Daily Archives: May 4, 2020

Let me say in advance: I have grown up with books. From the start I was a bibliophile, fanatically so, and in the course of a lifetime have collected many thousands of books including chess books, which for decades have been sent to me by friendly publishers. To these (the chess books, not the publishers) I have always had an ambivalent relationship. On the one hand they brought me a great deal of pleasure. On the other I was distressed by the colossal waste they represented.

Take for instance the famous and for a long time ubiquitous Chess Informant. I bought it regularly. The picture shows what the contents looked like. It also tells you how much of the approximately thirty volumes I collected I actually read. Close to zero percent. I did look at a lot of diagrams and try to follow the next three to five moves in my mind, but that was it.

I did notice that a certain percentage of the visitors in my house, the ones who had GM titles, and especially the super-GMs, read my Informants like Agatha Christie novels. Anand, for instance, would grab the latest Informant, curl up in a corner, and spend hours giggling and laughing at games he was replaying in his head. Nobody, really nobody, ever pulled out a chessboard to replay games. Either they could replay everything in their minds, or they used my method of diagram scanning.

So just a small percentage of chess players actually read chess books or magazines. When's the last time you set up the chess board (I'm not sure exactly where mine is) and pieces (those I can find I have two very nice sets in the shelf behind me) and replayed a game from a book? The situation has been exacerbated by the advent of replayable games in software and on web pages. That is so easy and so convenient that it is hard to find a proper place for books in the chess landscape.

So are chess books and magazines on the way out? Because you cannot replay moves, like you can do on any good web site? No, you actually can, if the publishers spend a miniscule amount of effort on it! Let me explain.

Everyone who buys a chess book has the ultimate replay device in their pocket, or on the coffee table. It is a smart phone or a tablet. What if you could use these, instead of setting up the chess board and pieces, to replay the game in the books? No mistakes, no tedious attempts to find your way back to the main line when you have been looking at analysis. Everything is automatic, just like on a replay board on your computer screen.

I am not the first person to think about this. Take a look at the paper "A Framework for Recognition and Animation of Chess Moves Printed on a Chess Book" by Sleyman Eken et al. It was published (in 2015) by the International Arab Journal of Information Technology and proposes "a set of techniques to animate chess moves which are printed on a chess book. These include (1) extraction of chess moves from an image of a printed page, (2) recognition of chess moves from the extracted image, and (3) displaying digitally encoded successive moves as an animation on a chessboard." It's all pattern recognition, and with AI today the process could be made very efficient.

But is that what I am looking for? You use your phone or tablet to scan a page, with an AI app to find the chess game and make it replayable? No, there must be an easier, non-technical way. And there is. The chess book author needs to provide the games and moves in replayable form to the reader, and the reader must have instant access to them. The solution: QR codes.

Once again I am not the first person to come up with this solution. When thinking about using QR codes in the chess books I might end up writing, I remembered that it had already been done, very nicely, by my friend Prof. Christian Hesse (who writes very entertaining books on mathematics and on chess). And I get them all from him. Searching through the twenty or so I own I found Damenopfer, written in 2015. "Damenopfer" is "Queen Sacrifice" and the subtitle translates to "Astonishing Stories from the World of Chess." It is a thoroughly charming collection of examples where surprising sacs play a decisive role if you understand German it is well worth buying ($12.40).

The thing about Damenopfer is that, for the first time, every single game in the book contains a QR code for you to scan. Within a second or two you have the game, moves, and the entire analysis, on your mobile phone, in a bus, in the garden, anywhere. So you read the stories in the book and then replay the games on your electronic device. Let me give you an example:

Here are two pages I scanned from the book (click to enlarge). In case you don't know the German piece letters: KDTLS = KQRBN. Now try reading the two examples:

Chances are you can manage the first pretty well, but the second is more difficult playing through in your mind.

Now whip out your mobile phone or tablet. Check if you have a barcode or QR code scanner installed. Chances are it is already there, but if it isn't get one of the dozen or two available for free in the Apple Store or Google Playstore. Takes a couple of minutes to download and install and of course you only need to do this once. After that you can use the scanner for all kinds of thing, e.g. read reviews of products in stores, scan grocery packages for recipies, etc. But you can also point your phone or tablet at the pages above. The scanner will automatically read the QR code and ask you whether you want to proceed to a page. That will take you to a special replayer for the game in question.You can play through the moves, tapping on the replay keys or on the notation below the chessboard. Very nice, don't you agree?

The two examples above may be just about manageable, following the moves in your mind and enjoying the beautiful tactics. But what about the following:

I just give you the diagrams and the QR codes. In the first case (White to play and win) Christian writes: "It looks like a perfectly hopeless situation for White. The chances for the white king to survive are the same as for a snowman in a blast furnace." And he goes on to show us the truly incredible moves White must make to acrtually win: 1.b6+ Ka8! 2.g7 h1=Q 3.g8=Q+ Bb8 4.a7 Nc6+ 5.dxc6 Qxh5+. "This is the critical point in the study," he writes, "White wins with a queen move that comes from a different world and a different reality." 7.Qg5!!! "The queen, dressed in a kamikaze outfit throws herself in between." Hesse give a three alternate lines explaining why the queen moving to g5 is the only way to win:

6.Ka4 Qd1+ 7.Qb3 Qa1+ 8.Kb5 Qe5+ 9.Ka6 Qa1+=6.Kb4 Nd3+ (6...Qh4+ 7.Ka5 Qh5+ 8.Qg5 +) 7.Kc3 Qa5+ 8.Kxd3 Qa3+ 9.Kc2 Qa4+=6.Ka6 Qe2+ 7.Ka5 Qe5+ 8.Ka4 Qd4+ 9. Kb5 Qe5+=

6...Qxg5+ 7.Ka6! Qa5+! 8.Kxa5 Bxa7 9. c7!! Kb7 10.bxa7 "and Black raises the white flag, 1-0."

Beautiful, isn't it? What, you did not follow everything? Then use your phone or tablet to see all the moves and variations on a nice graphic chessboard. Incidentally, this is one of my all-time favourite studies.

The second example, on the right in the above scan, is a 27-move game with seven additional moves to show why Black resigned after a firework of sacrifices. Can be easily followed on the printed pages by a GM, but not by me. But I can scan the QR code image next to the diagram and immediately replay everything on my phone. Try it, it is dazzling how White played 14.Kf1!!! to initiate the sacrifice tornado. In the book Hesse explains why 14.Kf1 (which he gave three exclams) was necessary in order to avoid a bishop check nine moves later. This is explained in the book, while the moves can be replayed on your phone or tablet. After a five-second scan.

After getting re-hooked on Christian Hesse's book and playing through a dozen examples I realized I had the solution to my dilemma: how to produce a book in which people will not ignore most of the chess content where they can actually play through all the games given.

So this is how I can produce my book in fact in greater quality than in Hesse's book. That was published five years ago and a lot of progress has made since then. I also discovered how easy it is to implement: adding replay code takes me a average of a minute and a half per game. And readers get instant access to tools no chess author dreamed of, until a few years ago.

How I plan to use these tools and how you can do the same for books and magazines that will be the subject of my next article. I will also give you a couple of trial chapters which you can print out and use. And in return you can tell me what you think of the project.

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The future of chess books (1) - Chessbase News

Two Santa Clarita siblings have been rated as top chess players in both the state of California and the nation, officials said.

Dr. Aakash Ahujas children, Aakash Jr. and Aakashi, have both ranked within the top 20 chess players in the state for their respective classes, according to the United States Chess Federation (USCF).

They both started playing in May of 2018, not exactly two years ago, and they have worked very hard and are both very motivated, Dr. Ahuja said.

Aakash Ahuja Jr. is ranked twelfth in California among all 9-year-olds and ranked 55 in the country by the USCF.

Aakashi Ahuja is also ranked second in California and ranked twelfth nationally among 8-year-old girls.

Aakash got curious and he started playing with me at home, Dr. Ahuja said. We went to play at a small tournament at CYCL in May 2018. He got a small trophy. He had not taken any classes.

Aakashi became interested in playing chess after Aakashs achievement, and began taking coached classes.

They love each other but they are competitive, and seeing his trophy, she got excited, Dr. Ahuja Said. They both wanted to join classes and both of them have been playing ever since.

Both students are currently enrolled at Westcreek Academy and are coached by Jay Stalling from the California Youth Chess League, a local chess academy.

KHTS FM 98.1 and AM 1220 is Santa Claritas only local radio station. KHTS mixes in a combination of news, traffic, sports, and features along with your favorite adult contemporary hits. Santa Clarita news and features are delivered throughout the day over our airwaves, on our website and through a variety of social media platforms. Our KHTS national award-winning daily news briefs are now read daily by 34,000+ residents. A vibrant member of the Santa Clarita community, the KHTS broadcast signal reaches all of the Santa Clarita Valley and parts of the high desert communities located in the Antelope Valley. The station streams its talk shows over the web, reaching a potentially worldwide audience. Follow @KHTSRadio on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Excerpt from:

Two Santa Clarita Siblings Play To The Top Of State, National Chess Ranks - KHTS Radio

I have mentioned before that the inspiration underpinning both the style and content of my chess columns forTheArticlederives to a certain extent from the book,The King, written by the Dutch Grandmaster Jan Hein Donner. His discursive columns, masterpieces of chess related prose, were penned during the period when his world had shrunk to just one small room in a care home, after he had been blasted, and partially blinded, by a stroke.

A further influence was the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. His classic,Sternstunden der Menschheit(Stellar Moments of Humanity), led me to develop the theme of my columns forTheArticle: what might be called Sternstunden der Schachheit, or Stellar moments of Chess.

Zweig, a gourmet of things intellectual, was evidently fascinated by chess, a fascination which may be observed from his chess-centred Schachnovelle. Usually translated as The Royal Game, this novella reconstructs the internal mental activity of playing chess as a defensive rampart against the very real slings and arrowsof the external world, in this case the Nazi torturers tormenting the chief protagonist, Dr B.

Another writer fascinated by chess, whose literary career partly intersected with that of Zweig during the first quarter of the twentieth century, was the enigmatic Anglo-Polish merchant naval officer, Joseph Conrad. This Polish-speaking subject of the the Russian Tsars, whose empire incorporated Poland at that time,rose to become one of the most impressively enduring craftsmen of the English novel in the late 19th and early 20th century. Conrad only started to learn English at the relatively late age of twenty and his resonant unfamiliarity with his adopted tongue lends a startlingly original, if somewhat stilted, edge to his prose style.

To me, Zweig and Conrad have always seemed very much like light, as expressed in Zweigs perennial optimism and belief in humanity, contrasted with Conrads exploration of the darkness concealed in the recesses of the human soul. Ironically, though, it was Zweig who committed suicide, while a suicide attempt by the young Conrad went hopelessly wrong and he lived to a ripe old age in rural Kent, just outside Canterbury, in his chosen country. One can almost detect W.S. Gilbertsjingoistic refrain fromhis nautical operetta,HMS Pinaforein the background: in spite of all temptations, to belong to other nations, he is an Englishman And so Conrad was, by 1889, having put the Russian-ruled Poland of his youth well behind him.

Devotees of Grand Guignol space opera will recogniseNostromo, the title of one of Conrads most celebrated novels, and also the name of the gigantic space vessel in the intergalactic horror film Alien. The two, book and spaceship, are linked by the concept of cargo. In Conrads hands the eponymous anti-hero Nostromo (derived from the Italian, meaning our man) deliberately conceals a stolen cargo of silver, which turns out to be lethal for him. The movie sees the Nostromo taking on board, as inadvertent cargo, an equally lethal, quasi-indestructible, alien life form, which first throttles, then injects and finally, in its embryonic new life format, bursts forth from the flesh of its paralysed victim, and then begins to hunt down the Nostromos crew.

As testimony to his enduring relevance, another notable Conrad title,The Secret Agent, offers frightening insight into the black heartlessness of late 19th century urban terrorism. The novel was later adapted as a cliffhanging thriller, Sabotage (1936) directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

One scene from that film was shot at Simpsons-in-the-Strand,still a popular restaurant. In fiction it was patronised by Sherlock Holmes, and in real life it was the haunt of such Victorian chess luminaries as Howard Staunton and Thomas Henry Buckle (see my previous column ), thereby becoming the traditional home of British chess.

In 1979 Conrads most famous novel, Heart of Darkness, was adapted by Francis Ford Coppola into the napalm-singed movie Apocalypse Now . With its helicopter gunships soaring to the theme of Wagners Ride of the Valkyries, and the bloated Marlon Brando as Conrads murderousKurtz, lurking at the horrific epicentre of the primeval jungle, Apocalypse Now garnered the prestigious Palme dOr, plus no fewer than eight Oscar nominations.

In Conrads original novel, we are introduced to the naval Captain Marlow, who tracks down Kurtz. Marlow reappears playing chess in Conrads novel Chance , and it is widely believed that Conrad modelled Marlow on himself. One Archibald Dukes, a medical officer servingon the Torrens , sailing from the UK to Australia in 1891-1893, records playing chess with the Polish first mate (Conrad himself). Having blundered away his queen, the most powerful piece on the board, the doctor tried to resign, but Conrad would have none of that and insisted on continuing to the inevitable checkmate.

In the Canterbury museum The Kit, one can still observe two of Conrads chess sets and a book by the chess genius Capablanca, My Chess Career , published by Bell and Hyman in 1920 and signed by Conrad himself. Conrad had pasted in some newspaper chess columns over the advertisements at the back of this evidently beloved book. Among other Conrad memorabilia, there is also Howard Stauntons Chess-Players Companion , a small homage to the Shakespearean scholar and the only Englishman ever to have been considered as World Champion.

Conrad also used chess for unorthodox but imaginative purposes. In the biography My Father , written by his son Borys, the story is related of the chess code developed by Conrad during the First World War:

When I re-joined him he said: Look here, Boy, in case you should get yourself knocked in the head I should at least like to know where your remains are disposed of out there. He then explained a code he had devised by means of which I could let him know approximately what part of the front I was on, without running foul of the censor. Many years before he had taught me to play chess and he now gave me a pocket chess set and said that we would play games by post. Certain moves, not relating to the games in hand would, when used by me, indicate squares which he had ruled on his war map. Then he escorted me to my car, shook me vigorously by the hand and said: Be off now, Boy Bless you. This was in November 1915.

Conrads second son, John, also relates in his memoir Times Remembered , how his father used to summon him to play chess in the middle of the night, at moments when his reserves of literary energy were flagging:

People have said when I have told them of this recollection that my father was being rather selfish in getting me out of bed, but it never struck me in this way. I was flattered that he should ask me to get up and play chess with him in the small hours. There was no compulsion about it but there was a special kind of novelty in sharing the shadows surrounding the pool of light on the chessboard, a silent communion punctuated by the occasional click as a move was made or a check called. I realised fairly soon that the mental effort of playing chess helped my father to realign his thoughts so as to overcome an impasse for the arrangement of words or the construction of a phrase to convey some subtle meaning.

No actual games of chess played by Conrad (or Zweig) have come down to us. But we do know that Conrad admired Capablanca, who won the World Chess Championship in 1921.

John Conrad recalls that his fatherdecided to take him in hand and improve his sons game, so two or three times a week after dinner they got out the chessmen and board and spent a couple of hours playing through the games in Capablancas book. Father and son played through every game in the book, with Joseph reading out the moves, and stopping where Capablanca had made a comment, so that they could write down their own observations.

At the end we would compare notes and argue over various alternative moves. My fathers comments were very similar to those in the book but sometimes there were wide divergencies of viewpoint and we would play the variations through, making notes of our reasons for our moves.

In lieu of a game by either of the two literary giants, here is a link to an elegant Capablanca masterpiece , which, crowned by a queen sacrifice to force checkmate, was instrumentalin his victory over Emanuel Lasker in the 1921 World Championship Match in Havana.

Read the rest here:

Darkness and Light: Joseph Conrad, Stefan Zweig and Chess - TheArticle

A girl plays in an orphanage in India during confinement.EFE

There is a before and after in chess, a date that marks a little change: Gary Kasparovs defeat to IBMs Deep Blue in New York in 1997. The golden age of sports, in a few days when the media around the world dedicated thousands of hours and pages to cover the hercleo man-machine challenge, gave way to more periodically calm times. The coming world championships did not have the significance of the Fischer-Spassky, Karpov-Korchnoi or Kasparov-Karpov, either because of the charisma of these great masters or because any commercial program of less than 100 euros was able to overcome the number one without major problems.

But chess has survived evolving and adapting to the new times after almost a millennium and a half of setbacks thanks to the fact that as Ramn Rey Ardid, a psychiatrist and champion of Spain from 1929 to 1942, defined it is only one step above human intelligence A step enough to attract and not bore, be easy to learn, impossible to master. And in this fight to find his place in todays society and in the world of sports he found a new promised land and his second youth thanks to education and technology.

His introduction to teaching after the recommendations of the Senate in 1995 and of the European Parliament in 2012 contributed to making their practice universal, and there are already more than half a million children in Spain in learning courses (100,000 only in the official program of the Junta de Andaluca) when the number of federated according to the CSD in 2018 was 28,382. Something, saving the differences, similar to athletics that has 85,401 federated (2018) and yet hundreds of thousands of people practice it as an amateur. Curiously, in Spain there were more federated chess than athletics from 1941 to 1960

A game in New York these last few days.

Internet and chess are a perfect marriage. Gone are the times when fans go to a club, with semi-busy schedules in endless smoke evenings, and heatedly discuss this or that position. Now, at any time of the day, there are opponents of your level ready to play the electrical and adrenaline-charged games of 1 minute, the calmest of 25 or the classic of 90. There are also numerous teachers who teach in virtual classrooms, simultaneous sessions and tournaments that replicate competitions such as the Invitational Magnus Carlsen Chess24.com at another level, with comments in 7 languages, and number one in broadcasts of lite tournaments.

The Covid-19 pandemic has promoted the practice of chess as collected by portals such as Chess.com, which with almost 36 million registered users has reached projected figures for the 2021-2030 decade in the last quarter, with 8.5 million games disputed daily. Another website, Lichess.org stores more than 2,000 million games in its databases, of which 10% have been played in the last month. A realistic calculation indicates that annually, adding all the platforms, some 6,000 million. A dizzying figure, unimaginable, although not as much as the number of mathematically different games that could occur: 1 followed by 100,000 zeros!

The growth of chess practice has been exponential these daysdeclares Javier Ochoa from Echagen, President of the Spanish Federation. There has been a great demand for information and parents interested in these days of confinement, since the image we project is not only associated with entertainment, but also with education and culture.

Face-to-face and online chess is the same, but playing in three or two dimensions with the computer screen causes different sports situations. Pressing the clock when time troubles begin gives way to handling the mouse skillfully and quickly. Another example; In a live game there are no mistakes when leaving a piece in a space that is not the chosen one, while in those that are played in cyberspace it sometimes happens that the movement is not completed correctly., with the consequent consequences, sometimes catastrophic.

The question of possible pitfalls They need an in-depth analysis by the FIDE Refereeing Commission, not so much for the super lite competitions but for fans who may be tipped, just like a lecturer when reading with the telepronter. But these are setbacks of youth, of the second youth of chess.

Esports, on the Olympism radar for two years, have positioned themselves even more on the sports scene in this pandemic. In addition to conventional video games, spearheaded by the League of Legends, offline sports have adopted this formula to create their own competitions even beyond the well-known FIFA. Tennis, rugby, sailing they have turned to consoles as a competition formula to multiply audiences. Without going any further, the BRAND vertical has tripled the number of users and more than 15 million followed the Mutua Madrid Open.

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Chess: The second youth of chess - Explica

Thierry Henry has revealed his preference between playing for Arsenal and Barcelona, saying it was like playing chess with Pep Guardiola at the Nou Camp.

The Frenchman is the Gunners all-time top-scorer with 175 goals, forming part of their Invincibles side in the 2003/04 season.

But he moved to Barcelona three years later, winning the Champions League against Manchester United in 2009.

And the 42-year-old has now revealed which side he preferred to play for.

Speaking to Manchester City forward Sergio Aguero on PUMAs Instagram channel, Henry said: At Arsenal I could go wherever I wanted, like when you played with Diego Forlan [at Atletico Madrid].

It was much easier for me at Arsenal because I had either [Dennis] Bergkamp or Kanu.

They liked staying in the middle which allowed me to drop back, move on the right side, left side.

And he compared it to life at the Nou Camp, where the former forward was not so much freedom.

I was at Arsenal, I never thought I was going to leave but I did, Henry said in a later chat with England women's star Nikita Parris.

I went to Barcelona, a different type of game, a different type of style to relearn how to play the game because at Arsenal, Dennis was there, Kanu was there and I could move everywhere up front, come in the middle, get the ball, go on the right and the left.

Then suddenly you arrive at Barcelona and I had [Frank] Rijkaard asking me to stay on the left and then when Pep arrived.

Pep is an amazing coach first and foremost but hes very demanding, very intense and its almost like you play chess with him.

You always want to be a step ahead of what youre doing. To do that you have to stay in your position in order to make the pitch as big as possible for the midfielders to operate what they need to operate.

And you need to make fake runs to take the backline away, to create space for the No.10 on your side because we were playing with one holding midfielder and two No.10s so I always had to make runs in behind to make sure that Andres [Iniesta] was going to get the ball and if you dont you kill the space. And then I started to understand space, move in the space.

It was a different type of game and then once I did adjust and adapt then in 2009 we went on the year of winning everything possible.

It was an amazing time but as you know, Arsenal is in my heart.

It comes as United legend Sir Alex Fergusons true thoughts on Henry have emerged.

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Thierry Henry preferred playing for Arsenal than Barcelona chess with Pep Guardiola - Daily Star