Dover Books

I am pleased to announce that this site is now associated with Dover Publications! Many of the chess books in my library are by Dover; I like them because Dover books hold up well, cover a wide variety of subjects and, best of all, they are reasonably priced. Check out their books using the like on the left.

Stockfish 5 Is the Strongest Chess Engine

Stockfish, an open source UCI engine that was developed by Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba and Joona Kiiski, has become the top ranked engine on all the major engine ranking sites. It was derived from Glaurung, an open source engine by Romstad.

CCLR’s 40/40 Rating List (64-bit/4 CPU’s)

1-Stockfish 5 - 3299
2-Houdini 4 - 3276
3-Komodo 7a - 3249
4-Gull 2.8b - 3199
5-Critter 1.6a – 3174

Thankfully for engine lovers everywhere, in a 2010 interview, Romstad stated, “There are no plans of a commercial Stockfish. Why shouldn't it be free? All three of us have regular jobs which pay our bills; computer chess is just a hobby. Most people don't earn any money from their hobbies, and I see no reason why chess programming should be different. Going commercial would force us to deal more heavily with tasks like marketing, support and GUI programming, for which we have little skill and interest. All we would get in compensation for the extra work is a small amount of money which we don't really need.” Download from the official Stockfish site.

Flood Update

 

   

Above is our garage a day after the flood showing the three feet of water.  That's a freezer full of meat floating in the foreground.

I have not played any chess since the aforementioned flood except for one correspondence game against an ICCF IM; fortunately two of my three opponents resigned soon after the flood and the IM only moves occasionally.     
     Mostly we have been busy making repairs like replacing drywall, painting, etc. Repairs also included replacing all the electronic components on the furnace and my new (two week old!) hot water tank. Also we had to replace a sump pump that burned out, furniture, floors, etc. We lost two downstairs refrigerators and a freezer plus my car was a total loss when the garage flooded. 
     In addition I have also made some major repairs to our drainage system outside. Even so, that would not have saved us from the storm because there was so much water that our neighbor who has lived in his house for 46 years got water in his basement for the first time. The insurance adjuster estimated repairs at $20,000 plus. Fortunately several years ago I purchased water back up insurance, but that only paid for a fraction of the damage. I learned that 1) a lot of people were not aware that their homeowners insurance does not cover them unless they have water backup insurance and (2) flood insurance is pretty much useless unless you live on a flood plain because in order to collect your house cannot be the only one that suffers flood damage! Although not flood damage, right in the middle of this the refrigerator in the kitchen crapped out when the compressor went bad, so that had to be replaced, too.
     The government is offering low interest long term loans to storm victims, but there is a catch. Isn’t there always? I expect the government to a lot to me and almost nothing for me, so I wasn’t surprised when the guy two houses down told me what happened to him when he applied for a loan to repair his home. He was told he had to hire a contractor to do all the work at 3-4 times what it was going to cost him to do it himself. He told them he only wanted to borrow enough to pay for the materials for repairs and he would do the work himself, but “they” said no, so he didn’t bother with the loan.
     Anyway, there’s finally light at the end of the tunnel.  When things over which you have absolutely no control happen all you can do is accept it and keep plugging away.  Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you. This time the bear got us. The important thing is to stay positive.

Flooded!

 

I am temporarily “offline” on this Blog.  Monday night (5-19) here was a huge storm in our area which included a tornado not too far away.  As a result our house was flooded with 3 feet of water and we have been living in a hotel awaiting repairs to our house plus doing much of the work ourselves so there has been little time for chess.  I hope to resume posting after things return to something close to normal.

The a3!? Anti-Sicilian

    It has been recomended by, among others, GM Alexei Bezgodov and IM Sergei Soloviov, both of whom have written books on it. Instinct tells me all the books recommending it are balderdash because the move simply cannot be as good as 2.Nf3 or 2.Nc3 because a3 does nothing for White's center. Of course, that’s not to say it isn’t playable.     
     White plays 1.e4 c5 2.a3 with the intention of playing 3.b4, diverting Black's c-pawn from the centre and allowing White to build a strong central position with his e and d pawns. Depending on Black's 2nd move this may or may not involve sacrificing a pawn. Of course White can play the Wing Gambit (1.e4 c5 2.b4) or the Wing Gambit Delayed (1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.b4) without the fanfare of 2.a3.
     I have tried 2.a3 a few times in online blitz games with pretty good results. I have not used it with the intention of playing b4 though because I’ve also tried the Wing Gambit and WG Delayed and have not gotten very good positions.
     The following online game was quite interesting. We reached what appears to be a standard Sicilian position and after a flurry of exchanges beginning at move 9 we reached a position where I had 2R’s, N and 5P’s against my opponent’s R, 2B’s and 6P’s. These positions are the kind that, in my opinion, engines don’t evaluate very well, so going over it with Houdini 2 doesn’t answer a lot of questions. In fact, while analyzing it with a couple of different engines, there were different suggestions for both of us at almost every move, but most of them seem to lead to nothing significantly better than what we actually played. Still, it seems to me that all the winning chances were Black’s but when he missed his best chance at move 37 the game was a draw. Black kept playing though hoping for a mistake which is exactly what happened. Unfortunately for him, it was his mistake and it cost him the game.

Marcel Duchamp, Chess Master

     After becoming an established artist, Marcel Duchamp turned his focus to playing chess and spent a large part of his life as a serious player. He once remarked that “while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” By most estimates, Duchamp was a player of about master strength. He competed in the 1925 French championship, reportedly scoring 50 percent, and represented France in the 1933 Olympiad (on the same team as Alekhine, the world champion). Though he was usually outclassed against the best players, occasionally he managed to hold his own, drawing a game against Vera Menchik, the women’s world champion, in 1929 and drawing with Frank Marshall in 1930.

     After moving to Greenwich Village from France in the 1940’s, he played for the Marshall Chess Club in the Metropolitan Chess League and his photograph still hangs on the club’s wall.

     By 1923, Duchamp (1887-1968) had established himself as a force in the avant-garde art communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Then, suddenly, after two decades of innovation and considerable controversy, he was reported to have quit making art in order to focus on chess. Of course, Duchamp never totally quit being an artist.

     Following a brief excursion to Buenos Aires during 1918 and 1919, where he became a self-described "chess maniac," his interest in the game grew far beyond an idle pastime. He soon made it his objective to win the French Championship. Between 1923 and 1933, chess dominated Duchamp's life as he competed in tournaments across Europe. Following several respectable performances, including a first-place finish at the Championship of Haute Normandie in 1924, he was awarded the Master title by the French Chess Federation.

     Though his objective of winning the French championship never came to pass, Duchamp succeeded in representing France in numerous tournaments and Olympiads. He published a book on endgame tactics, extensively revised a classic analysis of opening strategies by Eugene Znosko-Borovsky, authored a chess column in the Paris daily newspaper Ce Soir, and became one of the most respected players of correspondence chess in the world.

     His participation in tournament play slowed dramatically after 1933, though he remained engaged with the professional chess community for the rest his life. He became a valued ambassador for the game through the various honorary positions as well as his charitable effort, the Marcel Duchamp Fund of the American Chess Foundation. His legacy also includes playing a pivotal role in introducing the theme of chess in art to a wider public through his involvement in the organization of two historic exhibitions, "The Imagery of Chess" in 1944 and "Hommage a Caissa" in 1966.

 

    The first exhibition dedicated entirely to his association with chess, "Marcel Duchamp: Chess Master" was conceived as an opportunity to experience Duchamp's influential career through his involvement with the game.  In addition to a selection of works by Duchamp, this exhibition also featured chess-related items by other artists, many of whom shared Duchamp's enthusiasm for the game. It presented people the opportunity to see examples of the unique chess-set designs by Man Ray, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dali.

 

Download Free Chess Engines

I have added a link on the left under Favorite Sites and Blogs where you can download free engines from ChessOK. The engines available are:

Houdini 2.0
Deep Rybka 4
Houdini  1.5a
Stockfish 2.11
Critter 1.1.37
Naum  4.2
Spark 1.0
WildCat 8.0
SmarThink 0.17a
SOS 11.99
Zchess 2.22
Gromit 3.0
Ufim 8.2
Mustang 4.97
GreKo 8.2
Kaissa2 1.8a
Adamant 1.7
Booot 5.1.0
Eeyore 1.52 (32 & 64bit)
Zeus 1.29
Arics 0.95a
Anechka 0.08
Patriot 2006
AlChess 1.5b
OBender 3.2.4x
Counter 1.2
Strelka 2.0B
Belka 1.8.20
Ifrit 4.4
Bison 9.11
Uralochka 1.1b
Marginal 0.1
Chess 3
Woodpecker 2
Gull 1.2

Fischer Random Chess

     Chess960 (or Fischer Random Chess) was invented and advocated by former world champion Bobby Fischer who publicly introduced it in 1996 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The idea is that it renders the prospect of obtaining an advantage through the memorization of opening lines impracticable and compels players to rely on their talent and creativity.
     Randomizing the main pieces had long been known as Shuffle Chess; however, Chess960 introduces restrictions that preserve the game’s nature by retaining bishops of opposite colors and the right to castle for both sides. Shuffle Chess wasn’t new; it was suggested as early as 1792.     
     Fischer started work on his new version of chess after his 1992 return match with Boris Spassky with the goal of eliminating the importance of opening preparation. This was, in part, the result of his belief that the Russians (to be politically correct these days, “Soviets”) fixed all international games. Actually, the Russians (Soviets) were not the only ones who fixed games; there are plenty of examples by players from every other country. Anyway, in games where the starting position is random it would be impossible to fix every move because it would be too difficult to memorize. These days even an average player can have a lot of opening knowledge but it comes to naught once they are out of theory but that’s not the case in GM chess which is the circle Fischer moved in.     
     Another reason for Fischer’s desire to implement RFC was his desire to eliminate prearranged games. Of course, being Fischer, he also had other reasons why FRC was better than conventional chess. He thought it was healthier! He pointed out that due to such long hours in front of the computer screen many top players today, such as Anand and Kramnik, wear thick glasses. Who wants to look like a bespectacled nerd when you can look like this?

     Yet another reason to play FRC: all of the study necessary to play conventional chess made it hard work, and he had gotten into chess in order to avoid work.     
     I know you are all dying to know my opinion of FRC, so it is:  When I get to the place where I am a walking encyclopedia of openings, can recall hundreds, if not thousands of master games, have in memory thousands of “chunks” of positions, have a knowledge of endings that will enable me, like Fine, to bash out a book on them in 6 months and my rating is up around 2700, or maybe 2800, I might be interested in FRC. Until then conventional chess suits me just fine.     

Larry Evans

 

   Larry Evans (March 22, 1932 – November 15, 2010), grandmaster, author, and journalist was awarded the IM titlein 1952 and the GM title in 1957. In 1956 U.S. State Department appointed him a "chess ambassador".
    Evans won or shared the U.S. Championship five times and the U.S. Open Championship four times. He wrote a long-running syndicated column and wrote or co-wrote more than twenty books on chess. Evans, born in Manhattan, learned much about the game by playing for ten cents an hour on 42nd Street in New York City.
    At age 14, he tied for 4th–5th place in the Marshall Chess Club championship and the next year he won it outright, becoming the youngest Marshall champion at that time. He also finished equal second in the U.S. Junior Championship. At 16, he played in the 1948 U.S. Championship, tying for eighth place at 11½–7½. Evans tied with Arthur Bisguier for first place in the U.S. Junior Chess Championship of 1949.
     By age 18, he had won a New York State championship as well as a gold medal in the Dubrovnik 1950 Chess Olympiad. 1951, he first won the U.S. Championship, ahead of Samuel Reshevsky and won his second championship the following year by winning a title match against Herman Steiner. He won the national championship three additional times: in 1961–62, 1967–68, and 1980.
    Evans performed well in many U.S. events during the 1960s and 1970s, but his trips abroad to international tournaments were infrequent and less successful. He won the U.S. Open Championship in 1951, 1952, 1954 and tied with Walter Browne in 1971. He also won the first Lone Pine tournament in 1971.
     In the 1960s, Evans moved to Reno when he discovered he had another talent: counting cards. According to Frank Brady, “He had a memory that he built up from chess. He could memorize cards, and he wasn’t making any money from chess in those days. Nobody was. He made a lot of money and he kept getting banned from casino to casino.”
     His best foreign results included two wins at the Canadian Open Championship, 1956 in Montreal, and 1966 in Kingston, Ontario. He tied for first-second in the 1975 Portimão, Portugal International and for second-third with World Champion Tigran Petrosian, behind Jan Hein Donner, in Venice, 1967. However, his first, and what ultimately proved to be his only, chance in the World Chess Championship cycle ended with a disappointing 14th place (10/23) in the 1964 Amsterdam Interzonal.
     Regarding his style, Evans was willing to take risks in open tournaments against weaker players but that did not work as well against the best players. Evans was closely associated with Bobby Fischer in his quest for the world title and was Fischer's second for the Candidates matches leading up to the World Chess Championship 1972 against Boris Spassky. As a result of a disagreement, he did not serve as Fischer’s second during the actual championship match. At his peak in 1968 he was rated 2631. By the age of eighteen he published David Bronstein's Best Games of Chess, 1944–1949 and the Vienna International Tournament, 1922.
     His book New Ideas in Chess was published in 1958 and wrote or co-wrote more than 20 books on chess. He is probably best known for his contribution to Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games in which he wrote the introductions to each of the games and for convincing Fischer to publish the book he had initially been reluctant to do so.
     Evans began his career in chess journalism during the 1960s, helping to found the American Chess Quarterly and was an editor of Chess Digest during the 1960s and 1970s. For over thirty years, until 2006, he wrote a very popular question-and-answer column for Chess Life. He also wrote Evans on Chess which appeared in more than fifty separate newspapers throughout the United States. Evans also contributed a large amount of material to the Chessmaster computer game. He was inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame in 1994. Many of Evans’ book received wide acclaim, but chess journalist, Edward Winter found and published many errors contained in his writings.
     On Monday, November 15, 2010, at approximately 3 p.m. Evans died at Washoe Hospital in Reno, Nevada, from complications following a gall bladder operation.

Washoe Hospital

My Blitz Engine Test Tournament and Gull 3

     While it can hardly be considered scientific, I recently held a small engine tournament at 6 minutes per game between my most used engines and was surprised at the results.

     I don’t know much about Gull 3 x64, released April 17, 2014, but decided to try it out in a match against the winner of the tournament. Gull only runs on 2 CPU’s so my match pairing it against Critter running on 4 CPU’s is not fair, but still the final result was surprising in that Gull won +2 -1 =7.
     On a more reliable level chessengines blog shows the following results: Houdini 4 wins 3 Super League Season 5/2014 - Jurek Chess Engines Rating 2014.04.21_JCER_Season5_SuperLeague

Gull 3 can be downloaded at Sourceforge.

Real Men Play Chess!

  

  
     When you think about it all that time most of us spend playing chess, a game which frankly, as far as I know, has never helped me in anything, sometimes you have to ask yourself if it isn’t a waste of time. Obviously if you good enough to make a living at it, it’s not a waste of time, but what about the rest of us?
     Of course millions of people spend time and money on hobbies such as collecting things, bowling, golf, photography, you name it and I am sure there must be psychological and emotional benefits from having a hobby. Anyhow, I have this nagging feeling that I should be doing something more productive with my spare time, but so far I haven’t come up with anything, but that’s not what this post is about.
     I came across an amusing site the other day named The Art of Manliness and there was a post listing 45 manly hobbies and guess what? Chess was the first one listed! Maybe I'm not wasting my time as badly as I thought.

QGD Exchange Variation

     This opening used to be a favorite of Reshevsky and he scored many wins with it by using the Minority Attack and in the process making things look easy, so naturally I used to use it a lot. Unfortunately my games weren’t as slick as Rehevsky’s.
     However, White has more than one way to play the positions arising from the Exchange Variation.  He can play a central advance with f2-f3 followed by e2-e4 or he can castle Q-side and play for a K-side attack.
     While chances are balanced, Black is usually more or less forced to use his superior activity to launch a piece attack on White's K as the long-term chances in the QGD Exchange structure favor White. Black will often pay an early …Ne4 so that after the N is exchanged and his P on d5 lands on e4, the change in P-structure alters the strategy.
     It was the Minority Attack that always interested me but as I said, unlike Reshevsky, I could never get it to work out because my opponents never seemed to have any trouble meeting it and I ended up with a lot of draws. In this game things were, according to Houdini 2, nearly dead equal until Black shot himself in the foot with 29…c4.

Nezhmetdinov vs.Paoli

For a Youtube video biography on Nezhmetdinov see my post HERE.  His opponent in this game, Enrico Paoli (January 13, 1908 – December 15, 2005), was an Italian International master. He was born in Trieste, Italy, and learned chess when he was nine years old. Paoli was winner of International Tournaments of Vienna (1951) and Imperia (1959). He won his last Italian Championship at age 60, and organized the famous Reggio Emilia chess tournament. He beat Soviet GM Alexander Kotov with the black pieces in Venice in 1950, but missed receiving the Grandmaster title by only half a point at a tournament in 1969. He was awarded the title of Honorary GM in 1996 by FIDE.

Fun with Rooks

     Most everybody knows the basics of Rook handling: the power of Rooks on open or semi-open files, Rooks on the seventh rank, behind passed Pawns, etc. One lesser known Rook handling scenario is what Tartakower called the “Hyper-modern Rook,” a Rook in front of the Pawn chain. This method can be very effective when the normal methods, e.g. open files, are ineffective or not available. In the following game Alekhine uses his Rooks in front of the Pawn chain to conduct a direct attack on Kmoch’s King.  What makes the game interesting is watching Alekhine's attack appear from what appears to be nowhere.

An Opening Test for Engines

     The website Chess Openings offered this challenge: fire up the engines and see when, or if, they could find the brilliant 11.Rc1 as was discovered by former ICCF World Champion Aleksandr Dronov who played it against Jeurgen Buecker in the 2007 championship.

 

     I gave each engine about 5 minutes using 3 cores and 1024 Mb of RAM and all they all displayed 11.Nef3 as their first choice and none displayed Dronov’s 11.Rc1 in their top four selections.  Here are their evaluations and ply depth:

StockfishDD64SSE4.2: +0.30, depth 26

Deep Rybka 4.32: +0.30, depth 18

Houdini 2.0c 64c: +0.16, depth 22

Critter 1.64 64bit: +0.23, depth 21

     When I entered the move manually the engines displayed the following evaluations: StockfishDD64SSE4.2: +0.05

Deep Rybka 4.32: +0.15

Houdini 2.0c 64c: 0.00

Critter 1.64 64bit: 0.00

     I decided to try using IDeA in Aquarium 2014 using Stockfish set at 20 seconds, depth 17 to see what results I would get. After about 2.5 hours here are the results:

 

     As you can see, the engine has not gotten very deep into the position, but 11.Rc1 is pretty far down the list. So why is this important? Because these days correspondence chess as played on ICCF or LSS where engine use is allowed (you’ll probably lose all your games if you don’t use one) analysis has to be very deep and detailed, especially openings. Openings represent about 50% of your results in these events so excellent opening preparation is necessary.
     I prefer to play on LSS in the “Rapid” events because 1) I enjoy tinkering with engines and 2) I don’t have the patience to fiddle with the kind of opening preparation and analysis that is required to win consistently as explained HERE.
     The point is that to play successfully on sites like LSS and ICCF there is a whole lot more work involved than just letting an engine run for a minute or two then playing whatever its first choice is. Dronov is only rated 2043 with FIDE and I would be curious to know how such a low-rated player discovered 11.Rc1 even using engines. Perhaps it could be done if you had a really good opening book, a couple of powerful computers and more patience than I have accumulated in a lifetime, but I prefer to stick to LSS Rapids and hope my farrago leads to success.

Kotov – Bondarevsky Leningrad 1936

     I have occasionally seen the position after White’s 23rd move presented as a tactics puzzle, but rarely has the complete game been given. That’s a shame because it's an interesting game. Bondarevsky conducts a beautiful attack even though the game was full of errors by Kotov. It should be remembered that at the time this game was played neither of these players had yet achieved GM status.
     All of the references that I checked maintained that Kotov missed holding the draw by not playing 23.Kf1 but it appears that Houdini 2 found a way for Black to keep the attack going by 24…Qxd4+. After playing around with the position for about an hour, it seems that even after 23.Kf1 that Black is still winning. If anyone finds a way that White can save the game, please post it.

Chess Cartoon: Alexander Kotov vs Aron Nimzovich Chat Battle! - Who wins...

Nottingham 1936

     My favorite chess books are game collections and tournament books and Nottingham 1936 by Alekhine is one of my favorites.
     Nottingham, a 15-player tournament held August 10–28 at the University of Nottingham, was one of the strongest tournaments of all time. W. H. Watts in the introduction to the tournament book called Nottingham 1936 "the most important chess event the world has so far seen”. That’s because it included five past, present, or future world champions (Lasker, José Raúl Capablanca, Alekhine, Euwe and Botvinnik).  A number of other prominent players, such as Reuben Fine, Samuel Reshevsky and Salo Flohr, were in the tournament, too. The event is also notable for being Lasker's last major event, and for Botvinnik achieving the first Soviet success outside the Soviet Union.

Standings:
1-2 Botvinnik and Capablanca (10.0)
3-5 Euwe, Fine and Reshevsky (9.5)
6 Alekhine (9.0)
7-8 Flohr and Lasker (8.5)
9 Vidmar (6)
10-11 Bogoljubow and Tartakower (5.5)
12 Tylor (4.5)
13 Alexander (3.5) 1
4 Thomas (3.0)
15 Winter (2.5)

     As for the book itself, it was a historic tournament and no serious player should be without it because Alekhine’s annotations, while not as meticulous or impressive as those in New York 1924, are still very good. The latest translation is figurine algebraic and Russell Enterprises has produced a quality book. GM Andy Soltis does the introduction.
     Now, why would anybody be interested in this old tournament? It was Lasker’s last tournament, the last major victory for Capablanca, Botvinnik’s second trip outside the Soviet Union and his first tournament victory with the subsequent emergence of the “Soviet School of Chess.” It was Alekhine’s poorest performance of the 1930’s and it confirmed the world class strength of Euwe, Fine and Reshevsky.
     Some of the games are lacking high quality, but that’s OK. In magazines and “best games” books you usually see only the best and not the way most games are really played; that's one reason why I like tournament books; you get to see the warts and all.
     Of Alekhine’s annotations Soltis wrote , “This was the last of Alekhine’s splendid tournament books, and it helped make Nottingham a legend. It falls thematically between New York 1924, with its remarkably intense analysis of moves, and New York 1927, with its emphasis on sporting qualities and psychological factors. This is a book that devotes attention to 'playing the board' as well as to 'playing the man…It was written by a more mature, self-confident Alekhine. Earlier in his career he embellished if not outright lied about some of the moves he played and how much he had calculated.” Also, the round by round commentary helps create a sense of being there. 
     Besides all that, it’s enjoyable just to watch them play! Take the following game; it’s not perfect and would probably never make it into a best games collection, but it’s a good example of the ups and downs of typical tournament games.