October 2011 CHESS Magazine

IN STOCK NOW!

CHESS Magazine - October 2011 - £3.95 - click here to buy online

UK's most popular CHESS Magazine

Magazine, 60 pages

UK's most popular CHESS Magazine - established 1935! All the regular features of the UK's best-selling CHESS magazine plus more!

• FIDE World Cup, Khanty-Mansiysk - Chess in the Wild West East!This year’s World Cup was as entertaining as it was strong, and proved an audio-visual feast for spectators as Peter Svidler triumphed. Enjoy our in-depth coverage!
• Sants for the Memories! - ‘Born-again’ English GM Matthew Sadler annotates his exciting last-round game from Sants against Jan Smeets. Revealing!
• Russian Super-Final - ‘Svidler on the hoof’ again! Richard Palliser annotates
• A Tale of Two Tournaments - GM Keith Arkell annotates games from Coulsdon and Paignton
• Starry, Starry Knights - GM Stuart Conquest at large... he loses a laptop but, after a bit of digging, uncovers a 19th century chess legend
• The Mating Game - James Essinger is writing a novel - on love, friendship and chess!
• Chess in the 1960s - Our look-back takes us to Bled 1961, which was all about Mischa and Bobby... but Bisguier also played some great chess there
• Overseas News / Home News - A round-up of what’s been happening near and far. English teenager Callum Kilpatrick annotates a win against a GM

Plus more!

Download a pdf file with the extract from this magazine.

Dutch for Chessplayers

Ever wondered how to pronounce 'Euwe'? Or 'Scheveningen'? Or 'Wijk aan Zee'?

Wonder no longer - there is a website which gives guidance on the pronunciation of some chess-related Dutch names and terms...

http://www.heardutchhere.net/duchess.html

Very useful - though I'm not sure I can replicate some of those sounds myself.

August CHESS Magazine

The August CHESS Magazine is out now. Buy it here.

The UK's most popular and comprehensive chess Magazine, established 1935. All the regular features plus the following ... 

• King’s Tournament, Medias - As in 2010, Magnus Carlsen wins... but Sergey Karjakin was right alongside!
• Interview: Boris Gelfand - Part 2 of Boris Gelfand’s exclusive interview with John Saunders
• World Open, Philadelphia - English and American stars Mickey Adams and Gata Kamsky clash in an Armageddon finale
• Commonwealth Championship, South Africa - Nigel Short narrowly failed to keep up with the Jones boy! New Commonwealth champion Gawain Jones annotates his best game.
• County Championship Finals - Steve Giddins reports on a rare success for Surrey against Kent
• Judit Polgar - The best-ever woman player talks candidly to Lars Grahn
• Perfect Preparation - Part 2 of Eddie Dearing’s advice on how to prepare for a game
• Bobby Fischer Comes to London - A look at Nigel Short’s simultaneous display from the film premiere

Plus all the usual features and more besides

To order a copy of the August 2011 CHESS Magazine, click here

New Chess Blogs

I've added a few more chess blogs to the list on the side panel.

FM Steve Giddins is, like me, a former editor of BCM and he has restarted his chess blog, here:

Steve Giddins' Chess Blog

GM Gawain Jones is one of England's top GMs and he has a blog here:

Gawain Jones' Chess Blog

'Full English Breakfast' is not so much a blog as a series of podcasts by GM Stephen Gordon and IM Lawrence Trent and can be found here:

Full English Breakfast

'GingerGM' is GM Simon Williams' chess blog and shop, featuring his popular videos and other other merchandise as well as blog articles.

GingerGM

2011 British Chess Championship

This year's British Chess Championships are being held in Sheffield. There is a very impressive line-up, headed by GMs Mickey Adams, Nigel Short, David Howell, Gawain Jones, Nick Pert and Stephen Gordon, and assisted by some generous sponsorship from Darwin Strategic Ltd.

The official website is http://www.britishchess2011.com/index.htm

Live Commentary by IM Andrew Martin: http://www.livestream.com/leylandchess

Matthew Webb's Chess Blog: http://www.mattywebbchess.com/

Other useful links: The English Chess Forum * The Week in Chess * Live Games * Results *

I'll try to add other links to various blogs, etc, as they become available

Kasimdzhanov's Not Wearing Any Draws

Kasim wants chess to 'go commando'

Former FIDE Champion Rustam Kasimdzanov has sent an open letter to the World Chess Federation with a revolutionary idea: to abolish the draw in chess altogether. 


“This way the expectations of the crowd will never be deceived. There will always be a winner, there will always be blood. (…) It will be good for our sport. Not just sponsors and attention and prizes. It will be essentially good for our game.”


Read the full story on ChessVibes here


And, yes, the only real reason I've blogged it is to be able to use the headline at the top of the blog...


... oh, go on, then. His idea is that, if a longplay game is drawn, it is replayed immediately at ever decreasing time limits, with colours reversed, say, 20 minutes each for the first one, then 10 minutes each, etc, etc, until a game is decisive. That is counted as the score of the game (1-0, 0-1 but not ½-½) and - perhaps most controversially - counted for rating purposes.


All kinds of snags occur, of course. For one thing, it wouldn't work for league or weekend chess as there is no spare time to fit in a series of replays. It might work for a top-level tournament with a limited number of competitors, by way of an exhibition or experimental event (like the Melody Amber tournament) but I can't see it catching on. Many players would be reluctant to put their longplay ratings on the line.


Besides which, what is wrong with a good, honest draw? But the good news is that it is not being proposed by another person from that neck of the woods with a name beginning with K - Kirsan Ilyumzhinov.  Then chess would be in real trouble. His ideas have a bad habit of turning into implemented decisions in a twinkling of an eye and with minimum of thought. Nobody much is likely to take any notice of a second-tier world champion who won his title in a discredited Libyan event shorn of a host of big-name players and which effectively excluded Israeli competitors. Thank heavens, you may well say. And so would I.

July CHESS Magazine

The July CHESS Magazine is now out, edited by me. You can download a sample PDF, buy a copy or take out a subscription by clicking here. In its 60 full-colour ages, there is a huge variety of articles for players of all standards.

For me personally, the big event of the month was conducting a full-length interview with Israeli super-GM Boris Gelfand. The interview was so long that it became necessary to split it into three sections: one section comprised Boris's comments on the recent World Championship Candidates' Matches, which are included in the coverage of the competition, with the more general elements of the interview divided into two more sections, with part one in July and part two in August. Boris was the most generous and courteous of interlocutors, and interviewing him was one of the most pleasurable experiences of my 12-year career as a chess commentator. Boris must be just about the perfect role model for anyone with serious aspirations for a professional career as a player.

We've also got a great game annotated exclusively for us by globe-trotting super-GM Nigel Short from his tournament victory in Angola; coverage of the Nakamura-Ponomariov and Robson-Finegold matches in Saint Louis, with annotations by Richard Palliser; world champion Vishy Anand beating Alexei Shirov in Leon; articles by Lorin D'Costa, Yochanan Afek, Norman Stephenson, Nick Ivell, Adam Raoof, Sean Marsh, Rene Mayer; and of course all the regular features, such as GM Daniel King's How Good is Your Chess?, my look-back through the back pages of the magazine, Find The Winning Continuation and news round-ups.