Not Fischering this time. Actual, honest to goodness fishing for fish. My dad has organized an excursion to the Sea of Cortez with a group of friends and I'll be at a remote spot in Baja Mexico for the next...
April 2005 Archives
In an earlier thread Vlad posted a link to an interesting interview of Boris Gelfand on the ACP site. His remarks about Nakamura's concrete style of play being of "another dimension" jibe with Nakamura's own comments about his play being different and computer-like.
I just posted an interesting item on the recent 100-board Estonia - Latvia match. It was sent in by a Latvian chess journalist and also goes into the 30-year history of these matches.
Tony Mayo sends in this story from the Washington Times on drugs to boost concentration and other things that could aid chessplayers. Susan Polgar is interviewed. I excerpted a similar piece in the LA Times last December at ChessBase.
The Argentine papers are following up on the announcement that the FIDE world championship will be held there. News on the organization, financial guarantees, etc.
It's already taken over the below thread, so I'm taking it as a topic suggestion. US champion Hikaru Nakamura played 1.e4 e5 2.Qh5 against Krishnan Sasikiran in the Sigeman tournament today and lost in 87 moves.
Continue reading Nakamura's 2.Qh5.
Not that I want to turn this into a forum for exhibitionist felines the world over, but in case you're sick of looking at my cats, here's my friend Anna's cat Sigfried. He's from Spain, now living in Brooklyn. As...
Today FIDE announced they have found a site and sponsor for the 2005 FIDE world championship tournament we were discussing here a few days ago. It's the Argentine province of San Luis.
Continue reading FIDE WCh in Argentina, Che!.
World Junior Champion Pentyala Harikrishna recently bemoaned his economic status. According to this note, he was granted five lakhs by the his regional government.
The Swedish half of the Sigeman tournament is over and aging Dutch lion Jan Timman is leading with an impressive 4/5 score. Young tigers Nakamura, Sasikiran, and Iordachescu are a half-point behind.
FIDE is moving ahead with the latest brainstorm of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. Instead of KO, this is an eight-player double round-robin scheduled for October. It's clearly intended as a unification event with Kramnik and Leko as special invitees.
It's hard to beat Garry Kasparov at the chessboard, but today someone beat him WITH a chessboard. He has a bruised head, but is otherwise okay. This frightening incident is being tracked at ChessBase.com. Luckily he's hard-headed.
I just posted Part 2 of my interview with Garry Kasparov to ChessBase. This part focuses more on his play, with specific games, tournaments, and periods of peak performance. His choice of best performance ever might surprise you.
An arbiter friend is looking for links to national rating lists. Some of them are hard to search for since the official sites are in various languages. And many links are out of date. Tops on the search list are Serbia & Montenegro, Philippines, and most Eastern European countries. If you have links, please post them. Links to link pages also welcome.
Two interesting tournaments are starting up now in the not-so-frozen tundra. 14-year-old Magnus Carlsen is playing in the Gausdal Classics in Norway. The Swedish-Danish Sigeman Tournament starts on the 15th with Nakamura and Sasikiran as top seeds. You can also vote in a poll to pick the winner of Sigeman.
American GM, coach, and organizer Maurice Ashley is the subject of the latest chess article on the homepage of the New York Times. That's three in a month, believe it or not. This one is a new class Ashley is teaching at City College in Harlem on using chess and chess metaphor to improve thinking and teaching methodology.
Chess stats man Jeff Sonas posted some these and other numbers from his ChessMetrics site to the Anand Oscar thread.
Top performers of 2004:
#1 Viswanathan Anand: 2829 performance: 28.5/43 (66%) vs 2691
#2 Alexander Morozevich: 2799 performance: 25.5/39 (65%) vs 2669
#3 Peter Leko: 2789 performance: 30.5/55 (55%) vs 2725
#4 Garry Kasparov: 2776 performance: 20.5/34 (60%) vs 2689
#5 Michael Adams: 2770 performance: 38/59 (64%) vs 2633
So that everybody knows it's all Anand all the time around here, I'll give the link to a recent interview with him.
It was no contest. Vishy Anand won his second consecutive "Chess Oscar" as player of the year for 2004. The voting:
In Part 1 of my March interview with Garry Kasparov, he repeated his well-known suspicions and accusations about human interference in the 1997 match with Deep Blue. This business as usual was fresher because of his retirement and the recent distribution of the movie "Game Over: Kasparov vs the Machine," which focuses on these suspicions.
Bagley and Morrigan, my coworkers. Open thread. Topic suggestions, revisits, get your rant on. Play nice....
Anatoly Karpov is in Baltimore for simuls and to train the champion UMBC university chess team. The Sun story on his simul is here, but the other one with Karpov's brief comments on Kasparov's retirement and political plans is free registration only.
Several people have sent in reports of something that was rumored last week. Sean Evans sent in this this Russian report, which has the most details.
According to the major Russian news agency RIA, chess ex-champion Bobby Fischer, who has recently settled in Iceland, is planning to visit Serbia again.
Part 1 of my interview with Garry Kasparov is up here at ChessBase. All I have to say is thank god the typing is over. Seven hours of recording into twenty pages of interview, yeesh. Why didn't I just dump the entire thing into one MP3 file and get it over with? It's a lot tidier this way, since the conversations took place over a week.
The New York Times has a good profile and interview with 17-year-old US Champion GM Hikaru Nakamura. (He also holds the even higher title of ChessNinja.com Black Belt newsletter contributor. So much for the Times research staff.)
Either it's new or I missed it. (I think it's new because a lot of the dates are screwed up. But they don't call it the Grauniad for nothing.) You used to have to be sneaky to get Leonard Barden's chess column from the Guardian website, but now they have a nice chess section with recent columns.
Jennifer Shahade: Usually, when looking at the games of the top players, it is hard for me to find instructive games for my students. However, I’ve found many in this year's Melody Amber tourney.
The student paper at Drexel University reports: Drexel's chess team has been hit with two years of probation from the NCAA after they learned of recruiting improprieties. The improprieties have been occurring for at least five years and include providing...
Saying "it is clear the chess world still needs me", Garry Kasparov today announced his return to professional chess. It remains to be seen if Kasparov can shake off the rust and be competitive again at his age.
