April 1 Shenanigans

I want some of those training supplements on the chessbase site! haha

I forgot the april fool thing , but if it is a joke it is really amazing , i like the game a lot.

Mig! You mean that the part of the Rogoff article (the game with Huebner) is not a hoax??!

I remember seeing the Ivanchuk game on Chesspro.ru around Christmas/New Year, so even if it was an elaborate joke it wasn't April Fools!

This is a reference to a famous game in which Huebner played a one move draw with White, he was tired after a few tough games or something, and was forced to replay the game cos it was deemed inappropriate. So he and his partner (mighta been Rogoff, can't remember) played a joke game in protest. In the end they were forced to play it yet again; Huebner didn't show up and was forfeited.

yeah, that's the story. it's not a reference to the game; it is the game. here's the wiki article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_records_in_chess#Shortest_game

the article mentions several forfeitures among the shortest games... as if forfeit games are some sort of rarity in master play.

Bobby Fischer is alive!

http://chessconfessions.blogspot.com/2009/04/bobby-fischer-is-alive.html

Of course the joke in Chessbase is related to a topic that was discussed here a few days ago, but they did a very good work choosing a Rogoff's game which was actually real (as mentioned above, was a protest game after being forced to play for the third time without making a "dull draw") and a variant of chess which looked strange but actually make sense (at least for one player).

The problem is that the first report was fairly obvious to be fake that if we trusted Mig (that there was only one fake report), we got no options to guess which was the fake one.

Hey, Mig. You spoiled the joke for us the people that read first your blog before that Chessbase =P

And I thought the new FIDE ELO list was the joke ... ,:).
Anyway - as Mig asked for more - http://chessmind.powerblogs.com/ also has a good one today .... .

I sincerely hope that the piece about that Ethiopian chess variant with spectators being allowed to make moves is the joke.
If not, I am visiting Ethiopia.

I don't know if Ethiopian chess is real, but searching for videos of it I found this great chesslike african game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpPmXpGFfFE

I'm dropping chess as soon as I find the rules for this.

i wanted to include some more mean-spirited side effects with the gene therapy pills, but fred is too nice.

And this is probably another one ... :
http://tigerchess.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/rule-change/
"I’ve just heard that FIDE are considering reinstating an old rule that pawns don’t need to promote when they reach the 8th rank, but can simply remain as pawns. It appears to have been pushed through by a British Problem Society lobby, who claim that it will help them create an entirely new generation of problem themes.

I don’t know much about this area myself and suspect that it will have minimal impact on practical players. But I guess we’ll have to be more careful about replacing pawn with the appropriate piece when they get to the 8th rank lest the move as interpreted as something like ‘e7-e8 = pawn’."

Promoted pawns now have the option of becoming "anti-pawns" - they move backwards, capture backwards, and when they reach the 4th rank (or 5th, for black) they have the option of moving one or two squares. A possible path would be something like a8-a7xb6-b5-b4-b2.

Why do I think this idea's been used and discarded already?

Biggest April 1 News is (or should be) that World #1 Topalov made the largest rating gain among the top 100! How often does the incumbent pull this off?

Well, there was an introductory kids chess class where someone asked if a pawn can promote to being a pawn of the opposite color.

I loved their April 1st joke.