FIDE World Chess Champion Ruslan Ponomariov sent an Open letter to the members of ACP. He said: "The latest FIDE decisions regarding the World Championship granted exclusive privileges to GM Garry Kasparov. ... The match was unilaterally cancelled by the FIDE president, Mr. Ilyumzhinov. Unfortunately, starting with the General Assembly in Bled, the FIDE board exclusively defended the interests...

I am collecting names, addresses and e-mail addresses of chess players who are interested in playing in FIDE Rated events to be held in Oregon in 2004 and beyond. There probably will be 3 or 4 events a year. These will be invitational events. If you are interested in being invited please let me know. Some Details below and others are still being worked out. The first event is set for June 5-13,...

Hi all, If you visit www.madaboutchess.com and register for the forum, you will find that you can post FEN positions, and the forum turns them into a graphical chessboard - perfect for discussion positions. I did it by extending the bbcode in PHPBB to have a new pair of tags - and , which you surround the FEN position with. Feel free to go and have a play :)

I hope you enjoy watching this short chess film called "CheckMating" http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/content/atom_7

Another Tactic of the Old School has been added to my web site. Try and slove it if you can at http://amchesscoaching.com Coach Leopold

It seems Ponomariov I still willing to puruant to the agreement that he and FIDE had when he won the title. (and here I'm not talkign abotu reunification because ultimately it appears the parites couldn't agree on that. Kasparov appearantly wouldn't accept draw odds and the time factor change) I wonder if FIDE will honor their original agreement and let him defend the title. see this...

I just replayed the video of the 1997 film Titanic and I noticed that the actor who played Captain Smith is Bernard Hill. http://imdb.com/name/nm0384060/ However, Bernard Hill is also the name of a vetern chess master. http://www.64.com/uscf/ratings/10103908 The age is about the same. Does anybody know if this is the same

A few months ago, on 20 December 2003, David Norwood offered a chess trivia quiz in his column for The Telegraph. According to an account at http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1373, a follow-up column with the answers was set to run one week later. But this subsequent column was never published. I have checked the on-line archive for all of The Telegraph's chess columnists (Pein,...

Der Humorist, April 12, 1851, gives a report on a letter written to Szen, raising some interesting questions and some facts I did not know. First, Szen is called the city archivist of Pesth; I did not know his profession. More interesting is that the letter speaks of an invitation written to Szen by a Lord. While I would imagine that Szen would receive a formal invitation to London 1851 around...

Here's a subject which everyone may say has been done to death, but it really hasn't been 'done' in the past few years. So everyone belly-up to the bar and give us your opinion of the ten best chess books ever written (or in your collection at least)... Here's mine, starting with the best, #1: 1) "The Test of Time", Garry Kasparov. A superb book, a collection of Kasparov's best games,...

I'm directing my club's 2nd Annual William Sandbothe Memorial this weekend (http://www.quadcitychess.com/sandbothe.html). The advance entries look pretty strong and the prizes are fairly high (for my area, anyway), so we're expecting about 50 players -- not too shabby for a Midwest event not run by Goichberg. Anyways, the advertised prizes for the five-round, G/130 event a 1st: $500 +...

Lapshun's Complaint Yury Lapshun is one of the top scholastic coaches in the US. Lapshun is himself an International Master and near grandmaster strength player who played in the last US Championship. Many of his young students have performed well in the national championships and in the World Youth Championships. As one of his rival chess coaches put it, "Lapshun is the best". Now, however,...

My son is narrowing down his college choices. He's got some great options (admitted at Caltech, Harvey Mudd, Columbia, Northwestern, Washington University) and chess is not going to be the *determining* factor, but it's certainly not irrelevant. Despite what Harvey Mudd's web site (http://www.hmc.edu/admin/admission/hmclub.html) says, we've learned that there is no chess club there, and...

This post is written out of a scholarly interest in a well-known 'quotation'. In the RGCM thread, 'Civility' (27 April 2003), Jerome Bibuld wrote: "Although you may be a United Statesian, you seem to forget that, in Uhmuhrikka, when we hear the word, 'culture', we reach for our guns...." In response (27 April 2003), Simon ('Chapman billy') wrote: "...The philistine attitude of Goering seems,...

For the second time I have been playing chess at my club and there is a small boy who is playing someone else but keeps blurting "check!" "Check!" over and over. The other small child that he was playing would immediately move leadign to another "check!" This must have gone on for about 3 minutes. That may not seem long and I really can't explain why it annoys me so much but I find it very...

from http://www.olimpbase.org "OlimpBase has been designed to bring complete data for all the Chess Olympiads played in the history. As you must have noticed so far only 1927-1974 period has been done. The rest is missing. We want to be ready for October 14th, the Calvia take off. We are growing dynamically, but we are still missing some data. We are working on Haifa 1976 and Malta 1980...

More than 3000 annotated games at: http://www.angelfire.com/games3/smartbridge/

Playing chess for win/fun seems to have gone out of the window. Every top player seem to have concerned only about their ratings. They are so much afraid of going down on ratings that they would much prefer to settle with a draw against another top player. I am tired of chess and chess icons. I better move to poker now.

A chess master who is friends with the participants has just related the following story: At the conclusion of the 2003 US Chess Championship, three women were tied for the woman's prize. They were Irina Krush, Jennifer Shahade and Anna Hahn. All three of them are friends. Therefore, since both Irina Krush and Jennifer Shahade had previously won the US Woman's Championship, they decided to give...

Everywhere I turn, I see recommendations to study the endgame. I am a club player, and I have no doubt that studying the endgame will improve my overall game, but I'm not clear on exactly HOW to study the endgame. Are we talking about mate-in-2 puzzles? Or general principles? Are master endgames too subtle for club players to learn from? Or should we just buy a few endgame books? I know the...