Celeb Chessplayer No. 954

Frances Barber is a highly accomplished and very attractive British actress. In today's (25 April) Telegraph, she mentions that she is a chess player...

"I love playing chess with a friend. He's a special friend. He's not an actor and he's a very good chess player, but I'm not elaborating further – he's so new that something might go wrong."

Though not wishing to spoil Ms Barber's chances with said special friend, it would be interesting to know his identity - if indeed he is a 'very good chess player' as she claims.

Bolton Easter Congress

I'm testing some new code for displaying games in an online viewer on this blog. I'm using Chess Viewer Deluxe, written by Nikolai Pilafov and based on Michael Keating's very popular MyChessViewer which I used to use for BritBase. It looks pretty good and, unlike most viewers to date, allows you to move pieces around on the board. It was quite easy to set up. I might well start using this for Britbase proper.

For testing purposes, here are three games from the Bolton Easter Congress sent to me by Mick Norris and Rod Middleton.

(2020 editorial note: this blog post has long since been overtaken by time and the original code used to display it is no longer allowed by modern browsers - but you can still enjoy the games which now appear in pgn4web format - JS)