Chess News - FIDE World Chess Championship 2007 Starts This Week

Just a reminder - the FIDE World Chess Championship 2007 will be held in Mexico City, starting this Wednesday, September 12, 2007, as an eight-player, double round robin tournament. Visit the official site for more information. Live game replay from the official site is here.

Regal Games from the Realms of Yore: La Bourdonnais vs McDonnell 1834

Today, in our Sunday series Regal Games from the Realms of Yore, we feature the famous fiftieth game of the McDonnell-La Bourdonnais Championship Match of 1834. Wikipedia says of the match:

It was the first match of any importance in the history of chess and is still referred to today as the World Championship of 1834. The games were published widely, and were annotated and discussed by enthusiasts all over Europe. In the course of the mammoth encounter, both players introduced several innovations, a few of which are still seen today. It might even be said that the modern era of chess began with the McDonnell-La Bourdonnais match of 1834.

Like the first game in the Regal Game series (Celebrated Chess Games from History - Stefan Levitsky vs Frank James Marshall 1912), this is one of the earliest "classic" games I remember playing through. The game was included in the Random House book The World of Chess by Anthony Saidy and Norman Lessing, which is where I came across it in 1974.

Like Chernev and Reinfeld did earlier, Saidy and Lessing hooked me into playing over this game with an intriguing statement:

McDonnell sacrifices his queen on the 13th move, a sacrifice that only leads to fruition twenty -three moves later.

White resigns - he is helpless against the threat of ...Ng2 check followed by ...Rh3 mate.

The authors conclude:

Beyond inserting a number of exclamation points it is useless to try and analyze the wildly uninhibited game. Howard Stauntion, the famous English player, made the attempt some years later, only to give up with the historic remark: "It seems uttertly impossible for either player to save the game!"

Sign of the Times - Using Technology to Cheat

Cheating at chess is making more headlines. Today CNET, a site that covers technology news reports the following:

Checkmate for Indian chess player after phone ploy "Caught using his mobile phone's wireless device to win games, player is banned from competition for 10 years."

I'm not sure there will be anyway to stop this now that computers can beat the world champion. The possibilities for relaying computer moves to a player whether electronically or through some other means (pre-arranged codes or signals) may make competitive chess events impossible to hold.

As much as I embrace technology, there are times when I long for the good old days when chess expertise was a skill and talent possessed only by human beings and not machines.

Deep Junior Triumphs in the World Computer Chess Championship

I came across this link just by chance at CNET News.com, the technology news web site in the "Resource center from News.com sponsors" section. IBM may have given up on "Deep Blue" computer chess sponsorship but Intel seems to have taken up the void left by IBM.

"Like a pit crew attending to a Formula 1 race car, an Intel application engineering team worked closely with Deep Junior developers Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky before the competition—as well as between matches—to optimize Deep Junior performance on a next-generation Dual-Core Intel Xeon processor 5100 series-based platform (codenamed Woodcrest) to help secure the win."

ChessBase.com has an article on the tournament here: Shay Bushinsky: How Deep Junior Conquered Turin

To read more from Intel about the technology used to power "Deep Junior" click on the following link for a PDF article: Deep Junior Triumphs in the World Computer Chess Championship

The Next Big Match - Fischer vs. Karpov !!!

Don't count on this ever really happening... but the report is that Fischer will play Gothic Chess against Karpov for $10 million. What is Gothic Chess? It is a chess variant with a 10x8 board and two new pieces! Check it out (sorry about the pun) at the official site www.gothicchess.com and at The Chess Variant Pages article "Gothic Chess - Ed Trice's improvement to Capabalanca's chess, played on a 10x8 board with the Archbishop and Chancellor as new pieces."

Vladimir Kramnik becomes the Unified World Chess Champion!

Quite an exciting finish! I was backing Topalov the Bulgarian. Topalov is more my style. An attacker - even if it means losing some games - or in this case the World Championship. But it is better for Chess that Kramnik won - it puts to rest a lot of potential controversy over the forfeit win that was given to Topalov when Kramnik refused to play game 5. And Kramnik did, when all is said and done, out-play Topalov. For more on the deciding final game see Susan Polgar's commentary.

Bathroom Break Scandal to End World Chess Championship?

You just can't make up this kind of stuff. From the New York Times:

"On a day in which no game was played, Silvio Danailov, the manager of Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria, sent a letter to the appeals committee of the match detailing what he said were an excessive number of bathroom breaks — more than 50 per game — by Vladimir Kramnik of Russia." For the rest of the saga read here.

Topalov showed up for game 5 (with complaints) but Kramnik's demand to have his bathroom unlocked was not met and thus he forfeited game 5. Topalov gains a point so the score is now Kramnik 3 and Topalov 2.

At least the match will now get the media coverage it has been missing! There's no such thing as bad publicity after all :-)

Kramnik Takes a 2-0 Lead Over Topalov

See the Susan Polgar Chess Blog for the best up-to-date coverage of the 2006 World Chess Championship Match and check out her analysis of game one and game two. You can also get live coverage of the match at the Internet Chess Club or official coverage at FIDE.

Hopefully, Topalov will rebound just as Bobby Fischer did when he was down 2-0 back in 1972. I'm pulling for Topalov (Bulgarian) over Kramnik (Russian) simply on the principle that the Russians have dominated chess much too long :-)

What World Chess Championship?

"In what is regarded as the most important match for 13 years, Veselin Topalov and Vladimir Kramnik will face each other across a board for the right to be undisputed world chess champion."

And yet there is absolutely zero coverage by the American media! Fortunately, there are alternatives sources for information on the match - but anyone outside of the world of chess will know nothing about it. How sad.

For those in the know, here at least is a good article on the match at www.timesonline.co.uk.

P.S. Rook has been tied up in a new home purchase - but lots of new material coming soon...

"The Mad Genius of Bobby Fischer" Cable TV Special

PROGRAM LISTING

The Mad Genius of Bobby Fischer - Repeat. "The tactics Bobby Fischer used to become
one of the world's best chess players."

... is showing on the Game Show Network (GSN) ON September, 23rd from 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM EDT. You can find the GSN channel and program guide for your region here.

I probably watch TV less than 98% of the American population - maybe about 4 or 5 hours per week. However, because we have a Microsoft Media Center PC I can search the program guide for the word "chess" - which is how I came across the program when it aired back in August. It is now being repeated if you care to see it.

Needless to say, the show is less about chess than it is about the tragic life of the man himself. However, I did find the show interesting because there was a lot of video of Bobby Fischer playing chess from his early career up to the point when he abandoned serious play. The other great thing about the show is that they interview many famous US chess personalities. After hearing some of these names mentioned for years and years it was nice to actually match their names up with faces.

The 2nd half of the show had a lot of coverage (and video) too but it was less interesting from a chess perspective and probably of more interest to behavioral psychologists.

Whatever one thinks about Bobby Fischer, with all of his appalling behaviour and hateful invective, he did inspire a whole generation to get involved chess and made the game an exciting thing for those of us growing up in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies.

NOTE: The picture above is from the Time Magazine covering the 1972 match - which I still own and treasure to this day.

The World Chess Championship 2006 or What Ever Happened to Dr. Zukhar?

Having recently come back to chess, I’m greatly looking forward to following my first major chess championship since 1978. I got a chuckle recently reading an old Time Magazine clipping I saved concerning that match – the one between Korchnoi-Karpov-Zukhar. I of course jest here concerning Dr. Zukhar – but at the time he seemed to be as much a part of the contest as the players themselves.

As a refresher to the 1978 match, let me quote from Wikipedia’s entry on Anatoly Karpov:

In 1978, Karpov's first title defence was against Viktor Korchnoi, the opponent he defeated in the previous Candidates tournament. The situation was vastly different from the previous match, because in the intervening years Korchnoi had defected from the Soviet Union. The match was played in Baguio in the Philippines, and a vast array of psychological tricks were used during the match, from Karpov's Dr. Zukhar who allegedly attempted to hypnotize Korchnoi during the game, to Korchnoi's mirror glasses to ward off the hypnotic stare, Korchnoi's offering to play under the Jolly Roger flag when he was denied the right to play under Switzerland's, to Karpov's yogurt supposedly being used to send him secret messages, to Korchnoi inviting two local cult members (on trial for attempted murder) into the hall as members of his team.

Now I’m not sure this latest match will be as entertaining off the board as that match was, but it does look to be interesting.

Check out the excellent article Who will win the Topalov-Kramnik world championship? at Chessbase.com.

If you read only one article on the match, this should be the one. It presents an excellent background to the match, especially helpful to people like me who have been away from chess or for new players just taking up the game. The article also explains the match format, provides player’s biographies, and even speculates who will win the match. Best of all, it concludes with a complete “Schedule of the World Chess Championship 2006” which you can copy and paste somewhere so you don’t miss a game. Highly recommended.