chess
jrosenhouse | October 20, 2008After a quick draw in game four of the big chess match, Anand and Kramnik got back to business today. Kramnik went into the same line of the Meran as on Friday, surely having some improvement ready over Friday's game. What he had in mind we'll never know, since Anand varied first:
V. Kramnik - V. Anand World Championship 2008 Position After 15. ... Rh8-g8
Kramnik allowed Anand to play his novelty, 14. ... Bc8-b7 a second time. Anand accepted the invitation, but after 15. Bxb5 he varied with 15. ... Rg8. In Friday's game Anand played 15. ... Bd6 instead.
Anand has gotten himself into…
jrosenhouse | October 17, 2008Remember at the end of my last chess post when I wrote:
But no need to despair! This is just the feeling out period. I suspect the real match will begin shortly.
Oh baby! Was I more right than I knew! Vishy Anand drew first blood in the big chess match today, and did so in fine style. Once again Kramnik opened with his queen pawn, and Anand replied with the Slav. But whereas game one saw Kramnik employ the insomnia-curing Exchange Variation, this time we had the ultra-sharp Meran Variation. After fourteen moves of well-known theory, Anand, playing black, bashed out a novelty:
V.…
jrosenhouse | October 15, 2008Two games down in the big chess match. The results?
Two draws.
And not the exciting type of draw with lots of thrust and parry and two lone, bruised kings remaining on the board at the end. I'm talking about boring draws.
But no need to despair! This is just the feeling out period. I suspect the real match will begin shortly.
Kramnik and Anand tend to be fairly conservative players, and that has certainly been clear in these first two games. Bobby Fischer was gleefully playing technically dubious but highly exciting opening like the Benoni Defense and Alekhine's Defense in his WC…
jrosenhouse | October 13, 2008Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod! Just try to guess why I am so excited right now. I dare you, just try.
I'll even give you some time...
Okay, so maybe the title gave it away.
The long awaited (among chess fans anyway) match between Viswanathan Anand of India and Vladimir Kramnik of Russia begins today. To fully understand the importance of this match, let me lay some history on you.
In 1972 Bobby Fischer played defending champion Boris Spassky for the title. After twenty-one of the scheduled twenty-four games the match was mathematically over. In the weeks that followed Fischer was appearing on…
jrosenhouse | June 23, 2008The new issue of New in Chess magazine arrived in my mailbox this weekend. It contains an article by British grandmaster Daniel Gormally about what it is like to be addicted to the Internet Chess Club. I know the feeling well, and can affirm that this is only a small exaggeration:
Wake up around 2 pm. Blearily switch on your computer. Check your e-mails, no new e-mails. Open ICC. Check who's online. Immediately experience frustrsation as when you type '1' (the comand to enter the one-minute pairing pool) you are left waiting for a game. Experience withdraweal symptoms (sweaty palms,…
jrosenhouse | June 7, 2008An interesting article from today's New York Times:
The rapper RZA, a founder of the Wu-Tang Clan, sat in a suite on the 48th floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel overlooking Central Park, staring at a chess game through a pair of sunglasses. His hand was frozen a few inches above the board as he looked for a strategy to thwart his opponent.
Chess has long had an important role in the aesthetic of the Wu-Tang Clan, which has songs about the game. In “'The Wu-Tang Manual,” a 2005 book about the group and its members, RZA (pronounced RIZ-a) wrote that chess is part of the Wu-Tang essence “…
jrosenhouse | January 28, 2008If you'll forgive another chess post, the annual grandmaster chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands is now complete. It was the first major tournament of the year, and it had a pleasingly unexpected outcome. Young phenoms Levon Aronian of Armenia and Magnus Carlsen of Norway were the joint winners, with eight points out of thirteen.
For Aronian this was a return to form. His ability to play with the big boys had been established in a number of tournament wins (for example, Wijk aan Zee 2007). Alas, his play had been somewhat shaky since then, but he is plainly back in form…
jrosenhouse | January 20, 2008Via The Chess Ninja, I see that Gary Kasparov has commented on the death of Bobby Fischer. I have copied his remarks below the fold.
With the death of Bobby Fischer chess has lost one of its greatest figures. Fischer's status as world champion and celebrity came from a charismatic and combative personality matched with unstoppable play. I recall thrilling to the games of his 1972 Reykjavik world championship match against Boris Spassky when I was nine years old. The American had his share of supporters in the USSR even then, and not only for his chess prowess. His outspokenness and…
jrosenhouse | January 18, 2008Former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer has died of kidney failure at the age of 64. The New York Times has an informative article here.
For chess fans Bobby Fischer was the classic example of the need to separate the art from the artist. Away from the board Fischer was an emotionally disturbed misfit, entirely unable to take care of himself or deal with the world in a reasonable way. His incoherent, hate-filled rants against Jews and America made him more an object of pity than of anger.
But at the board he's the best there ever was. Only Gary Kasparov is a plausible rival for this…
jrosenhouse | October 1, 2007Viswanathan Anand of India is the new, mostly undisputed, World Chess Champion, thanks to his stellar performance at the Mexico City tournament. The Chess Ninja has the details.
By all accounts Anand is a class act and a well-deserving champion. He played, and lost, a title match with Gary Kasparov in 1995. This steback did not long stop him from returning to top form, and he has ben a fixture in top level chess for more than twenty years. So congratulations to him!
If all goes according to plan, Anand will play a match with Kramnik (who officially lost his title by only finishing tied for…
jrosenhouse | May 24, 2007Alexander Shabalov took clear first place in the just completed U.S. Championship. He scored seven points out of nine (six wins, two draws, one loss) in a field of 36 players.
For a while Shabalov seemed on course to match Bobby Fischer's mind-boggling 11 wins, no losses, no draws performance in the 1963-1964 editiion of the event. Shabalov won his first five games, beating tournament heavyweights like Nakamura and Kaidanov along the way. Sadly, the streak was broken when Shabalov lost in round six to defending champion Alexander Onischuk.
Shabalov has long been a fan favorite for his…
jrosenhouse | May 2, 2007Writing at Slate, Ann Hulbert offers some thoughts on the use of chess as an educational tool in elementary schools:
In January of 1958, three months after Sputnik triggered an educational panic in America much like today's angst about the global talent race, a 14-year-old boy from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn made headlines: Bobby Fischer became the youngest U.S. champion in a cerebral sport long associated with genius--and long dominated by the Russians. The game, of course, was chess, and 15 years later--during his antic showdown with Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972--Fischer…
jrosenhouse | March 6, 2007File this one under, “It's my blog and I'll post what I want to post!” Late last year world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik got married in Paris. Some photos of the wedding have now been posted at Kramnik's website. No real news here, but one of the pictures includes former world number one Boris Spassky, who is apparently close friends with Kramnik. Spassky, of course, was the fellow who lost the world championship, in pretty humiliating style, to Bobby Fischer in 1972.
jrosenhouse | March 6, 2007My parents have been in town for the past two days, so I'm a bit behind on my blogging. So how about we get back into the swing of things with a little chess news.
Sunday's New York Times had this article about a protest held in St. Petersburg against the government of Vladimir Putin. The leader of the protest? None other than former world chess champion Garry Kasparov:
The rally was held in advance of local elections scheduled for March 11. Opposition events typically draw no more than several hundred people, but several thousand gathered for the rally in Vosstaniya Square.
Two leaders…
jrosenhouse | January 30, 2007Speaking of chess, we really ought to take a moment to acknowledge the fact that the first major grandmaster chess tournament of the year has now ended. I refer of course to the annual event at Wijk aan Zee, in the Netherlands. This year's event ended in a three-way tie between Veselin Topalov, Teimour Radjabov and Levon Aronian.
The last time we saw Topalov was during his big World Championship match with Vladimir Kramnik last fall. You might recall that Topalov lost the match, and pretty much humiliated himself by manufacturing a scandal about Kramnik's frequent bathroom use. He seems…
jrosenhouse | January 30, 2007Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake Young reports on a major study into the reasons for the dearth of women among competitive chessplayers. His conclusion:
I am going to make an analogy to make this data make more sense. Why does it seem like the US has substantially fewer good soccer players than the rest of the world? We clearly have good athletes. We play other sports well. We train athletes just as well. Why do other countries do so much better?
The answer is that when you are a good athlete in the US, you do not play soccer. You end up playing something else like football or basketball. The…
jrosenhouse | December 11, 2006Chess Life is reporting that David Bronstein has died of unknown cuases at the age of 82.
Bronstein resides on a short list of players, along with Paul Keres and Viktor Korchnoi, who can vie for the title of Greatest Player Never to Win the World Championship. His peak came in the late forties and early fifties, when his tactical brilliance and his advocacy of then offbeat opening like The King's Gambit and The King's Indian Defense propelled him to the upper tier of professional players. With regard to that latter opening, he was truly ahead of his time ; the King's Indian later became a…
jrosenhouse | December 5, 2006Vladimir Kramnik lost the sixth game of his match against the computer prgoram Deep Fritz today. He thereby lost the match by a score of 4-2.
The finla game saw the super sharp Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense. This was in stark contrast to the careful positional play of the earlier games. The computer managed to prove, once again, it's general superiority in tactical positions. The machine played the opening in somewhat bizarre fashion, and did not appear to have much advantage out of the opening. But it was able to keep up the pressure, and seized on a few sloppy moves by…
jrosenhouse | November 29, 2006Vladimir Kramnik will receive a lengthy section in any book devoted to history's greatest chess players. He's been a top grandmaster for close to twnety years. He defeated the seemingly invincible Gary Kasparov in a straight-up match. He has successfully defended his title twice, both times coming from behind.
So try to imagine the sting that comes from knowing the following position will forever be placed just below his name:
This is the penultimate position from the second game of Kramnik's ongoing match against the top computer chess-playing program Deep Fritz. The dust has settled…
jrosenhouse | October 18, 2006Just move the little horsey to all of the unpainted squares. But don't be too impressed if you clear the early levels with little difficulty. It gets hard in a hurry. So far I haven't managed to get past level 11. My wrist is too sore right now to try again!