Vladimir Kramnik on Man vs Machine and world championships

4/11/2002 – In July we are going to see a big qualification tournament for the right to challenge world champion Vladimir Kramnik. In October there will be a spectacular Man vs Machine battle in Bahrain. Now the man at the center of these exciting events has speaks out and discusses computers, Fritz, Deep Blue, the classical world championship and FIDE. You will find the exclusive interview here

Smirin on computers: God bless me!

4/10/2002 – In a few days GM Ilya Smirin is going to start his match against four top chess programs. It will be broadcast live on the Fritz7 Playchess server and on Kasparov Chess. This comes after experienced Grandmaster Boris Gulko, Elo 2605, lost his match 3:5 points. Will Smirin do better? He is an Elo 2702 Super-GM and the world number 15, and he has experience playing computers. Ilya shares his thoughts on the forthcoming match with us here.

He jes' keep rollin' along

4/10/2002 – List after list, year after year – for almost the entire lifetime of some of his rivals – Garry Kasparov has sat on top of the rating list. This time he has only one "crown prince" by his side – Vladimir Kramnik, 29 points below him. Then a big 57-point gap, where a sagging Vishy Anand is being pressed by three other players. You will find the top hundred here.

Garry Kasparov: A History of Profesional Chess

4/8/2002 – At the end of February Yasser Seirawan presented a detailed proposal for sorting out the chaos that current afflicts top-level chess. Soon after that Garry Kasparov replied directly to Seirawan's proposal. Michael ("Mig") Greengard, who had spent the weekend interviewing the world's number one player in New York, also got a full chronology of the GMA and the PCA from Kasparov. He now passes ít on to the chess public in an extensive keynote article here.

Eric van Reem – Impressions of Dortmund

4/7/2002 – On Friday we reported on the press conference that was held in Dortmund, which provided full details of the Einstein Candidates' Tournament that will be held in July this year. Our contributor Eric van Reem visited the conference and supplied the pictures. In the meantime Eric has sent us a report with his impressions of the press conference and the plans of Dortmund and Brain games. More

Dortmund hosts world championship qualifier

4/5/2002 – This year the traditional Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting is not just a super-strong tournament. It doubles as the Einstein Candidates' Tournament, and the winner earns the right to challenge Vladimir Kramnik for the Classical World Chess Championship. Eight players have been invited, according to their standing in the ratings lists (Kasparov and Anand have refused). In a press conference today all details were revealed to the public. You will find them here.

Doctor Viktor Kortschnoi

4/4/2002 – He is unquetionably one of the great chess players of all time, twice world championship challenger, a top GM with great international successes, even today at the age of 71. Now Viktor Kortschnoi has been awarded the title of Doctor honoris causa by the Independent University of Moldova. He also inaugurated a new sports complex of the university, which bears the name of one of our favourite ChessBase contributors. More

There is such a thing as a free lunch

4/4/2002 – Fritz7 allows you to join a global chess community and play chess on the Internet. You can download a ten-day trial version of the program. This can be used to run a bunch of free "engines" which are available in our download zone: Crafty, Comet, EXChess, Faile, InmiChess, BamBam, Goliath, or the latest UCI engines Pharaon and Sjeng. Don't miss the chance – it is all completely free of charge. More

New pictures of the chess babe

4/2/2002 – Look who's on the title of the popular Russian youth magazine Yat. It's Alexandra Kosteniuk, chess's answer to Anna Kournikova, hitter of the yellow ball. Alexandra has just returned from Singapore and Jakarta, where she demolished the Junior team 6:0. As a special service we provide our visitors not with the games of this match but with rushes from the photoshoot in Moscow. In thumbnail and wallpaper. No pushing and shoving now. The pictures are available here.

Fischer moves – a cruel hoax!

4/2/2002 – Yesterday we posted a report on a new rule proposed by Bobby Fischer and under consideration by FIDE. To our horror we have discovered that this was a cruel hoax, perpetrated by an evil prankster in the ChessBase team. Apparently he was practising a pagan ritual know as "April Fool". We apologise to the visitors who for who found the spurious article distressing, and thank everyone for the many letters we we received. You will find some excerpts here

Just one of 17,823,400,766 positions

4/1/2002 – Imagine this: a relatively simple endgame position, six pieces on the board, with a study-like win. The problem is that White must find 262 accurate moves in order to achieve his goal. In most cases the slightest inaccuracy leads to an immediate draw. We refer to the longest known six-piece ending, as calculated by the endgame databases of Ken Thompson and Eugene Nalimov. Take a deep breath before you proceed to the details here...

New Fischer moves

4/1/2002 – Although the reclusive ex-world champion Bobby Fischer has not played much chess in the last 30 years, he has introduced a number of important innovations into the game. After the Fischer Clock and Fischer Random Chess he is now proposing a further change, the "Fischer move". It was presented to FIDE and will come up for a vote at the Executive Council meeting in Dubai. More...

Free ten-day trial version of Fritz7 PlayChess client

3/29/2002 – Like to play a game against a friend? No problem, even if it is the middle of the night, and he is 5000 miles away. On our Playchess server you can make new friends, play casual games, watch strong players, follow and discuss live events with other visitors. Normally you need Fritz 7 or Shredder 6 to do so, but now we are offering you a free 10-day trial version, so you can see what it is like to be part of this exciting new global chess community. More

Fritz back on the top

3/28/2002 – The Swedish Svenska schackdatorföreningen (SSDF, Chess Computer Association) is an independent that tests the stronges chess programs in the world. Over the years they have played no less than 85,022 (!) games between different computers. On the last 22 lists our Fritz engine has been on top 15 times. In the February list Shredder 6 took the lead. But now the newly tested Fritz 7 is number one again, 34 points ahead of the field! More

How Sashenka Kosteniuk got elected

3/24/2002 – As you probably know we conducted a Player of the Year poll in February, and it was surprisingly won by not by Kasparov, Kramnik or Ponomariov, but by 17-year-old Alexandra Kosteniuk (the exact results are here). Today we give you some excerpts from the messages we received. They give you a good insight into the grass-roots feelings in the chess world. More

Almira holds number four player to a draw

3/21/2002 – It took great control on our part to refrain from using a "beauty vs the beast" headline here. In round ten of the German Bundesliga Almira Skripchenko, number 618 in the rankings, faced Britain's top GM Michael Adams, number four in the world. With an excited crowd watching Almira showed a great deal of pluck to hold her tenacious opponent to a 91-move draw. More

What is Brutus?

3/20/2002 – At the computer chess tournament in Paderborn sharp-eyed program spotters discovered a new name in the list of participants. Brutus. Not the guy who did in the famous Roman emperor, but a spectacular new development in computer chess, a kind of new mini-Deep Blue, being developed by Dr Christian Donninger. Currently the program runs on an FPGA Virtex V405E board provided by Alpha Data Systems, Edinburgh. You find all the details here

A fresh start? Kasparov replies to Seirawan

3/20/2002 – At the end of February American GM Yasser Seirawan presented a detailed, concrete proposal for sorting out the chaos that current afflicts top-level chess. The details, he hoped, would be discussed by all interested partien during the super-tournament in Prague. The problem was: how would the prime player in this game, Garry Kasparov, react to Seirawan's proposals? Tear them up and flush them down the drain? More

Lübeck wins, John Nunn teaches us a lesson

3/19/2002 –

[Post:title]

[Post:publishedon_day].[Post:publishedon_month].[Post:publishedon_year] - The critical round of the German team championships was won by the SV Lübeck – which consists mainly of legionary British grandmasters. On Sunday they wrapped it up with a narrow victory over the main rivals Solingen. Instrumental for the success was Dr John Nunn, who won four games in a row for Lübeck. John gave us a unique insight into chess thinking and strategy by annotating his games for us. This is a lesson you will not want to miss. More...

ChessBase Player of the Year award

3/15/2002 – And the winner is... well, frankly a big surprise. We assumed that our Player of the Year poll would elect Kramnik or Ponomariov, or maybe even Garry Kasparov for the ChessBase title. Boy were we ever wrong! Before you click on to more information try to guess who took the nomination. Maybe you have a better feel for what was cool in chess in 2001. The final results are to be found here.

Oh what the hell – put it on g1!

3/6/2002 – "Great players never castle," wrote Königsted in Kort Afhandling in 1784. While this is arguably the worst piece of advice ever published in a chess primer, even to this day many players give little thought to where His Majesty should reside. Robert Timmer has written a practical manual on the dangers of leaving the King in the center, and the possible drawbacks to castling too early, too late or on the wrong side. And our database program ChessBase provides interesting tools to research castling habits in chess. More

Man vs machine, Gulko vs computers

3/4/2002 – He is a strong player and a brave man. Boris Gulko, 1975 USSR Champion and, after his emigration, two-time US Chess Champion, will be taking on four of the world's best computer chess engines later this month. Junior, Shredder, Fritz and Hiarcs are the opponents. The games can be followed on our Fritz server and in the Kasparov Chess playing zone. More

Shredder wins computer tournament – yet again

3/3/2002 – It does this with clockwork regularity. At the 11th International Paderborn Computer Chess Championship, which finished today, it was the German program Shredder which finished at the top of the list, with six wins and one loss. Second was Fritz, which beat Shredder in their individual encounter, but was not so ruthlessly efficient against the other programs. More

Topalov beats Karpov in Cannes

3/2/2002 – At the NAO Chess Masters the game of the day was Veselin Topalov's 75-move victory over tournament leader Anatoly Karpov. Topalov and Gelfand are now at the top of the tables with 4.5 points each, with two rounds to go. Alexander Morozevich, the world's number 5, is last with an incredible 1.5 out of 7. Games, results and links are at our Cannes report page, a partial explanation for Morozevich's performance can be found in his CBM interview here