The event went over four games and was staged in Maastricht, The Netherlands from 10 - 13 May 2005. The unusual aspect of this match: both players were allowed to use computers, as in the Advanced Chess concept developed by Garry Kasparov.
Loek van Wely vs Daniël Stellwagen in their Complete Chess match
The event was also billed as a confrontation between two generations. The 32-year old Van Wely has won the last five championships of the Netherlands. Stellwagen, 18, is the youngest Grandmaster in The Netherlands and showed his abilities in various tournaments.
A classical silhouette of the Complete Chess player (Stellwagen)
Both players have played matches with computer involvement in Maastricht before. In 2002 Loek van Wely played in a spectacular man-against-machine encounter against the Dutch program Rebel: the match ended 2-2. Last year, Daniël Stellwagen won the first Complete Chess Match against the German talent David Baramidze 2.5-1.5.
Loek with wife Marion
The match started with two games of Complete Classic Chess. The first was won by Stellwagen, the second was drawn. Then the GMs proceeded to the Complete Random Chess section, in which the initial positions of the pieces will be decided by chance. Random Chess is very much in discussion these days, and the organisers proudly point out that the rules of this variant were developed by Count Van Zuylen van Nijevelt and Baron Van der Hoeven. Thus it should be stressed: the players were not playing Fischer Random but rather Van Zuylen van Nijevelt Van der Hoeven Random Chess. Tell that to a friend.
Daniël Stellwagen won the second match as well, by 1½:½, so that the final score was 3:1 in favour of the 18-year-old. The time limits in all games were 40 moves in two hours, followed by 20 in one and finally 15 minutes plus 30 seconds per move.
At this stage we hand over to the exquisitely multilingual Dutch organisers who have prepared a full report on the event. On the official web site you will find a full impeccably written English language report with the games, daily reports, lots of pictures (without captions) and press reports.
