English Chess Forum

http://chessorg.de/bischofsgruen.php?lang=en The tournament in Bavaria is ongoing with 36 players. The results of the first two rounds have been posted but although round 3 should be on right now, they have not posted the draw online. For a few Senior tournaments scheduled for later this year in Ger...

Hi all. I've just been through my chess book collection and I don't seem to have any books about or by Jonathan Penrose. Did he write any Chess Books? Are there any books of his games? Anything about his history? Has anyone got any interesting information or anecdotes about Jonathan Penrose? It wil...

David Sedgwick's response is pretty comprehensive, I think. I would just add that we sometimes see 10-round events (e.g. Gibraltar and Reykjavik in recent years) which accommodate players who wish to take a half-point bye at some stage while still preserving norm possibilities. In Ireland half-point...

The Najdorf-Denker gap is remarkable, if one can prove they never met in between. Denker was an honorary GM. I guess we are all going by entries in ChessBase Mega Database or similar, which may not be all-inclusive. The Olafsson-Gaprindashvili is certainly likely to be valid for all-GM meetings, I t...

It's live online apparently.
There has been this running joke for months on chess24 about this mysterious figure.

So the question of the day (answers please!): WHO IS MR DODGY?

I still find myself referring to a couple of old books to check what they say: the 1916 Handbuch des Schachspiels (ed. Schlechter) and especially Levenfish's encyclopaedic Sovremenny Debyut (1940) which was really the forerunner of ECO . Bernard Cafferty used to swear by this book in the days before...

...Most of Anatoly Karpov’s opponents, but not all, were very strong club players, around 1900 to 2300 perhaps, which explains the result. Elo ratings weren't used at that time .... I tend to agree with the first of those statements but not the second. In the early 1970s FIDE had already been using...

I don't know the Standage book but you should look at the earlier history, published by McFarland in 2000: "The Turk, Chess Automaton" by Gerald M. Levitt. It includes all the 50 known games played in London in 1820 when Mouret operated it. They were published in a book at the time which used to be ...

Thanks to Tim Spanton's recent posting in the Congress Diary section, I have been able to update my Seniors calendar at http://www.chessmail.com/seniors/Seniors-calendar.html with the Oberfranken tournament in late June/early July which he discovered. This tournament appears to be the only Senior ev...

There seems to be more in ... Sicilian: lines with ... e5 T. D. Harding, P. R. Markland B.T. Batsford, 1982 golmayo.png I wonder if Tim has the rest of the game. Sorry, no. Senor Mendez asked me about this game three weeks ago but since he did not mention the opening moves there was no reason to lo...

Presumably So just agreed a draw in Round 3 with a view to regrouping for the next mini-match. Or, after the horrible loss in the second game, he couldn't cope with possibly losing in the third game. Perhaps he should have tried something sharp in the third game and said to himself if I lose I lose...

I recall two arbiters discussing that the most confusing thing they've ever encountered was a double resignation. What I imagine would make that perplexing if not vexating is if one player has a winning position and the other a losing position. Making sense of that would be rather challenging, and ...

How is it that Europe are fielding Aronian, an Azerbaijani and a Georgian player? Perhaps because those countries are in Europe? I am surprised nobody has corrected Chris: Aronian is of course from Armenia, not Azerbaijan. Both Armenia and Georgia are in a liminal area, technically Asian in the str...

They do and as we know research is always an on-going project. Unfortunately the more reliant on material discovered on-line I become, the worse off I feel overall, as if something at hand is very wrong...maybe that's just me showing my age, and temporarily forgetting sites such as The British News...

Might archives held by John Lewis have more for those curious about this? Very unlikely because, as I hinted above, the whole store was burned out in the Blitz. There was a very graphic photograph in Chess magazine at the time. So unless personnel records were stored elsewhere you will not find any...