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jackiechan sends in a link to this Moscow Times report on civil unrest in Kalmykia, the Russian republic ("republic") led by FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. Choice quote from a reformist party ("Yabloko") leader: "Over the past 10 years of Ilyumzhinov's rule, an elections system has been formed under which the candidates favored by him always win."
Funny, sounds just like Ilyumzhinov's rule in FIDE. The rulers of the Russian satellite republics get support from Moscow only insofar as they get out the vote for the ruling party come election time. We may use this latest flare-up to remember the 1998 murder of journalist (and Yabloko party member) Larissa Yudina in Kalmykia. Former bodyguards of Ilyumzhinov were implicated.
Another Moscow Times column sums up nicely: "In a society where the primary asset is control of the government machine, some owners of this invaluable resource -- notably the regional leaders -- could encounter a few problems. Judging by the demonstrations in Kalmykia and the runoff election in Bashkortostan, their problems are just beginning."
Problems for Ilyumzhinov inevitably mean problems for FIDE. Since he can buy any FIDE election we may be waiting for him to lose power in Kalmykia before his hold on FIDE loses its grip.
San Diego. (DD #175 below) After three years in the rainy northwest, the US Championship is leaving the home of its sponsor group and getting some sun in Southern California. The Swiss-system tournament will take place during the first two weeks of December at the new NTC Foundation's Promenade Centre.
The NTC Foundation is a nonprofit corporation in charge of renovating and developing a large area that used to be home to the Naval Training Center. The space will be used for civic and cultural purposes and the 2004 US Championship will be the inaugural event of the flagship Promenade Centre. (Why they spelled it wrong I've no idea. Americans using "quaint" British spelling intentionally has always bothered me. Why not "Ye Olde Promenade Centre"?)
NTCF will co-sponsor the Championship with organizers AF4C, which is A-OK. The prize fund stays at the world's largest: $250,000. (Rumor has it that the Aeroflot Open (January) is trying to squeeze some more money out of the airline to take the prize fund title. AF4C honcho and sponsor Erik Anderson says that would be great because then he could use that to raise even more! Now this is a US-Russia arms race I can get behind!)
Quoth Anderson in a press release scheduled to come out in full this week: "AF4C has been looking for a partner whose mission is aligned with ours: NTC supports creative education and believes in the value the U.S. Chess Championships can bring to the national expansion of the AF4C classroom chess curriculum."
I believe there will also be chess tournaments open to the public running alongside the Championship. This will create a great festival atmosphere like you see during many of the summer events across Europe.
ChessMaster is again a sponsor and I believe the ICC is already committed as well. It will be interesting to see if the organizers decide to have a serious web presence for the 2004 event or if they will continue to basically outsource coverage and analysis to ChessBase (and ChessNinja...) One thing I've found while running the official sites for major events like the Kramnik and Kasparov man-machine matches is that quickly releasing media-friendly reports dramatically increases coverage in the general press.
When one game of the 2002 Kramnik-Fritz match in Bahrain match went late and I wasn't allowed to stay and publish a report, the next day the news coverage had dropped dramatically. Few news agencies will bother to have a specialist figure out what's going on and write a chess report based only on the gamescore and result and the non-chess writers don't know what's going on. But if you spoon-feed them a nice summary in plain English with a little drama they'll copy-paste and run the story. In San Diego perhaps this should also be done in Spanish to increase local coverage. Did I mention I'm fluent in Spanish?! Chess, sun, and good Mexican food. Sign me up!
New US Chess Federation President Beatriz Marinello is reported to be back at home in Chile due to a serious illness. Of course you want to be near family in such situations, but being in a country with guaranteed universal medical care doesn't hurt either.
[When I lived in Latin America it often surprised Americans to hear that these supposedly "backwards" countries had things like free universal health care and free university education. Such things are also normal in Europe but are viewed with suspicion by "get what you pay for" Americans. That the corollary is "if you can't pay you get nothing" doesn't bother them until they need it. But we have a nice military.]
Meanwhile, another Chilean has come to the US, if just to visit. GM Ivan Morovic is playing in Kansas along with Karpov and Onischuk. (Karpov won the all-play-all rapid.) Morovic has long been one of the top players in Lat.Am, coming up in the 80's with Cuban Jesus Noguieras and the Brazilian Milos.
An interesting article announces that world #3 Vishy Anand will be working on an autobiography to be completed in 2006. The piece has charming tidbits about how his parents miss him and cook his favorite foods when he is home. (He and his wife have long lived in Spain.)
Anand is 34 and has many good years ahead of him if you look at Kasparov, to say nothing of Korchnoi and Lasker. I remember reading something about the youngest players to write a game collection (I think it was Pomar but I don't recall). Few players have the fame to write an autobiography and Anand is definitely one of them. It might end up a bestseller in India, although it's not likely to sell nearly as well to non-Indian chess fans as a chess book penned by Anand would.
His straightforward collection of games ("My Best Games of Chess") is a routine collection of notes without much in the way of insight. To be fair, few active top players can devote the time and energy to the introspection and research a top-notch game collection requires. And not everyone is a naturally gifted and entertaining writer like Tal was. Maybe it's something about Latvians. Shirov's "Fire on Board" remains the best modern "auto-" game collection in the past decade, perhaps two. (Amazon.com inexplicably lists Mark Taimanov as a co-author of "Fire on Board.")
Kasparov's fine "Test of Time" is outdated and out of print and we won't see him look in the mirror for a few years, when the fifth volume of his "Predecessors" series comes out. Kramnik's "My Life and Games" was hastily produced and is too often given over to an obsequious third person (Damsky).
Staying with contemporary players, I strongly recommend Yermolinsky's "The Road to Chess Improvement" and both John Nunn game collections. His original "Secrets of Grandmaster Play" was my first "serious" chess book and it took me years to really dig into it. Great book.
Getting back to autobiographies, Kasparov has various iterations of his bombastic but revealing book. Botvinnik's "Achieving the Aim" is a guarded chronology. Smyslov's "In Search of Harmony" hasn't been translated into English. Korchnoi and then Karpov both liked "Chess is My Life" for a title.
Russian is probably the only language that can support such books consistently these days. Maybe an Indian reader could inform us as to how many languages popular books there are usually translated into.
While they're doing their best to make things bad for the players that doesn't mean FIDE has forgotten about the rest of the people in the chess world. They've moved on to taking player photographs from around the web and reproducing them without permission in their online player profiles.
Chess journalist John Henderson needed only a few minutes to find dozens of his photos at fide.com, including most of the top American and Chinese players as well as Vladimir Kramnik. All were apparently taken from various reports at ChessBase and The Week In Chess websites. No photo credit is given and no one contacted the easily contactable Henderson to negotiate a purchase or ask permission.
Copying content on the web is so easy that many people sincerely believe that it's legal. But copyright infringement is just as serious online as off (just ask the RIAA what they think of MP3 file sharing). FIDE can't hide behind the "criminal or stupid" defense. It is also very unlikely that each player submitted his own photo and it happened to be one taken by Henderson. (FYI, the subject of a photo does not own the rights to that photo, particularly if they are a public figure or competitor in a publicly viewed event. On the other hand I don't know of any photographer who wouldn't give his subject a copy for personal use.)
I suggested that Henderson just submit an invoice to FIDE for all the photos he can find on their site. If someone uses one photo accidentally and removes it when asked, you can be more understanding. I was on both sides of that situation several times when I was editor-in-chief of KasparovChess.com. But FIDE ripping off chess journalists is sad. Photo credit and a link is all most would ask, but FIDE seems to be intent on poisoning the water of ever well it can find. They continue to make enemies of the people that could help them.
More amusing is that they can't get the photos right either. Sergey Shipov has replaced Alexei Shirov!
It sounds like the next US Championship is close to being announced and it will be on the move to San Diego, California. December 2004 is the likely time slot. The original plan for October ran into trouble with the change in the Olympiad dates. This will make it almost two years since the last championship, in Jan. 2003. That's a significantly longer delay than when there wasn't a championship at all in 2001. (Oct 2000 to Jan 2002)
This is no small thing when you consider how important the Championship paycheck is to US professionals. How they schedule their year can depend on how well they do. On the other hand, since the AF4C took over the event, one tournament pays out more than three or four did before they took over.
Get ready to plunk down another $30 for a chess book because the massive Part 2 of Kasparov's "My Great Predecessors" series on the world champions is coming into stores now. The English version already available in the UK but probably won't make landfall in the USA for a few weeks. Probably not in time for Christmas unless you can get an IOU or gift certificate from Santa. Kasparov will be back in the USA at the start of 2004 but no word yet on any book signings.
Part 2 covers Euwe, Botvinnik, Smyslov, and Tal. That Kasparov was Botvinnik's prize student and was close to both the man and his way of thinking adds an extra dimension. That Kasparov played many games against Smyslov and Tal is another big difference between Part 2 and Part 1.
Game three of the Kasparov-X3D Fritz match was a horrific display of the worst of computer chess. (From one perspective. It was also a nice control game by Kasparov.) The game was basically lost on move five when the computer, still in book, played 5...a6. This allowed Kasparov to close the game and although the machine was in book for a while longer, it could have easily been determined in advance that X3D Fritz was hopeless in this position. Basically that's what the computer's "book trainer" is supposed to do. It's not about finding stunning novelties, but get the machine safely to positions it can play well.
Alex Kure, the Fritz Team's book guy, has a very tough job. Imagine trying to prepare for Kasparov and ruling out thousands of variations that could lead to: 1) positions with locked centers, 2) trading the queens, 3) static pawn structures in which the human can pick the machine apart in the endgame.
Much of this goes into the massive opening books that are included with every program. The books are tuned and tell the program which lines to play how often and which moves to avoid completely. It was therefore interesting to find that 5...a6 is prohibited in the book that is included with Fritz 8. (See image) Kure was hoping Kasparov would play a line he had played before, but was outfoxed.
Paul Hoffman was engaged in his addiction to watching live GM games online, viewing Nakamura-Dominguez from the Santo Domingo Open Great Cup Nazir Atallah from yesterday's round four. The game ended rather abruptly in a pawn-up endgame for Nakamura. Word came through on the ICC that Dominguez's cell phone had gone off and he had been disqualified. No other confirmation of that, but if so it follows Ponomariov's disqualification a few months ago for the same offense. Players are usually sharp enough to turn their cells off, spectators are another story. Unfortunately they can't be disqualified so easily.
Even the computers are making a mess of the world championship these days. The WCCC just finished in Graz, Austria. The program Shredder beat Fritz in a playoff to take the title this year. The controversy came in the final round of the tournament. Fritz and Shredder were tied for the lead and both were beating their opponents. Then the amateur program Jonny announced a three-time repetition against Shredder in a totally losing position! (Much more on this at chessbase.com.)
Most programs have code to detect repetitions and so avoid them in advantageous positions. A bug in Shredder allowed it to repeat three times although it was close to announcing checkmate. Basically what happened after that is that the programmer of Jonny, embarrassed at getting a draw this way (and a draw that would keep Shredder out of the playoff and therefore make Fritz the champion) went to the arbiter to ask to continue playing (and losing). The arbiter didn't understand and after some confusion, the game continued and Shredder duly won.
The game was continued because the machine didn't claim the draw correctly by FIDE rules. It made the move instead of claiming first. Of course this is the way the interface is programmed, not in accordance with FIDE rules. Clearly this is idiotic since a computer is perfectly aware of a repetition, unlike a human. (In human play the rule is designed to make you confirm the repetition on your clock, hard to do in time trouble.) So either all the programs have to change to giving notification before they make the third repetition or the ICGA needs to discount FIDE rules that are irrelevant in comp-comp play.
Then there is the problem of the operator/programmer stepping in to throw the game that was drawn. If he didn't want to lose on a programming bug in Shredder he should have resigned earlier, or perhaps not played at all and forfeited the game to make a sincere gift of the full point. Since when are bugs invalid reasons for winning (or not winning)? Isn't a bad move a bug? If Jonny had claimed the draw according to FIDE rules would its operator have been allowed to voluntarily throw the game anyway?