It's a metaphor

No Harry Potter, no Kronsteen, no Knight playing Death, but 101 checkmates in film.

Of the actors pictured, Bogart was one of the strongest chess players in real life. (Peter Falk, who didn't make the cut, was no patzer, either.)

Parental advisory: at least two instances of profanity and one (bloodless) murder.



Via ChessVibes.

Michael Adams annotates...

...his simul win against Steffen Klug of the Downers Grove Chess Club.

Daniel Parmet's report on the simul (with scores of all ten games) can be found here.  At the risk of repeating myself, I had a wonderful evening, as I'm sure that those who attended GM Adams's lecture and simul at the North Shore Chess Center also did.  He's a really nice guy!

"it's not a big secret that Garry and me are not the best friends anymore"

Check out part 1 of Peter Doggers's interview with Viswanathan Anand in ChessVibes.

Gelfand interview, Part 2

Read it on ChessVibes.  But allow me to steal a passage of interest to readers in Chicago, the Twin Cities, and New Jersey (not to mention Belarus, Israel...)

It was wonderful to see that you brought your four coaches to Moscow: Tamara Golovey & Leonid Bondar, Eduard Zelkind, and Albert Kapengut. Please briefly describe what they meant for your chess development.

Sure, it's my pleasure because they did a lot and they're part of my success. I was very happy when they accepted my invitation and came to Moscow to see the match and to cheer for me. Eduard Zelkind was my first coach. I started to work with him when I was six and we worked until I was 11, when he moved to the United States.

So he was the one who taught you that rook ending?

Yeah, exactly! He taught me the rook endings. I still have notes with the rook endings. So it's kind of a disappointment for me that I didn't win this totally winning rook ending in game 3 but it has nothing to do with chess knowledge.

Tamara took over when he moved to the States, and she accompanied me to many events, in Soviet Union Championships, and she gave me some valuable lessons, like before each game you should not only try to remember what you'll play, but you should also move the moves at a chess board because then you'll remember them well. I still do this.

Leonid Bondar is her husband and he was my teacher at the Chess University, the same as where Andrei Filatov was studying, and Ilya Smirin, and Zsuzsa Polgar... He had a lot of prominent students. His passion for chess is incomparable. There we talked about cities, and he told me that Geneva is the best city in the world because in the city parks they have big chess sets! I learnt a lot from his passion and his love for chess.

And of course Albert Kapengut was my trainer for many, many years, till 1993. With his help I won the first Interzonal; I worked the whole first Candidates cycle with him. He taught me a lot of things. Most importantly, he taught me how to deal with information and the importance of information, and how chess players should work on chess. This is the most important thing, I think. You can have the best trainers, the best computers, but if you don't know how to work, if you don't have passion for it, nothing else can help you. These are the most important lessons I got from them. And of course all of them taught me that you should win dignity and lose with dignity.

"Lady Gaga would never be invited to play in the Tretyakov Gallery"

 Peter Doggers interviews Boris Gelfand on ChessVibes.

 ***

 Tamara Golovey and Leonid Bondar (who taught young Gelfand in Belarus) went to Moscow to watch the match, as did Eduard Zelkind of Minnesota. Other former students of Tamara came from New York, Austria, and Belarus to lend support to Boris. Even the sponsor of the match, Andrey Filatov, was a former student of Leonid: he, Gelfand, Susan Polgar, and Ilya Smirin had all studied at the Academy of Sport in Minsk, where Leonid once worked. We're very fortunate to have Tamara and Leonid here in Chicagoland!

Kramnik 1½ - Aronian 1½

Sergei Shipov annotates Kramnik's win in Game 3 for ChessVibes.

Candidates 2012 in London?

That's the well-sourced rumor. Teimour Radjabov of Azerbaijan would be the wild card.

Spassky turns 75

Today (already yesterday in France) is/was Boris Spassky's 75th birthday!

Here's a ChessBase interview (still in German for the time being; Google Translate version here). Spassky is now confined to a wheelchair, but he reports that his second stroke only affected one hemisphere, and that he can still speak and think. With a self-deprecating laugh, he adds, "Above all, the side responsible for chess works, and is as reliable as before."

I met Spassky in a Mandarin restaurant in Grenoble in the summer of 1978.  It was Spassky who started making small talk with me: perhaps he caught my shock of recognition (I wasn't sure it was Boris, and only found out later that he and Marina indeed lived in Grenoble).  Perhaps he simply wondered what a grubby American college student was doing there.  I remember that I had mu shu pork, that he asked about my studies, and that we didn't talk about chess. He seemed like a very kind man.

Carlsen wins Bilboa in blitz playoff

...and Hikaru Nakamura, bizarre round nine loss notwithstanding, takes third on tiebreaks.  A deserved win for Carlsen (who beat the red-hot Ivanchuk twice in regulation play) and a bittersweet step forward for Nakamura.

Coverage in the usual places....

ChessBase 

ChessVibes

WhyChess (all games available via drop-down box)

The Week in Chess

Bilboa Round 9: Vallejo 1 - Nakamura 0

Nakamura flagged on move 40 in a slightly superior position: he thought he had made the time control, and stepped away for a glass of juice.

As Carlsen beat Ivanchuk today, a win would have brought Nakamura into a tie for first.

Three decisive games today!

Playing blitz with Kasparov

Apparently Garry can still play chess, as France's top player, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, recently discovered.  Read his firsthand account on ChessVibes.

computer cheating (in quite another sense)

Via ChessVibes: The International Computer Games Association claims that Vasik Rajlich lifted the code of Crafty and Fruit.

The claim is not a new one (it's been discussed on rybkaforum.net for some time), but ICGA bans Rajlich for life and strips Rybka of the 2007-2010 titles. (I hope Rybka takes the news well.)

more on smartphone cheating

...at ChessVibes and Chess Ninja.

Kramnik-Radjabov press conference

As you may have read on ChessBase, at one point in the Kramnik-Radjabov tiebreaks, there was a moment when Radjabov was literally seconds away from winning the Candidates quarterfinal match: all he had to do was draw a tricky (but objectively drawn) rook plus opposite-color bishop ending.  After move sixty, there was a clock malfunction, and the arbiters took thirteen minutes (!!) to restart the blitz game.  Kramnik managed to win and force yet another two-game blitz tiebreaker, which he also won, and with it, the match.

Interview here: congratulations to Teimour Radjabov for acting in such a sporting fashion after such a heartbreaking turn of events.

Incidentally, interest in the match was so high (and English-language real-time coverage so wanting) that The Week in Chess crashed: the TWIC live site is still offline.

Korchnoi at 80

 Age is just a number: Korchnoi beat Fabiano Caruana just a couple months ago!

Coverage at ChessBase and ChessVibes.

How to cheat at chess (freeware version)

• Load the open source program Stockfish on your quad core at home; you now have a beast that will beat any human.
• Install GlaurungServer on the same machine.
• Download the Stockfish for iPhone app.
• Configure your app to talk to your home computer with Stockfish's "remote engine" interface.
• At your next tournament, use the toilet strategically.

And even if the connection with your home computer were to go down, there are several native iPhone apps (tChess and Shredder are both excellent alternatives to Stockfish) that offer master-level tactical advice.

Human nature being what it is, I would wager that a handful of unethical players are already doing this.  (Something similar may have been committed by a member of the 2010 French Olympiad team and two accomplices: bravo to the French Chess Federation for commencing a painful investigation.)  This is one reason for FIDE's cell phone ban.  If you know a tournament director who has worked major national events (we are fortunate to have more than our share of these good folk in Illinois), he or she may share some horror stories with you.  And these are the bad guys who were caught, bad guys using yesterday's technology.

So could someone please explain to me the wisdom of continuing to have big entry fee, big money class events for amateur players?  Amateurs include masters, too; most of us with ratings below USCF 2450 or so play for the love of the game.  I don't think this is as big an issue at higher levels, as strong players have an idea of what other strong players are (and aren't) capable of.

I should add that Stockfish is an amazing engine and that GlaurungServer (which I haven't bothered to test-drive) looks like it could be incredibly useful for serious (and ethical!) players (amateur and pro) who want to consult it during kibitzing sessions..

"Another good day at the office...."

GMHikaru tweets:

Another good day at the office, but there are still two incredibly important rounds left!!

Today Nakamura beat another young star, Jan Nepomniachtchi of Russia.  (Jan's surname only looks unpronounceable: Alex Yermolinsky says it quite naturally on ICC.). Hikaru leads Anand by ½, Aronian (who has two Dutch GMs to play) by 1, and Carlsen and Kramnik by 1½.   This top group is in fine form, with performance ratings from Carlsen's 2795 to Nakamura's 2906.  

Details on Chess Life Online, ChessBase, and ChessVibes, among many fine sites.

Kenny Rogers warned us not to count our ELO when we're sitting at the table, but Nakamura is now #7 in the world on the live ratings list, and within one win of the #5 spot!

"Carlsen shows his win against Nakamura"

Video at ChessVibes.

Nakamura is still co-leader: play resumes tomorrow!

Big win for Nakamura

© Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau

After 7 of 13 rounds, Nakamura takes the sole lead in Wijk aan Zee!  Anand is in clear second, while Kramnik and Aronian are tied for third.

GMHikaru tweets:

Another exciting win today against Smeets! Tomorrow the tournament really begins as I play the big dogs in succession!

47 minutes ago via web

More at ChessBase and ChessVibes.

Big test for Nakamura

....at the Tal Memorial!  Black against Mamedyarov is not an easy way to open a supertournament!

Previews at ChessVibes and Chess Life Online. 

The games begin at 7 a.m. Chicago time: I'll link to updates sometime tomorrow morning.