Archive for Columns
Saturday, August 15, 2009 17:50
For over a decade, I have been ridiculed by chess friends for playing the Centre Game, an opening with a respectable history which nevertheless has a very bad image in modern opening theory. In Mainz, I witnessed Ian Nepomniachtchi and Levon Aronian play a very exciting game, reminding me of a time when internet chess had just begun and I had the...
Wednesday, August 05, 2009 16:03
As the cockpit announces that we're about to land at the airport of Palermo, the capital of Sicily, I'm thinking of the Sicilian Defense. There’s no chess opening more beautiful, more difficult, more sinister than the Sicilian. Who is attacking whom? Who is first? Who is right? Nobody knows, not even the best chess players in the world. Who...
Friday, May 22, 2009 19:23
If you have kids, you've probably thought hard about how to name your child. Should you choose a 'special' kind of name, or rather a very trendy or well-known one? Popularity is an important aspect when it comes to choosing virtually anything. The same goes for chess openings: do you want to go for popular main lines or for 'off beat' variations...
Thursday, May 21, 2009 21:39
This week ChessBase published translations of two interesting interviews, with FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov and with UEP President Joseph Resch, about the 2008 Anand-Kramnik match, the 2010-2011 World Championship cycle and the failed negotiations between FIDE and UEP. I found myself agreeing with the FIDE President for the first time in my...
Friday, May 01, 2009 21:07
In two recent reports on the Grand Prix in Nalchik, my colleague-editor Michael Schwerteck wrote about how he hates the Petroff Defence - especially the way it's played by all these super grandmasters. All these boring draws - blegh. And Michael's clearly not the only one.
Let's consider what can be so hateful about the Petroff in the first...
Thursday, April 23, 2009 3:49
Everybody has a favourite chess move. Many just love 23...Qg3. Tim Krabb?©'s favourite is 16...Nc6. According to British Chess Magazine, it's 47...Bh3. And a member of my local chess club is obsessed by the move 7.Ke3! in the Traxler Counter-Attack. These are all highly spectacular moves. My own favourite is the¬†very modest queen-shuffle 2.Qe2.
I...
Wednesday, April 08, 2009 19:08
I've always found it difficult to take the concept of chess as a team sport very seriously. The U.S.A., arguably the country most obsessed with team sports, didn't have a national chess team competition until 2005. Makes you wonder, doesn't? Then there's the fact that a team sport seems to require by definition, cooperation - which is pretty...
Tuesday, March 24, 2009 17:00
This is not a review of an actual chess book that was recently published. However, the article was inspired by a book, and I really wish someone would write this book with a view to chess. I'm talking about The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which is about 'the impact of the highly improbable'.
As Taleb explains in the prologue,...
Wednesday, March 04, 2009 1:10
Last week, ChessBase was apparently 'forced to cease Internet broadcasting of the Topalov-Kamsky match'. As we noted in our report on the first match game, live broadcasting of the chess moves in this match without permission was prohibited by the Bulgarian Chess Federation (although they didn't seem to have a problem with Chessdom's, Crestbook's...
Tuesday, February 17, 2009 5:22
In his fourth column about beauty in chess, Michael Schwerteck was inspired by the recent German championship, as well as by ski jumping.
It has always bugged me that the scoring system in chess is so primitive. As everybody knows, there are only three possible results: 1, 1/2, and 0. However, there are so many different ways to achieve them!
Let...
