Isn't life wonderful, Sanya?

2/26/2003 – It's almost a week sind the Aeroflott Open finished in Moscow – time to look back and take stock. The organisers were delighted and have decided to keep the "GM Super-Swiss" going, indefinitely. "Let's make it 300 GMs next year," they said (instead of the 150 this time). Read all about it in Eugeny Atarov's final report from Moscow, which is full of personal pictures of the players.

800 Wins at 32 Years Old!?

2/25/2003 – It's chess all right, but Japanese chess, or shogi. The popular sport has its own icon, Yoshiharu Habu, whose games are regularly on TV in Japan. On Sunday Habu became, at 32, the youngest player ever to reach 800 career victories, breaking the record by six months. Kasparov has yet to reach that number in competitive play. More..

Drawing Sickness Strikes Linares

2/25/2003 – The question of the day among the Playchess.com spectators: "Does Peter Leko get paid by the move?" Poor Peter! Having just escaped his reputation for too many short draws, now he is suffering because of long ones! His game again went the distance and he and Ponomariov were on stage long after Anand-Kramnik and Vallejo-Radjabov were also drawn. More..

Leko-Kasparov a Battle for the Ages, but a Draw

2/24/2003 – The kids took the day off and Kramnik couldn't make progress against Vallejo. It was left to Peter Leko and Garry Kasparov to provide the show, and they did that and more. Leko had a fine position until Kasparov pounced with a rook sacrifice. An incredibly difficult Queen and pawn endgame arose and it seems that Kasparov missed several winning attempts in the seven hour marathon. More..

Kasparov will win Linares!

2/24/2003 – A week ago we introduced you to the participants at the Linares supertournament and asked you to predict who would win. We got many hundreds of messages from almost every corner of the world. Most visitors believed that Garry Kasparov would completely dominate the opposition. We have put together extensive excerpts from the letters we received. More...

Anand and Leko Start Strong in Linares

2/23/2003 – Vishy Anand continued where he left off in Wijk aan Zee by beating Ruslan Ponomariov in the first round of the Linares supertournament. Peter Leko kept pace by outplaying youngster Teimour Radjabov in the endgame. Kramnik-Kasparov failed to live up to expectations and fizzled to an 18-move draw. Paco Vallejo had the bye. Report, results, online game replay, and more...

Klaus Bischoff, Germany's first Internet Champion

2/23/2003 – The first German Internet Championship was successfully completed on Saturday. It was not, as we stated, the first national Internet championship in the world – this was staged in Iceland seven years ago, as we were informed by Hannes Sigurgeirsson and Dadi Jonsson (wonder where they are from). In spite of this the event in Hamburg was a great success. Here are the games, results and an illustrated report.

Fritz wins Paderborn computer chess tournament

2/23/2003 – After suffering a setback in round five, when it lost to its sibling Shredder, Fritz cruised home to victory with five points from seven rounds. It was helped by Shredder's shock loss in its final game to the amateur program Yace. You will find the final results and all the games of the tournament here.

A Black Day in Linares! Radjabov Defeats Kasparov

2/23/2003 – Ah, they grow up so fast, so very fast. Teimour Radjabov became the youngest player ever to defeat the world's number one player in tournament play. He beat Kasparov with the black pieces in a wild tactical affair out of the French Defense. Kramnik joined Anand at the top of the standings by adding to Ponomariov's woes. Vallejo entered the action and held Anand to a draw. Full report.

Schredder beats Fritz at the IPCCC

2/22/2003 – Fritz was cruising along at the computer chess tournament in Paderborn. But then sibling Shredder produced a stumbling-block victory, the result of brilliant openings book preparation, with Fritz having essentially lost the game before Shredder had started to think. Now there are four programs in the lead. You will find an illustrated report and all the games here.

Chess – a matter of life and death

2/21/2003 – It wasn't Karpov, Kasparov or Deep Blue, but murderers, arsonists and other felons, all facing off against two inky-haired students, the top-rated players in Princeton University's chess club. The felons were all inmates at New Jersey State Prison, a maximum-security facility that houses the state's death row – and a thriving chess club of its own. Read about it in this NYT article.

Volcanic chess festival

2/21/2003 – It began as a joke by a bunch of chess loving friends in downtown Reykjavik, where Fischer faced Spassky thirty years ago. But it has blossomed into Iceland’s most successful chess event, a chess festival (18th – 27th February) that features Adams and Shirov – and the spectacularly beautiful landscape of this island in the Northern Atlantic.

Games and tactics from Moscow

2/21/2003 – They failed to supply the games, except as scans of the original gamescores. The Aeroflot Open has ended with a victory on tiebreak by Viktor Bologan, but of the many hundreds of games only 97 have become available so far in machine-readable format. To keep your interested we have at least extracted the tactics from them, presenting a set of ten combinations for you to solve. The final standings and the 97 games are here.

Pictures from the press conference

2/21/2003 – We told you about it when the story broke: that FIDE is staging the match between Garry Kasparov and Ruslan Ponomariov in Buenos Aires from June 19 to July 7. Now we have received received pictures from the press conference in which This was announced by FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov and Garry Kasparov announced the plans in Moscow on Tuesday. More

Breaking news: Kasparov vs Ponomariov in – Argentina!

2/19/2003 – The match between Garry Kasparov and Ruslan Ponomariov is to take place from June 19 to July 7 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This was announced in a news conference by FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov in Moscow yesterday. The match is being held in line with the Prague chess unity plan. Looks like FIDE may help organise the other match between Kramnik and Leko as well. More

Goodbye, 97 pound chess weakling!

2/19/2003 – Remember those Charles Atlas ads of your youth? The 97-pound weakling was pushed around at the beach in front of the girls – until he learnt the secrets to a dynamic body. James DuBois thinks ChessBase has unintentionally created a chess body building system for the player that is sick and tired of being a chess weakling. More

Faces and friends in Moscow

2/17/2003 – In round four there were lots of draws. It's obvious that the Aeroflot Open has reached cruising altitude. Time to change the angle of view, at least in a photographic sense. Here is Eugeny Atarov's illustrated report.

Dutch blitz chess marathon

2/16/2003 – Once a year there is a Blitz Chess Marathon in Dordrecht, Holland. There is place for 200 participants, but since many top grandmasters are present you have to be there in time to secure a place. Which means getting up at 6 a.m. and driving for two hours, especially if you are a lowly 1400 player, fulfilling a wager with your brother. Jeroen van den Belt reports.

Kasparov knows more about Deep Junior than we do

2/15/2003 – Two days after the X3D/FIDE Man-Machine World Championship match between Garry Kasparov and Deep Junior had finished, Mig talked for over two hours with Junior co-programmer Shay Bushinsky. From his home near Tel Aviv, Israel, Bushinsky spoke about the joys of a big match, Junior's preparation, the program's style of play, and the touchy subject of man-machine draw offers in a fanscinating interview.

Hikaru Nakamura breaks Fischer's record

2/15/2003 – At the beginning of February an unassuming 15-year-old from White Plains, New York, who loves spaghetti, tennis and pingpong, broke Bobby Fischer's 1958 record to become the youngest American grandmaster ever. Hikaru Nakamura earned his final GM norm at the Bermuda International Chess Festival, and since he has a rating of 2520 the title is certain. More

Ponomariov signs deal with FIDE

2/14/2003 – They got together at six in the evening, the reigning knockout world champion Ruslan Ponomariov and representatives of FIDE. At 6 a.m. the next morning the 19-year-old champion, hardly able to speak any more, "signed some paper". Apparently Ponomariov has conceded to all demands and agreed to play the announced match against Kasparov. More

Shredder tops the computer rankings

2/14/2003 – When was the last time Fritz did not occupy the first place in the computer chess ranking lists? In the latest SSDF (Chess Computer Association) ranking list, based on over 90,000 games played by 251 computers, it is Shredder 7.0 that is in the lead, eight points ahead of Deep Fritz 7.0 (Fritz 8.0 has not been tested yet). Here is the list of the top 50 programs.

Moscow picture gallery

2/14/2003 – After three rounds of the Aeroflot Open in the famed Hotel Rossija everything is still, well open. After three rounds there are six players with a perfect 3/3 score: Aleksandrov, Bologan, Efimenko, Alexander Moiseenko, Najer and Zvjaginsev. Only a small number of games have become available, so we bring you a picture report by Eugeny Atarov.

Who is Peter Weinberger?

2/13/2003 – Do you remember the Ken Thompson's Endgame CDs that ChessBase published some years ago? They were the first databases of five-pieces endings that reached the general public, precursors to the Nalimov Tablebases we have today (Fritz Endgame Turbo). If you still have a copy of the original CDs you may want to take a closer look at the artwork. It contains one of the most famous running gags of the US computer community. Here is the full story.