English Chess Forum

A woman is filling the form for me and say it Needs the address and phone number of the place of residence, what shall I do? If the "form" is the entry form for the tournament, your address in Iran. It's so the organisers can send stuff through the post, but they probably wouldn't bother ...

The critical position, it seems, is after 27.Rb5 Bd8?? which is a failure to rise to the occasion - 27... a6! would have put the question to both players. I certainly missed 27. .. a6 until an engine found it for me after the game. It goes on to suggest that I take the Knight on a5 and then give up...

[Event "Crewe Major"] [Site "Crewe"] [Date "2017.10.15"] The Open was using duplicate scoresheets. Are the games likely to be published? The chess-results server could be used, given its capacity to store pgns. Here's my first ever win against Mike Surtees. For once I ...

I really don't like time controls being determined by what the clock can handle. Fact of life though. The FIDE 90 30 standard was originally going to be something like 40 moves in 75 minutes with an extra 15 added and 30 second increments from move 41. The 1990s Mk1 DGT wasn't able to handle this. ...

Another significant difference is that the 3000 tells you which session you are in. I consider that a big plus. For playing hours of four hours or less, you should probably scrap intermediate time controls and only have one session. That way you avoid the grey area where the clock doesn't properly ...

What happened to Slough? Ben Purton took over the management of the squad and renamed it first to Slough Sharks and then Sambuca Sharks. A merger with Grantham followed to create today's Grantham Sharks. He also uses the name "Sons of Anarchy" for the rapidplay squad (this year's winners)

Which teams have been around the longest in the 4NCL? Barbican were there from the beginning, but took a break in the third season when the BCF tried to set up a rival league. The initial 6 from 1993-94 were Invicta Knights Maidstone Barbican Covent Garden Slough North West Eagles Bristol Bristol (...

Stewart Reuben wrote: 'Breaking the stalemate'?

Dictionaries give two meanings to this, one being where it is used as an alternative to "deadlock" and the other as the technical chess term.

http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/stalemate

I have to agreed with Alan here, that we need to be looking at for the 4ncl and big british events to used the DGT 3000 They all went digital years ago. There's not a lot to choose between the DGT2010 and DGT3000 other than the display of seconds throughout the game. It's Congresses, Leagues and ot...

'we machine learned something that's nearly as good as Rybka'...... Agreed, but it would be interesting to see evaluations, particularly of openings which weren't influenced by the prejudices or prior opinions of its programmers. Up to a point contemporary GMs supply this, by playing ideas that eng...

Julie Denning wrote:you're no doubt thinking of a Britten Norman Islander or Trislander operated by Aurigny.

There was also the Short Skyvan, which as its name suggests was styled as a van with wings. They certainly operated to the Isle of Man, whether Guernsey as well, I'm not sure.

It isn't a good deed at all, if the intention is to establish a monopoly player, destroying competition and harming the supply chain. That would seem the outcome, if not the intention. DGT's near monopoly on digital clocks is challenged by Chinese lookalikes, although doubts have been expressed abo...

The last time I costed a major FIDE event, the World Youth, I estimated a cost of £1.3 million to be held in London in 2012. I suppose unlike out of season Greek, Turkish and perhaps other holiday centres, there isn't anywhere in the UK where the difference between what an organiser might pay to bu...

Surely it would have already been tried. Perhaps not with the same first principles approach. Programmers of chess engines from the very earliest have tried to use evaluation functions of various levels of sophistication and learn openings by look up. I'm aware that there was an engine that confron...

David Shepherd wrote:with just the rules and 72 hours to work out how to play optimally

You wonder what would happen if you let it loose on chess. Would it agree with Fischer that 1. e4 was "best by test"?