Posts tagged Chess
Bobby Fischer is dead!!!
Jan 18th
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“The United States is evil. There’s this axis of evil. What about the allies of evil — the United States, England, Japan, Australia? These are the evildoers.” — Bobby Fischer
Ex chess World champion, Bobby Fischer, is dead! I am not kidding, this is real news and not some hoax. It was a shock, reading that news item. I know it should not have been, after reading/hearing all his rantings over the years, but still it was. That mystery around Fischer will be missing from now. Has Fischer really left behind a void?? Debatable. But no one can deny the fact that Fischer was a real genius over board and his death is going to have an impact on all chess players’ minds. The reason for his death is unknown.
What is the impact? What will happen now?
- Be ready for the conspiracy theories. Don’t be surprised if you hear that U.S poisoned Fischer, or there was a secret service team dispatched to eliminate Fischer.
- Less news for news papers and Philipines/Icelandic radio stations. They won’t hear anymore anti-semitic remarks from Fischer.
- People will keep debating who is the strongest between Kasparov and Fischer.
- Karpov *can* boldly claim that he’d have crushed Fischer, had their WC match happened in 1975.
- No more updates to his classic “My 60 memorable games“, nor any more fake “My 61 memorable games” possible.
- People who stole money from Fischer, if at all it was true, will sleep peacefully from now.
- U.S. authorities can forget about Fischer breaking the U.N. sanctions imposed on Yugoslav (in 1992) and start pursuing other useful things.
- No one will know for sure what happened in Pasadena jailhouse.
- No one will claim any more that all games between Russian players were setup or prearranged.
- Chess community will eventually forget Fischer and move on. He will be just another page filler in a chess history book. Â
One thing is for sure: Fischer’s games will be studied and admired by generations and generations of chess players to come.
Let’s forget all the bad things surrounding Fischer and lets just enjoy his games. Hopefully our posterity will remember him for what he was over a Chess board than what he was as a person.
Rest in Peace Fischer; We already miss you 
External links:
- Articles reporting his death
- Associate press article
- Canadian press article
- Reuters article
- CNN-IBN article
- Key dates/facts from Fischer’s life.
- Official (?!) Fischer site
- This site is treasure trove of Fischer info. Starting from his Icelandic passport to Garry Kasparov’s appearance fees, you will find many interesting things here. Don’t miss his radio interviews!
- Chessbase article on Fischer’s radio interview.
Chess UCI protocol tracer utility
Jan 4th
I have this bad habit of starting coding on some application, bringing it to an alpha-ready stage, dropping it and moving on to the next one. Fortunately I don’t do this in my day job, else I’d have got the boot long time back.
Couple of months back, I was working on a chess application. I will not be able to discuss it further here, as I still think that app idea is a good one and is highly marketable. My chess GUI had to support UCI engines. UCI (Universal Chess Interface) is a protocol used by Chess GUI to talk to chess engines (see Figure 1). There are other GUI <-> Engine protocols, like Winboard, but UCI is an effort to create a standard. Since my software had to support all the existing UCI engines, I decided to understand the UCI protocol fully. I looked around for some way to capture the UCI transactions that go in between the GUI and the engine, but couldn’t find any tool to do that. So I wrote my own.
[Figure - 1]
In the attached file, you will find uciplug.exe, the main UCI tracer application. Tracer is a simple pump, which works as shown in Figure 2:
[Figure - 2]
It acts like a network repeater, by passing on everything it gets (either from the engine, or from the GUI) to the corresponding recipient, the only difference being it also logs that message to a file. Multiple instances can be used for running more than one engine simultaneously.
Download
[Download not found]
Interview with Vishwanathan Anand – IBN Live videos
Dec 26th
Recently CNN-IBN ran an interview with Chess world champion Vishwanathan Anand (Vishy). I didn’t catch this on TV, but ,thanks to IBN-Live, found them in their site.
The show is split in to 5 parts. Click on the following links to open them in a new window. The site needs no registration to view the videos, so enjoy!
Chess Forums
Jun 4th
I have setup a forums site for Chess. The main idea is to give a platform for discussing Chess in Tamil/English (focus being the former!). Hopefully, tutors/reviews and other articles will accrue over time. Check that out and let me know.
Chessbase Light 2007 Activation – eh?!
May 11th
I love the work being done by the good folks in Chessbase; IMO they have the coolest jobs, they get payed to develop software for CHESS 
Ohhhh, I wish I had some kinda day job like that! I know video game development is as interesting, but anyway gaming has never been one of my serious interests. Anyway, coming back to CB…I check the Chessbase site more than my Gmail, sometimes, which reminds me of the lack of RSS in their site…but I am not going to complain about that ever, as I feel it is worth visiting their site for the excellent articles they post. I am not sure if Fredrick Friedel ever thought of creating a business model out of the Chess news network they can easily build. Ok, again I am digressing…
I read with interest the article on their Chessbase Light 2007 software. It provides nearly all the functionalities of the full-fledged Chessbase DB software, one of their flagship products, for FREE. Of course, the catch word in the above sentence is “nearly all“. BW, CB Light allows only viewing, you cannot create databases or save games using that. For that you need to upgrade to CB Light Premium, which I guess is the same as Chessbase starter pack minus Bigdatabase 2007/Player encyclopedia/CB Magz.
The activation screen looks like the above screenshot (NOTE: I am using the screenshot provided by CB). When I saw this I was like ‘Eh?? What stupidity!!”…Do you see the captcha field in that window? Captcha are used for preventing the bots doing automatic signups, spams et al. Is there any sane reason why the user has to type the code shown in the image????
“Oh, ok…may be this code is part of the activation process”, I thought.
When I went to the site meant for generating Activation key, I didn’t find a field for entering the abovementioned captcha code. Then why the heck the CB Light programmers decided to show the captcha code in CB Light? Beats me!
Note that I may be totally missing a valid reason behind having that captcha in a desktop program, if so I’d appreciate if you’d enlighten me!
What are chess tournament categories?
Mar 29th
If you are a chess fan, you probably already know what the tournament categories mean. MTel masters, which is going to start this month, for example, is a category 20 tournament (based on January rating list). The tournament categories are determined by the average tournament rating. Lets say, the average ELO rating of a tournament (sum of all ELO ratings / number of players :-p ) comes to 2253, it fits the definition of a FIDE category-1 tournament.
Each category corresponds to a 25-ELO range. The ranges that are normally used by FIDE are:
| Category | ELO Range |
| Category 20 | 2726 – 2750 |
| Category 19 | 2701 – 2725 |
| Category 18 | 2676 – 2700 |
| Category 17 | 2651 – 2675 |
| Category 16 | 2626 – 2650 |
| Category 15 | 2601 – 2625 |
| Category 14 | 2576 – 2600 |
| Category 13 | 2551 – 2575 |
| Cat 12 | 2526 – 2550 |
| Cat 11 | 2501 – 2525 |
| Cat 10 | 2476 – 2500 |
| Cat 9 | 2451 – 2475 |
| Cat 8 | 2426 – 2450 |
| Cat 7 | 2401 – 2425 |
| Cat 6 | 2376 – 2400 |
| Cat 5 | 2351 – 2375 |
| Cat 4 | 2326 – 2350 |
| Cat 3 | 2301 – 2325 |
| Cat 2 | 2276 – 2300 |
| Cat 1 | 2251 – 2275 |
The table can be further extended to Category 21, 22 et al. The tournament categories were once used for GM and IM norms, but are no longer used (Check this page for the current FIDE title norms). As far as I know, the highest category FIDE tournament so far has been Category 21. If you know of anything more, do let me know.
The USCF (US Chess Federation) and ACF (Australian Chess Federation) maintain a separate scale for national titles and rating classification. You can find more info on these here
ETAD
Nov 16th
I haven’t totally recovered from my last ETAD (Embarassing, Totally Annihilating Defeat). If you remember, I bought CM 10 + White Belt + Black Belt to try to drown myself, but alas, it looks like I need more. So, today I went ahead and took a 3 months subscription to Chess Today. Chess Today(CT) is a daily newsletter, delievered to your mailbox as a PDF, with interviews/annotated games/puzzles et al. It is published by GM Baburin. I am hoping to see some good annotations for the ongoing Russian Superfinals games in CT as well as BlackBelt. Mig or Baburin? Lets see whose annotations I understand more
Russian Super Finals Rd 1
Nov 15th
I was on a long vacation last week, enjoying not only playing with my brother’s daughter, but also preparing to watch Russian Super finals How can anyone miss this one (even if that means missing a 2 yrs cutie’s smile)!?
Russian heavy weights, Kasparov, Kramnik & Karpov usually do not play in their national championship, which, by the way, is one of the strongest events! In Russia, literally, you can find an IM-strength player in every house. It is a known thing that a Russian Candidate master is as strong as a FIDE IM. With its abundant Chess talent and more importantly, the excellent ambience which nurtures this Chess talent, it should not come as a surprise that Russia is the dominant Chess playing country. Russian Chess Federation head, Zhukov, announced last year that the winners of the 57th Russian championship @ St.Petersburg and Tomsk , along with top 7 Russian GMs (Kasparov, Kramnik, Svidler, Morozevich, Bareev, Karpov & Grischuk) would play in a super-final, finding a single Russian champion!
Kramnik & Karpov pulled out. The former producing a Doctor’s letter saying he needs 2-3 months rest before any serious play and why the latter pulled out is still a mystery. To make a guess, I’d say Karpov would be at the bottom of the points table in this strong tournament if he played and he knew that If you think Kramnik’s producing a doctor certificate reminds you of how we used to produce a proof for taking sick leave, back in the school, you are not alone! 
More >
A look @ Chess Olympiad 2004
Nov 3rd
Whew, what a month October has been! With the heavy weights Kramnik & Leko fighting it out for the Dannemann World Championship title, I have to admit, I didn’t pay that much attention to the first 3 – 5 rounds of this year’s olympiad. Of course, there were so many elite players playing including my favorite Chucky. But, more than Kramnik, I needed a break after those nerve-wrecking final 2 games of the WCh
When I finally caught up with it, 5 rounds had finished. Russians have won the gold since time immemorial, so, naturally they were the favorites for the Gold again. There were other strong teams to look for too, like Ukraine, Israel, USA (with Russian GMs in all boards), India, Armenia et al. India, with Vishy (Vishawanathan Anand) in board 1, was the strongest of all the Indian olympiad teams ever. India had 14 points and was placed 6th, after 5 rounds. Not bad! That too, when you have someone like Anand in the team, we already have got a psychological edge over all our opponents. But India started with an unimpressive score of 2.5 – 1.5 over Uruguay. Anand rested that day (why do you need rest in the first round?!). At the end of 5th round, Ukraine was at the top with 14.5 points and they had already played Russia! So, unless they blundered against some low-rated team, they had a chance to be in the top-3. More >
The ultimate chess game
Nov 1st
Chessbase has a funny article on Bush vs Kerry here. Bush – Kerry game score is a neat idea. I also loved the way Kerry’s play resembled mine! Great minds think alike?
Also, Krush and Shahade look cute in their wigs That article has MiG written all over it, even though it lacks the touch of the good old MiG we all knew and loved.
