Scacchi: Enciclopedia pratica dei Gambetti

Marco Saba's Scacchi: Enciclopedia pratica dei Gambetti is an interesting resource, offering over 700 database generated opening reports for various gambits.  The ones I looked at (including the Urusov and Ulvestad) were useful, though necessarily limited by the practical games available in these rare lines.

BBC's "How to Win at Chess"

The BBC has produced a wonderful hour-long documentary titled "How to Win at Chess," most of which has been posted at zaphod319's YouTube channel.  It is also widely available for download, though not yet available for sale.  Structured rather like David Shenk's The Immortal Game, it follows an arranged game between British chess personalities Ray Keene and Daniel King (which the two players use as a vehicle for instruction) while jumping off into various aspects of chess history, culture, and competition.  Highly recommended.

Hat tip to Mark Weeks, who often posts about videos on Friday.

Unorthodox Openings Newsletter

If you are serious about unorthodox openings, then you will definitely want to check out some issues of the Unorthodox Openings Newsletter.  The early ones are simply a collection of various (often amateur) games featuring oddball openings.  But the more recent issues typically feature analysis, annotated games, and history.  You will even find some book-length issues devoted to the Zilbermints Gambit (1.d4 d5 2.e4 dxe4 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.f3 exf3 5.Nxf3 e6  6.Bg5 Be7  7.Bd3 Nc6 8.O-O?!?! Nxd4 9.Kh1!?), the Grob (1.g4?!?), and the Halloween Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Nc3 Nf6  4.Nxe5?!?!)  Lots of ideas for the adventurous chess player out to have fun.

Joe Renna's KCC Photos

Joe Renna has posted photos of the Kenilworth Chess Club in a very nice Picasa web album.

Immerse Yourself in Chess History

Google Books has an amazing collection of magazines, many of which feature articles on "chess." I recommend you start with "Chess Champion Bobby Fischer in Deep Training" and work your way down.... But be sure to come up for air occasionally. (Hat tip Mark Weeks.)

World Chess News

You will have to check out "World Chess News," hosted by three lovely Swedish sisters, and ask yourself how you could have missed it for the five years it has been airing! Of course, only the past six episodes have been available in both Swedish and English, but previous episodes have English subtitles. The banter is no more silly than standard news programs and the most recent episode (#252), which features coverage of Nakamura's US Championship victory, is very professionally produced. I also recommend their "Opening School" episodes, which cover the type of openings of interest to club players.

According to their website, the program (which airs on Swedish TV and the internet) is completely produced by a single family: "The WCN team consists of five siblings from Stockholm, Sweden, currently in the ages between 21 and 14. Adriana, Antonia and Amelia Krzymowska (21-17) and Alfred and Albert Krzymowski (16 and 14) created the idea and concept of the show. / Seizing the opportunities of their generation; with advanced computers, the Internet and digital cameras, they learned all of the technical and editorial aspects of producing a news show, and have done that ever since (They write the scripts, set the lights, adjust the sound, record the shows, edit the material, air and market WCN)." This impressive achievement predicts great future success for all of them! Because you are likely curious, Alfred has a 2069 ELO and Adriana an 1860 ELO.

Hat tip to Pete Tamburro.

First American Chess Congress, October 1857

GM Andy Soltis's ever-excellent Chess to Enjoy column in this month's Chess Life and Chess Life Online reminded me that the First American Chess Congress began 150 years ago this week in New York on October 6, 1857. You can find his column online, along with the puzzles section that features six selections from the tournament. You might also like my own "Puzzles from New York 1857" along with the selected games from which the puzzle positions come.

I would like to take a moment to compliment the editors of Chess Life for producing one of the best issues I have seen (not to mention the sexiest-ever chess magazine cover photo!) and for putting all of this excellent content online for the entire chess community to enjoy. Bravo!

Articles List Updated

I have updated the list of Articles on the Kenilworth Chess Club website. It's not quite the ChessCafe Archives, but easier to navigate than Jeremy Silman or Chessville.

"The Tsar's Opponent" in The New Yorker

For those who wonder about the status of Garry Kasparov's campaign for the Russian presidency, David Remnick's "The Tsar's Opponent: Garry Kasparov takes aim at the power of Vladimir Putin" (The New Yorker, October 1, 2007) makes an excellent and informative read. I am always intrigued by the way that chess becomes conflated with politics (see here, here, and here for instance), and Remnick's analysis is often quite astute in this regard. I was especially struck by the following aside about the way that chess championship matches are always mapped onto concurrent political situations in the public imagination:

Like heavyweight championship bouts, matches for the world chess championship have a way of taking on political meaning. Bobby Fischer’s psychodramatic match with Boris Spassky in Iceland, thirty-five years ago, was a Cold War epic (of a particularly neurotic type). In the popular press, it was not enough to say that Spassky failed to contend with Fischer’s brilliant and unpredictable openings; more comprehensibly, it was a triumph of American ingenuity over a sclerotic Soviet bureaucracy.

In 1984, when Kasparov made his first bid for the world title, the political drama was purely Soviet. The regime was in its last year before perestroika. Konstantin Chernenko, a career apparatchik, directed the imperium from his sickroom. His senescence was a symbol of the regime. The market stalls and store shelves were bare. The technological age had arrived—but not in the Soviet Union. Karpov, the world champion, was an exemplar of the Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko “era of stagnation,” an obedient member of the nomenklatura. As a player, he was a defensive artist, whose style, like Kutuzov’s in war, was to absorb and smother attacks and then destroy his confounded opponent. Like Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, he was a living symbol of official Soviet achievement.

Kasparov represented a new generation. At twenty-one, he was ironic, full of barely disguised disdain for the regime. He was a member of the Communist Party until 1990—his chess ambitions required it—but no one saw him as subservient. Rather, he was cast, in his challenge to Karpov, as a champion of the young and of the outsiders. His chess style was swift, imaginative, daring—sometimes to the point of recklessness. Karpov painted academic still-lifes; Kasparov was an Abstract Expressionist.

The full text of this wonderful article is available online at The New Yorker's website along with a 22-minute audio clip ("His Next Move") from Remnick's interview with the former chess champion.

IM Mark Ginsburg

I noticed that IM Mark Ginsburg recently uploaded a bunch of archival photos and games to his blog. The pictures are so much a part of their era that they will make you laugh, especially a shot of Ben Finegold displaying his pocket knife. I also liked the clever game IM Franciscus Borm - Ginsburg, Belgium 1987, which I could not find in a database. Worth checking out, along with other Ginsburg games at Chessgames.com.

2007 World Open

If you are at home today, as I am, and finally have time to look at some chess, I recommend you check out Monroi's 2007 World Open site and follow some games live on the net. Going into the last round, there is a five-way tie for first with Hikaru Nakamura, Leonid Yudasin, Varuzhan Akobian, Alexander Stripunsky and Sandipan Chanda with 5.5/7. I've been trying to follow some of their games and find it good training to challenge myself to find the same moves as the GMs. I'm also looking through early round games to see what I missed. Jim West does a good job of annotating Ippolito-Tanaka from yesterday, which was a great positional win by the New Jersey IM.

Chess bloggers at the event include Daaim Shabazz of The Chess Drum blog, George Duval of Blunder Prone (who is struggling but posted a nice win), and Steve Eddins of Steve Learns Chess.

Death or Deception?

Justin Horton offers up "Late News" about the mysterious end to one of his correspondence tournaments at the always excellent blog for the Streatham & Brixton Chess Club. The story has a wonderful hook and a rather unexpected ending which I'm sure you'll enjoy.... (Thank you to Tom Chivers for correcting my previous version).

Nimzovitch du Pion Roi

There is a useful new site on the Nimzovich (1.e4 Nc6) in French: Nimzovitch du Pion Roi. It may soon be time to update my 1....Nc6 Bibliography.

Basman-Sale Sicilian

Marc Lacrosse sent me a link to his new site devoted to the Basman-Sale Sicilian (1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Bc5!?) I have always been a fan of opening analysis websites and this one is pretty good. It even offers some nice zipped PGN files of games with the line. All free, so you can't go wrong.

There was a book by Valeri Bronznik titled Sizilianisch für Mussiggänger (roughly translated as "Sicilian for the Idler," Kania 2004), which received a favorable review from John Watson (archived at the Wayback) and an article by Srdjan Sale himself titled "Breaking the Fritz Bind" in New in Chess Yearbook #73 (2004). So it is a currently interesting line, worth a look even if you only play these things from the White side....

PS (2015) -- An updated and translated version of Boznik's "Lazy Man's Sicilian" has recently been released by New in Chess.  Also at Amazon for cheap.

John Watson Refutes "Chess Openings for White, Explained"

I have not been visiting TWIC much in recent months since John Watson's excellent book review column has been on hiatus. Today, however, I found that it was back--some might say with a vengeance! Watson's review of Chess Openings for White, Explained by GMs Lev Alburt, Roman Dzindzihashvili, and Eugene Perelshteyn is the most important of the books he covers and he presents the most negative review of this book, by far, that I have seen to date. Watson points to several glaring flaws in their analysis, and (most importantly) provides games and analysis of his own to support his case. As I pointed out in my partial review, "Grand Prix Attack, Explained," the near absence of game references undermines the book's credibility on several occasions in the section I analyzed most closely. According to Watson, the problem runs throughout the text.

That's not to say that the book is worthless if you are looking to play these lines. It just means that you had better compare other books, do your own analysis, and look at the most recent master games before you trust what they have written. Watson's review offers much food for thought, and it is a must read for any who have already purchased a copy of their own.

Monte Carlo 1902

Sarah Beth Cohen has posted some interesting materials about Monte Carlo 1902 at her blog. You can download a PGN file of the games from the Pitt Archives.

And How Many Chess Bloggers?

There is a very good post today by David Glickman of the Boylston Chess Club Weblog titled "How many chess blogs are there anyway?" As with my "how many chessplayers?" question, his post is motivated by a wildly exaggerated number in a particularly popular chess blog with lots of publication and little fact checking. Kudos to DG for helping to keep things sane.

How to Grow a Super Athlete

There was an interesting article in the Sunday New York Times (in a sports-related supplement called Play). It is titled "How to Grow a Super-Athlete" by Daniel Coyle. I'm only now reading it thanks to club member Ed Selling, who sent me the link. I usually don't read sports, I must confess. But the article has some implications for chess -- which is as much a sport as it is an art or science, etc. Coyle writes:

What is talent? It's a big question, and one way to approach it is to look at the places where talent seems to be located — in other words, to sketch a map. In this case, the map would show the birthplaces of the 50 top men and women in a handful of professional sports, each sport marked by its own color. (Tennis and golf handily rank performance; for team sports, salaries will do.) The resulting image — what could be called a talent map — emerges looking like abstract art: vast empty regions interspersed with well-defined bursts of intense color, sort of like a Matisse painting.

Canada, for instance, is predictably cluttered with hockey players, but significant concentrations also pop up in Sweden, Russia and the Czech Republic. The United States accounts for many of the top players in women's golf, but South Korea has just as many. Baseball stars are generously sprinkled across the southern United States but the postage-stamp-size Dominican Republic isn't far behind. In women's tennis, we see a dispersal around Europe and the United States, then a dazzling, concentrated burst in Moscow.

The pattern keeps repeating: general scatterings accompanied by a number of dense, unexpected crowdings. The pattern is obviously not random, nor can it be fully explained by gene pools or climate or geopolitics or Nike's global marketing budget. Rather, the pattern looks like algae starting to grow on an aquarium wall, telltale clumps that show something is quietly alive, communicating, blooming. It's as though microscopic spores have floated around the atmosphere in the jet stream and taken root in a handful of fertile places.

A quick analysis of this talent map reveals some splashy numbers: for instance, the average woman in South Korea is more than six times as likely to be a professional golfer as an American woman. But the interesting question is, what underlying dynamic makes these people so spectacularly unaverage in the first place? What force is causing those from certain far-off places to become, competitively speaking, superior?

This suggests a straightforward study (Mark Glickman, are you listening?) regarding the geography of chess performance by rating in the U.S. or around the world. Maybe it has already been done (if so, someone send me the citation!)--and it would probably be a relatively simple matter of extending the work already done on gender. I imagine it would reveal where there are some schools and programs making a significant difference in nurturing chess talent in specific places (including in and around New York!)

The article had some other implications for chess, however, which I am only beginning to absorb. The biggest is that it suggests that chess training has to include specific work on problem solving technique or "thinking" technique if it is to be fully effective. As a great tennis coach is quoted as saying: "Technique is everything ... If you begin playing without technique, it is big mistake. Big, big mistake!" Gets you thinking....

Searching for Ron Thacker

Robert Pearson has an interesting post at his chessblog titled "Ron Thacker, Where Are You?" I enjoyed reading his personal narrative, which made me remember some of my own more interesting roommates from younger days. Anyone with information about Mr. Thacker should contact Robert via his blog. Frankly, though, I think he should just keep the chess books!

Irrelevant USCF Politics

Mark Weeks has posted his monthly "blog tripping" column (see "Elsewhere on the Web: Blog Tripping in February" -- he will soon have to add the year!) It is one of the few monthly articles I look forward to reading. As usual, he points us to some interesting stuff we might have missed rather than focusing on the mainstream material (his discussion of Linares-Morelia, for example, only links to the new and excellent Magnus Carlsen blog). However, in doing so I think his coverage is becoming a bit more idiosynchratic than journalistic, which is more typical of blogs than of what we think of journalism, which some call "the first draft of history." Blogs don't generally give us "History," they give us stories and perspectives. Bloggers generally tell us what interested them more than what items might have been broadly important in the world or in that portion of it we call the "chess blogosphere." But, depite that, Weeks always manages to make a very interesting observation about the chessblog zeitgeist which we had not recognized. He catches the trend. Last month he pointed up the rising importance of chess video. This month it is the nearly absolute irrelevance of USCF politics to chessbloggers (or all but one anyway).

Why are chessbloggers so apolitical? It might be better to ask the question of chessplayers in general. How could chessplayers be so disengaged as to allow people like Sam Sloan to influence the USCF, or dictators like Kirsan to run FIDE?

As I wrote in response to "Planet Kirsan," we chessplayers are an apolitical bunch, which may be precisely why the Soviets found chess so useful as a method of improving rational analysis without motivating critical consciousness or civil unrest. Ironically, as chess politics get more ridiculous, the mass of chessplayers become only more disengaged, which allows things to get even more ridiculous. I'm glad Mark Weeks has at least pointed out the problem, though I'm not sure that us chessbloggers are ever going to be particularly motivated to improve the situation.