604 Days of Chess

The game has finally ended and I have lost.

As you can see from the board, Mike had me down to just my king and cornered me in check-mate.

The game started on 20 March 2005 and ended today on 14 November 2006, 604 day later. I first mentioned the game here: Red Hot Pawn. Is this a record? I don't know, I'll send an email to the owners of Red Hot Pawn (www.redhotpawn.com) and ask them.

I noticed that as soon as the game was over, Mike immediately challenged me to a new game. I have also noticed a worrying improvement in my opponents game. He's getting quite good.

Now there was another thing that I noticed when I went to the Red Hot Pawn site to check on my defeat. That was this excellent advert.

For me, an adult, this advert does not cause offense. (If I recall correctly this type of advert did not cause me offense at any age.)

However, I'm not sure that Mike's parents would be happy with Mike viewing these ads when he's playing chess. I know that the Red Hot Pawn web site has the option to subscribe and if you are a subscriber then you will not see adverts - that could be a solution.

However, if they are going to take images like this off the site if I subscribe then I'm definitely not going to subscribe to the site. Let them stay!

It may be that Mike's computer has an adult image filter on it and so he doesn't see ads like this. Is there such a thing to stop kids seeing ads like this? I don't know...