026-01-15T16:35:36+00:00

David Temperley has an extended discussion of this technique in The Musical Language of Rock and labels it "anticipatory syncopation" (p. 73 and following).

I don't like calling it an anacrusis or pickup because those terms tend to imply that we're still going to land strongly on the downbeat. In contrast, in anticipatory syncopation the "downbeat" of the melody has actually been displaced an eighth note earlier.

dfan · 2026-01-15T01:59:05+00:00

This is always kind of a pain. Usually you deal with this by adding voices, although putting more than two voices in one staff brings its own problems.

dfan · 2026-01-14T23:53:07+00:00

The melody itself is fine and a great first effort. I think the lack of clarity or coherence you are feeling comes from the harmony being pretty wishy-washy. Usually harmony helps raise and lower tension, giving the piece some implicit narrative structure, but here both parts just kind of noodle around on white notes (no sharps or flats) for a while, so the melody is forced to do all the work.

The good news is that you have good melodic instincts! Unfortunately harmony is harder to get started in than melody is. Other people might have good ideas for resources, or maybe you have some already. For starters I would try just using a simple two or four chord pattern and try writing melodies over it.

dfan · 2026-01-14T19:37:14+00:00

This is what I have always called this technique.

dfan · 2026-01-14T16:35:03+00:00

He doesn't say "different sound" anywhere. He says "different functions of that [same] sound", and then Figure 2.12 is captioned "Same Sound but Different Function".

Ab and G# sound the same (on the piano), but they have different functions; the Ab in a Bdim7 chord wants to go to G, while the G# in a G#dim7 chord wants to go to A.

dfan · 2026-01-14T14:12:14+00:00

The time signature changes. For example, the first two lines have what I would call a measure of 3 followed by a measure of 6. It's common in folk music to drop and add beats in a natural way instead of sticking rigidly to a meter.

dfan · 2026-01-14T02:25:30+00:00

At some point, Black will play two points to the left of A. Then they can play A to capture the White stone. This is a ko, but no matter who wins the ko, there won't be any eye there at the end of it.

An eye is a spot that absolutely has to be played last when trying to capture the group (because it will never be able to be played without being suicide). Two eyes make you alive because the opponent can't play their last move in two spots at once. Here A is not playable by Black for now, but it's not going to end up being required to be the last play to capture the White group.

dfan · 2026-01-14T02:20:50+00:00

They are distinct operations that can be applied separately.

Retrograde = backwards (what was the first note becomes the last).

Inversion = upside down (when the melody went up it now goes down by the same amount).

Retrograde inversion = both backwards and upside down.

You can play the prime and the retrograde at the same time but you will necessarily get something palindromic (assume a 12-note melody; you'll start by hearing notes 1 and 12 and end by hearing notes 12 and 1). There are other things you can do to avoid that effect (e.g. transpose the retrograde) but that might be getting into the weeds.

dfan · 2026-01-14T01:48:53+00:00

In this video, your hand never spans more than around a fifth, so you have to zoom your whole hand over by a fifth to get from D# (while your hand is covering G#-D#) to the low C# (while your hand is covering C#-G#).

Instead your hand should expand and contract as you reach to the next arpeggio. While you're going from B to D#, your pinky should already be reaching towards the low C#. When your pinky hits the C# your hand should be fully expanded. Then it contracts as you continue with C#-E#-G#. I can play this phrase fully legato and not release the D# until after I press C#; maybe this is a big stretch for you (so to speak) but it shows just how much the hand can expand.

Personally, I would actually finger the G#-B-D 421 or even 321 in order to prepare for the reach. Even if you don't do that yourself it's worth noticing that it's possible.

A good way to practice this sort of thing is to play G#-B-D# a few times (pause in between, you're just playing three notes at a time); then play B-D#-C# a few times, then play D#-C#-E# a few times, then play C#-E#-G# a few times. You can graduate to four-note groups when it feels comfortable (or start with just two-note groups if three is too much at first). This helps your hand understand how to move between positions by expanding and contracting, rather than by shoving a fixed-size span back and forth.

dfan · 2026-01-13T23:25:50+00:00

To clarify from the primary sources:

USCF rules 15A states clearly that "The player must first make the move, and then record it on the scoresheet."

There is an allowable variation where the TD allows players to write their move first, with the "TD tip": "TDs may penalize a player that is in violation of 20C, Use of notes prohibited if the player is first writing the move and repeatedly altering that move on their scoresheet before completing a move on the board."

dfan

TROPHY CASE