Their arrogance is the problem. They scheduled the US Championship at the same time as the world championship to stop Zatonskih, Abrahamyan and Goletiani from going. FIDE announced the world championship 6 months ago but the AF4C people feel that they are more important.What a bunch of dicks! Ray Gordon

The AF4C screwed the players out of more than $20K. Sam Sloan

Hi, I'm interested in mainly of the Mephisto, Fidelity or Novag models but will entertain others. So it is time to clean out your closet and get some money for those machines. Please let me know what you have and how much do you want for it. Thanks Charles

With the very strong rumors on the street that U.S.Chess Live is on its last leg and is soon to go out of business for good, like Kasparov Chess and Chess 21 before it, WCN is pleased to announce a special "WELCOME TO WCN" program for all existing U.S. Chess Live Members. We are offering every U.S. Chess Live member, who is not a current WCN Gold Member, a full year of Gold Membership on WCN. ...

Bobby Fischer met the press today, his hair and beard neatly trimmed but his opinions still bristling, and declared he was finished with a chess world he regards as corrupt. The flawed chess genius Fischer said he was happy to be in Iceland, which granted him citizenship to pave the way for his release from detention in Japan, where he was held on a US extradition warrant. In a rambling news...

Reading an article from Feb 1851 talking about London 1851, they maention players they hope will come. Two of the names are unfamiliar. I know all of the names Cochrane, Kieseritzky, Devinck, Laroche, Lecrivain, Sasias, Loewenthal, Calvi, Lasa, Anderssen, Jaenisch, Szen, Schulten, Stanley, Turner. Does anyone know who they might be talking about when they refer to Kusserman and Schumaker?

Everybody knows it since Gregory Mendel and his genetics, and mathematicians knew always that in order to investigate a complex situation you should concentrate on its one aspect only (one at the time). Thus in order to undestand the chess history it should be very helpful to concentrate just on the financial angle. By writing down the budgets and expenses

I can do the website better than Mig or Paul Hoffman. My website www.samsloan.com speaks for itself. The USCF and AF4C should ask me to do their websites. Can anyone make that suggestion to them? Thank you. Sam Sloan

As I recall, it was an almost dead-equal rook endgame with a single open file, but capablanca had the slight advantage of having his king closer to the open file. This seemed to make all the difference that he needed to win. I want to say Capablanca had black. I also want to say this was against Corzo, but I've looked at all the capa-corzo games I have and none look familiar. And it may not...

What happened to Zhu Chen? I do not see any of her results and I noticed in Round 1 there was no Game 8..I am assuming she was seeded 8th..EJAY

What do you say about the AF4C robbing the players out of $20,000?

The publisher of my book, Everyone's 2nd Chess Book, has sold the entire lot to a 3rd party distributor; I am not sure who this is. Anyway, I was able to purchase a box for autographing. I will sell single copies, including postage, for $17, which is actually less than you would pay to get an unautographed copy if you had to pay for shipping. I will also sell a dozen or more autographed copies...

I have a datbase window open in Chessbase 9. One of the columns is headed ECO, for the ECO code number. Most of the games have an ECO code, but about 20% don't. I don't want to write these in by hand - say by F2 and inserting the code manually after looking it up - so is there a way of getting Chessbase to do it automatically? Alan --

I did answer a recent email letter from a participant of rgc* but I got in return only the following message: "This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

Brunel University, London UK School of Social Sciences and Law, Centre for the Study of Expertise Applications are invited for a postdoctoral position to work on an ESRC funded project on 'Modelling perception, memory, and problem solving in chess novices and experts'. This ambitious project aims to extend the CHREST computational model so that it will simulate most of the key empirical...

The Last Blunder The last post from San Diego... The last blunder of the US Championship turns out to have been made many months ago. As the saying goes, to err is human but to really screw things up you need a computer. Due to an error in an Excel spreadsheet formula used to calculate the prize fund distribution, the itemized prizes add up to around $20,000 more than the prize fund of $253,600....

Hi guys, I wrote an essay called The Eighth Seal: Queen and Rook on the Eighth Rank In this essay I examine, as you may have guessed, a few examples with queen and rook on the opponent's eighth rank. The last one is the critical position in Spassky - Tal 1958 where Spassky misses the win. The essay is in

Here it is, with very minor, cosmetic editing. Actually, I typed from my hard copy only the regular text. There was more, as you can learn from the text itself. Enjoy, Wlod *************************************

You're history. See you in May. You will get what you deserve. Sam Sloan

From reading your various posts, I get the impression that many of the regulars here are over 60 years old. It is a shame that you folks have so much venom for each other. Soon there are some of you who are bound to pass on, and you have lived your lives hating each other, Sam Sloon, etc. Very sad that after a life-time knowing each other, none of you can be friends.