Jul 132011
 

This post is primarily a test to see what readers think of this new game viewer I’m trying out. Personally, I think this is superb and it is also quite easy and quick to use.

Update 15/07/11: After early feedback I’ve now tried loading up multiple games into the viewer (one advantage that it has over the previous one I was using) they are all in the Two Knights Defence which continues a recent theme. I’ve tinkered  with the default colours a bit purely for aesthetics (I think it looks nice anyway!) and have a couple of the games with notes in to see how people think the comments are working.

Some early lessons.

  1. You need to have Java installed on your computer to see the viewer. If you don’t have it your browser should prompt you but if it doesn’t and you can only see a blank space below then you can download it for free here. I promise it’s worth the effort.
  2. I’ll need to learn some lessons about putting in the game annotations as this viewer displays them slightly differently to Fritz. As a note for anyone wanting to send me games in future, it only displays annotations if you add them “after move” and not “before move”. It also doesn’t work very well if you intersperse single words between moves in sub variations which is a style that works very well in Fritz and Chessbase but not here.
  3. Finally, please ignore the error message that is displayed on some of the boards when you bring them up. One you start playing through the games they work fine and I haven’t been able to figure out what the error message actually means yet!

Please feel free to feedback more now that I’ve updated this.

Jul 072011
 
Dave Wedge has left for
pastures new

Hebden Bridge Chess Club members may well be aware that during the course of the summer break we have lost one of our very best and most experienced players. Dave Wedge has taken up an exciting career opportunity that means he will be down in Cambridge during the week and unable to continue playing for us. He will be sorely missed. Dave has been the ‘A’ team’s top board player for a lengthy period of time and has collected multiple honours both with the team and individually. We wish him the best of luck with his career and hope to see him out and about in Hebden Bridge when he’s home at the weekends.

Shortly before he left I asked Dave if he would be so good as to send me some of his most memorable Hebden Bridge and Calderdale games from his archive. I’m delighted to be able to present the first two of those games today. Dave is hoping to send me a further two games later in the summer and I look forward to being able to publish those here as well. I’ll let Dave introduce these exciting games in his own words.

“I’ve attached the first game, which is a short miniature that I played in 2005, when representing Calderdale ‘A’ on board 2 against Bradford in the Woodhouse Cup. My opponent was James Dannenburg who was graded 175 at the time (his current grade is 186). In terms of grade this must be one of the ‘best’ games I’ve played. I was reluctant to count it as one of my best games, however, since the play is flawed and many of my moves were fairly obvious. The deciding consideration was its entertainment factor — I think your readers might enjoy the game and it shows that strong opponents can sometimes be soundly thrashed with very little effort!”

A fine swashbuckling effort with the White pieces there. Time for another.

“Here’s the second of my ‘best’ games. Again the play was flawed (on both sides) but this game was one of a series of memorable tactical encounters with David Firth and shows why the Benoni is seen as a fighting defence for Black.”

Personally I think this second effort really shows what Dave’s game is all about. He sets himself up actively and grabs the initiative when the opportunity arises before finishing the game off in an attractive fashion. I can also vouch for the resiliance of his Benoni Defence as I have myself failed to score against it on multiple occasions!

Many, many thanks go to Mr Wedge for taking the time to prepare these for publication. I hope readers will enjoy them and be able to learn something from them. Flawed they may be (how many perfect games have any of us ever played?) but they are still of a high standard and offer plenty of food for considered thought.

Jun 102011
 

John Kerrane reports today on the latest event in the Hebden Bridge Chess Club summer programme.

As part of its summer programme, Hebden Bridge Chess Club ran a fixed opening tournament on Monday evening at the Trades Club, Holme Street. This time the 16 players taking part had to begin every game with the Spanish Opening, or Ruy Lopez, in 5 rounds of 15-minute-a-side-games.

The clear winner was Darwin Ursal, a guest from Halifax Chess Club, with a maximum score of 5/5, with Hebden Bridge’s Nick Sykes close behind on 4/5.

The surprise statistic of the evening was that, of the decisive results, there were 22 wins for Black and only 13 for White. This was a bit of a puzzle, as the Spanish is considered to be one of White’s strongest openings, and one in which White’s first move initiative last the longest.

The answer maybe, as Nick Sykes suggested, that very few of the players present employ the opening regularly as White, but many more must be familiar with some way of countering it as Black, so they were better prepared to meet the line than to play it themselves.

On the previous Saturday, Yorkshire Chess Association hosted the Northern Regional Girl’s Chess Championships, in which one of Hebden Bridge’s young players, 10-year-old Robina Murray, distinguished herself by coming second in the under-12’s section. She now goes on to the national finals in London in July, and the club wishes her the best of luck and steady nerves.

I’ll finish this post off by publishing the remainder of the activities planned at the club over the summer recess:

June 13th — Summer Knockout Competitions
June 20th — Analysis Evening with Matthew Parsons
June 27th — Summer Knockout Competitions
July 4th — How good is your chess?
July 11th — Club AGM
July 18th — Opening Surprise tournament
July 25th — Summer Knockout Competitions
August 1st — Analysis Evening with Pete Leonard

Apr 262011
 

Today I am pleased to make it official that the fifth edition of the Chess Improvement Carnival (CIC) will be held right here on this blog from the 4th of May.

For those of you who haven’t seen previous incarnations of the CIC then the idea is simply this: readers nominate chess related posts and articles that they would like to share with the world. It can be something you wrote yourself or something that you’ve seen on another blog that you think is useful, instructive, thought provoking or funny.

If you still don’t get the idea then why not check out some of the material that was selected for previous carnivals hyperlinked below:

  • CIC IV — April: The Omelette Edition, hosted by Liquid Egg Product
  • CIC III — March: The Renaissance Faire Edition, hosted by Blunderprone
  • CIC II — February: The Coney Island Edition, hosted by Brooklyn 64
  • CIC I — January: hosted by Blue Devil Knight

The only guidelines for submission that you need to bare in mind are these. First of all the post has to be chess related and second of all it has to come from a blog rather than a professionally run chess website. You can nominate a post by following this link. The deadline for submissions is looming so don’t procrastinate, nominate your favourite post now and lets make the May edition of the carnival the biggest one yet!

Apr 062011
 
Can Hebden Bridge ‘A’ make
 lightning strike twice?

Today’s post is designed merely to give members and regular readers a heads up on some important dates coming up in the next few months.

1.) First of all, on Monday the 9th of May, the 2011 edition of the Calderdale Chess Team Lightning Competition takes place at Todmorden Working Mens Club. Please note that, unlike recent years, this is tournament is taking place in Todmorden and NOT at the Belgrave Club in Halifax.

All players are welcome but it is suggested that you contact your team Captains about entries from your club as several will already be making plans. In previous years additional teams have been made up by gathering surplus players from all clubs so everyone should get a game that wants one.

Last year Hebden Bridge ‘A’ won the tourney with a record score of 24/25 but they did not have to face the 2009 champions, Huddersfield, who will no doubt be hungry to snatch the title back this year.

The Team Lightening event is always a really fun way of ending the season so please do come along and join in.

Grand Master Danny Gormally returns to Leeds Chess
Club for another simultaneous event on the 12th of June

2.) On Sunday the 12th of June Leeds Chess Club will be hosting a simultaneous event with Grand Master Danny Gormally. It costs £10 to enter and you can register for it on the Leeds Chess Club website. I entered the corresponding event last year and can heartily recommend it. Danny was very laid back and relaxed and this made for a friendly and fun atmosphere. If you want your chance to take on a Grand Master face to face then this is as good as you’ll get.

3.) Finally, here is a real coup for this website! I am delighted to announce that, from May the 4th, our humble blog will be hosting the 5th edition of the Chess Improvement Carnival. The idea behind the event is very simple. Readers nominate interesting and useful posts about chess from across the blogosphere. Those nominations are edited and promoted right here for all the world to see. It’s a kind of “Chess Blog Greatest Hits” for the month of May. If anyone is interested in taking a look at the current edition then you can go to the Liquid Egg Product blog and have a browse. Of course we need nominations for May’s edition so if you’ve spotted a useful, interesting or funny blog post about chess anywhere on the internet recently then please submit it here and it will be considered.

Dec 012010
 
This type of Scotch makes for a better
picture though don’t you think?

No, not the Scottish, (fine people though they be) but the Scotch. Not the single malt variety of Scotch either. No, yesterday was St Andrew’s day and that seems good enough reason for this blog to celebrate the Scotch Game. It is a venerable system that is first mentioned by Ercole del Rio in 1750 but which owes its name to a correspondence game played between the Edinburgh and London chess clubs in 1824.

For a very long time the opening lay dormant and slumbering as the players of the 20th century generally thought its waters were too quite to offer the White player any sort of advantage. That assessment was changed forever when Garry Kasparov sprung it on Anatoly Karpov in their 1990 World Championship match which was played in Lyon.

Since then the Scotch has gained a new lease of life as today’s Grandmasters use it as a viable alternative to the well trodden paths of the Spanish.

For me, the Scotch has been a reletively new acquaintance. For many years I exclusively played the Sicilian against 1.e4 but in the last four or five years I have started to insert 1…e5 into my repertoire and that has meant that I’ve had to figure out a way of meeting the Scotch. I have had some excellent results against it (in fact I don’t think I’ve lost against it over the board), and yet I’m beginning to consider playing it with the White pieces too as an altenative to the Italian Game that I usually trot out.

Today I shamelessly offer readers of this blog a couple of my greatest hits against the Scotch which may serve either to recommend or put off members from the opening, who knows.

This first game was played over the board.

And this one was played online.

Nov 112010
 
Mikhail Tal (1936-92)

10 top Grandmasters are currently contesting the Tal Memorial Tournament in Moscow. Tuesday, the rest day, was the day on which, had he still been with us, Mikhail Tal would have celebrated his 74th birthday. It therefore seems entirely appropriate for this humble blog to pause for a moment’s thought and reflect on the great man’s works.

In these times of hyperbole the term “genius” seems, in a sporting context at least, to be applied to almost anyone who has had a good day at the office. Most people who don’t know any better would probably define every Grandmaster as a “genius”. However, there can’t be very many players who have been described by a fellow World Champion as a genius. Yet, iron-willed World Chess Champion, Tigran Petrosian, once said that Tal was the only living chess genius that he knew and Mikhail Botvinnik famously commented,

“If Tal would learn to programme himself properly then it would become impossible to play against him.”

This is a wonderful compliment but of course the quote also contains a veiled reference to Tal’s penchant for speculative, intuitive play. Botvinnik seemed to be suggesting that Tal’s unwillingness to “programme himself” was a weakness in his game. Personally I think that, although Botvinnik may well have been right to an extent, he was also missing the point. Tal was Tal. He just played the game the way that felt right to him. This didn’t mean that he wasn’t capable of winning arid, positional games. It just meant that, he loved to let his fertile imagination have a free reign whenever he got the opportunity. In certain types of position he was capable of doing things that no other player could do and he was also capable of stirring up mind-boggling complications in positions that were apparently benign.

In order to celebrate the “Magician of Riga’s” birthday then I’d like to post one of my favourite games of his. Most of the notes to this game are taken from “The World’s Greatest Chess Games” in which this particular encounter features. The start position in the viewer below is from the key moment in the game but I’d highly recommend that you play through the whole thing because this game certainly shows that Tal was capable of deep strategic manoeuvring as well as tactical pyrotechnics. Indeed, one of the reasons I am so fond of this game is because it demonstrates a wonderful fusion between tactics and strategy. The final sequence of moves is truly breath taking with pieces arriving from all across the board to help deliver checkmate. Please enjoy, and be inspired by, Mikhail Tal at his very best!


Oct 292010
 

Today the Hebden Bridge Chess Club blog welcomes a new contributor. I recently posted on the dangers of making hasty decisions due to time trouble.  As therealparsnip shows us in this game, sometimes even Fide Masters can make the mistake of playing critical moves too quickly whether they are in time trouble or not!

A fat lady… singing (by Brad Fitzpatrick)

 “I’ve recently been playing a lot of 45min + 45sec increment games on ICC (Internet Chess Club). ICC is great in many ways, and the recent update of the main software Dasher, has added a 45 minute button to the menu, along with 1min, 3min, 5min, 15min, and 960 variant. Of course you can choose to play any time that you want, such as 2min 12 sec increment.

I have found the 45min 45sec option very useful as you have enough time to have a proper game, much as in evening league chess. To those not familiar with increments in time controls, you have 45 minutes to start, with 45 seconds added each move, so the game can easily last more than 2 hours.

US National Master Dan Heisman does weekly videos covering amateur games at this time control which are very interesting. In one of these recently he mentioned how some players, no matter how strong, don’t use this time properly and sometimes start playing like they were playing Blitz chess.

It’s also interesting looking at chess etiquette in this format. For instance if you start one of these games, its probably fair to make sure you have the time available to actually play the game! It is not unheard of for some players to start nagging their opponents to make a move! Alas, whilst internet chess is in many ways brilliant, it does bring out the rudeness in some people that in over the board chess is generally hidden, though we do of course all have our stories!

One of the good things about this time control is that it works as very good practice and training for proper matches. There is no reason why you cant have your chess literature spread out around you whilst you are playing, helping you in the opening etc. This allows you to work and study your openings in a way you would not normally be able to do. Of course at some point in the game you are going to have rely on your own skill!


In this game I was playing with the Black pieces against Fabio Samaritani, a Fide Master with one IM Norm, who has been rated 2340. In this country would put him in the top 60 players nationally.”


“So in conclusion I was very pleased with this game. After the first 15 moves or so, when I had been using material available to me, I was on my own, and after a blunder on f5, I was able to fight in the position, defend, create counterplay, and then take advantage of my opponents blunder. My opponent like me, used plenty of time in the middle game, up until the last few moves, when presumably, feeling that the position was won, played far too quickly and allowed me to win. As such I was able to beat someone who would be seen as one of the best players in the UK, while at the same time, learning a lot about this line for the next time I get it over the board.”

Many thanks to therealparsnip for this excellent and entertaining game. In this particular case it was less of a fat lady singing and more like a case of “it ain’t over ’til the royal lady’s pinned!”

If any other readers have taken any notable scalps in the course of their careers and would like to use this blog as an opportunity to share the secrets of their success please feel free to e-mail me your games. New contributions are always welcome.

Oct 152010
 

Hebden Bridge Chess Club members who are not medieval historians may not be aware that the 25th of October is a truly auspicious date for Englishmen. On that date it will be the 595th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt where Henry V’s English army took on a numerically superior force of Frenchmen and absolutely thrashed them. With the black pieces too!

To celebrate this auspicious occasion I hope to entertain readers with another victory over the French. In this instance however, the battlefield is the chess board and the French concerned is the opening variation and not the people.

Rozbeef 1, Froggies 0! I can feel a warm jingoistic tingle running down my spine.

Oct 012010
 
Way back at the beginning of September I posted some evidence to support the elementary chess principle that castling is, both from a positional and tactical perspective, a necessity in the game of chess. Today I’d like to bring Hebden Bridge Chess Club’s members attention to some examples where castling turned out not to be such a good idea. Of course these illustrations all fall into the category of “tactical oversights”. It would seem perfectly possible to argue that the only way castling can be “strategically unsound” is if a player can choose to castle on either side of the board and selects an option that is not consistent with the strategy he has pursued up to that juncture.
Greenpawn34

Let’s begin our exposé with some amusing cases of chess blindness, namely, players castling into an immediate checkmate. My fellow blogger, Greenpawn34, has, once again, come to my aid with the fruits of some insightful database queries.

“Players castling into mate in one. So far I have found 116 examples of this on the 1400 database.” (A database of games played on the Redhotpawn website).

Crash!

Bang!



Is that h1-a8 diagonal going to cause a problem?
White played 16.0-0 and Black check mated him



Wallop!



Watch out for that half open h-file! White played 11.0-0
and Black check mated him



Kapow!
Cunningly, White played 24.Nf4(!) ignoring the enprise
Rook in order to allow Black to play 24…0-0-0?? Oh dear!

In all of the cases above the losing player simply failed to visualise what the position would look like after they’d castled. In other words, they played the move on autopilot and paid the ultimate price. These are fairly unusual cases. However, in contrast to this “instant check mate” scenario, I should imagine that most of us have games in our score books where either ourselves or our opponents have unwittingly castled straight into the teeth of a blistering attack that led us/them to defeat. This can often be a case of, “right idea, wrong time to try it,” or it could be that we’ve underestimated or failed to notice our opponents attacking threats. I’m ashamed to say that these next two examples are not only my own, they are even from the same tournament!

Calderdale Individual Championships 2009/10: Round 2

Calderdale Individual Championships 2009/10: Round 5

Finally, by way of redemption for my sins in the games given above, I offer readers the game below which I played over 15 years ago! I still find it hard to believe that I’ve only played a handful of games since then that I think can hold a candle to this one. In all fairness to my opponent it would have been very difficult for him to envisage the full horror that awaited him when he played 12…0-0.

This one is definitely amongst the “best three wins” in my chess career. I hope to play this well again one day in the next 15 years!