Ask the
Tiger!
Logical Chess vs Amateur's Mind 1979.1 The "L" Shaped Knight Move - A Tactical Lesson 1983.1 Experience With Dan's Thinking Process? Playing In Time Trouble 1975.1 Fritz 8 Question Play the Classical Dutch - Come Learn With Us! 1973.1 Zoom001 Boris Spassky's Last Gambit General Blunders
GAMES Janssen,R (2483) - L'Ami,E (2433) [D86] 1.d4 Nf6 Ernst,S (2475) - Van den Doel,E (2588) [D20] 1.d4 d5 Van Wely,L (2675) - Delemarre,J (2418) [D30] 1.d4 d5 Alexopoulos,G (2236) - Nakamura,H (2648) [B22] 1.e4 c5 Gulko,B (2697) - Bengtson,M (2295) [A34] 1.c4 c5 Dreev,A (2695) - Koneru,H (2496) [E12] 1.d4 Nf6 Koneru,H (2496) - Sasikiran,K (2658) [A04] 1.Nf3 c5
Past issues of The Chessville Weekly can be viewed at our archives. |
Volume 2 Issue 27
July 6th, 2003 In This Issue "Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence." Abigail Adams
1st
OCL Individual Tourney Registration is still open for the 1st OCL Individual Tournament. There are three sections available, these are OPEN, Under-1800 and Under-1500. The tournament will be 60-15 time controls, same as for the OCL Team events. This time, however, it's an Individual event. Each section will be over 5 rounds, there will be one game each week. You can choose when to play the game, so long as you and your opponent agree a date/time and that the game is finished before the round deadline. Registration Deadline 00:00 FicsST July 12th If you have not tried the OCL before, or maybe you haven't
got enough STANDARD games under your belt, then now is the time to give it a
try! Register today!
Click
here for further information and details on how to enter.
White Mates In Four - Find the Solution
(7/6) Problem of the Week: Tactical training with our weekly puzzle.
(7/6) Ask the Tiger! The latest question and answer column from one of the world's leading GMs, chess teachers, and authors, Nigel Davies, of Tiger Chess fame. This month's column includes his advice on using computers, the Zukertort Opening, eating one's vegetables, his list of the top-10 must have chess books, advice on the Grunfeld and Stonewall openings, the best ever endgame books, and more! Read his latest column, and learn what the Tiger knows. (7/5) Lasker-Steinitz Game 16: The latest game from this famous 1894 World Championship Match, featuring annotations by Wilhelm Steinitz himself. This has been a match of streaks - and the most recent streak belonged to Steinitz with wins in games 13 and 14. Lasker regained momentum with a win of his own in game 15. Now Lasker repeats a tactic that served him well in Game 10, when he repeated Steinitz's own opening variation against him! Will it work again in Game 16? (7/4) Site Review - Chess Mix. ChessMix is a relatively new site by 47-year old Bulgarian GM Ventzislav Inkiov (current FIDE Elo 2478). The site has been translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Bulgarian, and Italian. Let's take a look... (7/4) Free Download - PGN Notation Language Converter: This freeware utility was been coded by Dimitris Siskopoulos based on an idea of Andreas Prapopoulos. The aim of this software is to convert Chess Notation between English and French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish and Spanish (and vice-versa). An attempt is made to make the conversion similar to the pgn notation standards in order the converted notation in English language can be readable by a chess playing software. This is a 71 kb zipped file. (Updated from the original version posted on 6/28.)
(6/30)
The Lucena
Position, Part 2. In
Part 1 we
looked at the basic winning method. In Part 2 we look at why White cannot win if the pawn is on the a- or h-files (OK, we will even look at the
exception to this exception!). Still to come: Part 3, where we will
examine the
important question of getting to the Lucena position from earlier in the
endgame.
The Lucena Position Part 2
This position, and ones similar in characteristic, are known as the Lucena position. Luis Ramirez Lucena, (1465-1530 est.) was a Spanish chess player and author of the oldest existing printed book on chess, Repeticion de Amores y Arte de Axedres, published in Spain in 1497. The Lucena position is won for White, regardless of who is on move, and regardless of which file the pawn is on, except for the a & h files. In The Lucena Position Part 1 we looked at the basic winning method: the rook needs to be on the 4th rank in order to provide shelter for the king, which is going to wind up on g5. Many chess teachers call this "building a bridge", although I have never really understood that as being descriptive of what White is trying to accomplish. For me, I think of it as building a shield, since White wants to shield his king from the coming Black checks. Black's only hope is to keep checking the king once it emerges from the shelter of it's pawn, hoping that White won't be able to avoid a perpetual check... In The Lucena Position Part 2 we look at why White cannot win if the pawn is on the a- or h-files (OK, we will even look at the exception to this exception!). When the pawn is on the a or h-file, the opposing king must be cut off by more than three files or else the game is drawn. If the enemy king is four or more files away, then the pawn can win. First, let's look at the drawn position... Still to come: The Lucena Position Part 3, where we will
examine the important question of getting to the Lucena position from
earlier in the endgame. ChessMix is a relatively new site by 47-year old Bulgarian GM Ventzislav Inkiov (current FIDE Elo 2478). The site has been translated into several different languages "in the spirit of the motto of FIDE "Gens una sumus", including English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Bulgarian, Italian. Let's take a look... My first impression was that the pages look overly cluttered, although navigation is simple enough. Menu buttons along the left side of the pages include: 10 Days; Calendar; Events; Find Club & Player; Closed Tournaments; Announcements; Books; E-Books; ELO; Tools: Travel; Weather; Maps; Country Profile; Converter; About us; The Team; Contact. I was, unfortunately, unable to discover who the remainder of the team was as I was unable to use the "Contact Us" page. Apparently "The Message can't contain special chars", like quotation marks, apostrophes, and I don't know what else because I could never get my message to go through, and quit after a half-dozen tries. Every ten days a new download file is made available in both pgn and Chessbase formats. The most recent download I looked at was an 867 kb zipped pgn file containing 3696 games from such diverse events as the European Championships to the Pan American Championships to the famous 1st Saturday Tourneys to the Svidler-Chernyshov match. Also included were rapid games (New York Masters) and the DEM Willingen Under-18, U16, U14, U12, and Under-10. Games of this caliber may color your view of the database, as may some of the nearly indecipherable event listings (e.g. 5th ZNG111). Registration on the site is free, although I haven't figured out any advantage to doing so. It costs $4.95 however to see another registered user's profile. There is also a section for listing players, organizers, and clubs, although there are very few in any category registered as yet. A series of eBooks are available - for a price - all focused on opening theory. Current offerings include: Chaos Counter Attack 1.d4 g6 2.c4 g7 3.c3 c5 4.d5 c3+ 5.bc f5 ($13.95 to download, $4.95 to view online once); Schlieman Counter Gambit 1.e4 e5 2.f3 c6 3.b5 f5 ($11.95 for download, $4.95 to view one time online); New Chaos Counter Attack 1.d4 c5 2.d5 f5; Anti-Gruenfeld; The Spike Anti-Pirc 1.e4 d6 2.d4 f6 3.c3 g6 4.e2 g7 5.g4!?; Trompovski 1.d4 f6 2.g5 e4; Anti, Anti Sicilian; Ideas for Black and White in the 2.c3 and 3.c3 Sicilian. Still, the eBooks sound interesting, if not a bit steeply priced. By comparison Chess Publishing charges $18 for access to a single section for a full year. A great international chess tournament and events section, with plenty of detail are provided in a very organized manner. Links to outside websites provide information on traveling arrangements – e.g. train-, plane- and ferry-timetables, weather forecasts, exchange rates, information about destinations, and more. A simple interface is provided to research someone's FIDE Elo rating on the FIDE site, along with a rather sparse links section, which currently only provides links to 1 Sponsor's link, FIDE & the European Chess Union, + 68 other national Federations. Overall, this looks like a fairly
commercial site, with little free chess content. A Barnes and Nobles
affiliation provides access to books, and another small banner ad near the
top center of each page completes their revenue generation mechanisms.
Visit ChessMix.
1894 World Championship Match In 1894 the defending World Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, Champion for the preceding 28 years, played a match for the title with Emmanuel Lasker. The match was more hard fought than the final score might indicate, and took place over a span on nearly two and one-half months in three different cities - New York, Pennsylvania, and Montreal. The match was won by Lasker, who would go on to hold the title for 27 years himself, by a score of +10 -5 =4. We've gathered the scores of these 19 games together, along with annotations by both combatants as well as American Champion Jackson Showalter - The Kentucky Lion. Each game can be followed on the screen using the diagrams provided, or on an interactive javascript board. This was a match of streaks: after
splitting the first six games 3-3, Lasker proceeded to run off five straight
wins. Steinitz steadied the ship with a draw in game 12 and then started a
winning streak of his own with wins in games 13 and 14. Lasker
regained momentum with a win in game 15. In today's game Lasker repeats a
tactic that served him well in Game 10, when he repeated Steinitz's own
opening variation from game 9 against him! Will it work again in
Game 16? Follow all of the games of this famous
1894 World Championship Match, and see these two giants of chess history
locked in mortal combat!
The Mad Aussie's Chess Trivia Who Am I? 1. I played OTB chess both before and after WW2. I won my country's national championship 7 times, plus I also represented my country in 8 Olympiads. My best performance was finishing 1st in a European Zonal tournament. I then started playing CC, and my results in this form of chess exceeded my OTB results. I also became a tournament arbiter, and was the chief arbiter at 2 world championship matches. I was awarded the Golden Palm of the Order of the Crown by my country for my achievements in chess. You would not associate my name with the country that I live in. Who Am I? 2. I learnt to play chess at the comparatively late of 16, but by my mid 20's I was already one of the top players in the world. I won 13 of the first 23 tournaments that I competed in, including 5 successive tournaments in one year. I was a logical choice to play in a match for the world championship title, but could not arrange the financial backing required to make such a match a reality. In the latter part of my career, my results started to become more erratic. My good results would be mixed with times when I would play extremely poorly and commit inexplicable blunders. I was also very shy and introverted. I would withdraw to the corner of the tournament hall after making a move. I claimed that I spent 6 hours a day, 300 days a year studying the game, and played in tournaments for another 60 days. I was considered one of the best rook endgame players of all time. Who Am !? Submit your trivia to the Mad Aussie!Pablo's Chess News Chessville coverage of:
Kraai,J (2510) - Harmon,C (2211) [A30] 1.Nf3 Nf6 2.c4 b6 3.g3 Bb7 4.Bg2 c5 5.0-0 g6 6.Nc3 Bg7 7.Re1 d6 8.e3 Nbd7 9.d4 cxd4 10.exd4 0-0 11.b3 Re8 12.Bb2 Rc8 13.Qd2 a6 14.Rac1 Rc7 15.d5 Qa8 16.Nd4 Nc5 17.Nc6 e5 18.b4 Ncd7 19.a4 Nb8 20.b5 a5 21.Ba3 Bf8 22.Re2 Nbd7 23.Rce1 h6 24.Nd1 Nc5 25.Bxc5 bxc5 26.Nxa5 Nd7 27.Nb2 Bg7 28.Nc6 f5 29.a5 Bc8 30.Na4 Nf6 31.Nxe5 dxe5 32.d6 Rb7 33.Nb6 1-0 Ziatdinov,R (2476) - Finegold,B (2631) [B65] 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 d6 6.Bg5 e6 7.Qd2 Be7 8.0-0-0 0-0 9.f4 Nxd4 10.Qxd4 Qa5 11.e5 dxe5 12.Qxe5 Qxe5 13.fxe5 Nd5 14.Bxe7 Nxe7 15.Bb5 a6 16.Bd3 b5 17.Be4 Rb8 18.Rd6 b4 19.Na4 Rb5 20.Re1 Ng6 21.Bxg6 hxg6 22.g3 g5 23.Kd2 Kh7 24.Kd3 Kg6 25.Kd4 Bb7 26.c4 bxc3 27.bxc3 Ra5 28.Nc5 Bd5 29.c4 Rxc5 30.Kxc5 Rc8+ 31.Kb6 Rxc4 32.a3 Rc2 33.Kxa6 Rxh2 34.a4 Ra2 35.a5 Ra3 36.Rg1 Kf5 37.Rd7 f6 38.exf6 gxf6 39.Kb6 Rb3+ 40.Kc5 Rc3+ 41.Kb6 Rb3+ 42.Kc5 Rc3+ 43.Kb6 ½-½
other online chess news resources
The Chess Cafe Malcolm Pein: Pia breaks stranglehold Chessbase Devious Kings Revisited: A few weeks ago we published an article in our puzzle section; the solution here it is at last. Another look at Nahkchivan One giant step for David Howell Chess Visualization Training - New: Chat feature installed
Chess In Chicago -
New website look, and a new logo!
Discussion Forum,
Chess Humour and
Crosswords
Baltimore
City Paper Vote for the best player and best game of JUNE 2003! Ivan Sokolov is the best player of May 2003. The Best Game of May 2003: Radjabov,T (2644) - Dizdarevic,E (2491) [D45] 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.e3 e6 5.Nf3 Nbd7 6.Qc2 Bd6 7.g4 Nxg4 8.Rg1 Nh6 9.Bd2 Nf8 10.e4 dxe4 11.Nxe4 Nf5 12.Nxd6+ Qxd6 13.0-0-0 Ng6 14.h4 Nge7 15.Bd3 f6 16.h5 Kf7 17.Rg4 b5 18.Bf4 Qb4 19.Rdg1 bxc4 20.Bxc4 Rg8 21.a3 Qb6 22.Nh4 Nd5 23.Nxf5 exf5 24.R4g3 a5 25.Rb3 Qa7 26.Bxd5+ cxd5 27.Qc6 Qa6 28.Qxd5+ Be6 29.Rb7+ Ke8 30.Re1 Rc8+ 31.Kd2 Rc6 32.Qd7+ 1-0 Tigerchess - New Grandmaster GrowlSalt Lake Tribune (Shelby Lyman): Checkmate - Sammy Reshevsky Boston Herald: Keep your cool in battle for the board World Chess NetworkLarry Evans On Chess: TOPALOV TOPPED IN LEON Guardian Unlimited: Pawn Brokers "American grandmaster Larry Christiansen says: "Chess can be art in the hands of a gifted, creative player but is usually a kind of science/sport." Meanwhile, grandmaster Alexei Shirov, currently the world's number five and arguably the most fearlessly creative player of his generation, draws a distinction between the beauty of the game itself - as seen in the formal perfection and complexity of well-composed chess problems - and the bloody business of actually playing. "Let's say, the game itself is an art," he concludes, "but competitive chess isn't, even though the elements of art may be present." Scotsmans.com (Albert Morris): Opening up young minds to the thrust and parry of a mental duel Philippine Star: Place your bet on Pinoy chess The Independent: Syrian chess fanatic makes a bizarre move on Cordiant Financial Times: Einstein sinks into administration Washington Times: Emerging superpowers shine ChessBaseUSA T-NotesJUNE 29, 2003 NEW FRITZ SHOOTOUT FEATURES JUNE 22, 2003 FRITZ TECHNIQUE TRAINER JUNE 15, 2003 THE COOLEST CHESS PROBLEM EVER JUNE 8, 2003 JUNIOR8 AND DEEP JUNIOR8 Russian Chess - Shakhriyaz Mamedyarov and Nana Dzagnidze are the winners of the the World Junior Championships (under 20), which took place June 21st - July 3rd 2003 in Nakhichevan, Azerbaijan. Final standings of the leaders:
World Professional
Chess Rankings
1st July 2003 FIDE Rating List More from FIDE: 74th FIDE Congress time-table GM Zurab Azmaiparashvili and WGM Cramling Pia are the winners of the European Individual Championships To All National Federations FIDE Title Regulations Effective 1st July 2003 World Junior and Girls Championships 2003 in Azerbaijan Deadline for submission of tournament reports for the July 2003 FRL World Youth Under 16 Chess Olympiad World Youth Chess Championship 2003 FIDE World Rankings, July 1, 2003
Chess Sector - Ukrainian Chess Online The Campbell Report column for May-June 2003 Seagaard Chess Reviews William Steinitz - The first World Champion Third Millenium Chess Set Annotated Games New York Masters Game of the Week, analysis by IM Greg Shahade Robert Byrne (NY Times): El Gindy-Naby, 7th Golden Cleopatra Open, Egypt 2003 Lubomir Kavalek (Washington Post): Anand-Hansen, SIS-MH Masters 2003 Yasser Seirawan: Kasparov-Nikolic, Linares 1997 Jack Peters (LA Times): Van Buskirk-Nagaran, SCCF Candidates, Costa Mesa 2003
"Yasser Seirawan, the best
American player in the 1980s, has announced his retirement from tournament
play. He plans to make his final appearance in September in China in an
exhibition match against some of the world's best female players.
The Telegraph Chess Club Jonathan Berry (Globe and Mail): Stein-Burger, 1964 Interzonal in Amsterdam Puzzles & Problems
Chessville -
Problem of the Week Tell us about your favorite site that you would like us to keep an eye on for you. Write: Newsletter@Chessville.com Solutions to the Who Am I? Quizzes from The Mad Aussie 1. Alberic O'Kelly de Galway (Belgium 1911-80) 2. Akiba Rubenstein Position of the Week: Solution
1st Prize Shakhmatyi v
SSSR 1983. The "Diagram of the Century". "If I could take one
diagram to a desert island, it would be this one." Tim Krabbé built a
wonderful page about this position, which does a much better job that I
could do here of explaining this conception. Visit Tim's
'The Babson Task'
page for the solution to today's position! |
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Chess History Mad Aussie's Historical Chess Trivia
From Chessville's Downloads Canadian Chess Problems Chess History and Reminiscences, by H. E. Bird English Chess Problems, Edited by James Pierce and W. Timbrell Pierce (1876) Smith-Morra - Part 1 Chess Strategy by Edward Lasker 75 Chess Problems by John Thursby 700 Chess Problems Selected From the Compositions of Mrs. W.J. Baird (1902) Problem Solving Tourney (1888) originally published in 1888 by C.F. Stubbs Check out these and other great free downloads on our Misc. Downloads Page!
GAMES Van Wely,L (2675) - L'Ami,E (2433) [D19] 1.c4 c6 Delemarre,J (2418) - Nijboer,F (2562) [A46] 1.d4 d6 Kelleher,J (2084) - Weeramantry,S (2215) [B08] 1.e4 d6 Adams,N (2258) - Kosteniuk,A (2577) [D35] 1.d4 d5 Popovych,O (2331) - Blatny,P (2563) [B06] 1.e4 g6 Sasikiran,K (2658) - McShane,L (2592) [D85] 1.d4 Nf6 Bruzon,L (2610) - Nielsen,P (2625) [A11] 1.Nf3 Nf6
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