[2 October 2005] Ponomariov.com

[24-September 2005] WCC San Luis 2005

[12 May 2005] Ward Farnsworth's Predator at the Chessboard

[1 May 2005] M-TEL Masters Super Tournament

[24 April 2005] Chessville

[15 April 2005] Sigeman & Co Chess Tournament 2005

[11 April 2005] Dennis M's Chess Site

[5 March 2005] United States Chess League

[26 February 2005] ajedrez en Linares

[18 February 2005] Stuyvesant Town Chess Club

[8 February 2005] The Baysholiss Collection

[5-January-2005] Corus Chess Tournament

[24-November-2004] 2005 USA Championships (OTB)

[23-November-2004] Marf's Russian Chess Translations

[21-November-2004] The Bobby Fischer Unofficial Home Page

[24-October-2004] Anjelina Belakovskaia Home Page

[30-August-2004] Vladimir Kramnik - World Chess Champion

[20-June-2004] ICCF Amici On-line Magazine

[18-June-2004] ChessChamps.com

Another new Garry Kasparov site! This web site serves the purpose of publicizing Kasparov's new book series 'My Great Predesessors', but Kasparov claims a more comprehensive goal:

"For some years now I have been working on 'My Great Predecessors', the series of books where I outline my opinion on the great chess players and what they have contributed to the game. This website is in part to support and promote that work but I hope for something more.

"One of my dreams is that there should be a bridge between mainstream culture and chess culture, or if you like that the ICC crowd merges with the Yahoo or MSN crowd. I hope my work in general, the books and this website will all be part of that bridge. While this site may offer something for the serious chess player, it is not aimed at them. I want it to reach the mainstream public."

The webmaster is the respected and well-known chess personality Jon Levitt. There are several sections to the site:

1. Downloads: A curious name, but this section contains a lot of interesting material, including a gallery of photos of past great chess players, various reviews of the books, some games, articles, excerpts from the first to volumes and some biographical information on Kasparov and the books' co-author Dmitry Germanovich Plisetsky.
2. Feedback: This contains a discussion forum. an analysis forum and "Garry's Diary", some comments from Kasparov which should prove interesting.
3. Connections: Here you can read a welcome message from Karparov and information about the books and it's publishers.

The site appears to be pretty new, so the content is modest so far, but it will probably grow with time. I can recommend a visit to this site and suggest keeping an eye on it as it expands.

[4-June-2004] Correspondence Chess League of Australia (CCLA)

[10-May-2004] Szachy Korespondencyjne - Correspondence Chess

[2-May-2004] Welcome to My World of Chess!! (IM Wolfram Schön)

[29-February-2004] Chess Review Online Archive

[28-February-2004] ICCF Europa

[26-February-2004] ICCF Correspondence Chess Photo Album

[16-February-2004] John Edwards Chess Blog

[3-January-2004] Chess Odyssey

[2-January-2004] Corus Chess Tournament 2004

[6-December-2003] Annual Chess Awards

[1-December-2003] The Chess Drum

[23-November-2003] King's Head Chess Club

A nice site presented by the London chess club King's Head. There are links and articles. This is a site that looks worth exploring. There are a number of annotated games throughout the site that can be played through on screen.

[17-November-2003] Correspondence Chess Absolute Championship Review

The United States Chess Federation (USCF) has been running their most prestigious championship event The USCF Absolute Championship for many years. They are now trying to create an archive of this event consisting of crosstables, player profiles and games (to be available via a replay page). This page shows their progress so far.

[5-October-2003] 4NCL - Four Nations Chess League

This is a nice little site dedicated to the premier team chess league in England. A lot of strong International players participate along with a lot of lesser stars from England. I particularly enjoyed their selection of photos and a view of a scoresheet by Korchnoi in the "Items of Interest" section. There are also game downloads, news and other features. It all makes me wish I could play in a league like this.

[28-September-2003] Chess Book Covers and Other Artwork

If you enjoy chess art, this page is worth a look. You probably won't spend more than a few minutes here, but I enjoyed checking out the graphics. I suggest just going to the first image and clicking the "Next" arrow at the bottom to step through the images. Thanks to Karsten Fyhn for bringing this site to my attention in a posting on TCCMB.

[21-September-2003] CC Tandem Chess

SIM-elect Jason Bokar is hosting a fascinating correspondence chess match at his site SIM-elect Jason Bokar's Chess World. Here you can follow live coverage of a match played by 2-man teams, where team members take turns making the move in a single game ... without consulting each other!. Quoting from the page: "Grayling Hill (2346) and Jason Bokar (2509) Ave. Rating = 2428 vs. Dave Taylor (2528) and Ken Reinhart (2458) Ave. Rating = 2493 Referee: Steve Ryan Rules: Alternating moves from each player on the team. No consultation on the opening and no consultation during the game. Time limit is 10/30." The page shows a ChessBase generated JavaScript replay page which allows you to examine the moves on a board. If the commentary to the moves continues to be as entertaining as the first few, then this will be an event your must not miss!

[10-September-2003] The Ukrainian Chess Federation

This is the new web site for the Ukrainian Chess Federation. This URL takes you to the English pages. So far it is quite limited in scope, but I'll be surprised if additional content isn't added in the near future. So far there doesn't seem to be any news on the cancelled Ponomariov vs. Kasparov match, but you can see a few nice pictures and read about some young talent. It's always fun to investigate the links at a new site. You'll find a short list here of sites mostly in Russian, but one site that could be useful is Welcome to chess.vrsac.com! which has some interesting OTB tournament coverage with a nice Java viewer. On some occasions I've spent considerable time following one link after another, snaking from one site to another. You can easily spend the whole evening doing this.

[8-September-2003] Chess Players United

A new players organization is being formed for professional OTB chess players. They have a catchy acronym CPU and have lauched a decent web site. I think it will be interesting to watch their growth and am hopeful of additional content in the future. Perhaps an organization created by middle players instead of those at the top will have a better chance to succeed. It's worth a look at this web site if you follow the news of the top OTB players, as I do. The little flash display has no information content but is amusing. There is a forum where you can sign up and post your own suggestions.

[24-August-2003] José Raúl Capablanca

For fans of Capablanca, or people with some interest in his career, this site offers a summary of his career along with some stories about this great world champion. Many of his games are shown using ChessBase generated JavaScript game replay pages. You can find his famous loss to Richard Reti at the 1924 New York International tournament, ending his huge streak without a loss (his ten wins are also given). Losses were extremely rare for this man sometimes referred to as a chess machine. The author of the page has given a large number of his decisive games for replay (draws are avoided). There are a few pictures and a useful collection of links to web pages related to Capablanca.

[10-August-2003] Chess Classic Mainz

The 2nd Mainz Chess Classic event is coming up August 13-17, 2003. You can find out about CCM2 here, as well as read about Chess960 (also called Fischer Random Chess). The main events are two GM matches, a regular 8-game rapid match between Viswanathan Anand and Judit Polgar and a chess960 "World Championship" match between Peter Svidler and Peter Leko. Leko beat Michael Adams last year in the feature chess960 match while Svidler won last year's open tournament to qualify. This year there will be another open tournament to determine the challenger for next year's match against the winner of the Svidler-Leko match. This site is available in English, German and French.

[3-August-2003] Chess History Center

An interesting little site by chess historian Richard Forster, former Late Knight columnist at Chess Cafe. The site uses frames so I won't give specific links, but it's worthwhile poking around the various pages. "The Critical Eye" has some critical comments about Karparov's latest book On My Great Predecessors, Part 1 and Weltmeister Robert James Fischer, a ChessBase CD-ROM by Robert Hübner. The "Puzzles and Mysteries" page makes for interesting reading. I just suggest checking out every page ... it's a small site but potentially has something to interest you.

[2-August-2003] ChessWatch

I've appreciated this "site" before. Once it was part of the Club Kasparov web site; now it has found a home at the Internet Chess Club site. Mr. Gene Venable collects interesting web page URLs from the Internet and posts them here, allowing you to quickly find some of the best chess postings currently available. If you feel like browsing the web a bit for chess news and information, this is a good place to start. Congratulations to Mr. Venable for finding such a valuable way to serve the chess community.

[11-July-2003] INTERNATIONAL MASTER BEN FINEGOLD

Many outstanding chess players have their own personal web sites. If you are a fan of a particular player this can be a real boon, providing interesting photographs, documenting the player's record and biographical information and providing interesting personal observations and games. IM Ben Finegold of Ann Arbor, Michigan (USA) isn't as well known as many GM's, but he is an excellent player who routinely defeats leading grandmasters. This site's real attraction is the many games available for replay. Here you can see a leading master play both famous GM's and more ordinary opponents in local tournaments. Too bad none of the games are annotated.

[24-June-2003] chessgames.com

This looks like a very useful site with many valuable features. There is a serchable library of 256,000 chess games, Game of the Day, Player of the Day, Opening of the Day, a list of recent tournaments with complete lists of the games played, and some great player profiles with links to games. I checked out a sample search to view "Alekhine plays the Alekhine" and found 36 games. The game lists are rather neat. Each line in the list shows players, result, # moves, year played, event and opening (both ECO code and the name). Click on the players link and you get a java replay of the game. Click on the ECO code and you get a quick rundown of the opening with name, main practitioners, popularity by decades, winning/drawing percentages and number of games in their database. If you do a search for games by a specific player from a dropdown list, you get a nice profile page of that player, sometimes with a photo. I couldn't find any cc specialists in the list, such as our cc world champions. It's a cool site with more features not mentioned here.

[4-June-2003] The Scotsman (John B. Henderson chess columns)

To quote from the self-description of this site: "We at Rochade Kuppenheim were happy to present JOHN B. HENDERSON and his near-daily column from "The Scotsman" with online games, game download and archives. Besides that John writes regularly, for example for The Week in Chess (TWIC). He is present at all big chess events and reports extensively with often humorous articles. " Many of the columns will reflect local Scotish activities, but you'll find a lot of international stuff here. Recommended!

[3-June-2003] Ksenya Rybenko home page

Here's another fashion web site of a Russian female chess player, only I like the selection of photos better than Kosteniuk's. The ChessBase site refers to their "babe watch" coming up with this site. There's little chess on this site but lots of photos. The navigation is poor, making it time consuming and difficult to find the photos you may want to look at. I suggest going to the ChessBase description, which you may find easier than viewing the site itself.

[15-May-2003] Chess Weekly

According to Alexander Baburin's Chess Today newsletter, this new web site was created by the Russian weekly magazine Chess Weekly and the software company Convekta Ltd. (publishers of the chess database program Chess Assistant) to be an English-language weekly news site, publishing a new issue each Thursday. They are up to issue #8 now, with links to their previous seven issues. One of my favorite features is the Blunder of the Week, showing how even the top players can make those really stupid moves. They have reports on current events with commented games using java replay generated by Chess Assistant 7.1. I was surprised to see the following game moves, though.

I've seen this sort of thing before in ChessBase when I didn't have a required chess font installed. I checked and found a link along the top of the site labeled "Chess Fonts". After downloading the font zip file and unzipping the two true type fonts into Windows/Fonts I got the following display.

It would have been helpful it instructions had been provided. The java player seemed to function well, showing both main line moves and variations.

This site is modest, with very short reports of events, a few photos, a few games and slightly stilted English. I recommend checking it out, though. It makes for a concise weekly report of events and may, with time, grow a bit. If nothing else, check those blunders of the week!

[21-April-2003] GM Peter Svidler Unofficial Page

This is a fan page for GM Peter Svidler. It gives a brief biography, a list of his best results, an extensive set of photos of Svidler (many photos contain other famous chess players), and a game or two. It was obviously very recently updated. I would be surprised if the game collection of java replay games didn't expand quite soon. The only things I don't like are those nasty popup advertisements and the extensive use of underlining (I kept trying to click on the text, thinking they were links). Svidler fans will appreciate this site.

[11-April-2003] Patzer's ½ Point

Chess enthusiast Craig Sadler has set up this page on the Ottawa Chess Club web site. Here he has gathered together pictures, bio's and games of the correspondence chess world champions from the first (Cecil Purdy of Australia) through the 13th (Grigorij Sanakoev of Russia). Given that there have been two additional champions crowned I would guess this page hasn't be updated for a while, but it's worth a look now (before it may disappear!). This shows what a chess enthusiast can put together with a little energy and creativity. Perhaps you may be inspired to create your own web page focusing on your particular interest. No need to create an entire site ... see what this individual has done with a single page.

[4-April-2003] Jon Edwards' Book Reviews

10th USA cc Champion IM Jon Edwards is well known for his delightful and useful web site Chess is Fun. Now he has created a companion site providing book reviews and other useful information for those just learning chess. If you are a new student of the game or provide instruction to others then you may find this site most useful. The two sites are linked together to act as a single web site. The link Book Reviews and Great Game Archive goes from the Chess is Fun site to the book reviews and Free Chess instruction goes back to the original Chess is Fun site.

[10-March-2003] The World Chess Championship

Here is a worthy attempt to gather comprehensive information about all the OTB world championship competitions, including challengers' events. Congratulations to Mark Weeks who has presented this labor of love. He covers all the matches from Labourdonnais - McDonnell up through the current attempt to unify the championship with results and games for download.

[11-February-2003] Hull Chess Club (UK) Online

Many chess clubs have established web sites, and it can be most interesting to explore them. The Hull Chess Club in Yorkshire, England has a very nice site. They provide a download of French Winawer games, some interesting chess challenges and some brief book reviews, in addition to information of interest to local prospective members. I was delighted to find Team CC.COM on their links page. They must be a very enlightened group of chess enthusiasts!

[10-February-2003] Ponomariov-FIDE Crisis: materials and messages

The upcoming matches meant to create a single unified world champion of OTB chess is in trouble. The official FIDE World Champion GM Ruslan Ponomariov has demanded that his match with GM Garry Kasparov be played at the FIDE time limit used in the last FIDE Championship Knockout event, where he obtained his title, and he has also insisted on draw odds in the match (GM Vladimir Kramnik is getting draw odds in his match with GM Peter Leko). You can read a lot of material on this dispute at this page, part of the Ukrainian Chess Online web site, edited by GM Mikhail Golubev.

[8-February-2003] WorldChessRating.Com

This site is based in Moscow and appears to be a first rate chess news site. Perhaps it will be a good replacement for the defunct KasparovChess site. If you enjoy following the top OTB events this site should serve you well. [March 2003: Oh, oh, financial problems have struck this site and they've stopped updating it].

[4-February-2003] ChessNinja

This is the personal web site of chess journalist Michael Greengard, widely known as Mig. He has written a popular column for years titled ,"Mig on Chess". This column has been carried on a variety of popular web sites from TWIC and KasparovChess to its current home at ChessBase. If you enjoy his style you'll certainly want to visit this entertaining personal site. I recommend you check out his Daily Dirt page and look for any special features or interviews listed, such as his Interview with David Levy. I won't comment on his newsletters which provide training for a fee, since I have no interest or experience in this area. However, there are bound to be a few items of interest for you here. He's started archiving his old Mig on Chess columns, which is good news for us fans.

[25-January-2003] ChessBase On-line Database

If you're like me, you have a large chess database sitting on your hard drive, but it doesn't contain games from the last several years. It's hard to keep databases current. The excellent ChessBase web site offers this database of "2.7 million up-to-date games" (they just updated it) which can be searched on-line using their clever JavaScript code. You can move the pieces on the diagram using your mouse, select a year span and rating spans for the players and then click "Search". After a little delay you'll be given a list of games. Click on one and you can go through the game using their replay function. Click on "View as PGN" and a window pops up with a PGN version which you can copy & paste into your database program. Of course, it's not as easy to use as your resident database search facility, but you do get a very up-to-date collection of games.

Be patient loading the page, though. It takes a little time to load all that JavaScript code. I was pleasantly surprised at the search speed, though. Also, when you enter an opening position for searching, click on the piece you want to move and drag it to the destination square. You won't see the piece moving till you release your mouse button.

[18-January-2003] Kalli's Chess Tournament Calendar

If you follow OTB events as well as cc you may find this German site of interest. It has a lengthy list of OTB events. If you read German you may find some of the other pages of interest as well.

[6-January-2003] America's Foundation For Chess

This is the Seattle group that "saved" the USA Championship a few years ago. This year they are once again organizing the championship with expanded player list and more prize money. The USA Championship starts on January 9 and this site promises live coverage of the games. I'll be checking it out and hoping for the best. Games begin at 1:30pm Eastern Time.