Lip Service

There are many stop motion chess animations available on Youtube, but this clip by Joel Osborne stands above most of the rest.

"Check Animate" - A Stop Motion Chess Animation (16:42) • 'This animation is my final project for my BA (Hons) degree course in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol.'

From the description: 'The production is an animation of a real, historical game of chess played between Henry Atkins and Herbert Jacobs in London in 1915.'

A Gentleman and a Scholar

Which of GM Lothar Schmid's (1928–2013) many exploits will be remembered the longest? His near win of the 2nd ICCF World Correspondence Championship (1956)? His arbiter's role in the 1972 Fischer - Spassky Title Match, the 1978 Karpov - Korchnoi Title Match, the 1986 Kasparov - Karpov Title Match (KK3), and the 1992 Fischer - Spassky Rematch? His fabulous collection of chess books?

I think it will be the books.

Chess NAGs

While I was writing last week's post, Informant No.1, Game No.1, I included an awkward explanation:-

A '?' on Black's 9th leads to a plus-over-minus on White's 10th, which is awarded a '!'. A couple of White's subsequent moves are also awarded a '!', after which Black is lost.

Certain that there must be a better way to use the 'plus-over-minus' notation, I discovered Wikipedia's page Numeric Annotation Glyphs, which equates various chess notation symbols to Unicode. Here's a table of the relevant symbols and codes.

‼	8252	'‼' vs. '!!'
⁇	8263	'⁇' vs. '??'
⁉	8265	'⁉' vs. '!?'
⁈	8264	'⁈' vs. '?!'
□	9633	Wikipedia shows '9632' (which is ■)
∞	8734	See also Unclear Positions (and follow ups)
⩲	10866
⩱	10865
±	177
∓	8723
⨀	10752
⟳	10227
→	8594
↑	8593
∆	8710
⌓	8979
⇔	8660
⇗	8663
⟫	10219
⟪	10218
✕	10005
⊥	8869

Now here's the same awkward explanation using Unicode:-

A '?' on Black's 9th leads to a '±' on White's 10th, which is awarded a '!'. A couple of White's subsequent moves are also awarded a '!', after which Black is lost.

Looks good, but more trials necessary... Thanks, Wikipedia!

Working with Wonderboy

After the little detour for Carlsen on Confidence, let's continue with More Early Carlsen, which was based on GM Agdestein's book about Magnus Carlsen, titled 'Wonderboy'. After writing those posts, I turned my attention to the subject of chess teaching and picked up the book 'The Chess Instructor 2009' (New in Chess, 2008), edited by Jeroen Bosch and Steve Giddins. The book is a collection of 16 essays about -- you guessed it -- chess instruction, primarily for children.

Here I was surprised and pleased to find 'Chapter 15 - Simen Agdestein: Working with Magnus', a short, six-page chapter which summarizes the early material in 'Wonderboy' (New in Chess, 2004), and continues where 'Wonderboy' left off, when IM Carlsen became GM Carlsen. Here, for example, is one anecdote from that chapter.

After Magnus became a GM, Garry Kasparov was in Norway in connection with a film that was made on Magnus and he suggested that Magnus should play fewer tournaments and train more. Kasparov also gave Magnus a little homework: 'Analyze four losses and spend at least four hours on each game.' That meant about 16 hours of work and he was only given five days on the assignment. I suggested we could do the job together, but it just wasn’t so tempting for Magnus and he actually declined an offer from Kasparov of a full time coaching program. He rather wanted to just play and have fun.

Carlsen eventually changed his mind. In another recent post, Kasparov at 50, I noted that one of the ex-World Champion's post-retirement accomplishments was

Training: Carlsen (Sep 2009 to Feb 2010; NB: Carlsen said, 'Working with Garry Kasparov over the last twelve months has been a unique experience')

What was the film and where can we see it? I'll tackle that some other time. At the end of his 'Working with Magnus' essay, Agdestein offered 'three favorite books on chess teaching':-

• 'My Great Predecessors' by Kasparov
• 'Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy' by John Watson
• 'Fundamental Chess Endings' by Karsten Mueller and Frank Lamprecht (also mentioned in 'Wonderboy')

Something tells me that 'Working with Magnus' is not the last word from either GM Agdestein or New in Chess.

A Big Hole in Chessvibes

Oops! A few weeks ago, on my World Chess Championship Blog, I wrote a post about London Candidates - Second Week. The post was basically a set of links to different primary resources for the 2013 Candidates tournament, which I later extended to include rounds played after the second week.

One of those resources was Chessvibes.com, which had some great content and comments about the tournament, destined to go down in chess history as one of the great chess events of all time. A few weeks after writing the post, the Chessvibes links stopped working, and pointed instead to the first page in the site's 'Archive for Reports'. Scrolling down to the time period covering the Candidates tournament, the archive shows only this...

...where nearly all content between 15 March and 25 April is missing. A Chessvibes post, Back up, dated 28 April explained,

After a downage of almost two days, and one of the most unpleasants weekends we've ever had, were finally back up. So what happened? Well, our hosting provider's fire alarm went off on Friday night, and the sprinklers in the data centre then damaged many hard drives, including ours.

The post, which could have been titled 'Back up But No Backup', went on to admit that the site was 'still missing quite some content', and nearly a month later I guess that it will be permanently missing. Fortunately, we always have the Archive.org Wayback Machine: Internet Archive : http://www.chessvibes.com/. My previous experience with Archive.org is that it is normally a year or two behind the current web, but for Chessvibes.com, the most recent crawl is currently 20 April 2013.

Is all of the missing Chessvibes content present and accounted for? I can't say. Are the user comments intact? They seem to be present, but I doubt they are complete. Will I change the links on my 'Second Week' post? No, but I'm glad to know that they are still working in at least one corner of the web.

St.Louis Chess Mural

I'm always impressed when I see a new chess mural. This one is located in St.Louis, the current 'chess capital' of the USA.

Chess Mural on Tower Grove © Flickr user pasa47 under Creative Commons.

The photo appears to capture a work in progress; see "Allowing The Choir To Paint:" Artist Grace McCammond And The Boys And Girls Club Create A New Mural.

Informant No.1, Game No.1

In The Language of Logic, I copied the explanation of the Informant code system given in Informant no.1. Here's a copy of game no.1 from that same Informant.

To play through the complete game, see...

Vladimir Simagin vs Alexey Sokolsky; corr-1 1966
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1125291

...on Chessgames.com. The first Informant didn't give the names of the annotators, and we can see at a glance that the notes are very basic. A '?' on Black's 9th leads to a plus-over-minus on White's 10th, which is awarded a '!'. A couple of White's subsequent moves are also awarded a '!', after which Black is lost. The analysis gives the impression that Black was in deep trouble after the 9th move.

I'm always reluctant to use an engine to analyze a correspondence game between two masters, because they undoubtedly spent many, many hours analyzing the different positions before making each move. Stepping through this game with an engine reveals a wealth of sidelines and complications, none of which can be explored for a short blog post like this one. The engine considers the position after White's 10th to be roughly balanced and offers several suggestions for improving Black's subsequent play.

Also worth noting is the Rabar opening classification attached to the game ('R00'). I discussed the Rabar codes once before in Explaining Dynamics with Symbols, and the first Informant used around 75 of its 240 pages to explain the classification system. (It used 140 pages to present its 466 games.)

When we consider that, in the 1960s, the Informants and their symbols were a revolutionary system for distributing chess knowledge, we can appreciate how far our knowledge of the game has progressed in the nearly 50 intervening years. The language of logic transcends words.