|
I don't want this to turn the DD into a personal blog, but the kind folks in the message boards have shown more interest than I have in my return to competitive chess at next week's World Open in Philadelphia. (Thanks for the support, guys!) After some initial confusion because of my ancient US rating and my much higher and more recent but still old Argentine rating (2300), I will be playing in the open section.
I figured that after a six-year layoff I might as well jump into the deep end and get some fodder for training. It will be painful but I decided I shouldn't worry about results until 2004. I hope that by then I'll have found time to study a bit. Either that or I'll have to start only including openings I want in my own repertoire in the Black Belt newsletters! (My "preparation" for the World Open has included trips to Seattle and now California and now my laptop is broken!)
Last February at the US Amateur Team I played my first six classical games in six years. It's a great event but hardly conducive to serious chess. My main goal in Philly will be to stay at the board for nine games and work so I have some decent material to analyze when it's all over. I'll try to post updates from Philly and also post photos and reports at ChessBase.com during the event.
A somewhat depressing story about a 7-year-old kid in England whose parents have pulled him out of school so he'll have more time to work on chess. The kid has already won several adult tournaments (!!) and so must be considered quite a talent, but really, out of school at seven to work on chess, or anything?
His 6/6 performance at the Central London Rapidplay in May was mentioned at the BCF website: "But the show stealer was 7-year-old Peter Williams, who swept all six games in the U120 Minor. Organiser John Weightman used epithets like 'outclassed' and 'slaughtered' to describe the Alton, Hampshire boy's treatment of his opponents, four of whom were graded over 100. His best win was against runner-up Adrian Riley (who won his other five games), and he won even in the final round when a draw would have netted £100.
Peter today appears on the Junior Prix leaderboard in 19th place, and he is currently third in the U11 Prix behind Subin Sen and Callum Kilpatrick. He already won the bottom section at Coulsdon Easter, but that was at U90 level.
At seven years two months, Williams is probably England's third youngest winner of an adult tournament, after Murugan Thiruchelvam and Jack Rudd who both won adult events aged six. He belongs to Richmond Junior Chess Club and is coached by Gavin Wall."
Duly terrifying no doubt. But even such precocity does not guarantee you are the next Polgar or Karjakin. Thiruchelvam is now 14 and is rated 2259 at an age when he would need to be a GM to impress a jaded chess world.
Mikhail Langer writes in: "Sport-Express (Russian sports daily) reports that Ponomariov and Kasparov received letters informing them that their match will take place in September in Yalta. The report also states that the official match anouncement is planned for late June - early July.
What's Ponomariov's oscillating frequency? Would he be able to peak again in September, so soon after his professed peaking in June? :)"
Hey, I'll do the jokes around here! You've heard of Yalta but can't remember why and have no idea where it is? It's the southern tip of Ukraine, in the Crimea region on the Black Sea and it's famous because of the 1945 War Conference that included Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. (Now shown in the correct, non-Microsoft map above. Thanks to the several people who pointed out the mistaken map.)
I guess earlier is better than later, although press coverage suffers every time the match site and/or dates are moved. The annual Prague event is scheduled for September and it would be a shame to have two great events conflict.
The grand old man of online pay-to-play chess sites, the Internet Chess Club (ICC) has written a big check to support US chess. They just put up $100,000 to become funding underwriters of the AF4C for the next four years. The AF4C (#110, 107 etc.) puts this money into developing its scholastic programs and the US Championship. There is no truth to the nasty rumor that some of it goes to support John Henderson's bacon habit. Kudos to the ICC for digging deep and giving back, even if my online chess heart is still with the new hotness, Playchess.com.
Speaking of the ICC, they have done the chess world another favor by putting Gene Venable's ChessWatch back on the air. The peripatetic review of online chess has had many homes and was the reason I met Gene online in 1999 and in person in 2000.
He started it himself on a free website and when I was put in charge of building site content and staff for the nascent KasparovChess.com I asked Gene to come on board as an editor-by-email. When KC opened an office in New York and I moved there I asked Gene if he would move from San Diego to join KC full time as an editor, and to continue Chess Watch under the glaring red of KC. (He couldn't really argue with the palette considering his own predilection for a painful shade of yellow.)
He packed his bags, moved to New Jersey, and commuted to our Broadway & Wall St. office each day. When KC started to shut down operations bit by bit and the NY office was closing (Spring 2001) it was suggested that I move to Moscow to work with the Russian content team. I declined and suggested that Gene go and sure enough he surprised us and jumped at the chance. He just needed to get a passport first! (For a few months it was just Gene, controller Anthony Milazzo, and me wandering around the large office, the other dozen employees having been let go.)
Gene continued work in Moscow until KC folded up shop completely and then decided he liked Moscow so much he would stick around! When the aforementioned Moscow content folks reappeared with the new Kasparov-supported worldchessrating.com Gene was recruited again but the site's financial backing was never on solid ground. Now he and ChessWatch are at the ICC website, which has never had any content worth speaking of before.
It's definitely worth a bookmark. Good luck to Gene, with whom I shared many a plate of bean dip at the Wall St. Bar and Grill (which followed the lead of KasparovChess and closed up shop over a year ago, RIP).
Here's a picture of Gene with some chess VIP visiting our offices in March, 2000.
For more nostalgia, try this:
(Yes, I save everything.)
December 26, 1999
Hello Gene,
This is Mig at the newly renamed KasparovChess.com. We're launching our completely new site early in the coming year and I'm looking for fresh contributors. I like the concept of your ChessWatch site and instead of stealing it I was wondering if you would be interested in doing what you're doing now, but be paid for it and get a few hundred times the number of hits!
Please write back if you're at all interested. GM Ronen Har-Zvi is my assistant here and will be following things up on this end. (Basically this means annoying you constantly until you acquiesce.) (No, there are no Kasparov tattoos or "we love Garry" brainwashing sessions.) I hope your holidays are happy ones, take care. Saludos, Mig
A strange document is currently making the rounds. FIDE's World Chess Championship Committee has sent out a sort of summary of their meetings during the Bled Olympiad last October. They want "the world's top 200 GMs" to send them feedback on the proposal. It also includes questions about which time control the players prefer.
Strangely enough, the godfather of this movement toward a new championship cycle, American GM Yasser Seirawan, didn't receive a copy until over a month after it was first sent out! He is troubled by the fact that they are referring to what they sent out as "the Seirawan Plan" despite how it differs in many respects from his original "Fresh Start" proposal. He was the secretary of the Bled meetings but he only recorded the comments made and the document he produced was not purely of his views.
One of the additions to the original plan is a "Last Chance Super Tournament" that would give high-rated players a second chance to qualify for the candidates matches if they didn't make it through the big KO. Sound silly to me. I'm also against having the incumbent world champion play in more than one match. Title succession is a very powerful symbol in chess and having a new champion never face the old champion sacrifices 90% of the drama and makes the final just another match.
(And no, I don't care if that's not the way it's done in tennis or golf. Think boxing. Chess world champions define eras and become legends. Why throw that away for the sake of a false "democracy"? What's wrong with the best player being champion? Trivializing the title won't help the chess world.)
Another suggestion is that the initial KO be at the rapid time control previously used but that they shift to classical controls for the matches and final. This is weird, sort of like running sprints to qualify for a marathon final. On the other hand the winner will have proved himself master of all different time controls. What do you think about mixing controls over the course of a world championship cycle? Perversion, improvement, or a necessary evil?
The full document and comments by Seirawan will be published later today at ChessBase.com and I'll update this link to go right to it.
The current format of the US Championship still has a few kinks to be worked out. Having most of the players come as qualifiers from the major Open tournaments is great because it encourages the top GMs to play in US events and it also allows for surprises to make it to the big show. To qualify you have to play a $75 fee before the event begins, all the money from these fees going to the Championship. (That is, even if your score is good enough, if you didn't play the fee, no qualification.)
So far, so good. Another rule is that you can't take any byes if you want to qualify. You have to play all your games. (In many big opens titled players are allowed full-point and half-point byes in the early rounds.) Sounds fine, take away the freebies. But what happens if you pay your fee, qualify, but it comes to light that your first round opponent didn't show up for your game, disqualifying you? In that case your name is Michael Casella. That's what just happened to the American FIDE Master at the National Open in Las Vegas.
After some debate it was decided that Casella will get his ticket to the Championship due to a precedent, especially since the forfeit win wasn't in the last round. It's up to the tournament director to find him an opponent but there's not much they can do if the clocks have been started and someone doesn't show up at the board.
Quite a few people finished ahead of him in the standings but all of them except for GM Joel Benjamin were either already qualified, not eligible, and/or didn't pay the $75 before the event. So Benjamin and Casella get the two spots. (Trivia: 21 players paid the qualifying fee.)
Here I am hard at work in Seattle after watching the Mariners beat the Atlanta Braves on a beautiful summer day.
(Lest I be accused of treason, that's a NY Yankees cap I'm wearing.)
John and I spent most of our time here at Safeco Field. And you thought Erik Anderson had a nice office!
When you think about the center of chess in the United States you think of New York City. Many of the country's top players live in and around New York and the histories of the Marshall Chess Club and the currently defunct Manhattan Chess Club have no equal.
On the other hand, the tiny town of Crossville, Tennessee has much to offer as well. It must, because it looks like it will become the new home of the United States Chess Federation. (Currently located in New Windsor, NY, an hour north of NYC.) Recently Crossville (population 7,000, but that doubles when you include the hound dogs and their fleas) was also selected as the fourth-best location in the US for retirement...
Apparently there aren't any buildings ready so they have some land on which to build. This even more bizarre when you hear that Erik Anderson and the AF4C floated the possibility of the USCF coming closer to them with two years of rent-free offices in Spokane, Washington, plus cash for relocation.
If Tennessee works out it could be dirt cheap in the long run, one reason why many US businesses have relocated to the South in the past decade. But this also means moving far from the chess culture of the Northeast. Anyone can tell you that Tennessee is checkers (draughts) country.
Chess again makes the news in a bad way with this item on a man killing his roommate with a knife during a chess game. There is no reason at all for chess to be mentioned in the story other than that it adds color. It seems clear from the story that they haven't disclosed what the argument was about, and the killer was apparently drunk and is claiming he doesn't remember anything. But a chess board was on the scene...
The Daily Dirt hasn't been daily lately but with good reason. I'm on the road and in the United States all chess roads run through Seattle, Washington. That's because Seattle is the home of the AF4C, better known as America's Foundation for Chess. They run the US Championship as well as promote a major scholastic initiative.
I spent an hour interviewing multi-millionaire venture capitalist Erik Anderson, President and co-founder of the AF4C. He talked about future plans for American chess and his own chess interests. The video interview will run on an upcoming ChessBase CD-ROM Magazine. Excerpts will likely soon appear in Chess Magazine (UK) and possibly Chess Life (US) (although not unless Chess Life first pays me for the photos they published six months ago!).
This is a bit of a coming out party for the affable Mr. Anderson, who has been content to stay behind the scenes and dish out piles of money, mostly raised for the AF4C as well as quite a bit from his own pocket. (At the closing ceremony of the 2003 Championship he personally wrote Akobian and Shabalov checks for $5,000 each for having fought hard in the final round instead of joining the other four top boards in agreeing to non-game GM draws.)
At his gorgeous corner office practically atop Lake Washington he shared his thoughts on the success of the AF4C, and his opinions of the USCF, FIDE, and the World Championship. And what could this have to do with the New York Yankees? You'll have to find out in this don't-miss interview.
Seattle has become the home of Scottish chess journalist John Henderson, here pictured hard at work in his apartment.
(Yes, that is a copy of "Men's Health" magazine sitting on the table. Somehow I doubt that's where he picked up the recipe for his favorite bacon sandwiches on buttered white bread.)
Despite being ten thousand kilometers from Edinburgh John continues to put out his daily column for The Scotsman newspaper. This while consulting on chess matters for the AF4C and going to as many Seattle Mariners baseball games as he can.
Meanwhile, last week Seattle lost its greatest contribution to the chess world, GM Yasser Seirawan. He and his wife Yvette Nagel Seirawan just moved to her hometown of Amsterdam. The departure of the greatest American player since Fischer is a blow. Seirawan will stay active in chess and you might say that he's closer to its epicenter than before.
Google searches can turn up some strange things. It appears that the horse "Kasparov" is still in the running, at least from this race report. (Scroll down to the 4:31pm race, horse #8.)
A few years ago there was a Karpov and and a Kasparov on the circuit. There have been quite a few racehorses named for chess players or with other chess-themed names. Anyone recall where such a list appeared? It's in this pile of books behind me somewhere...
Exclusive, just confirmed today by publisher Everyman: Garry Kasparov will be signing copies of his new book at Barnes & Noble in Manhattan on Monday, July 14! This is the first book of the "My Great Predecessors" three-volume set of Kasparov's opinions and game analysis of the 12 world champions that came before him.
The full info: Monday 14th July, 7.30 pm at Barnes & Noble. 2289 Broadway (at 82nd Street). Map here. I'll be there for sure and I know the only good Chinese restaurant up there...
The Everyman site has a "sneak preview," 12 pages of the book in Acrobat format.
This page has an early review of the book by a Russian chess writer/editor (in English). It's incredibly enthusiastic and you might be concerned because the site is partially under the sponsorship of one Garry Kasparov. (Yes, the on-again-off-again worldchessrating.com is on again.)
But Kasparov has been putting in a lot of work on this book for years, off and on, and I don't expect anything less than sensational. I've seen excerpts of the game annotations, some of which have been included in ChessBase Magazine in the past year or two. This first book covers Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca, and Alekhine and runs 464 pages.
The article mentions a name you probably won't hear too often in the media blitz to come, that of well-known Russian chess writer Dmitry Plissetsky. He assisted Kasparov with research and it's good of the site to mention him. (Because his name sure ain't gonna be on the cover!)
It's both impressive and disappointing that Kasparov has so few books in print. He hasn't given in to pressure to capitalize on his fame by letting a publisher churn out dozens of books with his name. On the other hand a game collection or four is long overdue. He has always said he'll have plenty of time to write when he retires from active play, so we might have a while to wait.
I admit that I rarely spend more than eight minutes thumbing through "Chess Life" when it comes each month so it wasn't much of a surprise that I had to be told by e-mail that the latest issue contains a photo of me in it. I thought it might be in the coverage of the Kasparov-Junior match in NY where I was doing the official online commentary for X3D.
Nope, it's in the report on the Amateur East team even in New Jersey. (Yes, these events were way back in January and February. Now you can understand the eight minutes.) For better or for worse, I have attained the level of ubiquity at which my photo is captioned only with "Mig," with no last name. At last I have reached the status of my idols Cher, Sting, and Moses.
Bashing Chess Life is a tradition in the US but I'll be constructive. The report on the Kasparov-Junior match (by Robert Rizzo, with contributions by Jennifer Shahade and Brian Killigrew) is fine. They were there, they attended the press conferences, they talked to people. Good. But the first thing you notice is that the 7-8 page report in the USA's premier chess magazine does not contain an interview with Kasparov or the Junior team. Not only did they not bother to do one ("they" being the editors who should have assigned this) but they didn't ask around afterwards. For example, I have hours of post-match one-on-one material with Kasparov and Junior programmer Shay Bushinsky.
Of course maybe I'm just disgruntled. Chess Life filled page after page (and the cover) with my photographs from the Kramnik-Fritz match in Bahrain half a year ago and I still haven't been paid! Various e-mail and face-to-face promises about checks in the mail have gone unfulfilled. So let's say I have a bunch of great stuff their readers would be interested in, why would I pitch it to them? Sad.
From a Publisher's Weekly report on the poor book market comes a mention that Deep Blue designer Feng-Hsiung Hsu's book "Behind Deep Blue" was a commercial success.
"[Publisher] Princeton attributes its "rather solid year despite the volatile political climate and erratic economy," in the words of assistant director Adam Fortgang, to a combination of a broad list and serendipity. Its Behind Deep Blue by the inventor of the chess-playing computer, Feng-Hsiung Hsu, had a "phenomenal" run which was not hurt by the chess battle between the computer and champion Gary [sic] Kasparov."
I assume they are talking about Kasparov-Junior, played in January. But the book came out a few days before the Kramnik-Fritz match in October, 2002. My copy arrived from Amazon as I was waiting for the car to take me to the airport for my flight to Bahrain and it was the second-most borrowed item during my stay. (The first were the pair of floppy diskettes I always bring on trips. People always seem to need one no matter how much the industry says they are obsolete.)
Speaking of Amazon, Hsu's book has a 4.5/5 star rating there after 14 reviews and is ranked #29,806 in the sales rank. (For blue perspective, pre-teen classic "Island of the Blue Dolphins" is #1,081 and Dr. Seuss's "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" is #602. But "Emily Insatiable" by Blue Moon Books is only 57,246. Go chess!
I thought the information in the Deep Blue book was interesting, but I found the tone strident and the text halting at best and vacuum-cleaner-instruction-manual at worst. I know edited second-language writing when I see it, but if this is the best it could be he should have worked with a ghost writer instead of having so many chopped-up sentences. It flows like granite in many parts and that was for a computer chess fanatic like me. Still, it's a must-read even if you know much of the computer chess history parts. (I'm mentioned in the book but as "a chess journalist," possibly for my own protection...)
Read Jonathan Schaeffer's book "One Jump Ahead" about his creation of the top checkers program, Chinook. Great read, if overlong in parts. Plus, Jonathan is an A1 nice guy. (Now back into checkers after years away. He plans to solve the game once and for all.)
While I'm at it, Paul Hoffman writes on chess for the New York Times and a few other mainstream publications while paying the rent with popular books and articles on science and history. His new book just came out and it looks fascinating. "Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight"