|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Chessville
Advertise to Single insert:
|
The Mad Aussie's Chess Trivia Submit your trivia to the
Mad Aussie! Reprinted from past issues of The Chessville Weekly, "The Mad Aussie's Chess Trivia", brought to you by the Mad Aussie himself, Graham Clayton. Graham earned his nickname from fellow ChessChatters because of his penchant for playing unusual openings in his correspondence games. Says Graham, "I am a librarian by profession, 37 years old, single, and live on the north-western outskirts of Sydney, Australia. I was taught the moves when I was about 10 or 11, and learnt to play by reading books from the local public library. My only significant OTB play was 4 years of high school chess between 1979 and 1982. I have been a member of the Correspondence Chess League of Australia since 1980, and play both within Australia and overseas." "With my overseas games, I enjoy the social side of meeting new people and making friendships as much as the actual games. Chess is much more than the actual moves on the board. I have always been fascinated by the history of the game - the great players, tournaments, controversies and incidents, as well as the unusual things. Chess for me is fun!" Clayton uses, among other sources, the "Oxford Companion to Chess" by Ken Whyld and David Hooper. See today's additions below, or check out the archives! Trivia Archives
Technological First: The first time that a large demonstration board was used to show the moves in a world championship match was in 1883, when Wilhelm Steinitz and Johannes Zukertort played a match in New York. Technology Marches On: Between 1896 and 1911, a series of trans-Atlantic matches were played between the United States and Great Britain, using the undersea telegraph cable that connected the two countries. The USA won 7 matches, Great Britain won 4, and one match was tied. Correspondence Interruptus: In 1889 and 1890 Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin played a 2 game correspondence match using the telegraph system as the means to transmit the moves. Halfway through the match, Steinitz requested an adjournment from December 1889 to January 1890 so that he could defend his world title against Isidor Gunsberg. Steinitz won the match against Gunsberg, but then lost both games to Chigorin. Correspondence Abandonadus: When the chess clubs of Paris and Pest played a 2 game correspondence match between 1842 and 1845. Alexandre Deschapelles quit the Paris team because they did not accept his recommendation of 1....f5 after the opening moves of 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 in one of the games. Fighting Chess:
Opening Fights:
Original Design: When the original design of the "Staunton" chess pieces was adopted in the mid 19th century, each Queen had 8 points on the coronet. The 8 points were to signify the 8 different directions that the Queen could travel on a chess board. Today there is no restriction on the number of points on the coronet of each Queen. Original Score: The earliest surviving game score for a consultation game dates back to 1837, when M Chamouillet, FJ Devinck & Leerivain played against Bonvil, Calviard and PC Saint-Amant in 3 games. Chamouillet's team played with the White pieces in all 3 games, while Bonvil's team gave the odds of playing without a pawn on f7. Chamouillet's team won the match 2.5 to 0.5. Olympic First: The first blind player to compete at a Chess Olympiad was English player TH Tylor, who played on Board 5 for the English team at the 1930 Olympiad in Hamburg. Olympic Excellence: Daniel Yanosfky represents Canada at the 1939 Buenos Aires Chess Olympiad at age 14. He scores 13.5/16 (+12, =3, -1) playing on Board 2. Olympic Endurance: Erich Eliskases represented 3 different countries when playing in the FIDE Chess Olympiads, as follows: 1. Austria (1930, 1933, 1935); 2. Germany (1939); 3. Argentina (1952, 1958, 1960, 1964). Olympic Longevity: Swedish GM Gideon Stahlberg played in 13 Chess Olympiads between 1930 and 1964. Olympic Competition: In 1936, the German chess Federation, who were not members of FIDE, organised an "unofficial" teams competition played over 8 boards to coincide with the Berlin Olympic Games. First Matches: The first recorded chess matches took place in Madrid in 1574-75, under the patronage of King Phillip II. The Spanish player Ruy Lopez lost matches to the Italian players Leonardo di Bona and Paolo Boi. First Match Game Scores: The Alexander McDonnell and Louis Labourdonnais match in 1834 was the first major match to have the moves of every game recorded for posterity. William Walker, a friend of McDonnell, attended all of the 85 games played and wrote down all of the moves. Championship Excitement: When Alexander Kotov and Mikhail Botvinnik played a crucial last round game against each other at the 11th USSR Championship at Leningrad in 1939, the crowd that wanted to watch was so large that a demonstration board was set up outside for those spectators who couldn't get into the playing hall. The crowd outside watching the game on the demonstration board became so large that it brought traffic to a standstill. Botvinnik won the game and the championship. Championship Paranoia: During the 1978 World Championship match in Baguio City, Viktor Korchnoi claimed that Anatoly Karpov's assistants were employing a parapsychologist named Dr Zhuker to hypnotize him during the games. Korchnoi also claimed that the cartons of yoghurt that Karpov was being given during the games were a "code" to give advice on what move to play. In retaliation, Korchnoi's assistants recruited two members of the Ananda Marga sect to sit in the playing hall and meditate, thus permeating the air with calm thoughts. Piece Values: One of the popular ways to
measure the "value" of the pieces is the following scale: Pieces Valued: The game Filipowicz-Smederavoc, Polanica Zdroj 1966 is drawn after 69 moves, with all 32 pieces still on the board. White claimed a draw under the 50 move rule. For over 30 years, this game held the record for the longest tournament game played without a capture. For the curious, here is the game, and the final position:
Chess Hustler: When Stanley Kubrick was an aspiring film director in the early 1950's, he helped fund his early short films by being a chess "hustler" in New York, playing games for money. Chess Hustlers: Three of the rooms in the Stockholm Chess Club have been named after Gideon Stahlberg, Geza Stoltz and Erik Lundin, who were the three best chess players in Sweden in the middle part of the 20th century. They were collectively known as the "Three Musketeers".
|
The
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
