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TAMPA, Fla., Nov. 23, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --Edison Avenue launches new service line providing virtual Corporate Development Officer services.Organic business revenue growth is not enough; companies need a strategic growth plan in today's tepid economy.

As Sun Tzu said in his ancient bookThe Art of War,"Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

Traditional sales and marketing generated sales are very important to a business's health, but it's no longer enough to remain viable in many industries. Businesses today face the triple vice of rapid technological advancement, talent wars and increasing competition.It's true that companies must grow or die - there is forward or backward, but nostanding still for any business.

This new Edison Avenue service is particularly relevant inmaturing industries when the demand for products or services has stagnated.Also, companies suffering fromthe law of large numbers, where the revenue base is substantial and generating high percentage growth is difficult.Psychological self-protection can also take holdas a company gets larger, creating morepressure to preserve the core businessand less willingness toinnovate and take risks. Each of these conditions can pose a threat to the long-term health of a company.

Most companies do not adequately understand how to address the 3B business growth dilemma Build Buy Borrow.The Buy reference acquiring another business and Borrow is strategic alliances, licensing and other leveraged relationships.

The smartest and best organizations often have a Corporate Development function, which until now has been unaffordable to smaller companies. This function/position usually reports to the CEO and leads strategic growth including: M&A, Joint Ventures, Capability Acquisition, and Licensing/Franchising to exponentially grow business sales beyond the limits of traditional organic sales growth.

The financial fruits of this role and function can be incredible.

This role is often the "secret ingredient" that private equity firms deploy to triple or quadruple the value of the companies they acquire. Edward Valaitis said: "Why leave all the upside on the table for the investors that may acquire your business one day?"

Edison Avenue provides Business Sale, Business Valuation and Growth Strategy Consulting services. Specializing in harvesting the enterprise value of companies with revenue between $2 million and $25 million.

Media Contact: Edward Valaitis 800-975-2114 [emailprotected]

SOURCE Edison Avenue

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Why Do Business Owners Sense They Are Playing Checkers in a Chess World? - PRNewswire

The Netflix chess epic The Queens Gambit has entered the stage of cultural ascendency in which people choose via Buzzfeed quiz or personal inclination which character you are. Sexy Benny (Love Actuallys Thomas Brodie-Sangster), the chess cowboy who thinks for five minutes or so that he is better than prodigy Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy)? Loyal Harry (Harry Potters Harry Melling), who realizes early on that he isnt even close and loves Beth anyway? Or super-cool Jolene (newcomer Moses Ingram), the fellow orphan turned law student/civil rights activist who needs to have a series of her own?

Ill tell you who I am. Im the girl who lost to Beth in the first round at the local tournament and then gave her a Kotex pad in the ladies room.

Actually, the character has a name, Annette Packer (Eloise Webb), and she shows up again a few episodes later to deliver a short but pivotal speech about how important it was to have been beaten by Beth because it proved that girls could do great things. Its the 1960s as evidenced by Beths Cleopatra eyeliner and kicky hat the same decade when real-life child prodigy turned troubled but brilliant grandmaster Bobby Fischer was giving the United States one more weapon in its Cold War arsenal by beating Russians on his way to the world championship.

In 2020, the message about the value of seeing a woman win in a mans world may seem a bit obvious (and given the whiteness of virtually everyone involved, limited) but to its everlasting credit, The Queens Gambit is not about that. Aside from a few sexist comments from a few minor characters, the series examines a personal journey toward greatness in which the lead character happens to be female.

Still, its tough not to wonder how many lives would have been different if there had been a Beth Harmon, actual or fictional, at the time of Fischers rise. Including mine.

Like thousands of other kids, I learned to play chess during the Fischer boom, the craze that grew around his ascent to world champion in 1972. When I was 7 or 8, my father bought a chess set and taught me how to play. He was nowhere near as good of a player as Beths mentor, orphanage janitor Mr. Shaibel (Bill Camp), but he was good enough to teach me how to play strategically and aggressively. And, like Mr. Shaibel, he offered me books that would advance my ability to play, some of which I actually read.

For four or five years, I played a lot with my dad, with his friends and then with schoolmates and my fifth grade math teacher. Mr. Goetz kept a chess board on his desk and was always happy to play a bit between classes or after school. For a minute, I had fantasies of being that kid who could play seven games at a time and win all of them, but two obstacles quickly became apparent: I did not have the natural ability or dedication to advance beyond Look, a 10-year-old who can actually play chess!

Neither Fischer nor any of his opponents, Russian or otherwise, was female.

Obviously, there are many girls and women who do not need cultural validation to become champions or experts in their field; if that were the case, wed have no female champions or experts in most fields. Nona Gaprindashvili became the first female grandmaster in 1978, and many other women have achieved that title since. But although both Susan Polgar (who became a grandmaster in 1991) and Iriana Krush (a grandmaster in 2013) have played for or lived in the United States, there has never been a U.S.-born female grandmaster, much less anything approaching a female Fischer.

Its impossible to overstate the effect Fischer had on American chess so large and so lasting that in the universe of The Queens Gambit, Fischer does not exist. His historical dominance would have loomed too large over Beths fictional quest; she is his replacement, down to the cultural excitement generated by her rising career.

As Liz Garbus chronicles in her terrific 2011 documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World (which Netflix or HBO Max really needs to pick up pronto, as it is currently available only on YouTube), the prodigy from Brooklyn captured the countrys attention from age 14, when he won the 1957 U.S. Chess Championship. By the time he beat Boris Spassky to win the World Championship in 1972, he was an international celebrity, showing up on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and the cover of every national magazine.

Garbus loved The Queens Gambit the performances and the way the series captured the edge-of-your-seat excitement that chess held at that time, she says, though it took her a few minutes to adjust to an American chess that did not include Fischer.

I kept wondering if they were going to mention Bobby or Spassky, she says. It was tough for me to imagine chess during the Cold War without Fischer.

Fischers rise gave the United States one more arena in which to compete with the Soviet Union, where, as The Queens Gambit makes clear, chess was taken as seriously as pro football is in the U.S.

It was a kind of cultural propaganda, Garbus says. We dont live in that kind of bipolar world any more. At least not internationally, though the current political divide comes close. (What) we have in American politics right now is a bit like the emotion surrounding the Cold War you can imagine how amazing it was to see someone from your side kick someone from the other side in the butt.

Its no wonder then that the relatively handsome and charming Fischer became a fixture on the talk show circuit and why between national pride and the growing influence of celebrity, chess became a craze the way running did after Frank Shorter won the gold in the marathon at the 1972 Olympics and cycling did after the 1979 hit movie Breaking Away.

Like Beth, Fischer had demons; but unlike Beth, who continually worries whether she is mentally ill, Fischer actually was. Increasingly angry, paranoid and extremely anti-Semitic, he punctuated his world championship by withdrawing from the world and from chess. He refused to play publicly for 20 years including in 1975, when he famously lost his title as world champion by default; he simply did not show up to defend it in a match against Anatoly Karpov. When Garbus read Fischers obituary in 2008, she was shocked to discover there had never been a documentary about the rise and fall of his career.

It was soon after Karpovs default victory that I stopped playing chess for anything more than occasional fun. The charm of being exclaimed over as a girl who knew how to play gave way, in my early teens, to an attitude that was at best patronizing youre pretty good for a girl. More than that, though, it was the miraculous and misleading use of the word prodigy, so often applied to Fischer, that proved my biggest obstacle. I liked the idea of being a prodigy, but I thought that meant possessing some God-given ability that not only transcended hard work but also actually precluded it.

And after I stopped playing, I forgot all about chess.

I mean literally. It was weird how completely I had forgotten all those hours hunched over board or book and my brief dreams of greatness until I watched The Queens Gambit.

Even though I knew going in what the series was about, I didnt connect it with myself until the scenes in which Beth learns how the pieces move, becomes familiar with the names of the basic openings. Then, in a sudden rush like you read about amnesiacs experiencing, it all came back a childs thrill when she realizes that she knows what she is doing, that she is playing with intent, rather than merely reacting to her teachers moves. The joy of finally winning after all those early losses honestly, is there a more satisfying word in the English language than checkmate? and the intoxication of being asked by an adult, Howd you do that?

Where had all those memories and sensations gone for so many years?

Beth Harmon, already an outlier in many ways, was built to not care or even take much notice of the judgmental looks she gets when she takes on a high school chess club made up entirely of young men. That she has been fed a steady diet of tranquilizers only partly accounts for her preternatural calm, just as it only partly accounts for her ability to gaze at the ceiling and work through an endless stream of strategies and scenarios, to learn how to play the game in her head, to live and breathe chess.

Fischer, like Beth, was eccentric so sensitive to sound that during the world championship, he insisted the sound of the cameras was distracting him and moved his games to a small storage room but for Garbus, it is difficult to imagine a grandmaster who is also an addict. The brain fog of addiction is very incompatible with being a chess master. (Although The Queens Gambit captures perfectly the obsession and all-encompassing nature of those who give themselves to the game, Garbus adds, I never found anyone as stylish and chic (as Beth) things like grooming were not much of an issue.)

Watching Bobby Fischer Against the World makes it clear how much of Beth was influenced by Fischers life, down to her late arrival at an important match that opens the show. But even after decades of learning about and in some cases meeting extraordinary groundbreaking women, of knowing that there is nothing a man can do that a woman cant (often better), I was filled with a very specific sense of wonder and gratitude while watching a female character master a thing that, despite no small amount of effort, I could not.

And who knows how many women of my generation once had the actual potential to be chess champions? Who knows what might have happened if theyd had the chance to be inspired by even a fictional female Bobby Fischer? A grandmaster-in-the-making who got her period in the middle of a match and won anyway. Who acted up and acted out and made terrible mistakes but who was respected and even loved because of the rare talent she possessed.

That certainly did not seem possible in chess, or pretty much any other arena during the 1970s, 80s or 90s, when women who achieved or even aspired to greatness continually had to prove that the journey did not come at the cost of their femininity.

I dont want to spoil The Queens Gambit any more than I have, but its most beautiful aspect is its willingness to grant its central character everything she has earned, even as it shows us how very difficult that earning can be. Intuitive brilliance will take you only so far; the deciding factor of genius is always dedication.

I loved The Queens Gambit so much, I watched the final episode three times. Then I went and found the chess set my father bought to teach me how to play; the box was dusty, dented and torn, but all of the pieces were right where I had left them.

Mary McNamara is a culture columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times.

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So many lives would be different if we'd had 'The Queen's Gambit' 50 years ago. Including mine - South Bend Tribune

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Please take thought of our offered activity in a cost that is affordable to the families therein giving all students some fun and learning and perhaps the new ones to CHESS an opportunity to learn and see to further their skills within the sport and or not ... never know till try.

Age's are from K ~ 6th Grade

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Worry not if they not even know what a pawn is, as we have taught such to now a level in months to playing mini tournaments in our class all online.

We use the software ChessKid.Com and are organized to which have many students in current and the factor of them interacting is just as important as the sport itself

So join us and try it out it will be fun (to keep safe and fun, all students "must" register. Join the day, two or three ...

All regular Chess classes this coming week and private 1-1 Chess classes are closed for break as to bring about this Chess Camp 😉

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Local Event: ONLINE CHINESE CHESS CAMP | THANKSGIVING BREAK | K ~ SIXTH (6th) - Patch.com

The first thing to say about chess is that we are not all natural geniuses like Beth Harmon, the star of The Queens Gambit, who is taught the game by grumpy but lovable janitor Mr Shaibel at the age of nine and is very soon beating him.

The daughter of a maths PhD, she sees the patterns and movement in chess immediately, can visualise effortlessly being able to memorise moves and play without a board is the sign of chess mastery and sees whole games on the ceiling of her orphanage dormitory. She is a prodigy, just like world champion Bobby Fischer, on whom Walter Tevis based the novel from which the TV series is drawn. We are mere mortals. So how do we get good?

First, by loving chess. You can only get good at chess if you love the game, Fischer said. You need to be endlessly fascinated by it and see its infinite potential. Be willing to embrace the complexity; enjoy the adventure. Every game should be an education and teach us something. Losing doesnt matter. Garry Kasparov, another former world champion, likes to say you learn far more from your defeats than your victories. Eventually you will start winning, but there will be a lot of losses on the way. Play people who are better than you, and be prepared to lose. Then you will learn.

If you are a beginner, dont feel the need to set out all the pieces at once. Start with the pawns, and then add the pieces. Understand the potential of each piece the way a pair of bishops can dominate the board, how the rooks can sweep up pawns in an endgame, why the queen and a knight can work together so harmoniously. Find a good teacher your own Mr Shaibel, but without the communication issues.

Once you have established the basics, start using computers and online resources to play and to help you analyse games. lichess.org, chess.com and chess24.com are great sites for playing and learning. chessbomb.com is a brilliant resource for watching top tournaments. chessgames.com is a wonderful database of games. chesspuzzle.net is a great practice program. decodechess.com attempts to explain chess moves in laypersons language. There are also plenty of sophisticated, all-purpose programs, usually called chess engines, such as Fritz and HIARCs that, for around 50, help you deconstruct your games and take you deeply into positions. But dont let the computer do all the work. You need to engage your own brain on the analysis. And dont endlessly play against the computer. Find human opponents, either online or, when the pandemic is over, in person.

Study the games of great masters of the past. Find a player you like and follow their careers. Fischer is a great starting point his play is clear and comprehensible, and beautifully described in his famous book My 60 Memorable Games. Morphy (Harmons favourite), Alekhine, Capablanca, Tal, Korchnoi and Shirov are other legendary figures with whom the aspiring player might identify. They also have fascinating life stories, and chess is about hot human emotions as well as cold calculation. Modern grandmaster chess, which is based heavily on a deep knowledge of opening theory, is more abstruse and may be best avoided until you have acquired deep expertise. The current crop of leading grandmasters are also, if we are brutally honest, a bit lacking in personality compared with the giants of the past.

Children will often find their school has a chess club, and that club may even have links with Chess in Schools and Communities, which supplies expert tutors to schools. Provision tends to be much better at primary than secondary level, and after 11 children will probably be left to their own devices if they want to carry on playing.

If a player is really serious, she or he should join their local chess club. There is likely to be one meeting nearby, or there will be once the Covid crisis is over. At the moment, clubs are not meeting and there is very little over-the-board chess being played. Players are keeping their brains active online, where you can meet players from all over the world. That is fun, but be aware that some players are likely to be cheating using chess engines to help them, making it hard for you to assess how good your play is. And you also get some abuse online from players who want to trash-talk. You are also likely to be playing at very fast time controls so-called blitz chess and that is no way to learn to really think about chess.

If you want to start playing over-the-board tournaments (when they resume), you will need to join the chess federation in your respective country. After youve played the requisite number of official games, you will get a rating a bit like a handicap in golf and can then start being paired with players of your own strength in matches. But until then, the key is to keep enjoying chess and searching for the elusive truth in a position. If you see a good move, look for a better one. You can always dig a little deeper in the pursuit of something remarkable and counterintuitive. Beauty and truth: the essence of chess.

Stephen Moss is the author of The Rookie: An Odyssey through Chess (and Life), published by Bloomsbury

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How to get good at chess - The Guardian

George Washington could have run for re-election until he died, but had he stayed put for a third term the country probably wouldnt have seen its third century nor would Lin-Manuel Miranda have written a song about it. This peaceful transfer of power was and is the radical idea at the heart of American democracy.

That doesnt mean its easy. Losing money is more painful to us than gaining it is pleasurable, behavioral economists have shown. This loss aversion may be doubly true when it comes to power.

President Donald Trump seems to be running out of moves on the electoral game board, but so far he has shown no inclination to give up. To make sense of the guy from Queens gambit, MarketWatch sought the advice of experts in the art and science of throwing in the towel: a chess master, boxing coach, poker player and the U.S. Monopoly champion.

Presidential politics is not a game, of course, but sports and competition can provide insight into the when and how of conceding defeat.

Bruce Pandolfini, famed chess teacher, coach and author (a consultant on Netflixs The Queens Gambit)

Chess is one of the few games in which conceding defeat is an important move; a player may announce their intention to resign, or merely topple over their king.

Top players resign because they have been beaten, outwitted, Pandolfini, 73, told MarketWatch.

You dont keep fighting when your situation is hopeless, and you have far less than a 1% chance of overturning things. Its kind of an insult to the game not to resign.

This often happens many moves before the end, when the checkmate is still in the mail.

There are people you just dont even want to play because they are such unpleasant losers. But most serious players do accept the conditions of professional play and resign in some acceptable manner.

When I was young I was playing a grandmaster and I continued in a position well after I knew I had lost I eventually did lose, Pandolfini said. The grandmaster said to me, Didnt you see that? I was a bit of a wise guy kid, though, and said, I wanted to see if you had seen it.

An unwillingness to resign is more common among young players, said Pandolfini, who has coached his share.

You wouldnt want to have a youngster give up so easily. That would signify a lack of fighting spirit, he said. You dont want to see a weakening of that resolve. Most youngsters do continue beyond the points they would resign as older, more mature players.

What possesses a player to stay in when the situation is hopeless?

Well, there are people you just dont even want to play because they are such unpleasant losers, Pandolfini said. Even in the world of serious chess. But most serious players do accept the conditions of professional play and resign in some acceptable manner.

Brian Valentine, reigning U.S. Monopoly champion and an assistant high-school principal

Playing Monopoly until the bitter end is more than most people can handle, with the exception perhaps of 12-year-old slumlords who, like pint-sized Mr. Potters, savor every moment of impoverishing their parents and siblings.

You know youve lost when you see the pitfalls of other players houses and hotels are outweighing your cash on hand and the odds of evading them with the dice, said Monopoly champ Brian Valentine, who may be the only person in America who has done more buying, selling and mortgaging of Atlantic City real estate than Trump.

In a family game, this is when its time to fold, he said. (Though others prefer to flip over the board, send dogs, hats, railroads and cash flying, in a dramatic rage-quit.)

But conceding defeat is not really an option in tournament play, Valentine said. You have to play to the end, because there is an actual time limit.

When the game seems hopeless, sometimes players get a hot hand with the dice, Valentine said. I have seen people kangaroo hopping all over the board, but this is not just a game of luck and very rarely does the evasion of having to pay a lot of money also correspond with you being able to gain money and build up simultaneously.

Trump just landed on Chance in the late stages of the game, knowing the only card left in the deck is Advance to Boardwalk. And Boardwalk has a hotel on it.

Top players know the odds, they know which Chance or Community Chest cards are still in the deck, and whether their only hope is beating the clock, Valentine said. I guess the analog in the present is whether in December when the electors vote or by January when there is an inauguration, eventually you are going to run up against the time limit.

There are some players who get erratic and unsportsmanlike in such situations, proposing absurdly lopsided deals as if they arent in a hopeless situation.

At the highest levels. though, there is a certain level of honor and dignity, he said. You have to respect the rules of the game, which have been in place for 86 years.

As for what Trumps Monopoly board looks like at the moment, Valentine considered a few scenarios before settling on this: Hes just landed on Chance in the late stages of the game, knowing the only card left in the deck is Advance to Boardwalk, he said. And Boardwalk has a hotel on it.

Asher Conniff, professional poker player

Poker at its core is a math game. Based on their cards, players calculate what percentage chance they have to win while weighing other factors like what cards could come next or what cards their opponents may have.

But poker is an emotional game, too, and reading situations based on the temperature of the room is essential.

There is a fair amount thats math, Conniff, 32, told MarketWatch. But some of it is just reading people.

Trump has nothing to lose. The party may have something to lose, and even thats debatable. Its what we call a free roll. He might as well try to win and if he loses he just kind of goes home. Hes not betting anything.

Conniff, who has been playing poker professionally for eight years, said that knowing when to get out can sometimes be the best skill a player could have.

One of the truest sayings in poker is, If you cant spot the fish, youre the fish.

A poker player deemed a fish is somebody who is not a seasoned player and who will likely have lost when the game is over.

So is Trump a fish in the 2020 election poker game? Not exactly, according to Conniff.

One of the great differences here is that he has nothing to lose. The party may have something to lose, and even thats debatable. Its what we call a free roll, Conniff explained. He might as well try to win and if he loses he just kind of goes home. Hes not betting anything.

Ryan OLeary, boxing coach, former member of the board of directors for USA Boxing, former New York national team and New York Golden Gloves coach

Boxing is one of the few major sports where the participants have an opportunity to end the match prematurely. Knowing when a fighter has taken enough of a beating, or when he or she has no opportunity to win is something that is a top concern for boxing coaches.

Sometimes my boxer gets pissed at me, and sometimes they understand, OLeary, 48, told MarketWatch. But either way my job is to make sure they come out of there safe.

If he knows his fighter is taking a beating and can no longer win the fight, OLeary will not hesitate to make a move.

Its time for [Trump] to just throw in the towel; he doesnt have a punchers chance.

I will always stop a fight if I feel like my boxer is not in it.

Assessing whether a fighter still has a chance can be difficult. One reason for that is what OLeary calls the punchers chance.

I had a guy, he was outboxed in the first two rounds, completely outclassed, but the kid he was fighting had no punch at all, he wasnt hurting my guy. My guy was getting outboxed, and I was pretty sure he was going to continue to get outboxed. But my guy was a hard puncher, so he had a punchers chance. If he landed the right punch at the right time, he probably could have taken out this prospect. We lost practically every round, but he was in the fight the whole time.

When asked whether or not Trump still has a punchers chance in the 2020 election fight, OLeary said: Do I think he can pull this out? Theres no way at this point. Its time for him to just throw in the towel; he doesnt have a punchers chance. Hes defeated now.

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Will Trump quit? A chess master, pro poker player, boxing coach and Monopoly champ on the art of throwing in the towel - MarketWatch