Las Vegas - gambling vs. games (and Khalifman)

I just got back from a short trip to Las Vegas. Among other things I was impressed by how many people are actually glued to the slot machines. The atmosphere reminded me of chess tournaments (in a sense that people are stuck to their chairs for days), but obviously a lot more people are into slot machines than into French defense. In some ways, you'd think chess would be a lot more appealing to folks who want to kill time, but perhaps the amount of effort and dedication required is too much. Even if you win some cash in an open chess tournament, that happens only once per trip. Perhaps it is as simple as the fact that 99.99% of people care about money a lot more than about any pawn structure nuances. Below is the picture of Caesar's Palace hotel where Alexander Khalifman won his FIDE Champion title in 1999. Apparently at the time, nobody in town knew about the event going on, and if they did, they probably would not care.

Khalifman, incidentally is an awesome chess player, often underestimated because he won his title without beating Kasparov, however as it often happens - lesser (compared to Kasparov) players can have a lot of very instructive games in their collection. I have a copy of Khalifman: Life and Games in Russian, and each game seems to contain a sacrifice that would win a beauty prize in a major tournament. His opening repertoir is sharp and extensive, so you'd find an instructive example from any major opening. It's too bad that his playing strength declined since the period of 1999-2000.

Assessing a position (without a computer!?)

Watching another great video from chessvibes, I was amused to hear how even a top GM (Movsesian) is careful to not assess a position without adding something along the lines of "I of course have not checked this position with the computer". Instead he prefers to say "this felt very comfortable during the game".



If GM's don't fully trust their own judgement -what can mere mortals like myself then say about a position - in a dynamic position the chances of me being wrong are likely more than 50%... But then of course there is a difference between knowing the 'truth' and just playing good moves.

'Chess is Cool' is actually kind of cool

I must admit I have gotten quite addicted to different tech related podcasts - those turn boring exercising activities (biking or running) into real fun, and make you feel productive. I finally checked out Alexandra Kosteniuk's Chess is cool podcasts, and was pleased with the few episodes that I listened to. They provide some reasonable chess tips and the host shares some of the stories of her preparation for tournaments. So if you are a chess player, and listen to podcasts, you've got to check out her show (click on the logo). I think chess podcasts can be quite useful and entertaining, especially if they are done in dialogue/interview style.



On a personal note, I've met Alexandra Kosteniuk over the chess board when I was as old as she is on this photo (Petrosian's chess club in Moscow), and I recall in that previous life I even had a positive score against her! I did not have as much determination though ...

Chess on linux

Chess on Linux, well, is possible. Since my windows installation went down last week, I've been experimenting with running different chess (and other) software on Ubuntu 7.10 and learning whether migrating to Linux is really as painful as people say. A few discoveries:

- Wine does miracles. Both Chessbase Light 6.0 and Chessbase Light 2007 run in Wine (the 2007 version must be installed via Wine, the ancient 6.0 version can run from a windows partition)

- Blitzin does work from Wine, but moves get input with a bit of delay (very fast UI is the main benefit of Blitzin)

- Jin is nice, but I lost a 3 minute game on time, and I want to blame it on the 0.5 delay that the UI has for displaying the moves - you hear the sound of opponent's move first, and only later see the actual move on the board. Note that I had tried the web based version of Jin before on Windows, and it worked perfectly.

- There are a lot of tools that are still missing and that I have not tried to find an alternative for yet, like Palview, Windows media recorder, and Windows live writer - I pretty much relied fully on them for making blog entries and videos for my youtube channel.

All in all, the amount of free software on Ubuntu, and decent interoperability with windows programs really put me on the fence as to whether or not to go back to windows full time for my home computing needs.

Corus 2009 is in progress

One of the major chess tournaments of the year is now in progress, and as usual you can follow the games online (with your engine running the background) and see annotations rapidly appearing on different websites and so on. I'd like to emphasize one amazing resource though - youtube press conference videos from last year's event. Carlsen, Anand and Topalov go over their games, show what they saw and what they missed during the game. It feels like you are almost present there and want to help them pick up the magnetic pieces that those super-GMs keep dropping on the floor. I really hope they put up this year's post-mortems on youtube the same way!!

Attacking Chess - seeing the entire board

Jiganchine - Trotchanovich, Fraser Valley Championship, 2008.

White to move.

How can White bring his bishop and knight effectively into the game?

Again, a video is worth a thousand pictures:

See my youtube account for a couple more chess videos.

Attacking Chess - opposite coloured bishops (video)

If you have read a few of Mark Dvoretsky's books (like I have), you'd know that opposite coloured bishops are his specialty both in the middlegame and in the endgame. Positional Play volume has a special chapter about importance of middlegame initiative whenever you have bishops of opposite colours.

Here is a simple position that could have also illustrated his ideas fairly well:

Jiganchine -Trotchanovich, Keres memorial, 2007

White to move.

For a detailed explanation and solution - watch this video I made: