2002-12-20 - 2:45 a.m.

Two Survivors

Well, today was all about being a survivor, in two different ways.

Today I had a pivotal game in the preliminaries of the Frown Town Chess championship. Because I lost my game last week I'm in danger of not making the cut to the final section. The only way to be sure of advancing is to win all the rest of my games, but I have several tough opponents still on my schedule.

Tonight I played Bobby, a young guy who has been rapidly improving recently. Although he is still rated well below me, he beat me twice in a row earlier in the year, and managed to draw me in the game we played in last year's preliminaries. Therefore this was an important game to win for two reasons: first, to maintain my standing in the tournament, and second to break my losing streak against him.

To make a long story short, I managed to win, but it was a game that neither of us could brag about.

He played the opening I expected, but varied early - he made what I felt was a premature attack, but it was very complicated. When the smoke cleared I was a piece ahead, but far behind on the clock. I managed to squelch his counterplay and got down to a winning endgame where I had a rook, bishop, and pawn versus his lone rook. Down to my last four minutes I then blundered away my pawn - the game was now very likely a draw. However, there was a final twist - two moves with plenty of time on his clock he blundered away his rook and resigned. He was so disgusted with himself I had to spend some time persuading him not to withdraw from the tournament.

He also told me I missed something that would have greatly shortened the game - immediately after he started the complications I could have trapped and won his queen. Sigh. In this case it was an example of me using the analysis from a previous move - I thought that one of my knights was on a different square.

Well, a dirty win is still a win. I'm still surviving. And when I got home I watched the tape of tonight's TV Survivor.

Well, it had to be about the most by-the-numbers finale ever. Brian, the slick used car salesman from Cali managed to hoodwink everyone and slide into a cool million dollars. He managed to arrange a final two with him and Clay, who was cranky and hostile enough to give Brian excellent chances of winning the jury vote. Brian had to stab a number of allies along the way to the final two, but managed to squeak by, 4-3.

It's obvious how Clay got to the final two: he'd been such a lazy crank that he seemed certain to lose a jury vote. I'm sure that each of the other final five survivors were imagining themselves sitting next to him at the end. Brian cleverly managed to eliminate the only other players capable of winning the final immunity challenges - Ted and Helen, and coasted into the final. It was plain that neither Clay or Jan was capable of winning the final test of endurance.

For the first time, the Survivor reunion was moderated by show host Jeff Probst, and I think he did a great job of grilling the contestants and getting the answers that everyone was curious about. Most of the questions seemed to be: "WHAT were you THINKING????" Brian could have been stopped at several points, but a combination of naivet� and poor strategy on the part of the other players allowed him to pass to the end without much trouble.

One of my favorite moments was in the Survivor Reunion where Brian was giving some longwinded granola-philosophy explanation of his behavior and Jeff cut him off, essentially reminding him that he'd ALREADY won the million dollars - he didn't have to keep bullshitting. Yay, Jeff! With every season I like him better. Wish I could say the same of the rest of the survivors. This year's crop seemed like a pretty dismal bunch. Well, Survivor 7 starts in February so we still have that to look forward to.

As the show was closing, Jeff made an interesting comment about how there is actually a methodology to playing Survivor - in the "Non-Competitive Game Theory" of John Nash, the Nobel-Prize-Winning subject of the book and movie "A Beautiful Mind." A sketchy outline of what this theory is can be found here. Probably the part most relevant to Survivor is "The Prisoner's Dilemma." Fascinating stuff.