Words about Pictures - 1

Credit goes to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq7Y2xx-U6A

    Ok, so we may have cheated a little. Posting a gif instead of an image, kind of in the grey/gray area, no? And on our first entry of this series, too. How could we? Well, we at MELnewzers decided that we could talk about images, gif, or even videos. Essentially, anything that doesn't contain text. And NO, we do not have to write a thousand words for every frame in this gif. That would be a lot. A huge amount. In short, no.

    This gif is a quite interesting one. It depicts a chess game between a goat-man and another player, who may or may not be a goat-man himself. The gif begins with the (aptly clothed) black player taking White's a pawn. The goat-man playing white (also aptly clothed) considers the position (as shown by him drumming his fingers and stroking his goat-beard), and then clenches his fist. Then he knocks the majority of the pieces off of the board. 

    We at MELnewzers believe that context is a very important part of studying an image (or gif or video or whatever). So, we painstakingly copied the starting position of the game onto a chess board:

This the board after the goat unleashed his devastating attack:

    One of the first things you may notice is that the board was set up incorrectly. The left corner square for both players should always be dark, and the right corner square should be light. The board in the gif was placed sideways, which only adds to the confusion aspect.

Next, take a look at the position. White seems to have a lot more pieces than black does. Indeed, after considering 30+ moves into the future, chess engine Stockfish says that White leads by 14.2 points and black's next move should be ...e4. For reference, one point is the value of being up by one pawn in a completely equal position. This essentially means that White is greatly winning in this game and it should be a breeze.

    But wait.

    It was white, not black, who swept the pieces off of the board. Why? Shouldn't white have kept playing? Well, it all comes down to the move black played, capturing goat-man's pawn with his bishop. This isn't what the computer says black should have played, but black's plan is much sneakier than a computer could think of.

    With the bishop move capturing the pawn, black gives a check to the white king. And if you see, the king cannot move anywhere. Oh no! The white and black bishops slice across the board, and the black rook controls the entire g-file, stopping the king from escaping that way. Game over, right? It turns out that this isn't checkmate, because there is a white rook on h1 that can simply take the bishop that delivers the check. 

    Sadly for goat-man, he messes up the game before he can see that he is not lost. If he just takes the bishop, he can go on to win, being up even more material than before. But noooo, goat-man sweeps his hand across the board, dislodging all of his own pieces while leaving a few of black's still standing.

What can we learn from this?

    Silly as it looks, this gif can actually give us a lot of insight on how to live our lives. We must strive to not be goat-man, and instead be the black player.

    What did goat-man do wrong? Well, he was up so much material and he had such a good position, but goat-man let it all go to waste. He swept his pieces off of the board without even verifying that he had lost. If only he had seen the board once more before taking such action, he might have won the chess game. Even though goat-man wore a bow tie, he let his emotions cloud his judgement. You, deal MEL, can be better than this. When you think you can win, go for it. Don't keep all your pieces behind your pawns where they are forced into passivity, like poor old goat-man did. Attack a little. And most importantly, stay calm and do not get provoked, even if the situation turns sour. Who knows, there might be a rook you weren't looking at before, and the whole game suddenly turns around.

    If you shouldn't be like goat-man, then who should you be like? The black player, of course. As impeccably dressed as goat-man, the black player calmly took one of goat-man's pawns with his bishop. Even though he was horribly lost, he didn't lose his cool. He didn't go all goat-man over the board. Instead, he was sneaky. If you can't win by being straightforward, then try to outsmart your opponent and go the cheeky sneaky route (Note: When talking about real life, the sneaky route can be qualified to the sneaky-but-legal-and-morally-responsible route. MELnewzers does not advocate robbing banks when in financial trouble). If you take the sneaky route, things just might go to plan, leaving you with two rooks, two pawns, and your king still standing tall.

    This gif presents us with three primary important lessons to take away. One, you must attack while ahead, or you could find yourself in what seems to be a compromising position. Two, you must keep a cool head about yourself and always contemplate your position before doing something drastic that may not be the best choice. And three: If you cannot beat your opponent through brute force, you're forced to think of another, craftier strategy. Sometimes, you may get caught and your bishop will get captured. But what's new with that? You were losing to begin with, and now you're only losing a little bit more. Other times, however, the opponent will let his focus wander, and that may score  you an advantage which you can press and turn into a victory. 

    Whenever you come into a tough situation, consider the gif of goat-man. Let it guide you to choosing the right course of action. Don't be like goat-man, whatever you do. Being like goat-man is not the way to go. For one, we just covered his faulty approach in, like, and entire paragraph. And for another, goats are vegetarians! Take the pledge, don't be veg.

    Well, fellow MEL's, we did it. We promised you 1,000 words about a picture and we got there. I may have had to use a gif and may have gotten a bit rambly, but MELnewzers always keeps its promises. (Note that we will in no way write a 1,000 word post for this series ever again)