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.

Where Harry met Sally

2/13/2003 – Back at last in "old" Europe we look back nostalgically at two exciting weeks in New York, where Kasparov met Deep Junior and where we occasionally got a chance to look around a city that is bigger and more vibrant than any other in the world. In our final pictorial report we visit the Petrossian Restaurant, stroll through East Village and, yes, have exactly what she was having. More

Deep Junior Makes the Fight Worth It

2/13/2003 – "In game five of my match with Deep Junior it played an imaginative sacrifice of the type generally considered impossible for a computer player," Garry Kasparov writes in the Wall Street Journal. "It was a landmark moment for computer chess and the science and programmers behind it." In an outspoken article he praises the programmers and organisers and criticises IBM for abandoning its experiment with computer chess in 1997. More

Fasten your seat belts, the Aeroflot open has begun

2/12/2003 – A total of 481 players from 38 nations has descended on Moscow to play in the yearly Aeroflot Open. Everything is being conducted in the style of a commercial airline flight, with "pilots", "navigators" and "flight personnel" running the show. The organisers have also though up a unique method of publishing the games: they provide scans of the original gamescores. More

Kasparov vs Deep Junior ends in 3-3 draw

2/8/2003 – The final game of the epic Man vs Machine match between Garry Kasparov and Deep Junior ended today in a 3-3 tie. With millions of TV viewers watching Kasparov came out fighting, but with the black pieces he was unable to gain enough to secure a clear win. Here is a short report and the game.

Aeroflot Open in Moscow

2/8/2003 – At last it's here, the tournament we have all been waiting for. The grand Aeroflot Open took to the air with a press conference in the Chess House in Moscow. At it we got to see the main protagonists in the largest open tournament in the world. Also the main sponsors, the press chief and two world champions. Here's an illustrated pretrournament report by Eugeny Atarov.

Kasparov-Deep Junior draw after stunning sacrifice

2/6/2003 – Garry Kasparov was determined to win his last white game against the computer. But on move ten Deep Junior produced a stunning piece sacrifice that left its opponent reeling. It's unclear if the combination was sound, but Kasparov was not going to risk testing it over the board. He quickly forced a draw by repetition to keep the score level at 2½:2½. Read our illustrated report.

Sergey Karjakin (13) beats women's vice champion

2/6/2003 – The Dannemann match between world women's vice champion Alexandra Kosteniuk (18) and GM Sergey Karjakin (13) ended in a 4:2 victory for the Unkrainian chess prodigy. The games, played in the spectacular surrioundings of the Swiss Alps, was covered live with the help of our ChessBase Flash program. We bring you all six games annotated by experts. You will find these and some new pictures here.

It's up to you, New York, New York

2/4/2003 – We've been here for a little over a week now, taking part in a gigantic event that is drawing world-wide attention. But just as overwhelming as the battle between man and machine that is being currently staged in New York is the town itself. Thank heavens there are moments of peace, islands of calm, and a lot of pleasant people to ease the tension. See it all unfold in Frederic Friedel's latest New York picture gallery.

Kasparov, Deep Junior draw game four

2/3/2003 – After two rest days and a devastating loss Garry Kasparov withstood considerable pressure to salvage a draw. In front of a packed audience commentators Ashley, Seirawan, Benjamin, Jennifer and Greg Shahade (picture) and Susan Polgar confessed that they had no idea what was going on. More in our illustrated round four report.