Fianchetto

Had a lot of fun this week heading down the Championships, which have been played at Glasgow Academy, in Kelvinbridge.

I played the morning lightning tourney, yesterday, on the sensory boards (!) and got 3/6, although narrowly seemed to have missed getting the Grading prize

There are some games of this on the net, but the names are all wrong - I salvaged the 3 games of mine I could find…

Browse them here - I have annotated them a bit too

My congratulations to Evis who *did* get the grading prize (the under 1750! one) in the blitz tourney this morning - excellent stuff from the Maestro

The Championships themselves have seen the 2 players I know well, doing *very* well - Allan Brown stormed to a 3.5 in round 5, and has slightly faltered since, but his performance rating gave evidence of his subtle skills. Allan is a great presence at Phones chess club, where I play, he is always keen to instruct us lesser players and I am happy he has done us all very proud with his participation at the Champs.

Also, my good friend Chris (with Blair in this pic) has done very well, after a great start then disastrous 2nd game (which was live on the internets!).

Good luck to both of them in today’s finale.

Check the Scottish Chess 2008 website - with all games, results and live coverage of top boards.

The tournament is very exciting with Markos (GM) still leading and unbeaten but he can be caught still… the young Uzbek greatly impressed yesterday against Markos - getting a draw in a Sveshnikov Sicilian.

…but only english schools it seems. Still, an interesting scheme to provide chess sets for free to all schools who apply. They look slightly ugly but are intriguingly meant to be near indestructible sets made from some form of durable plastic.

David Bronstein  
died this week . Basically a one-time unofficial world
champion (see his postwar match with Botvinnik) I was lucky enough to
be introduced to his play by the gift of a book, Sorceror’s Apprentice,
one of the best chess books out there, 200 open games is great for e4 players and for the witty analysis and ideas(much taken from his regular Soviet era chess columns). The Bronstein line Be2 in the Latvian (which was most in vogue in his epoch) is a classic idea of course…

-  Few long obits been written:

ChessBase (with ace pictures)

the week in chess one by mark crowther is really interesting.

I was looking at the tribute on chessgames.com

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=16521, lots of comments/kibbitzing there.

Bill Hartston in the Independent on Bronstein

Author of the excellent book, Chess for Tigers, Simon Webb was killed by his son last week. Details are unclear still; Simon Webb had been living in Sweden for some time with his family. The article is pretty grim reading.

Simon Webb was a former pupil of my grandpa who gave me a signed copy of his book when I was 10. My first chess book, and probably one that served me a lot of use, as it is a classic of chess psychology basically - getting the reader to understand the over-the-board nature of any chess match, pre ICC. It’s quite sneaky and diabolic in places which I always liked as many chess books skirt this topic I think, despite it being a dominant feature of club chess, for better or worse. Here’s a good set of tips he submitted online.

PWan

The Yahoo video search is something else, seems better than the recently announced Google one. Try searching for those ole chessnuts, Chic, chess, chests etc

Not that you’d know from reading the SPORTS sections of the UK newspapers, but both Short and Adams have been doing rather well in the strongest Chess tournament for a while, with both Kramnik, J Polgar and Anand taking part. Short got off to a good start but is now just level with others such as er.. World Champ Vladimir Kramnik, while UK no 1, Michael Adams is joint 3rd, narrowly off the lead and with les blancs in the next game. He accidentally walked into a drawn game after reaching a winning position in an endgame of a Petroff.

Round 9 is over now with a fair few still to go. The Bulgar Vesselin Topalov is first on 6 points (remember his classic encounter with Kasparov’s rooks a few years ago?).

Oh, but let’s just bang on about looser Henman shall we…

I have been doing some double checking on the notion of triple checking. I found this fascinating article on chess cafe.

“Did anyone ever deliver a triple check during a game of chess? Yes, very
probably, if he was playing in Italy more than 120 years ago. To be honest,
to this day I haven’t been able to find a single specimen of such a check
given in actual play, but this was possible in theory thanks to the suspended
Pawn.”

..so Kramnik retains his title after Leko seems to have missed a draw in the final game of the WCC (see middlegame …h5 move, not …N x B). (final score 7 - 7).

Dobra Trafika. It is on Koruni between Sumavska and Chodska. The 10 and 16 trams stop almost right in front of it. Stop Sumavska. “beware, café is hidden behind a newspaper and cigar store, very silent place during day, sometimes crowded at nights”

Prague chess cafe! Woo hoo! And Marathon is another one…full of theology students, apparently.

Other things to do in Prague - includes long list of second hand book shops.

the new proposal by that freakin’ nut and megalomaniac, and thus worthy club chess player, Ilyumzhinov, is like a Invisible Cities chapter, distorted to cheese by the Disneyland marketing team.

I would like to go to Dubai to play golf on that hotel , after learning how to play golf first of course.

check out Flo’s site - linked in the panel, left, too! he’s gonna be in Vienna soon, where there is a mega set of big chess boards in the park in the north east of the city, and also the best chess shop I have ever been in for being friendly and enthusiastic about the game to patsers like myself.