haha that's awesome

http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7051

these two are well-known in southern Germany. The blond girl was considered a teenage prodigy at the age of 12-13. Then they got into endless wars with the chess federation and moved to Croatia. Everything went pretty quiet around them until she appeared at some open 2007 where she put in a 2500+ performance. Later strong evidence of cheating was discovered, apparently her father analysed her positions on a laptop in the hotel room and signaled the best moves. That was the last german chess heard of her, until this bizarre reappearence in New Zealand.

weird..

She's quite attractive so I'd expect that they'll find it harder and harder to go unnoticed as this gains more attention.

The funny thing is there is no reason that wouldn't work in a 'real' man vs machine match as well. I just ran the position on Houdini for a few minutes and it also happily gives away the material to keep its 'winning position'.

Since it is up two exchanges the computer has to see it loses at least 6 'pawns' by force to not play c4 which I imagine would likely take days even on sick hardware. No computer's going to take the draw there, well except deep blue.

Amazon just recommended the classic "The Art of Checkmate" to my junk mailbox and I was looking for a book along those lines. I already own the hokey but good "How to Beat you Dad at Chess" and was wondering if anyone knew if there is too much overlap, if "The Art" has many exercises, and what the quality of the print is on the recent addition.

A current book that I had been looking forward to is "1001 Deadly Checkmates" by John Nunn which I recently browsed at the bookstore. The content is great but I couldn't buy it or recommend it because, amazingly for Gambit, the print and layout make it unusable. The coordinates are conspicuous and clutter the pages, and the pages themselves are semi-transparent which allows you to see ghost images from the other side in the diagrams you are looking at on the current one.

What's particularly sad for the computer here is that, at least in Houdini's case, it doesn't even play c4 thinking it's a win. Houdini only needs to reach depth 19 (which it can do quite quickly) to evaluate c4 at 0.00. It thinks it's creating a drawn position, but STILL chooses c4 over accepting the draw by the 50-moves rule, presumable because it's programmed to assume that it's more likely to turn a dead drawn position into a win than it is to lose that position. I have no idea how deep it would have to look into the position to realize that it is in fact lost after c4, and that the 50-move draw is preferable. So far with about 10 minutes of searching on a crappy piece of hardware, I've gotten it up to depth 28 and it still thinks c4 is drawing... would it make this blunder at standard time controls, and with high end hardware? Possibly... it's an interesting question.

lol machines

Did Nakamura just think the strategy up as the game progressed or is it something that he or others had prepared?

I think he had prepared it and the previous 20 games or so went something like 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 1-0. So it is conceivable that a human could beat a computer with this trick in a "real" man versus machine match, but you have to get very lucky for the computer to willingly play into such a closed position. This ICC computer plays all kinds of silly openings, apparently.

I know I'm a few weeks late here, but thanks for the replies. From what I remember, I was worried about white pushing his queen side pawns and I didn't think I could stop them. If you guys are right and it is possibly drawn it didn't matter much with my play. lol I managed to make some stupid moves and allowed him to win.

Once I get this "mental discipline" thing worked out I'm going to shoot up a few rating classes overnight. Any day now...

Have you check out Reinfeld's 1001 Chess Combinations? http://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Winni.../dp/0879801115

Its kind of hard to call a combo collections book a classic but I really think it is. It just has such a nice variety of well organized and thematic tictacs. The print is also quite nice. Its a book I've purchased around a half dozen times as I move from one locale to another!

If he's going for books with mating patterns, I'd think this Reinfeld book would be more useful http://www.amazon.com/Brilliant-Chec...tt_at_ep_dpi_1

Dear opponent,

Your several draw offers communicated adequately to me your opinion that the endgame was drawn, your chat-box issued opinion was unnecessary and superfluous. I felt that since all the potential winning chances were on my side it was at least interesting to explore a few other ideas just to be sure. In conclusion, go suck an egg.

Love,
Kyle

(P.S. you were right it was drawn)

standard

I feel like I saw an article a couple of years ago with Kasparov playing a game of Xiangqi (he had just learnt the rules) against a strong player. I thought it was on chessbase, but can't find it now. Anyone else recall this?

It think it was Shogi, not Xiangqi: http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=4544

yeah that's it. I learnt to play Xiangqi the other day, but Shogi looks another order of magnitude more difficult to learn.

Rybka cluster. Has anyone used it here? if so share your story

How often do people make moves on based on feel? Or I guess a better question would be, is it okay to make moves on feel?

I ask because in a current correspondence game I have going on, I thought a certain move was winning big time, but couldn't figure out the continuation. I ended up making another move, only to realize that the move I "felt" was correct, was the right one shortly after my opponent made his reply. Or so I think anyways. I still need to check it after the game is over with, but I'm pretty sure it works, and works big time.

Obviously it's not like the world would have ended if I was wrong, but I'm wondering how many people would have played the move just based on a "feeling."

At my level (like 1700), Dan Heisman calls this "handwaving the analysis" and identifies it as a big mistake. I think intuition to identify the candidate move is really useful, but I think you have to go ahead and at least grind out a couple of variations to see where it actually leads.

Also, some huge number of amazing chess moves in grandmaster games are amazing bc of being totally un-intuitive (though whether they tickled the gm's intuition at the time I couldn't say)--they look like they shouldn't work, but amazingly they do.

It's kind of something that I don't like about chess--for a really long time I played by intuition with the idea that it would lead me to good moves. In many ways it makes the game less fun to sit down and analyse the moves (when I don't feel like doing it).

It's funny to be how much chess is about those seemingly contradictory ideas. You want to train your instincts and pattern recognition to the point where the right move just "feels" right to you in as many situations as possible, but on the other hand you want to discipline yourself to basically never play a move just because it feels right without calculating the consequences.

It's fine to do that as long as you're good Silman (I think) has a position in one of his books where he says that he would make this move with barely any calculation just because the position was calling for the move.

I actually had Heisman on the mind when I was thinking about making the move. Not specifically because of anything he's said, but because he's a coach and I kept thinking "If he was my coach and I played this move, what would he say?" I thought of his ICC videos and pictured him going over it and saying something like "White told me after the game he played this move on a feeling. It turns out the move works, but at white's level he doesn't have the experience to play this way and he should have done something else."


I like that I found what I believe is the correct move, but as you said, I don't want to play it without calculating things. I'm pretty terrible about doing that, and inevitably have a move played against me that I wasn't expecting and can't meet. Happened later in the same game in fact. Not a fun feeling.

I will say it was nice to have a feeling about the move. It's the first time I've ever had a real feeling about a move like that. Hopefully it's a good sign that I'm seeing things better, and not just a one off.

That's exactly the answer I was expecting. Good is something I am not. lol


Thanks for the replies. Much appreciated.

Team 45 45 league, round 4. Match is tied 1.5:1.5 going into my match on the top board, my team (1-1-1) facing the undefeated section leaders (3-0-0) needing this match to stay alive.

After two tense hours of fairly solid play for this level and a very tight game all-around, we both have about five minutes left on our clock and I'm trying to figure out ways to angle for an edge in the coming endgame. ... Then he hangs a queen to a simple tactic, good game.

http://www.chessvideos.tv/chess-game...r.php?id=41795