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Monthly Archives: May 2020
Chess Online Against Computer
Posted: May 4, 2020 at 11:03 pm
Here is a chance to play chess online against a basic chess computer. This computer chess program was written to run in flash, but it still gives a decent game. This is a free game, uses a 3d chess board and needs no download. Could it be the best free online chess program out there?
If you want a tougher game then try some of the other computer chess engine download links on this site. Almost any UCI chess engine from Jim Abletts page will give an incredibly strong game, or you could download the Crafty chess computer which is also available with its own graphical user interface.
To play chess you must both install flash and then enable it your browser.
For example, in Chrome, after flash installation click on settings -> advanced and scroll down to content settings click this and then enable flash there.
You must complete BOTH downloading flash and enabling it in your browser for the chess game to work and be visible!
If after performing both actions the game still does not appear, then hard refresh your browser cache (control-F5 on Chrome).
FlashChess can also be downloaded to play on the desktop of your computer.
It is available from http://www.flashchess3.com/download.html
If this easy chess game is too easy for you, or you just fancy a change, why not try our new onlinecomputer chess program?
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Pairings Revealed For FIDE Chess.com Online Nations Cup – India Gone Viral
Posted: at 11:03 pm
The pairings for the first round of the $180,000FIDE Chess.com Online Nations Cupare Europe vs. Russia,China vs. Rest of the World, and India vs. the USA. This was the result of the drawing of lots, held during the online opening ceremony of the tournament.
How to watchAll games will be played on the Chess.com live server and can be followed on our events page and in our Android and iOS apps under Watch. Commentary by GM Robert Hess, IM Daniel Rensch, and special guests can be enjoyed at Chess.com/TVwhere the games will be discussed and explained.
The opening ceremony took place on Monday in a live broadcast on Chess.com/TV with hosts GM Robert Hess and IM Daniel Rensch. They revealed the pairing numbers that came from a random number generator processed during a private Zoom call with team captains and Chess.com technicians.
And this is how the Captains meeting looks like! #OnlineNations pic.twitter.com/WY9s7JdDTd
International Chess Federation (@FIDE_chess) May 4, 2020
These were the numbers:
1. Europe2. China3. India4. USA5. Rest of the World6. Russia
The pairings system follows the round-robin Berger table for six teams.That means the pairings for the first round on May 5 isEurope vs. Russia,China vs. RoW, andIndia vs. the USA.
FIDE Chess.com Online Nations Cup | Pairings
This schedule right away leads to interesting board pairings in the first round. Most notably is the possibility of a clash between GMs Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Ian Nepomniachtchi, the two leaders of the FIDE Candidates tournament. Theyll play on board one of their respective teams, Europe and Russia, if the captains decide to start with their main lineups (see below).
MVL joined the live show for a bit and, asked if he would hold anything back in preparation, he reminded that he already had played Nepo as White in Yekaterinburg: If I play with white, its not a match thats featured in the Candidates, and I can play my prep if I want to.
The broadcast of the opening ceremony for replay.
Other potential top-board clashes include GMs Viswanathan Anand vs. Hikaru Nakamuraand GMs Ding Liren vs. Teimour Radjabov. The deadline for submitting the team lineups for the captains is 30 minutes before the start of the round.
Anand is the only player who also serves as a team captain. Wouldnt that potentially lead to an internal conflict? What if captain Anand wants the player to sit out a round, but player Anand doesnt want to?
Answering the half-serious question of how he would win this argument, the Indian GM quipped: Oh, but Im gonna crack the whip on him!
FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich, team captain for Rest of the World, joined the broadcast as well. He started by saying:Thank you for a nice ceremony. Chess.com is really instrumental in doing this at a high-quality level.
His team faces rating favorite China in the first round. Dvorkovich: Its gonna be tough. In team China, there are some really great players, such as a top 10-player in the mens section and two world champions in the womens section!
Below youll find all teams. The first four players are part of the main lineup, while players five and six are reserve players. C stands for the captain.
Teams
*Anand will be playing captain while Kramnik is a team advisor.
The FIDE Chess.com Online Nations Cup is a team competition held from May 5-10 on Chess.com. The first stage consists of a double round-robin with each team playing each other twice. The top two teams after 10 rounds qualify for a Superfinal match on May 10.
All matches are played on four boards: three with male players and one with female players. The time control for all games is 25 minutes + 10 seconds increment per move, starting from move one. The prize fund is $180,000.
Find all information about the tournament here.
Chess.com (@chesscom) May 2, 2020
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Pairings Revealed For FIDE Chess.com Online Nations Cup - India Gone Viral
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Chess in the Caravansaray – Chessbase News
Posted: at 11:03 pm
"So what?" you will probably think, "Chess has nothing to do with ancient trade!" And if you thought that, you would be completely wrong! For more than a thousand years, the 7,000-kilometre route running from Europe, through the Middle East and Central Asia to China was the information super highway of its age, serving as the conduit not only for goods but also for the transmission of knowledge, ideas and culture between East and West both ways. Although the economic significance of the Silk Road was limited due to the long distance, its cultural impact was of great significance.
As merchants, artisans, and missionaries travelled along the trade routes, they brought with them new products, ideas, technologies and culture. And the game of chess was an inseparable part of that cultural exchange. Actually, all theories on the history of chess agree that the game originated in one of the countries of the Road, in either China, India or Persia.
Chess was played everywhere, in royal palaces and merchants' shops, in bazaars and even on the streets. But the most popular places to play chess were "caravansarays", large buildings, generally surrounding a court, where a caravan (a group of travellers journeying together on camels) could rest at night. These relay stations were constructed all along the Silk Road and were found throughout the Muslim lands of the Near and Middle East and North Africa.
The Shah-Abbasi Caravansary in Karaj, Iran | Photo and description Wiki
They were located along main trade routes of the Road at intervals of a day's journey for a camel caravan. Many were in desolate surroundings but others were at the gates of towns or within the towns. These structures offered facilities for the essential needs of the people and the camels of a caravan: a well for water, a place for the animals to rest, a sheltered area for the unloaded baggage, rooms for sleeping, kitchen and of course entertainment facilities, including chess. Chess was mainly a means of entertainment for travelling merchants, but surprisingly, it was also a nice source of income for some local nimble guys.
When and where do you think first chess "professionals" came into this world? I guess the first thing that came to your mind is Caf La Regence or the likes in London or Madrid. But again, to explore that, we will have to go back to Caravansaray era. There is a lot of historical evidence that caravansarays and other public places of that time were also gambling places. There were lots of games played for stakes, chess being one of the most popular. And caravansarays were most favourite places of "chess professionals" because there were always many rich merchants, an easy prey for them. These professionals had developed whole strategic systems, scenarios of luring those rich lamebrains into a game.
Imagine a situation: a caravan arrives at caravansaray, guests are welcomed and taken to their rooms, baggage unloaded from camels and put into warehouses, camels are given hay and water, dinner is ready for guests? Now what? Of course, a merchant who has slept all the way through from the previous caravansaray will now look for some fun. As he walks around, looking at the architecture and the artwork of the building, or listening to the nightingale sing in the cage, he is invited to have a game of chess by a homely, humble person who in no way looks like a chess expert. Let's call him the hunter and the merchant the victim, because this is very much like hunting indeed!
Like every novice who has beaten another novice several times, our victim considers himself the greatest player of all times. He is used to play for small stakes with his friends and mates. So the game starts, and starts the play, too! The hunter lets the victim take pleasure of the game for a while, makes simple mistakes, "blunders", builds simple mating positions for the opponent which the latter "finds" with a great effort.
This goes on until our hero "wins" three or four games in a row. While this is going on, the room is filled with amazed spectators and the victim is drowned in compliments about what a clever guy he is and what a strong player that he finds these combinations.
Now it's time to perform the second act of the play. The hunter wins the next game "by pure accident" and is so glad and happy. The victim believes he is incomparably stronger and just lost the last game by accident. He now loudly announces it's his debt of honour to offer a stake! The hunter pretends to be so afraid to play with this strong player, and only agrees to play for a very small stake, the fee for the dinner for example. Guess who wins this one. Of course the victim. Next game they play for accommodation fee. A portion of cannabis in hookah. Gradually the stakes rise, the hunter loses game after game, and is so "excited" and "heated up".
Finally, after having lost all his possessions, he "takes the last chance" and wagers his golden ring, his "great grandfather's only legacy" which is, by the way, worth about two hundred times all the previous stakes put together. Of course, he is "very lucky" in this game as the victim blunders a rook and a knight. But he still believes he is much stronger and next time he arrives at the same caravansaray, he will be very happy to play a rematch and this will happen over and over again, until he realizes what a silly child he has been!
As we said above, chess, or its variations like shatranj, was played everywhere, even in royal palaces, and even there they played it for stakes. This is mentioned many times in the folklore of the Silk Road nations.
You may have read the famous and fascinating Legend of Dilaram, which dates back to about VII century. The story is about a Padishah, who loses his entire kingdom, including his harem, in shatranj against a foreign prince. He is only left with his favourite wife whom he calls Dilaram (the name is Persian and comes from the words dil = soul, and aram = ease, rest). He makes a final desperate decision and wagers his wife against everything he had lost in the previous games (may ladies forgive me, but women were treated just like their husbands' possessions in the medieval Orient). However, this decisive game, too, goes very badly for him and he eventually finds himself in a position where his rival can checkmate him on the very next move.
If you decide to solve this simple problem, bear in mind that they were playing shatranj, which has the same rules as modern chess with only two differences: the queen can move only one square in any direction and bishops move only two squares along diagonals, they can also jump over pieces.
His wife was watching the game from behind a parda the curtain dividing the room into men's and women's sections. In desperation she started to sing (forgive me for my rough translation from Uzbek): Oh my Lord, don't give up your soul's ease, give up your two Noblemen (Rooks), attack and wound your enemy with your Elephant (Bishop) and soldier (pawn) and let the Knight kill him. The padishah understood what she meant: Dilaram had found a brilliant winning combination, put it into a song and sang it to him. He executed the moves of the song and won the game.
Solution: 1.Rh8+ Kxh8 2.Bf5+ Rh2 3.Rxh2+ Kg8 4.Rh8+ Kxh8 5.g7+ Kg8 6.Nh6 mate.
This story is also a clear proof of two things important from the chess point of view: one is that even in that medieval era, when women's rights were so strongly limited, they played chess. Another is that players of that time, too, observed certain chess etiquette. Dilaram did not directly tell her husband the solution she found but hinted at it through a song.
But at no time should you think that chess was only a game for gambling. Nowadays some people like to call chess an art or a science. But back in the Medieval Orient it was much more an art than it is now! Moreover, chess was an entire philosophy. The greatest oriental poets, almost all without exception, wrote at least some lines about chess, some of them devoted entire poems in which they explained, for example, the course of a battle, or padishah's policy in chess terms. Oriental poetry in general is so specific that it has always been very difficult even for professional native-speakers to translate it into western languages. However, I will try to explain you a very philosophical thought of Alisher Navoi, the greatest Uzbek poet of all times, which he expressed in just two lines:
Shoh yonin farzin kabi aylar maqom etmish netong,Rostravlar arsadin gar tutsalar ruhdek yiroq.
Straight-goers like the Rook are always moved to the brinkThe sly and artful Queen takes her warm place right next to King.(This is just my rough translation from Old Uzbek)
This is an allusion to moves of Rook and Queen and their place in the initial position. The philosophy here is that straight, honest people don't achieve much in this life and are always given less than they deserve, and sly, unpredictable people who can go any direction, (i.e. betray) are always at the top of society.
The Silk Road no longer exists as a trade route, modern hotels have replaced exotic caravansarays and powerful trucks have replaced camels. Modern sites along the course of the Silk Road have become important tourist destinations. These sites include Uzbekistan's exotic and ancient metropolises of Samarqand, Bukhara, Khiva, Kokand and Tashkent, with their artistic and architectural treasures. However, one important part of that medieval culture the chess culture is still remaining in all those historical centres of Uzbekistan.
If you ever happen to go to Uzbekistan and want to play chess, find a "Chayhana" (chay = tea, hana = room) a traditional teahouse, a public place where people come to talk, drink tea, etc. The picture is of atraditional Uzbek chayhana.
Sometimes they meet to discuss business, to exchange useful information and the news of the day. But mostly they just like to chat and tell stories, and of course, play chess. In any chayhana, there are always several chess sets and players of different levels. As you enter the chayhana, the first thing you see is the chayhanchi a very friendly looking old man who looks after the chayhana and makes tea. He welcomes you in an orientally hospitable fashion, offers you a seat and a piala (traditional cup) of tea.
A pre-warmed china pot is filled with dry green tea, then a quarter of the pot volume is filled with boiling water, after that the teapot is put on a hot oven (avoid open fire!) for about two minutes. Then boiling water is poured into the teapot until it is full by half, afterwards the pot is covered with a thick cover. After 2-3 minutes the pot is bathed with boiling water, then three quarters of the volume are filled with boiling water, the tea is left for another couple of minutes and the pot is filled almost up to the top. Traditionally, tea is poured into piala and back to the teapot three times before serving.
You can join different groups of people sitting on Suri a traditional wooden bed for sitting, usually for 4-6 people. One group will be playing backgammon, another group loudly discussing news of the day, and several groups, of course, will be peacefully playing chess. As soon as you come up to any of the companies, you will be grated in a traditional fashoin "Assalom aleykum". If you decide to join a group playing chess, you can just play it for fun with one of many amateurs, or, if you are a considerably stronger player, you can play for a stake.
It is uncommon and usually considered impolite to openly play for money. The usual stake here is ordering Uzbek pilav (or "plov") for the whole company. This meal is really delicious, and indeed it's the pride of Uzbek cuisine. Each chayhana, and even each family has its own recipe of pilav, slightly different from others. In Uzbek culture it is considered shameful for men not to know how to cook pilav, and believe me, every man has his own little secret of cooking it.
Here is how I cook plov (for a company of eight people):
700 gr. of lamb (preferably fatless),350 gr. of lamb fat (preferably from the tail of local sheep),250 gr of onions1 kg of carrot (chopped into long thin pieces),1 kg of rice,a pinch of cumin
First the cast-iron pot (which we call kazan) is heated on a moderate fire. Then the lamb fat, chopped into pieces of about two grams, is put into the pot and allowed to melt until it begins to turn brown. Then the pieces of fat are completely removed from kazan and the oil is allowed to heat up until a slight white smoke appears. Now the meat, also cut into pieces, is fried for about 5-7 minutes, until it starts to become darker in colour and softer. Then the roughly chopped onions are added and fried. You should stir the whole contents in order to avoid burning, at 1-1.5 minute intervals. When the onions become slightly brown, the carrot is added and fried until it completely loses its hardness. Then you add 1.5 litres of water and allow to boil for about 20 minutes. Add salt. At the very beginning of the process you should wash the rice and put it in cold water. Now you wash it once more and put into kazan, the water completely covering it. After adding the rice, to avoid burning, you should regularly penetrate it with you ladle to allow water run down as it tends to always go up. By the time the rice is boiled enough, the water will have almost disappeared. It is now time to sprinkle the plov with cumin and cover it with a plate, leaving some space open along the edges to allow extra water evaporate. You should reduce the fire to a minimum. In 20 minutes you may enjoy your cookery masterpiece!
Note that correct choice of rice is crucial for making a successful plov. The genuine Uzbek plov is made of rice called Devzira (literally Genie's earrings), which will unfortunately be unavailable to you unless you are in Uzbekistan.
At the end, I want to tell you a funny story I recently witnessed at one of those chayhanas. Two old men were playing chess, for a serious stake I suppose. One of them accidentally touched his pawn. He suddenly realized that if he moved that pawn he would immediately lose a piece, but he was of course required to follow the touch-move rule. He suddenly cried out "Hey, chayhanchi! Why there's always no teaspoon here!? I need a teaspoon but there isn't one! Why should I have to stir my tea with a chess piece!?" And he stirred his tea with the pawn with clearly artificial indignation. But his opponent did not find a word to object and the game went on! In fact, he had no reason to stir his tea because we don't use sugar for green tea!
Originally hailing from Uzbekistan, in 2013 I turned a brand new chapter in my life: I moved to America. First I lived in Pennsylvania, just outside Philly, for a couple of years. Then the corporate pursuit took me to beautiful New Hampshire, where I still live a life of a (self-proclaimed) decent chess player, wicked carnivore and coffee addict. I absolutely love New Hampshire, its people, its nature, and its accent. I run chess classes at schools my pet project that I love more than anything else I do. So, instead of a prolix autobiography, let me tell you a truly New Hampshire story.
I landed at the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport on a beautiful November day -- autumns in New England are unbelievable. No sooner than I check into the hotel, my new manager called me and, among other things, said, "I left yaw khakis at the reception." I was a little taken aback, to say the least, and asked, "Excuse me, my what?"
His answer didn't change much, "Khakis, I left them for you at the reception." What khakis? What color? What size? Why? But the receptionist handed me an envelope with... Two car keys! That was the local pronunciation: kaah kees that I heard as "khakis". That's how New Hampshirites, or a Granite Staters, speak. They eat lobstah for dinnah, then they paahk theyah caah and go to the baah. I have made numerous cultural adaptations to local life, but I still haven't adopted the accent.
And sorry for my hair: baabah shops are closed for coronavirus quarantine. If you're in or around NH, hit me up through jbegmatov@gmail.com, and meet up for a game or two.
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Poem of the week: The Chess Player by Howard Altmann – The Guardian
Posted: at 11:03 pm
The Chess Player
Theyve left. Theyve all left.The pigeon feeders have left.The old men on the benches have left.The white-gloved ladies with the Great Danes have left.The lovers who thought about coming have left.The man in the three-piece suit has left.The man who was a three-piece band has left.The man on the milkcrate with the bible has left.Even the birds have left.Now the trees are thinking about leaving too.And the grass is trying to turn itself in.Of course the buses no longer pass.And the children no longer ask.The air wants to go and is in discussions.The clouds are trying to steer clear.The sky is reaching for its hands.Even the moon sees whats going on.But the stars remain in the dark.As does the chess player.Who sits with all his piecesIn position.
Howard Altmann published his Selected Poems, Enquanto uma Fina Neve Cai / As a Light Snow Keeps Falling, last year, a bilingual, Portuguese/English edition with translations by the Portuguese poet Eugnia de Vasconcellos. The Chess Player appears in it, and was first published in 2005, in Who Collects the Days, Altmanns debut collection.
Obviously, it predates the Covid-19 pandemic by a number of years. At the same time, the poem may illuminate, and be illuminated by, current events. It also tunes in to an ancient and universal human experience: the daily fading of light into dusk, when the mood may slip into melancholy and uncertainty. The hushed emptiness that descends on the park in the poem is almost naturalistic at first, but the widespread movement of desertion soon gathers foreboding through repetition. Its as if all ages and all species had silently agreed to emigrate.
The Chess Players was a film written and directed by Satyajit Ray in 1977, based on Munshi Premchands short story of the same name. Two chess-mad noblemen, Mir and Mirza, are so obsessed with their game that they refuse to notice the turmoil of the British incursions seething around them, not to mention the disintegration of their marriages. Despite these catastrophes, Rays touch in the film is light, as is Altmanns in the poem. The images his statements evoke are sometimes surreal, and sometimes presented in a whimsical manner. They may be backlit by a pun (The lovers who thought about coming have left) or trip us on a gently comic letdown (The man in the three-piece suit has left. / The man who was a three-piece band has left.) The line, The sky is reaching for its hands, is particularly effective. Perhaps hands suggests a clock, and the desire of the sky to seize hold of time and make it move faster. Or the hands may be potentially the monstrous hands of a killer. Nothing terrible actually happens in the poems foreground, but the threat level rises as the moon becomes unusually sharp-eyed, the stars unusually ignorant and dim.
The rhythm slows right down at the end of the poem, with full stops insisting on a painfully weighty pause for thought at the ends of lines: But the stars remain in the dark. / As does the chess-player. / Who sits with all his pieces / In position.
Only now do we learn that no game is in progress: in fact, the player has no visible opponent. The solitary figure sits at the untouched board in the dark. It raises the question as to whether the poems hidden subject is war. From a war gamers site, I learned that the name chess is derived from the Sanskrit chaturanga which can be translated as four arms, referring to the four divisions of the Indian army elephants, cavalry, chariots and infantry. In this regard, chess is very much a war game that simulates what we would now call the combined arms operations of the ancient world.
Perhaps we should abandon the image of an al-fresco chessboard altogether? The single player may be planning moves of a more desperate kind, moves that might include the assassination of some leader, or the pushing of the nuclear button. He may have gone crazy and got trapped in a ferment of fantastic plans too complex and entangled ever to be accomplished. The pieces, whatever they represent, are in position but, perhaps fortunately, will never move forward.
So reading the poem now, we might also be reminded of a stalemate of statistics, strategies and models. Earlier on, weve been cheerfully told, Of course the buses no longer pass. / And the children no longer ask. The lightness of tone and rhetorical patterning, and the faint stumble in the end-rhyme (pass and ask), seem to show the effects of an effortless severance of intellectual curiosity and lively physical action. Perhaps all the players in the park are obedient pieces being moved around a board or taken and scattered in some master game? Perhaps even the chess player is a pawn.
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Poem of the week: The Chess Player by Howard Altmann - The Guardian
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The future of chess books (2) – Chessbase News
Posted: at 11:03 pm
5/3/2020 So I am being pressured to publish a book, a collection of articles that have, in the last twenty years, appeared on our news page especially those describing encounters with famous players. And the ones that showed entertaining puzzles and games. They were very nice on a computer monitor, where you can replay and analyse everything but transfering them onto very thin slices of tree? Nobody fetches a chessboard and pieces to replay moves anymore. Ahh, but there's a solution to this problem. Let me show you. And please help me evaluate this approach.
ChessBase 15 - Mega package
Find the right combination! ChessBase 15 program + new Mega Database 2020 with 8 million games and more than 80,000 master analyses. Plus ChessBase Magazine (DVD + magazine) and CB Premium membership for 1 year!
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As I said in the first part of this article: I believe that chess books and magazines represent a colossal waste. Less than ten percent of all readers play through the games they contain those who do are called grandmaster, or IMs, and they do it in their heads they read chess books like adventure novels. The rest of us try to follow the first few moves, if they are part of our openings repertoire, and then jump to the diagrams, where we replay a few moves that follow in our mind. The rest is usually ignored.
So just a small percentage of non-professional chess players actually read chess books. Hand on your heart: when was the last time you set up the chess board and pieces and replayed a game from a book or a magazine?
The irony is that you probably have the ultimate replay right there in your pocket, or on the living room table: your smart phone or tablet. On it the moves are executed on a graphic chessboard, and you can even have an engine running in the background, ready to answer every what-if and why-not question that might occur to you.
But how do you get the moves of the game, printed on paper, into your electronic device? Scanning the page and using intelligent OCR is not a practical solution. Also downloading a file and then searching in a database for the game you see on the page is cumbersome. You need to get it in one quick and easy action. And that is possible using a QR code. This is a kind of barcode (QR stands for "quick response") in matrix form, which the camera of your smartphone or tablet can pick up quickly and effectively. And an app, one of a dozen you can get for free in the Apple or Google stores, will immediately execute the instructions contained in the QR matrix.
I am not the first person to think about the possibility of using this in chess books. As I told you in the first part of this article: my good friend Prof. Christian Hesse used the system in 2015, in his (German language) book Damenopfer. There, for the first time I believe, you could scan a QR image printed next to each diagram or at the start of a game, and then replay it on your electronic device. This takes a second or two. After that you have the game, moves, and the entire analysis on your mobile phone or tablet, and can replay them right there, in your garden, on a train or plane, anywhere. You read the stories in the book and replay the games on your electronic device. I showed some examples in my previous article.
So how I can I use this tool in my books? I have been experimenting with converting past articles printable text. After trying Microsoft Word and Libre Office I hit upon Google Drive, which has a word processor that appears to exactly fulfill my needs. So the process is copy and paste a text from articles, update and format them nicely, and then export the file, which is stored in the cloud, e.g. to PDF. Works very nicely. Google's word processor does not have all the functions of the dedicated packages, but it has all the essential ones, and they have been optimised for ease of use.
The articles I convert often have positions or games. I always have them in PGN or ChessBase in fact they are usually embedded in the JavaScript replayer on the news page and can be downloaded with a click from there. Take for example my recent article "The game that shook the world." At the bottom is a replayer with the annotated game. Clicking on the diskette icon downloads the PGN and, in my setup, loads it into ChessBase 15.
Now comes the decisive part: I go to the File menu and click "Publish this game". ChessBase 15 offers to produce a One Click Publication, with the replayer. It gives the URL, embed code for the player (so you can add it to a blog article), and social media buttons (to post on Facebook, Twitter or email to a friend). Here is what the page it generates looks like. That is definitely a page you can link to.
If you follow the URL given, on your mobile phone or tablet, this is what you get. You shold try it out: scan the following QR code (use a barcode or QR scanner as described below) and see what it looks like on your device.
As you can see on the photo the tablet produces the full player, where you can start an engine (fan icon) that will help you to analyse. There is even a "!" icon (on the right side of the engine display) that shows you the threat in any position, which is incredibly useful in the case of unclear moves (I use it all the time).
For the technically savvy there is another option: "Create an HTML file" and upload it to your server. In that case you use
tag. Full details are given here.
So we have generated the replay page as described above. It takes less than one minute. But how do you embed a link to it in your book or magazine? This is where I use QR codes, which are infinitely more practical than typing a long URL into the mobile phone browser. And it is perfectly simple to implement: simply google for one of a dozen (free) QR code generator pages. There you simply paste the URL ChessBase gave you for the replay page, and bing! you have the QR code matrix as a JPG or PNG. This you embed on your book or magazine page.
Naturally you can use this to link not only to replay pages, but also to YouTube videos, audio files, small utilities, etc. Here are some examples from the trial articles for my book (click all images to enlarge):
The above QR code leads to a video interview that is the basis of the article
Check if this external small utility works without problems on your phone or tablet
And here is the book page with a QR link to the full game with all annotations.
I think this is a very feasible method of making chess content available to readers of a book. I thank Christian Hesse for his pioneer work described in the first part of this article. Things have in fact improved: Christian's book was published five years ago, and I am using the latest ChessBase replayer, developed in 2020. It has many exciting functions that were not previously available.
I will give you three trial chapters, which you can download and print out, to get a real feel for how my book would work. Or you can simply click on the links and display the files on the PGN reader. Then tell me how the game replayer runs on your mobile phone and your tablet. Also, I would be interested to find people who can assist in the production and publication of the book(s).
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Isolated Queens II: Top Streamers to Play BotezLive & US Chess Women Event – uschess.org
Posted: at 11:03 pm
Photo courtesy Alexandra Kosteniuk
Jennifer Shahade
Alexandra Botez, Courtesy Botez
US Chess Women and BotezLive present Isolated Queens II on Saturday, May 2nd at 2 PM ET. The online girls and womens blitz tournament on chess.com will be hosted by the most popular female chess streamer in the World, WFM Alexandra Botez and Womens Program Director and two-time US Womens Chess Champion Jen Shahade. Jen and Alexandra will give educational commentary on the ten round Swiss event at twitch.tv/botezlive, which will also be hosted on twitch.tv/uschess and twitch.tv/jenshahade. The event will feature some of the best players in the World, as well as many talented youngsters and enthusiastic amateurs. $2000 in prizes will be awarded to the top streamers in the event, while all women can compete for bragging rights and the chance to play against some of the strongest women in the World. Defending champion Alexandra chessqueen Kosteniuk is back to try to reclaim her title. The former World Champion and sensational blitz player will be streaming the event on twitch.tv/chessqueen.
Songwriter and chess conceptual artist Juga of Jugamusica.com will also join the party on May 2nd. Jugas music video, Isolated Pawn, is a perfect watch to get you in the mood for the event, and we will listen to it during the event commentary.
Juga, who recently appeared on Ladies Knight, is also a new streamer, where she solves puzzles and sings karaoke on twitch.tv/jugamusica.
Other confirmed players include:
Carissa Yip (photo Ootes)
IM Carissa Yip, who is a writer for ChessKid, a popular streamer at https://www.twitch.tv/carissayip and has started a and has started a recent campaign, Chess Against COVID for COVID-19 relief through her channel
Ivette Garcia, Courtesy David Llada
GM Irina Krush and WGM Sabina Foisor, Photo David Llada
Charlotte Clymer, Photo Tim Hanks
To join the event yourself, find tournament rules and instructions on how to join at tinyurl.com/isolatedqueens.
Thanks to the generosity of Ian Maprail Silverstone, Richard and Barbara Schiffrin and Nikola Stojsin of Open Field Media for donating the $2000 prize fund, which will be rewarded to the top streamers in the event. The top three streamers will receive $700, $500 and $300 while top finishing streamers Under 2200, 1800 and 1400 will receive $165 each.
60% of onstream donations during this match will support online education and educational content geared toward girls and youth. The other 40% will go toward supporting future events and matches. Dont miss the official broadcast on twitch.tv/botezlive where we will shout out many of the top streams. And look for the full post-event recap right here on CLO!
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The future of chess books (1) – Chessbase News
Posted: at 11:03 pm
Let me say in advance: I have grown up with books. From the start I was a bibliophile, fanatically so, and in the course of a lifetime have collected many thousands of books including chess books, which for decades have been sent to me by friendly publishers. To these (the chess books, not the publishers) I have always had an ambivalent relationship. On the one hand they brought me a great deal of pleasure. On the other I was distressed by the colossal waste they represented.
Take for instance the famous and for a long time ubiquitous Chess Informant. I bought it regularly. The picture shows what the contents looked like. It also tells you how much of the approximately thirty volumes I collected I actually read. Close to zero percent. I did look at a lot of diagrams and try to follow the next three to five moves in my mind, but that was it.
I did notice that a certain percentage of the visitors in my house, the ones who had GM titles, and especially the super-GMs, read my Informants like Agatha Christie novels. Anand, for instance, would grab the latest Informant, curl up in a corner, and spend hours giggling and laughing at games he was replaying in his head. Nobody, really nobody, ever pulled out a chessboard to replay games. Either they could replay everything in their minds, or they used my method of diagram scanning.
So just a small percentage of chess players actually read chess books or magazines. When's the last time you set up the chess board (I'm not sure exactly where mine is) and pieces (those I can find I have two very nice sets in the shelf behind me) and replayed a game from a book? The situation has been exacerbated by the advent of replayable games in software and on web pages. That is so easy and so convenient that it is hard to find a proper place for books in the chess landscape.
So are chess books and magazines on the way out? Because you cannot replay moves, like you can do on any good web site? No, you actually can, if the publishers spend a miniscule amount of effort on it! Let me explain.
Everyone who buys a chess book has the ultimate replay device in their pocket, or on the coffee table. It is a smart phone or a tablet. What if you could use these, instead of setting up the chess board and pieces, to replay the game in the books? No mistakes, no tedious attempts to find your way back to the main line when you have been looking at analysis. Everything is automatic, just like on a replay board on your computer screen.
I am not the first person to think about this. Take a look at the paper "A Framework for Recognition and Animation of Chess Moves Printed on a Chess Book" by Sleyman Eken et al. It was published (in 2015) by the International Arab Journal of Information Technology and proposes "a set of techniques to animate chess moves which are printed on a chess book. These include (1) extraction of chess moves from an image of a printed page, (2) recognition of chess moves from the extracted image, and (3) displaying digitally encoded successive moves as an animation on a chessboard." It's all pattern recognition, and with AI today the process could be made very efficient.
But is that what I am looking for? You use your phone or tablet to scan a page, with an AI app to find the chess game and make it replayable? No, there must be an easier, non-technical way. And there is. The chess book author needs to provide the games and moves in replayable form to the reader, and the reader must have instant access to them. The solution: QR codes.
Once again I am not the first person to come up with this solution. When thinking about using QR codes in the chess books I might end up writing, I remembered that it had already been done, very nicely, by my friend Prof. Christian Hesse (who writes very entertaining books on mathematics and on chess). And I get them all from him. Searching through the twenty or so I own I found Damenopfer, written in 2015. "Damenopfer" is "Queen Sacrifice" and the subtitle translates to "Astonishing Stories from the World of Chess." It is a thoroughly charming collection of examples where surprising sacs play a decisive role if you understand German it is well worth buying ($12.40).
The thing about Damenopfer is that, for the first time, every single game in the book contains a QR code for you to scan. Within a second or two you have the game, moves, and the entire analysis, on your mobile phone, in a bus, in the garden, anywhere. So you read the stories in the book and then replay the games on your electronic device. Let me give you an example:
Here are two pages I scanned from the book (click to enlarge). In case you don't know the German piece letters: KDTLS = KQRBN. Now try reading the two examples:
Chances are you can manage the first pretty well, but the second is more difficult playing through in your mind.
Now whip out your mobile phone or tablet. Check if you have a barcode or QR code scanner installed. Chances are it is already there, but if it isn't get one of the dozen or two available for free in the Apple Store or Google Playstore. Takes a couple of minutes to download and install and of course you only need to do this once. After that you can use the scanner for all kinds of thing, e.g. read reviews of products in stores, scan grocery packages for recipies, etc. But you can also point your phone or tablet at the pages above. The scanner will automatically read the QR code and ask you whether you want to proceed to a page. That will take you to a special replayer for the game in question.You can play through the moves, tapping on the replay keys or on the notation below the chessboard. Very nice, don't you agree?
The two examples above may be just about manageable, following the moves in your mind and enjoying the beautiful tactics. But what about the following:
I just give you the diagrams and the QR codes. In the first case (White to play and win) Christian writes: "It looks like a perfectly hopeless situation for White. The chances for the white king to survive are the same as for a snowman in a blast furnace." And he goes on to show us the truly incredible moves White must make to acrtually win: 1.b6+ Ka8! 2.g7 h1=Q 3.g8=Q+ Bb8 4.a7 Nc6+ 5.dxc6 Qxh5+. "This is the critical point in the study," he writes, "White wins with a queen move that comes from a different world and a different reality." 7.Qg5!!! "The queen, dressed in a kamikaze outfit throws herself in between." Hesse give a three alternate lines explaining why the queen moving to g5 is the only way to win:
6.Ka4 Qd1+ 7.Qb3 Qa1+ 8.Kb5 Qe5+ 9.Ka6 Qa1+=6.Kb4 Nd3+ (6...Qh4+ 7.Ka5 Qh5+ 8.Qg5 +) 7.Kc3 Qa5+ 8.Kxd3 Qa3+ 9.Kc2 Qa4+=6.Ka6 Qe2+ 7.Ka5 Qe5+ 8.Ka4 Qd4+ 9. Kb5 Qe5+=
6...Qxg5+ 7.Ka6! Qa5+! 8.Kxa5 Bxa7 9. c7!! Kb7 10.bxa7 "and Black raises the white flag, 1-0."
Beautiful, isn't it? What, you did not follow everything? Then use your phone or tablet to see all the moves and variations on a nice graphic chessboard. Incidentally, this is one of my all-time favourite studies.
The second example, on the right in the above scan, is a 27-move game with seven additional moves to show why Black resigned after a firework of sacrifices. Can be easily followed on the printed pages by a GM, but not by me. But I can scan the QR code image next to the diagram and immediately replay everything on my phone. Try it, it is dazzling how White played 14.Kf1!!! to initiate the sacrifice tornado. In the book Hesse explains why 14.Kf1 (which he gave three exclams) was necessary in order to avoid a bishop check nine moves later. This is explained in the book, while the moves can be replayed on your phone or tablet. After a five-second scan.
After getting re-hooked on Christian Hesse's book and playing through a dozen examples I realized I had the solution to my dilemma: how to produce a book in which people will not ignore most of the chess content where they can actually play through all the games given.
So this is how I can produce my book in fact in greater quality than in Hesse's book. That was published five years ago and a lot of progress has made since then. I also discovered how easy it is to implement: adding replay code takes me a average of a minute and a half per game. And readers get instant access to tools no chess author dreamed of, until a few years ago.
How I plan to use these tools and how you can do the same for books and magazines that will be the subject of my next article. I will also give you a couple of trial chapters which you can print out and use. And in return you can tell me what you think of the project.
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Two Santa Clarita Siblings Play To The Top Of State, National Chess Ranks – KHTS Radio
Posted: at 11:03 pm
Two Santa Clarita siblings have been rated as top chess players in both the state of California and the nation, officials said.
Dr. Aakash Ahujas children, Aakash Jr. and Aakashi, have both ranked within the top 20 chess players in the state for their respective classes, according to the United States Chess Federation (USCF).
They both started playing in May of 2018, not exactly two years ago, and they have worked very hard and are both very motivated, Dr. Ahuja said.
Aakash Ahuja Jr. is ranked twelfth in California among all 9-year-olds and ranked 55 in the country by the USCF.
Aakashi Ahuja is also ranked second in California and ranked twelfth nationally among 8-year-old girls.
Aakash got curious and he started playing with me at home, Dr. Ahuja said. We went to play at a small tournament at CYCL in May 2018. He got a small trophy. He had not taken any classes.
Aakashi became interested in playing chess after Aakashs achievement, and began taking coached classes.
They love each other but they are competitive, and seeing his trophy, she got excited, Dr. Ahuja Said. They both wanted to join classes and both of them have been playing ever since.
Both students are currently enrolled at Westcreek Academy and are coached by Jay Stalling from the California Youth Chess League, a local chess academy.
KHTS FM 98.1 and AM 1220 is Santa Claritas only local radio station. KHTS mixes in a combination of news, traffic, sports, and features along with your favorite adult contemporary hits. Santa Clarita news and features are delivered throughout the day over our airwaves, on our website and through a variety of social media platforms. Our KHTS national award-winning daily news briefs are now read daily by 34,000+ residents. A vibrant member of the Santa Clarita community, the KHTS broadcast signal reaches all of the Santa Clarita Valley and parts of the high desert communities located in the Antelope Valley. The station streams its talk shows over the web, reaching a potentially worldwide audience. Follow @KHTSRadio on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
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Two Santa Clarita Siblings Play To The Top Of State, National Chess Ranks - KHTS Radio
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Darkness and Light: Joseph Conrad, Stefan Zweig and Chess – TheArticle
Posted: at 11:03 pm
I have mentioned before that the inspiration underpinning both the style and content of my chess columns forTheArticlederives to a certain extent from the book,The King, written by the Dutch Grandmaster Jan Hein Donner. His discursive columns, masterpieces of chess related prose, were penned during the period when his world had shrunk to just one small room in a care home, after he had been blasted, and partially blinded, by a stroke.
A further influence was the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. His classic,Sternstunden der Menschheit(Stellar Moments of Humanity), led me to develop the theme of my columns forTheArticle: what might be called Sternstunden der Schachheit, or Stellar moments of Chess.
Zweig, a gourmet of things intellectual, was evidently fascinated by chess, a fascination which may be observed from his chess-centred Schachnovelle. Usually translated as The Royal Game, this novella reconstructs the internal mental activity of playing chess as a defensive rampart against the very real slings and arrowsof the external world, in this case the Nazi torturers tormenting the chief protagonist, Dr B.
Another writer fascinated by chess, whose literary career partly intersected with that of Zweig during the first quarter of the twentieth century, was the enigmatic Anglo-Polish merchant naval officer, Joseph Conrad. This Polish-speaking subject of the the Russian Tsars, whose empire incorporated Poland at that time,rose to become one of the most impressively enduring craftsmen of the English novel in the late 19th and early 20th century. Conrad only started to learn English at the relatively late age of twenty and his resonant unfamiliarity with his adopted tongue lends a startlingly original, if somewhat stilted, edge to his prose style.
To me, Zweig and Conrad have always seemed very much like light, as expressed in Zweigs perennial optimism and belief in humanity, contrasted with Conrads exploration of the darkness concealed in the recesses of the human soul. Ironically, though, it was Zweig who committed suicide, while a suicide attempt by the young Conrad went hopelessly wrong and he lived to a ripe old age in rural Kent, just outside Canterbury, in his chosen country. One can almost detect W.S. Gilbertsjingoistic refrain fromhis nautical operetta,HMS Pinaforein the background: in spite of all temptations, to belong to other nations, he is an Englishman And so Conrad was, by 1889, having put the Russian-ruled Poland of his youth well behind him.
Devotees of Grand Guignol space opera will recogniseNostromo, the title of one of Conrads most celebrated novels, and also the name of the gigantic space vessel in the intergalactic horror film Alien. The two, book and spaceship, are linked by the concept of cargo. In Conrads hands the eponymous anti-hero Nostromo (derived from the Italian, meaning our man) deliberately conceals a stolen cargo of silver, which turns out to be lethal for him. The movie sees the Nostromo taking on board, as inadvertent cargo, an equally lethal, quasi-indestructible, alien life form, which first throttles, then injects and finally, in its embryonic new life format, bursts forth from the flesh of its paralysed victim, and then begins to hunt down the Nostromos crew.
As testimony to his enduring relevance, another notable Conrad title,The Secret Agent, offers frightening insight into the black heartlessness of late 19th century urban terrorism. The novel was later adapted as a cliffhanging thriller, Sabotage (1936) directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
One scene from that film was shot at Simpsons-in-the-Strand,still a popular restaurant. In fiction it was patronised by Sherlock Holmes, and in real life it was the haunt of such Victorian chess luminaries as Howard Staunton and Thomas Henry Buckle (see my previous column ), thereby becoming the traditional home of British chess.
In 1979 Conrads most famous novel, Heart of Darkness, was adapted by Francis Ford Coppola into the napalm-singed movie Apocalypse Now . With its helicopter gunships soaring to the theme of Wagners Ride of the Valkyries, and the bloated Marlon Brando as Conrads murderousKurtz, lurking at the horrific epicentre of the primeval jungle, Apocalypse Now garnered the prestigious Palme dOr, plus no fewer than eight Oscar nominations.
In Conrads original novel, we are introduced to the naval Captain Marlow, who tracks down Kurtz. Marlow reappears playing chess in Conrads novel Chance , and it is widely believed that Conrad modelled Marlow on himself. One Archibald Dukes, a medical officer servingon the Torrens , sailing from the UK to Australia in 1891-1893, records playing chess with the Polish first mate (Conrad himself). Having blundered away his queen, the most powerful piece on the board, the doctor tried to resign, but Conrad would have none of that and insisted on continuing to the inevitable checkmate.
In the Canterbury museum The Kit, one can still observe two of Conrads chess sets and a book by the chess genius Capablanca, My Chess Career , published by Bell and Hyman in 1920 and signed by Conrad himself. Conrad had pasted in some newspaper chess columns over the advertisements at the back of this evidently beloved book. Among other Conrad memorabilia, there is also Howard Stauntons Chess-Players Companion , a small homage to the Shakespearean scholar and the only Englishman ever to have been considered as World Champion.
Conrad also used chess for unorthodox but imaginative purposes. In the biography My Father , written by his son Borys, the story is related of the chess code developed by Conrad during the First World War:
When I re-joined him he said: Look here, Boy, in case you should get yourself knocked in the head I should at least like to know where your remains are disposed of out there. He then explained a code he had devised by means of which I could let him know approximately what part of the front I was on, without running foul of the censor. Many years before he had taught me to play chess and he now gave me a pocket chess set and said that we would play games by post. Certain moves, not relating to the games in hand would, when used by me, indicate squares which he had ruled on his war map. Then he escorted me to my car, shook me vigorously by the hand and said: Be off now, Boy Bless you. This was in November 1915.
Conrads second son, John, also relates in his memoir Times Remembered , how his father used to summon him to play chess in the middle of the night, at moments when his reserves of literary energy were flagging:
People have said when I have told them of this recollection that my father was being rather selfish in getting me out of bed, but it never struck me in this way. I was flattered that he should ask me to get up and play chess with him in the small hours. There was no compulsion about it but there was a special kind of novelty in sharing the shadows surrounding the pool of light on the chessboard, a silent communion punctuated by the occasional click as a move was made or a check called. I realised fairly soon that the mental effort of playing chess helped my father to realign his thoughts so as to overcome an impasse for the arrangement of words or the construction of a phrase to convey some subtle meaning.
No actual games of chess played by Conrad (or Zweig) have come down to us. But we do know that Conrad admired Capablanca, who won the World Chess Championship in 1921.
John Conrad recalls that his fatherdecided to take him in hand and improve his sons game, so two or three times a week after dinner they got out the chessmen and board and spent a couple of hours playing through the games in Capablancas book. Father and son played through every game in the book, with Joseph reading out the moves, and stopping where Capablanca had made a comment, so that they could write down their own observations.
At the end we would compare notes and argue over various alternative moves. My fathers comments were very similar to those in the book but sometimes there were wide divergencies of viewpoint and we would play the variations through, making notes of our reasons for our moves.
In lieu of a game by either of the two literary giants, here is a link to an elegant Capablanca masterpiece , which, crowned by a queen sacrifice to force checkmate, was instrumentalin his victory over Emanuel Lasker in the 1921 World Championship Match in Havana.
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Darkness and Light: Joseph Conrad, Stefan Zweig and Chess - TheArticle
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Chess: The second youth of chess – Explica
Posted: at 11:03 pm
A girl plays in an orphanage in India during confinement.EFE
There is a before and after in chess, a date that marks a little change: Gary Kasparovs defeat to IBMs Deep Blue in New York in 1997. The golden age of sports, in a few days when the media around the world dedicated thousands of hours and pages to cover the hercleo man-machine challenge, gave way to more periodically calm times. The coming world championships did not have the significance of the Fischer-Spassky, Karpov-Korchnoi or Kasparov-Karpov, either because of the charisma of these great masters or because any commercial program of less than 100 euros was able to overcome the number one without major problems.
But chess has survived evolving and adapting to the new times after almost a millennium and a half of setbacks thanks to the fact that as Ramn Rey Ardid, a psychiatrist and champion of Spain from 1929 to 1942, defined it is only one step above human intelligence A step enough to attract and not bore, be easy to learn, impossible to master. And in this fight to find his place in todays society and in the world of sports he found a new promised land and his second youth thanks to education and technology.
His introduction to teaching after the recommendations of the Senate in 1995 and of the European Parliament in 2012 contributed to making their practice universal, and there are already more than half a million children in Spain in learning courses (100,000 only in the official program of the Junta de Andaluca) when the number of federated according to the CSD in 2018 was 28,382. Something, saving the differences, similar to athletics that has 85,401 federated (2018) and yet hundreds of thousands of people practice it as an amateur. Curiously, in Spain there were more federated chess than athletics from 1941 to 1960
A game in New York these last few days.
Internet and chess are a perfect marriage. Gone are the times when fans go to a club, with semi-busy schedules in endless smoke evenings, and heatedly discuss this or that position. Now, at any time of the day, there are opponents of your level ready to play the electrical and adrenaline-charged games of 1 minute, the calmest of 25 or the classic of 90. There are also numerous teachers who teach in virtual classrooms, simultaneous sessions and tournaments that replicate competitions such as the Invitational Magnus Carlsen Chess24.com at another level, with comments in 7 languages, and number one in broadcasts of lite tournaments.
The Covid-19 pandemic has promoted the practice of chess as collected by portals such as Chess.com, which with almost 36 million registered users has reached projected figures for the 2021-2030 decade in the last quarter, with 8.5 million games disputed daily. Another website, Lichess.org stores more than 2,000 million games in its databases, of which 10% have been played in the last month. A realistic calculation indicates that annually, adding all the platforms, some 6,000 million. A dizzying figure, unimaginable, although not as much as the number of mathematically different games that could occur: 1 followed by 100,000 zeros!
The growth of chess practice has been exponential these daysdeclares Javier Ochoa from Echagen, President of the Spanish Federation. There has been a great demand for information and parents interested in these days of confinement, since the image we project is not only associated with entertainment, but also with education and culture.
Face-to-face and online chess is the same, but playing in three or two dimensions with the computer screen causes different sports situations. Pressing the clock when time troubles begin gives way to handling the mouse skillfully and quickly. Another example; In a live game there are no mistakes when leaving a piece in a space that is not the chosen one, while in those that are played in cyberspace it sometimes happens that the movement is not completed correctly., with the consequent consequences, sometimes catastrophic.
The question of possible pitfalls They need an in-depth analysis by the FIDE Refereeing Commission, not so much for the super lite competitions but for fans who may be tipped, just like a lecturer when reading with the telepronter. But these are setbacks of youth, of the second youth of chess.
Esports, on the Olympism radar for two years, have positioned themselves even more on the sports scene in this pandemic. In addition to conventional video games, spearheaded by the League of Legends, offline sports have adopted this formula to create their own competitions even beyond the well-known FIFA. Tennis, rugby, sailing they have turned to consoles as a competition formula to multiply audiences. Without going any further, the BRAND vertical has tripled the number of users and more than 15 million followed the Mutua Madrid Open.
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