4/14/2002 – FIDE have recently concluded a world championship cycle, the Einstein Group is running their own world championship, and Yasser Seirawan has proposed a "fresh start". Now statistician Jeff Sonas has analysed the relative merits of these three (and 13,000 other possible) systems to find out which are the most practical, effective, inclusive and unbiased. There are some suprises in store (the FIDE system is no. 12,671 on the list, Seirawan's proposal is no. 345). More

4/12/2002 – A few days ago world champion Vladimir Kramnik, in a widely-read interview, spoke about his upcoming match against the world's strongest PC program. Comparing it to the IBM computer that beat Garry Kasparov in 1997 Kramnik said: "Fritz is clearly stronger than Deep Blue, whatever the hardware." Kasparov takes exception to these remarks. "Deep Blue’s play in some of the games was close to perfection". Kasparov's interview and all his games against Deep Blue are here.

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

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.

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.

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.

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