Posts tagged chessbase
Bobby Fischer is dead!!!
Jan 18th
Â
“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.
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!
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.
THE Plunge! How to forget chess defeats?!
Nov 1st
After getting beaten soundly (you can still see the dark ugly bruises in my face) in Online Chess for 3 times in a row, yesterday, I did the Chess equivalent of drowning myself in Liquor: Went out and bought more Chess books! You see, everytime I have an embarassing, totally annihilating defeat, I get soooo “low” that I go out, buy a new Chess book, read the first chapter and hope it doesn’t happen again. Does buying all these books help? I would say it only adds to the worries:
- How to pack/unpack/shift some 110 Chess books blah blah blah. A constant reminder of how many times I have embarassed myself.
- When am I going to go past the first chapter (?!) in all these books.
- The alarming rate at which this collection is growing. This is my major worry. I don’t seem to learn anything at all. Why?
- Keeping a tab of books in which I crossed the first chapter. Ohhh..this is quite an irritating thing, believe me. Most of the times, I get so confused that I start from the beginning.
Enough rambling! When I had my latest ETAD (Embarrassing, Totally Annihilating Defeat), I didn’t go out and buy any books. Does that mean I am cured? Nope! Since I couldn’t find any books that I didn’t already own, I bought Chess Master 10th Edition (CM) and subscribed to both BlackBelt and WhiteBelt. More >
Chessbase Magazine (CBM)
Oct 8th
After hesitating for a long time, I subscribed to CBM 2 months back. The Jubilee DVD that came with CBM 100 was the thing that really encouraged me to go for it
Jubilee DVD, for those of you who haven’t heard of it, contains a collection of randomly picked video reports from the previous chessbase magazines. You get to see Kasparov’s expressions when he lost to Anand in the Credit Suisse Masters Tournament, Tkachiev explaining how he sees Chess everywhere, Kasparov self destructing himself against Deep Blue, a 17 year old Leko explaining how important was a drawn game against Kramnik (makes an interesting viewing, with the current Brissago world championship) and many more interesting reports.
Some things strike you as odd: First of all, what are the Klitschko brothers doing in these reports? They are not even class A players. Second one: Why are there so many girls in the videos and pictures? Of course, Almira Skripchenko and Kosteniuk can play brilliant games, but so can some 100+ more GMs. (On a side note, Judith Polgar, we miss you here. Come back soon!! )
When I ordered a subscription, CBM 100 was the latest one. But I didn’t get it first, because of some customs problems blah blah. Chess Mate, who are the Chessbase dealers in South India, shipped me CBM 101. I got CBM 100 only last week. I’d say it was worth waiting for !
