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Jeremy Good wrote on Fri, Mar 20, 2015 10:58 AM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★

Cameron, I'm glad to play the game out for our own purposes, just as Joe Joyce and I hope to play out our games too, but without any bearings on Cameron's well-earned victory in this tournament. Thank you, Cameron, for exhibiting such tremendously great sportsmanship.

Your lavish praise of me earlier is much appreciated and made me feel already like a real winner long before our two games concluded. Thank you for that!

It really was part of my strategy to use as much time as I was allowed but I don't say it was a particularly good or ethical strategy. It may have created an aura of self-consciousness that wouldn't have been there otherwise and this may have detracted from the quality of some of the games, I'm not sure. But regardless, I, for one, learned a lot from playing in this tournament.

Thank you, Carlos, for organizing the tournament. I richly enjoyed it and look forward to the next one. I hope there will be another one in 2015 (I hope to talk with you about this, Carlos as I have some ideas about it; you mentioned wanting to organize other tournaments as well; let's discuss). I enjoyed the lucky games I played against you quite a bit too.

I would also like to come back and annotate each of the games played in this tournament. Perhaps a few of us can collaborate on that.

The tournament helped lure me back to the site and created a really positive turning point in focus, perhaps not just for me. I'm tremendously grateful that I was invited and allowed to play in it.

I tried very hard to win this tournament but I hope to re-double my efforts in the next one. There were points at which I wish I'd played much better (despite taking much time, overlooking some perhaps obvious moves) and/or taken more time to examine my moves (I see these time management issues as an essential part of my learning curve though) and obviously many points at which I benefited from others' blunders. I have a deep and increasing personal, vested interest in improving as a chess/variants-player. For one thing, I enjoy the athletic and aesthetic aspects of competitive chess.

The game Cetran Chess 2, like Tutti Frutti but more so, should help people appreciate that games with all different pieces are certainly as sophisticated as games with twin pieces. Cetran Chess 2 encompasses a nice range of value, with maybe four, five or six levels.

1) Knight (in its own beloved category).

2) Rook and Dragon Horse,

3) In its own category: Cardinal/Archbishop (which in some ways was the star of this tournament with its great mobility and forking ability),

4) Marshall/Chancellor

5) Queen

6) Sissa.

One could also lump the latter three in the same category as it frequently makes sense to allow exchanges among them. The exchangeability of pieces in categories 2 and 4 - 6 is part of what makes Cetran Chess 2 so fascinating. I think you really hit it out of the park with this one, Carlos.

Although the Sissa has a much more limited range than I thought initially (until the endgame it is very hard for it to go more than three or four spaces orthogonally), its tremendous forking abilities give it an edge, in my opinion, over all the other pieces, one that grows as pieces are removed from the board. If you can, I suggest to hang on to your Sissa! Too bad I had to exchange it in my last game.

As with all fairy pieces, I'm still trying to get used to it and even overlooked completely two of its moves in my last game (the ones prior to my opponent enjoying a sizeable material advantage).

The more I play with the Sissa, the more I appreciate it as a piece. It provides a wonderful and vital way of re-envisioning orthogonal and hippogonal distances on the chessboard.

Playing in this tournament gave me a renewed appreciation for both the piece and the game. Thanks again to you and everyone who played with me, including Sagi (don't be discouraged; thank you for conceiving of the idea of this tournament) and Joe (who is always a great player, designer and friend).

As a designer, I am inspired by Cetran Chess 2 to think about creating more games filled with diverse pieces and multi-tiered values. The randomizing keeps it fresh, but I encourage people to play both sides of each new random setup to make things fair.


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