The vocabulary of chess is at its best when describing abstract features of a chess game. Chess writers often invent new terminology to identify a particular chess idea. Sometimes the new terms catch on, but often they just die ignored and unused. Here is a collection of terms that are often used by chess writers in commenting on positional aspects of a chess game.
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Tournament software?,
DVF of Brasil asks, 'I was thinking to organize a championship here in my work and I would like to know if you know any software that helps to combine the matches and calculate the rating.'
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We identified a few packages, but perhaps you know one or two more.
The first Super Grandmaster tournament of the year, the 2006 Corus Tournament, was held 14-29 January in Wijk aan Zee, Netherlands.
The Grandmaster A (GM-A) tournament, a 14 player
category
19 event, featured six of the world's top-10 players :
Veselin Topalov (world no.2, BUL, 2801 FIDE rating),
Viswanathan Anand (3, IND, 2792),
Levon Aronian (5, ARM, 2752),
Peter Leko (7, HUN, 2740),
Vassily Ivanchuk (8, UKR, 2729), and
Boris Gelfand (9, ISR, 2723).
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It was also the first SuperGM tournament since the
FIDE World Championship in October 2005 at San Luis, Argentina, where Topalov finished 1.5 points ahead of Anand to win the title of FIDE World Champion.
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Your first task in a chess game is to get a good position. To do that you need to know something about the openings. We updated our popular Essentials: Openings feature (found on the left of every page) by converting it to tutorial format.
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We also added two new features
In
Classifying combinations as easy, your chess guide forwards a question asking, 'Is it possible to make a program than can evaluate a chess combination with an Elo figure (or range)?'
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It turns out that just such a program is available!
Elsewhere on the Web : Football star Shaun Alexander and Chess
The Shaun Alexander Foundation and Sprint sponsored a chess tournament for 2nd and 3rd grade students participating in the AF4C's (America’s Foundation for Chess) First Move™ chess program at Madrona Elementary School, Seattle, Washington, USA. The winners received an all expenses paid trip to Hawaii, donated by Sprint, to see Seattle Seahawks' running back Shaun Alexander play in the 2006 Pro Bowl.
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Read more and see photos by John Henderson in our
Shaun Alexander at Madrona
photo gallery.
Looking for one of our reviews? See our Graphic Index of reviews showing the book, CD, or DVD cover. If you just want a quick text list of the same reviews, see the associated Text Index.
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In
Sacrifices,
123aku345 asks, 'Does anyone know of a few GM games where the winning side has sacrificed a LOT of material? Basically I want to know what single game (and a few runners up) wins the crown of the most sacrifices.'
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If you have a good game in mind, let us know!
St. Petersburg, 1914: During one of the greatest chess tournaments of the pre-World War I era, murder is the theme and Avrom Chilowicz Rozental is somehow involved.
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'Then 32 years old, Rozental was at the height of his powers. He had defeated Lasker in 1909, Capablanca in 1911. The year 1912 was his alone: his spectacular run of triumphs at San Sebastian, Bad Pistyan, Breslau and Warsaw transformed him into one of the most talked-about celebrities of the age.'
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The U.K.'s Observer is publishing Zugzwang, a serial novel by Ronan Bennett, available online.
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Where did chess come from? The most widely accepted scenario is that chess appeared in India around 600 A.D., was adopted in Persia around 700 A.D., and was absorbed by Arab culture around 800 A.D. Just as chess is a difficult game, its origin is a difficult puzzle. We may never know the truth of its birth.
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