Chess Jokes : Chess Warning Signs

Warning signs you won't beat a computer at chess.

1. Before moving your queen, you consulting Eddie Murphy.
2. Your "garlic breath" strategy fails to intimidate this particular opponent.
3. You counter 'every' move with the "Canadian Burbon Opening."
4. Video tapes of you shouting at the ATM are legendary among the bank security staff.
5. You plan to use the "James T. Kirk Strategy" -- Talk the computer into blowing itself up!

Chess Jokes

Once, two Sardars were feeling bored and decided to play a few games

of chess to pass the time.

They were doing this for some time, when two more sardar friends

dropped by. Seeing them play chess, they said -

"Come on guys, we are feeling bored too. Let us play doubles!"

Chess Jokes

Santa Singh is Flying from Moscow to Delhi. To his surprise, sitting right beside
him is Gary Kasporov, the world Chess Champion. Santa has always been in awe
of Chess players, and immediately starts up a conversation with Gary about the
Nuances of the Game etc. Gary says ... "How would You like to Play me for $ 500/
US"?

Santa: "But you're too damn good".

Gary: "I'll play left handed".

Santa cant resist the bet and accepts. Kasparov, Check Mates our Sardar in 8
Moves .......

Santa is still scratching his head, as he leaves the airplane.

Upon Reaching Amritsar, Santa tells Banta about the game he had with
Kasparov.

Banta: "Tu bhi pura buddhu hai Santa". (You're an absolute fool Santa)
Santa: "kyon" (why)?

Banta: "Abe chooteye ........ Gary Kasparov Khabbu hai". (You ass hole, Gary
Kasparov IS a lefty, no wonder he beat you left handed).

Fide Rankings : Anand leads April 2008 FIDE ratings, Carlsen fifth , Aronian Sixth

The World Champion gained four points to cross the 2800 mark and top the rankings alone. Vladimir Kramnik and Veselin Topalov shed points to move to second and fourth; Alexander Morozevich gained points to move to third place. But the sensation is of course Magnus Carlsen, who at 17 years and four months is in place five, just 38 points below the leader. Is this a record?

World Champion Viswanathan Anand has gained four points to cross the magic 2800 line and top the April 2008 alone (in the previous list he was equal first with Kramnik). Vladimir Kramnik shed eleven points to move to second place at 2788. Third is Alexander Morozevich who gained nine to reach 2774; fourth Veselin Topalov who lost 13 to sink to 2767.

The sensation of the list, of course, is the Norwegian GM Magnus Carlsen (above), who at the age of 17 years and four months has climbed to place five in the world rankings, having gained a resounding 32 points to bring his Elo rating to 2765. Statisticians and historians need to get to work: is it the first time ever for a 17-year-old? Has anyone at that age ever approached the top rating by 38 points? Is there anything to stop this lad from becoming world champion? We for our part can only say: congrats Magnus, keep it up! You are one of the most intriguing personalities in current-day chess.

Going down the list a bit we find that Levon Aronian has gained 24 points to install himself firmly in place six. It is interesting to note that the Armenian is just two points behind Carlsen and four shy of Topalov. Other notables in the April 2008 list:

• 21-year-old Teimour Radjabov has gained 16 points to move from place 12 to place eight.
• Peter Svidler lost 17 points to drop from place five to nine (but hey, he's still in the top ten).
• Peter Leko, who is having a bad spell, dropped 12 points and two ranks to end at tenth and 2741.
• Vassily Ivanchuk, who in October 2007 was second in the world, is now number 11 at 2740.
• Alexei Shirov lost fifteen points to drop from seventh to 12th at 2740.
• Big winners are Chinese GMs Bu Xiangzhi and Ni Hua, who gained 17 and 23 points respectively to come in at 21st and 23rd in the world. GM Wang Hao gained 19 points to move from 48th to 34th.
• There are no women in the top 100 list – Judit Polgar has dropped out, perhaps due to inactivity (but see women's list below)?!

FIDE April 2008 Rating List

Top 53 Women April 2008

Here is where we find Judit Polgar, at the top of the Women's list. She has gained two points from 13 games played in the rating period, so we really do not understand why she is not in the main list. Probably just a glitch in the generation of the list.

In second place is the second female player in history to cross the 2600 mark, Koneru Humpy. In third, snapping at her heels, is the Chinese chess phenomenon Hou Yifan, who turned 14 just a month ago. Like Carlsen all we can say is: who is to stop this lass from becoming world champion?

Top 20 Girls April 2008

We can only repeat ourselves: guess who is the strongest girl in the world. Yifan, the chess marvel, who is 63 points ahead of Anna Muzychuk in second. Our friend Katya Lahno is closing in in third, with another favourite, Harika, in fourth place.

FIDE

City teen makes his move in world chess

He might only be a schoolboy but Cape Town's Anant Dole, 15, made a world-class impression at an international chess competition in 2008.

Anant exploded on to the local chess scene a few years ago just a year or two after his sister taught him the game.

But his proudest triumph yet was at 2008 Fide-hosted Parsvnath International Open Chess Tournament in New Delhi, India, where he clinched a joint fifth place and scooped a prize of 10 000 rupees (about R2 000).

In a rare occurrence for such a junior player, he also defeated Turkmenistan grandmaster Sapar Batyrov.

The tournament, held from January 13 to 20, was open to anyone so Anant had to compete against 400 talented players of all ages and backgrounds.

These opponents included grandmasters, Fide masters and international masters with years of experience and reputable international ratings.

The Grade 9 Sacs pupil who is also one of Mark Shuttleworth's Hip2b² ambassadors this year is ranked among the top 10 junior chess players in the country and has been invited to the national championships every year since he was eight.

"I won (nationals) at least five times in my age group," he said.

After his success at the competition, Anant was left with a local rating of about 2 150 (points) and an international Fide rating of 1 985.

His ambition is to eventually become a grandmaster - the most prestigious title a chess player can hold.

Players require an international rating of 2 500 to make grandmaster status.

"I would love to become a grandmaster one day but it will take a lot of effort. At the moment, I practise about an hour a day, but grandmasters put in about five hours a day," Anant said.

He believed the game not only taught him discipline, but also played a big role in his academic performance.

"I don't have to put as much effort into certain tasks as I used to, especially subjects like maths, because maths and chess are closely related. It has helped me face problems in all spheres of life," he said.

Anant's former coach, Kenny Solomons, said Anant had "great potential" as a chess player.

"If he continues to work hard and stay disciplined, he could be one of the best chess players around," he said.

Courtesy : http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=139&art_id=vn20080204112814395C455487

Kasparov Talks on Fischer

he latest issue of Time Magazine has a moving tribute to the eleventh World Champion Bobby Fischer, written by Garry Kasparov, the thirteenth World Champion. Meanwhile controversy is brewing over Fischer's estate, estimated at £1 million. And Variety reports on plans for a Hollywood movie "Bobby Fischer Goes to War" directed by Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald. Links and excerpts.

Kasparov on Fischer

Time: The Chessman, by Garry Kasparov
It is hard to say exactly when I first heard the name Bobby Fischer, but it was quite early in my life. When he was battling Boris Spassky for the world title in 1972, I was a 9-year-old club player in my native Baku in the Soviet Union. I followed the games avidly. The newspapers had extensive daily coverage of the match, although that waned as it became clear the Soviet champion was headed for defeat. Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games was one of my first chess books. (It had been translated into Russian and sold in the U.S.S.R. with no respect for copyright or royalties, infuriating its author.)

Controversy over Fischer's legacy

Times Online: Bobby Fischer, chess genius, heartless son
Unpublished letters seen by The Timesnow throw new light on the origins of Fischer’s precarious mental state and his obsession with beating Boris Spassky at the so-called match of the century in Reykjavik in 1972. He did not know who his real father was, and he deeply resented his mother for being an active communist under constant surveillance by the FBI.

Guardian: Fischer's 'widow' and nephews in legal tussle for £1m estate
As a chess mastermind Bobby Fischer was capable of executing manoeuvres as complicated as they were brutal. Now, following his death, the tussle over his million-pound estate may turn out to be just as convoluted. Last week the Reykjavik newspaper Visir reported that Fischer's estate, worth an estimated 140m Icelandic kronur (£1.07m), would go to Miyoko Watai, whom it described as Fischer's widow. But Fischer's brother-in-law Russell Targ has been in Iceland to instruct a lawyer to investigate whether Targ's two sons should be the beneficiaries. There are also confusing accounts of a daughter, now seven, whom Fischer is said to have fathered during a relationship which blossomed at country club in the Philippines. Yesterday Watai's lawyer, Arni Vilhjalmsson, said he had received an official document from Japan confirming the marriage. "It's a copy and I am waiting for the original," he said. If the document is proved authentic, Vilhjalmsson will take it to a magistrate in Iceland and ask for a private liquidation of the assets. Yesterday the Chesbase website carried a letter from John Bosnitch claiming that Fischer had married Watai in a ceremony at which he had been present: "I was the male witness to that marriage and the marriage certificate bears my name."

IceNews Daily: The complicated legacy of Bobby Fischer
Chess legend Bobby Fischer, who died on January 17th, was recently buried at a country church in Iceland during a Catholic funeral service. Though the service itself may have been peaceful, the legal wrangling over Fischer’s million dollar fortune may be about to turn nasty. Russel Targ, Fischer’s brother-in-law, has flown to Iceland in order to pursue legal investigations into the matter of inheritance which he feels should belong to his two sons. Another possible beneficiary is a seven year old girl, said to be Fischer’s daughter from a country club romance in the Philippines.

Fischer on the Big Screen

Variety: Macdonald to direct 'Bobby Fischer'
Universal and Working Title partners Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner have tapped Kevin Macdonald to direct "Bobby Fischer Goes to War." The drama about the upstart chess whiz's triumph over Boris Spassky in the World Chess Championship in 1972 is scripted by Shawn Slovo, based on the book by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Bevan and Fellner will produce. Macdonald won an Oscar for the documentary "One Day in September" before making his scripted directing debut on "The Last King of Scotland."

Cinema Blend: Bobby Fischer Heading Back To The Big Screen
Variety is reporting that Kevin Macdonald will direct Bobby Fischer Goes to War, a drama about the American chess champion. Fischer was a teenage sensation when he became a chess grandmaster at the age of 15. His huge accomplishment though, came in 1972 when he defeated Russian chess champion Boris Spassky. Of course, later in life Fischer became known as an eccentric and an anti-Semite. Macdonald's movie will apparently focus only on the match against Spassky. Fischer is a fascinating American figure, a hero for many years who later completely shunned his country. Given that the main character in Macdonald's Last King of Scotland was a murderous dictator, he's proven he can take on controversial but fascinating figures. I'm excited to see what he can do with this highly unusual story.

General articles

Daily Star: Talking about Lebanon with Bobby Fischer
Julie Flint remembers the Match of the Century: "Reykjavik in 1972 was my first big reporting assignment, for The Associated Press. I went for three days and stayed for three months". In 1992 she went to Belgrade to meet Fischer (with the help of Svetozar Gligoric), at 2 a.m., and was grilled about her reporting from Lebanon. "In the 1980s and early 1990s, I had been reporting from Beirut for ABC radio – and Bobby had been listening. He quoted myself to me. Why had I said this? What did I mean by that? Why was I out of breath when I said such-and-such (because I was recording, live, as I ran down a street in Mar Mikhael under Lebanese Army tank-fire in February 1984). Why were the Israelis so 'bloodthirsty'? 'Israelis' was not the word he used."

Bobby Fischer was my childhood hero.

In my office, I have a framed black-and-white photograph of a young Bobby Fischer, dressed impeccably in a suit, engrossed in a chess game.

Bobby Fischer was my childhood hero. He was U.S. chess champion at 14 and a year later became the youngest grandmaster in history. He took on the Soviets at their favorite game and beat them all, breaking the decades-long string of Soviet champions. When he defeated Boris Spassky for the world championship in 1972, I was 7 years old.

It was the height of the Cold War. Public television covered each move of the 21-game match. One evening, a New York City reporter visited 21 Manhattan bars and discovered that 18 had the Fischer match on television instead of the Mets game. That epic event was my first exposure to chess.

There was something intriguing about Fischer's intensity and those mysterious wooden pieces, so I asked Santa Claus for a chess set. Santa delivered.

As I began to study chess, I reveled in sharing Fischer's initials. I signed everything "Bobby F." When my dad came home with a copy of Fischer's classic book, "My 60 Memorable Games," I devoured every word. By the third reading, the binding was destroyed, and I kept the book together with a thick rubber band. When I read that Fischer subscribed to Russian chess magazines to learn the secrets of the Soviet masters, I got my hands on similar publications and taught myself the rudiments of the Russian alphabet so I could follow the moves.

Fischer possessed a relentless will to win. His great rival Spassky said, "When you play Bobby, it is not a question of whether you win or lose. It is a question of whether you survive." Unlike other grandmasters, Fischer didn't believe in occasionally taking short draws to conserve his energy in long, draining tournaments.

In the world championship qualifying matches, Fischer won 19 games in a row without conceding a single draw (the majority of grandmaster games are draws). It would be as if the New England Patriots didn't just win every football game they played this year, but didn't even allow their opponents to score. One Fischer opponent observed, "It began to feel as though you were playing against chess itself."

But after winning the world championship at age 29, the man who once said, "All I want to do, ever, is play chess," stopped playing. He didn't bother to defend his world championship in 1975 and went into seclusion.

I couldn't believe it. My own chess skills were improving, and I grew impatient for Bobby to provide new brilliancies. But as I entered high school and gradually mastered the game, Bobby Fischer was letting me down.

He quit chess and wrote a pamphlet titled "I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse!" I didn't read it. The son of a Jewish mother, Fischer began to spew anti-Semitic invective. An American hero, Fischer cheered the Sept. 11 attacks. It appeared that chess had kept him sane. Once he lost touch with the game, he lost touch with his sanity.

The romanticized view of Fischer that I held as a boy needed to adjust to a more complex reality. Aristotle said, "There was never a genius without a tincture of madness." That may be true, but Fischer's madness provoked tirades that were hard to forgive.

How was I to reconcile the boy who played the "game of the century" at 13 with the man who held such ugly views? I nodded my head when, in the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer," Ben Kingsley's character said, "I want back what Bobby Fischer took with him when he disappeared."

Why couldn't Fischer be like Garry Kasparov? Kasparov dominated chess for the past 20 years and recently entered Russian politics to challenge Vladimir Putin, at tremendous personal risk, and lead the pro-democracy movement. From my perspective as a local politician and chess master, this was a man I could admire.

When I learned of Fischer's death, I reflected on the hundreds of hours I spent studying his games while my schoolwork went unattended. Bobby Fischer was a big part of my youth, and I wondered how best to remember him.

A few years ago, I taught chess to a class of second- graders and regaled them with stories of a kid from Brooklyn who dreamed of becoming world champion, studied hard and then reached his dream.

I showed the students my framed photograph of the young Bobby Fischer, told them that it possessed secret powers and that I always won whenever I played with it next to me. I promised that the best-behaved student could borrow the picture when the second- graders paired up to play chess. That got their attention.

Later, as I walked amongst their games, quietly offering advice, I passed the boy who had earned the Fischer photograph, which he held tightly in his little hands. He leaned over to the girl sitting next to him and whispered "the Bobby Fischer picture really works!"

That's the Bobby Fischer I will remember.

http://chesscool.blogspot.com/2007/11/bobby-fischer.html

Courtesy @http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2004141350_bobbyfischer24.html

King County Councilmember Bob Ferguson is an internationally rated chess master and two-time Washington State Chess Champion. He can be contacted at bob.ferguson@kingcounty.gov.