GM Ian Rogers loses to Kristine Quek

At first I thought the above you tube video was an interesting documentary on the effects of dehydration on your thinking skills. In the clip it shows GM Ian Rogers playing Kristine Quek, and in it he comes off second best, in part because he is trapped in a sauna. As a scientific experiment it seemed plausible, until I realised two things.
Firstly, it isn't a documentary, but an ad for Zip Water.  I must say it is a clever ad, but given it is an add I am a little sceptical about the accuracy of the claims. And secondly, I'm not convinced that a loss of 10% of thinking skills (as the add claims is the effect of dehydration) is enough of a handicap for Rogers to lose the way he did. As there did not seem to be a scale attached to the 10% figure I am reminded of the "we only use 10% of our brains" claim that I hear repeated quite often.
But the point of advertising is to draw attention to the product, and it certainly does that. I particularly like the scene at the end where Kristine is rewarded with a nice glass of cold water while Ian can only look on helplessly.

Know the classics (but also when to update them)

The diagrammed position turned out to be the crucial moment of my game against Alana Chibnall on Tuesday night (not that I realised it then). After losing a pawn in the opening I decided my best chance of saving the game was to play a rook ending a pawn down. After reaching a position where I had a more active king and rook, I realised the position had some similarities with the famous Capablanca v Tartakower game from New York, 1924. In that game (given below) Capablanca gave away a couple of pawns (with check) to get his king into a more aggressive position.
Following this script I adopted the same strategy, creating a path on the kingside, and heading my king to g6. However it turns out there was a problem with following this script too closely. In the given position I played 36.Kg6 and after 36. ... fxg 37.Rg3 Ke8 38.Rxg5 Kf8 my opponent had just enough time to defend everything and I went down after 39.f6 Instead I needed to play 36.Rb3! first, as this had the effect of forcing my opponent to either give up the b pawn, or put one of her pieces on a bad square. The most instructive line began with 36 ... Kc7 when 37.Kg6 is now two tempii up on the game continuation, and I have enough time to win everything!


Capablanca,Jose Raul - Tartakower,Saviely [A85]
New York New York (6), 23.03.1924

2015 ANU Chess Festival comes to an end

The 2015 ANU Chess Festival wrapped up today with the final event, the ANU Secondary Schools Championship. 22 teams took part in this event, meaning that over the 2 week period of the Festival, 341 players took part in the various events. Numbers were up in all events from last year (by around 25% on average) so I would consider this years festival a big success.
Here is a list of the winners from each of the events:

• ACT Teams Blitz - ANU Scholars (Harry Press, Miles Patterson)
• ANU Open - IM Andrew Brown
• ANU Minor - Nohrval Valle
• ANU Primary Schools Teams - Kaleen Primary
• ANU Secondary Schools Teams - Lyneham High School

The ANU Chess Festival has now been running for 23 years, and has contributed a great deal to the vibrant ACT chess scene. A number of strong players have played in the ANU Schools competition including homegrown IM's Andrew Brown and Junta Ikeda. In fact there are now some second generation players starting to pop up, and even a couple of school teachers first attended the event when still in short pants.
The Open itself generally provides an opportunity for local players to develop there skills. While not quite at the size of the Doeberl Cup, there is still enough 'starch' in the field to provide a stern test. And the blitz championship (now in its third year) is a fun/serious event for the speedier players.
Such an event could not take place without significant help from the chess community. Special mention should go to Shun Ikeda (Festival Director), Paul Dunn (Festival Treasurer), Cam Cunningham (ACTCA President) and Mirabelle Guo, who put in a huge amount of work to make the event a success.
Next year the organisers are looking to make some small improvements to the events (schedule changes, and a bit of extra prize money), so keep your calendars free for the last weekend in July 2016!

More fun rules

Another school event, another new rule I was previously unaware of!
During the third round of the 2015 ANU Primary Schools Chess Championship, I was called over to a game to answer a strange (but not too strange) question. "If you get your rook to the other side of the board does it become a queen?" "No" I said, keeping the sarcasm level at 0 (these were primary school kids after all). "But in my last game, that's what my opponent did to me" was the reply. "Well, I said, you got tricked" was all I could say.
Amazingly, this question then turned up again in round 6, so I suspect there was a degree of trickery going on. I never found out the identity of the player whose rule it was, as it only seemed to be asked during the following game.
Nonetheless it did get me thinking about  a possible chess variant (as these things invariably do). Before the game, each player secretly marks a piece, and if that piece gets to the back rank, it becomes a queen (pawns still promote as normal). I suspect you could have some fun with this, trying to bluff your opponent with sudden lunges at open files or diagonals, while keeping the real piece up your sleeve. Of course the downside is that if one player did manage to sneak through the game might very well end there and then.
BTW One other interesting game from the tournament involved a 2Nv R (and no pawns) ending. The player with the 2N was determined to win, but his winning chances were diminished *after* his opponent lost the rook to a knight fork. Pushing on with the 2 knights, he then reduced his winning chances to nil after losing one of his knights. But despite the game being declared a draw at that point, and the result submitted, he remained undeterred, and played on trying to find that elusive K+NvK mate.

King of the ring

Over the years I have experimented with various tournament formats, to see whether variety is really the spice of life. However one format I was not aware of is currently being used in the Russia v China Match. It is apparently borrowed from Go, and it is a combination of a team match and a 'last man standing' type event.
Each team submits a playing order before the start of the match (unknown to the other team), and then the first two players meet. After that it is 'winner stays on' while the loser is replaced by the next player on the list. Obviously the match winner is the team which wins the final match, and eliminates the last player on the opposing team.
As it turns out, the Russian's are running away with the match, as Sergey Karjakin has turned into a one man wrecking queue. He has dispatched his first 4 opponents (Wei Yi, Ding Liren, Ni Hua, Yu Yangyi) and only needs to beat Wang Yue to complete a clean sweep. Even if he now loses, Wang Yue has to beat the other 4 Russian players to win the match!
Despite what seems to be a somewhat shorter match than the organisers anticipated, this format may be worth repeating. One tweak, which has been used in the USA, is to rank the teams in order of rating, and start with the lowest rated players first. This at least has the advantage of stretching the match out, as opponents are more likely to become harder to beat, rather than easier!

Wuuuuut?

Not sure what was happening here, but I can safely assume it was a concocted game between the two players involved. Further evidence supporting this idea, an identical game, from the same year turned up in my database, between two other players. Maybe it's what passes for chess humour in Germany.


Weber,Winfried (2095) - Weidenhoefer,Martin [A00]
Postbauer op Postbauer, 1997

All along the h file

When perusing a copy of "Bent Larsen's Best Games" I noticed a position where there were 7 piece lined up along the h file. I though this must have been a rare occurrence, and concluded games with 8 pieces along the h file must be scarcer still.
But doing a search on chessbase I found they were not that uncommon. I discovered nearly 100 games, and that was just with a search that had white pieces on ranks 1 to 4 and black pieces on ranks 5 to 8. The list of players who have played such games even include some famous names, such as Solkosky, Ian Rogers, Lajos Portisch and Johannsen (with 2 n's).  There soesn't seem to be any specific opening that leads to these positions either (upsetting my thesis that KID's were played in lots of these games),and the length of the games seems evenly distributed.
So without finding anything significant about this setup, I have randomly chosen a shortish game to at least show you that there is nothing special about being special.


Reefat,Bin Sattar (2487) - Abdulla,Al Rakib (2514) [C55]
BAN-ch 34th Dhaka (8), 28.04.2008