November 2004 Archives

It was cool that Kamsky came in today to blog after his win. He is clearly watched and seen as a little different from the rest because of his past star status and he's just as clearly intent on leaving that behind. He socializes and post-mortems with players he would have been giving simuls to a decade ago. It's got to be very hard to not have that magic at your fingertips anymore. Most never have it, but to have it and lose it is extra tough. Let's hope he sticks around long enough to get it back. Watching how well he is dealing with this has put him on my cool list.

Howdy all. I thought I'd be able to keep up here, but so far I haven't had a spare second here in San Diego. Apart from the www.uschesschampionship.com website, I'm doing the daily bulletins for the players and spectators and helping staff and players with their various computer problems. I literally have not been outside of the hotel since I arrived Monday afternoon, which is pretty pathetic.

Things should settle into a routine and get easier with each round, but I've been saying that for three days now. I'm going to put a sign on the wall above me saying "Next question: $5". I like to help, but it's hard to focus on analysis and the website for more than five minutes straight without an interruption.

Still, it's great! I don't want it to sound like I'm suffering; I love it. It's just that it's 4:20am, I've been up alone working on the site all night again, and I slept for three hours last night. (The core: results, games, downloads, analysis, annotated games, photos, report, poll, trivia, press releases, blog updates all day.)

So I'm getting tired and cranky despite the luxurious surroundings and living the chess fan's dream. I just got another personal lesson from Walter Browne as he came in and wanted to show me some lines from his game with Yermo. It's coming in Black Belt tonight, guys! Thanks to IMs Watson and Donaldson I don't have to do much serious analysis of my own, at least not for publication on the site. But I have to keep up with all the games so I can talk competently about them with the players for their analysis contributions and/or blog entries. This is the most chess-immersed I've been in a while and it's inspiring.

I'm very happy with the website. I only wish I'd had more time to work on the content before launch. (I had three days!) Player bios are still incomplete, many players don't like the ones we have for them, and it seems weird to roll them out now, not that I've had much time anyway. Thanks to everyone who has sent in suggestions and corrections on the site, especially Duif.

The ChampBlog was last-minute inspiration and it's far exceeded my expectations. Reaction has been tremendous from both fans and players. I know a few club events have used a blogging format to report on a tournament, but having the players unfiltered at such a prestigious event is very cool. As with my writing, I just make what I would like and hope others like it too. Forget press conferences and demo boards; I want a Linares blog and an Olympiad blog and a world championship blog! This is where the fans are, which means it's where the sponsors should want to be.

We have two IMs and the players themselves talking to an audience of maybe 20 people in the commentary room. They are also doing audio to the ICC, which is great, if limited. I doubt they ever mention the AF4C, Chessmaster, and the other sponsors. Meanwhile, tens of thousands visit the site each day. I hope the ICC is recording the audio; the system looked a little primitive compared to what's built into Playchess.com, but I haven't fooled around with it so I shouldn't talk. Still, multimedia is clearly the way to go no matter where you watch it.

(I was doing audio and even video stuff on my own for Real and then KasparovChess.com's "Champions Club" back in 2000, well before ChessFM and such. It was pretty raw, sort of like bad reality chess television, but it was fun. The ones I made for Real at the London 2000 Kramnik-Kasparov match were completely ad-libbed and I was as tired then as I am now, so they're a little embarrassing to listen to now. Plus, the technical glitches. I just put an oldie up for download here. It's of the 2001 Botvinnik Memorial, one of many clips that few ever saw. Real format.)

I hope to do some more blogging of my own, although I realized that it's not appropriate for me to do it at the official site in the ChampBlog. Who wants to read me babbling when the focus should be on the players? I just didn't know then that so many players would participate and thought some filler would be needed! Even if the gossip is fun, it's a distraction and should be separate. That's what this place is for, no?

My entries might not be as entertaining as Serper's or as linguistically cutting edge as Ross's, but I think my job security is okay until they learn to design websites. (Serper requested his first "boring chess" entry be removed after some haters on the ICC gave him a hard time about it. Sad, because he has a great sense of humor.) Next time around the players should have their own logins so they can blog at any time from their own computers throughout the event. I didn't have time to set something like that up this time around. In fact, they should be able to use the site as a blog and homepage permanently. I get asked all the time to put people in touch with various players for lessons or simuls, or just to pass on greetings and fan mail.

Okay, time to grab some sleep before I have to run in to set the live games link on the homepage to 05!

Hmm, I guess the party has started and as usual I'm the only one sitting down here in a room full of computers. Wait, the tech guys setting up the live game broadcasts are still working too. That makes me feel better.

The ChampBlog is now up at the official site. I grabbed Chief Arbiter Carol Jarecki for the first guest entry. I'm hoping for a cool, unfiltered experience by getting the players to blog. But I think Carol has dreams of being a novelist instead of an arbiter. I bet the players will be looser after the cocktail party, so stay tuned.

Gata Kamsky just arrived. First trouble already started, although not really his fault. He just bought a new computer with his credit card and apparently there wasn't enough credit left to use it for his room at check-in!

[I'm going to be adding many tiny tidbits throughout, sort of liveblogging the event. I won't send email notifications for each of these because it would be serious spamming. The ChampBlog at the official site will have items from the players and staff, not just me.]

One of the players, an older fellow, came by where we were setting everything up last night and was delighted to find out that clocks were provided! He explained that he had forgotten to bring his own...

The reverse is usually the case when European Grandmasters come to play in the big US open tournaments and are stunned to find out the players are usually expected to bring their own clocks and sets.

Greetings from San Diego. Actually, it's La Jolla, a rather exclusive and upscale village 15 minutes north of the city center. The site of the 2005 US Championship is the Hilton Torrey Pines hotel. It's between the sea and the beautiful Torrey Pines State Park.

It was no problem getting here from the small airport, which is practically in the middle of San Diego. I waited a few minutes for a shuttle bus that cost $12.50. (Company "Cloud 9".) Apparently it's a little trickier to get back to the city since there is no public transportation from the hotel to downtown San Diego! I guess you could just take the airport shuttle. They have free hotel shuttles into La Jolla and there must be a bus or something from there. I hope so, because a taxi is $40+.

The hotel and site are spectacular. Here is the view from the mini-patio of my room, which is right next to the tournament ballroom.

More importantly, the DSL internet in my room is working fine, although there is something about it costing $13/day. I hope I get a webmaster exemption for that! That's money I need to spend on caffeinated beverages in order to work on the site.

I'll be blogging from behind the scenes throughout the tournament and inviting participants and organizers to guest blog as well. That's in addition to the analysis, interviews, and photo galleries.

Tomorrow morning I'm headed to San Diego for the US Championships. Apart from the official reports I'll keep blogging and also incorporate this blog into the official site. I'll grab players and others to guest-blog various entries during the tournament. It should be good fun. Who would you most like to hear from in their own words?

Here's another reason to leave Brooklyn for San Diego. I like crisp Fall days as much as anyone, but it's going to be cold and rainy around here and I'm not sure they know what rain is in San Diego. As long as the hotel internet holds up, all should be well.

Despite being only the fourth seed by rating, Jennifer Shahade leads the voting to predict a winner in the Women's event by a large margin. She won in this format in 2002 and won the women-only event this year. Or is the voting influenced by the fact that she just became a regular contributor to my Black Belt newsletter? Last week she annotated her recent win against one of her competitors in San Diego, Anna Zatonskih.

Hikaru Nakamura has 40% of the vote for the overall title. (No Ninja favoritism here, although I'll be interested to see if he'd like to contribute. Sign him before he wins the title and raises his prices!) He's had a tremendous 2004 and could well be the favorite for the next 10 years unless Kamsky really comes back to chess full-time. Kamsky is second in the voting but has got to be terribly rusty.

Well, it was a rush job and there isn't much content yet, but at least I didn't have to resort to Viagra to get this site up. www.uschesschampionship.com is the official site of the 2005 US Chess Championships in San Diego. There are a few things I need to tweak (Mozilla/FireFox mangling my style sheets for one) and it's probably riddled with typos. But I think all the links and images are working okay at least. And the essential info is there except the rules and regulations page. That's because they haven't quite decided the rules yet!

Apparently even more funding has come in at the last minute, so it could go over the current $255,000. Then there's the tiebreak situation. Shabalov and Akobian saved us from embarrassment in 2003 by fighting hard while all the other leaders played pathetic 10-move draws in hopes of going to rapids or splitting the big prize a dozen ways. AF4C honcho Erik Anderson is very keen (an understatement) to avoid such a possibility by carrot and/or stick. They are still considering the best way to break ties without swinging thousands of dollars on a few rapid games.

The NYU newspaper has an article about how renovations to Washington Square Park may endanger the famous chess corner.

I recently mentioned the park in our places to play chess item. Most players use roll boards instead of the banged-up cement chess tables, but anyway we can hope that if they put in new tables they get the white squares on the right.

Ah, a nice weekend off before the panic ensues. The Russian championship is underway. Karpov, incensed at Kramnik for stealing his drop-out thunder, waited until the last minute before bailing out to save himself from a beating. With Karpov such treachery is expected by now. He fled the Botvinnik Memorial in 2001 to jump into the FIDE KO. In both cases he attended the press conference first. I wonder what karma will have in store for Karpov this time. In 2001 he was dumped from the KO by Zhang Pengxiang in his first match.

The US Championship is starting in a week. I'm going to be buried finishing the design of official website this week and as of the 22nd I'll be in San Diego to run it. Your suggestions and feedback are very welcome below. It's a hasty job, but it should be a great event and I hope to make the website a lot of fun. We'll have contests and prizes just about every round.

Iran just banned four of their top players for not agreeing to participate in the Calvia Olympiad.

It's tempting to react harshly to this this just because it's Iran, not exactly a hotbed of liberal democracy. But other than the reactionary wording, it's not hard to imagine other federations penalizing players for refusing to play on the national team.

As Alexander Shabalov points out, despite the report's statement that they "avoided attending the world meet in Spain," the banned Iranian players were actually IN Calvia. This must be regarding not playing during the Olympiad or some other "immoral" offense. Mahjoob and Ghorbani were forfeited in the 10th round against Kyrgystan and the other two didn't play that round either.

The USSR teams were highly politicized and Botvinnik's Achieving the Aim goes into detail about the shenanigans around team formation, although I don't recall anything about pressuring someone to play. (Although if they wanted you to and you didn't it's hard to imagine there wouldn't be repercussions.) It was more about maneuvering to get on the team or keeping someone else off. FIDE removed Kasparov and Short from the rating list when they broke away to form the PCA in 1993. Have you heard of any similar penalties, perhaps from countries without authoritarian fame?

According to this press release masquerading as a news story, the supermarket chain Tesco is selling far more of its chess sets than expected. This is bad reporting in many ways. A surge in sales compared to what? The only stat is that they are selling more than they expected to sell. That doesn't mean more sets are being sold this year than last year overall. They didn't even launch their chess set until earlier this year. Basically it says they did a lousy job of forecasting. We don't know if there is a boom or not at all. It's dandy they may sell 35,000 sets, but it doesn't mean much if that's 35,000 sets not sold by other manufacturers.

There is always a big increase in set and board sales around Christmas, often together with a primer as a gift for a junior. I'm sure we can poke around and see if such sales are up this year over last.

Going through the mail regarding the "Bush vs Kerry" chess game article at ChessBase.com was predictably disappointing. Of course complainers usually write more than supporters about anything, but it's the nature of most of the complaints that bugs me. Of course you can't expect Bush fans to really enjoy an article that pokes fun at their guy, but the ritual demands to remove anything political, anything "non-100%-chess" from a chess site mystify me.

Why should chess exist in a vacuum? ChessBase.com isn't a kids' site that published porn. It boggles my mind so much that I assume these people are annoyed mostly due to partisan reasons and that if the target had been Kerry they wouldn't have written at all. Had a group of well-known players sent in a faux game dissing Kerry that was equally entertaining, we would have run that too. That's not to say the political leanings of editors aren't relevant, of course. I might not have written an intro to such a game. But maybe I would have since I was no Kerry fan. (He is now safely in the Gorian past-tense.)

"Not appropriate" is a common substitute for "I don't agree" and when successful is nothing more than censorship. As long as an item is related to chess and, above all, entertaining, our tent should be big enough to handle it. I had to put up with this all the time during my first year of writing Mig on Chess at TWIC. I was disrespectful, insulting, opinionated, and a host of other things I won't bother to put between quotes. Lucky for me enough people liked those things as well as, I like to imagine, that I managed to be those things while being funny and informative on a good day. (If something is funny enough even the partisans can cut you some slack. The only people who had a problem with my "Weapons of Match Destruction" article wrote rabidly entertaining responses. I'm still trying to figure out the "Fascist communist" remark.)

We're going to publish an article with the feedback on the Bush-Kerry game, including some post-election gloating. Overall they are a good example of how partisanship is the worst enemy of free speech. If it's not funny, say so. If you don't like it, fine. But saying a satire chess game is not appropriate on a chess site is just another way of saying you think the wrong guy won the game but instead of stating an opinion you get self-righteous. (The next step for an American is to sue, I suppose).

Maybe you only want chess and your chess websites to be a total escape from the real world and bumping into a political satire was jarring. I understand that, but trust me, you'll recover. I'd rather continue to drag chess into the real world with other sports.

With the tournament a week away from starting, classical world champion Vladimir Kramnik has bailed out of the much-awaited Russian Championship super-final. Bearing a note from his mother, Vlady claims stress from his title defense against Leko. This is pretty thin gruel considering that fewer than half the games were hard-fought and there were plenty of free days.

The most ridiculous part of this is that the tournament was originally scheduled for September, but back in Spring it was moved to November at the request of... Vladimir Kramnik! A few months ago Kasparov told me he doubted Kramnik would play, but I don't think that is on the record anywhere. My biggest problem with this is that it's simply unprofessional. One of the biggest names in the game backs out of a big event a week before it starts? In a real sport the sponsors would be getting their money back and the player would be fined unless there were serious health issues. I'm sure he's tired, but that doesn't cut it. Part of being a pro means playing even when you're not 100%. That responsibility increases when you are the champ.

This bailout has already led to much of the usual "Kramnik's afraid of Kasparov" talk among fans. I think it's more of the champion's malady of not wanting to risk playing at less 100%. They pick their spots and often feel they have more to lose than to gain by playing. When I spoke to Kasparov today he said he was relieved about one aspect of the super-final field. Not about Kramnik, but that thanks to Tseshkovsky he wasn't the oldest player in the field!

This little article from a college paper on places to play chess seems more about using chess as a metaphor for making out. But it seems like a good idea to make a list of places to play casual chess. It could be a list to check before traveling. (Because doesn't your girlfriend just love it when you go to a lovely, exotic place on vacation and you get into a street chess game.)

Clubs that allow free drop-in play can be included. List the country, city, name of the place you could tell a taxi driver or find in a guide book, whether play is serious (with clocks, strong players, for money) or casual, and the usual hours of play. Add comments as you like after that. If it's an obscure place give an address, directions, or a link to a map. When we have a good list here I'll post it to a separate page and maintain it with a submission form.

I'll start with an obvious one.

USA, New York City, Washington Square Park, serious play, including blitz for money with expert-level players, all day until dark. Most are hustlers who only play for money. Rather mangy crowd with occasional drug trafficking, not recommended for unattended kids. Players often move to the nearby Chess Shop or Chess Forum shops to play in winter or after dark. Both are on the same block, two blocks south of the park on Thompson Street. They charge a few bucks for use of set and clock.

It's hard to imagine something less controversial than scholastic chess, but controversial it is. The movement is huge in the US, and while the benefits for kids seem beyond doubt, the benefits to chess federations and the traditional chess community are less clear. In general I believe more chess is always good, period. It would be nice if kids who learned in school continued to play in tournaments, but with nowhere for them to go as professionals in the US, finding the next Fischer will still depend on rare genius.

This item stems from reading this curious little note from a Utah paper about teachers getting funding to start using chess in an elementary school with the express hope that it will improve math test scores. Maybe things are getting desperate now that the US has decided that test scores are easier than actually educating.

A must-read overview on the scholastic chess topic is this article (Acrobat format) by Tom Braunlich entitled "Scholastics and the Soul of Chess". Among other things, it makes the case that there is a growing conflict of interest between scholastic chess and those who play it as a sport, with the US Chess Federation in the middle.

The underlying problems are not new: How best to divide up a small pie of resources and how to define success. More players = good, but what if, as is happening in the US, fewer adults play while more kids play? There are many other such mind-benders. Is 4th place in the Olympiad a credit to American chess when all the players are Soviet-bred? How to save top-level chess, where the US has produced just one GM in the past seven years? Nakamura, who recently turned 17. Before him you have to go back to Tal Shaked, then to the generation of Sherzer, Ilya Gurevich and Wolff to find the GMs whose chess was developed in the USA. Tellingly, none of them has played seriously in years. (Also interesting is that both Shaked and Gurevich won the World Junior.)

Ashley got his GM title fairly recently, but after a long layoff. Perhaps a better way to to put it is that Nakamura is the only US GM under 30 other than the inactive Shaked. Eugene Perelshteyn will likely make the title, although he's already 24.

After a few days of rumors that it had been officially delayed, the Dubai Kasimdzhanov-Kasparov match is officially on. The money is in the bank and the dates have been announced. (January 14 - February 1) Kasparov was somewhat relieved, but he is still troubled about the entire process after Kramnik's statements about ditching Prague and starting from scratch again.

That's the real issue here. What happens if Kramnik, as predicted, refuses to play? Since FIDE screwed up their side of Prague it's not unreasonable for Kramnik to have some new conditions. The question is whether or not he is willing to keep his word that he will put his classical title on the line for unification. We don't even know where to begin negotiations. Having Kasparov as FIDE champion instead of Kasimdzhanov might make sponsorship easier to find, but doesn't achieve squat in the way of unification on its own, especially since Kramnik is less likely to want to play Kasparov than Kasimzhanov. I say that not because Kramnik is afraid of Kasparov – he's not – but because he doesn't feel Kasparov deserves to be there.

Kramnik has considerable leverage, and I hope he and the ACP use it to push FIDE and to work with them to design and commit to a reasonable qualification system. Getting rid of the KO and the fast time control that came with it are right behind unification on the "save chess" wish list. But you have to have something to replace it instead of being nihilistic.

The latest Fischer hearing and shuffling of papers has put the case back in the news. Nothing big, although several reports say that the case could drag on to the end of next year. As usual, the lawyers win. It would be obscene to see Fischer incarcerated for what will be over a year and a half if that prediction comes true. Apparently Fischer was hoping for a Kerry win, so it hasn't been a good week for Bobby.

Well, back to chess. I'll try to avoid reading a newspaper for the next four years. Hey, it works for Bush. I could make a contrived election connection to chess by making the case that having an avowedly anti-intellectual president isn't good for a game with an egghead reputation in the US. But I won't.

Instead I'll touch on the already-infamous case of FIDE vice-president and Georgian Grandmaster Zurab Azmaiparashvili's altercation with Spanish police at the closing ceremony of the Calvia Olympiad. Azmai is out of jail now and an interview with him will be at ChessBase.com soon. Basically they thought it was best to wait until Azmai was safely back in Georgia.

The unrepentant attitude of the organizers and Spanish federation is the worst of it. Instead of apologizing for what was bad policy to start and a dangerous overreaction by security, they act as though having an unarmed man beaten to the ground on the stage of a chess event was perfectly normal.

Azmaiparashvili has some thuggish qualities that have manifested at various times in public and private. There had been friction between him and the organization at several points in Calvia already. I don't doubt he tried to step by security to get to the stage. But this is really beside the point. The Olympiad is a FIDE event and if the FIDE VP wants to get on the stage and perform a naked tap-dance, well, cover the eyes of the kids and stand back. Okay, maybe not, but clearly the organizers have gone power mad when they have crack security police bludgeoning chess politicians. That should be left to the fans and the journalists.

With apologies to Johnny Cash. From the Oct. 27 Chess Today:

[Quoted from the original interview published in Sport Express on Oct. 27.]

The problem isn't Gulko; he deserves to have his federation obey its own rules. The problem is that the rules emphasize USCF ratings for international competition, and qualification is based on ratings so old that upcoming players are punished and recent form isn't considered. It's not fair to single out Gulko. But rules that allow any player who has barely played in the past year are ridiculous.

Depending on USCF games or rating is silly because a strong American player must pursue opportunities in Europe. They should be encouraged to play in US events, so counting USCF games for the activity minimum seems reasonable. But FIDE rating should trump when it comes to qualifying for an international event.

Anyone want to bet against Nakamura playing board one for the USA in Turin, 2006? When was the last time someone played their first Olympiad on board one, for any country? I think Kamsky did this for the US at Manila, 1992, his only Olympiad. That adds to the trivia quest: only Olympiad appearance on board one?