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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

3/19/2002 –

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[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...

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.

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

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

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