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Dark Knight / Le Chevalier Noir
General Guidelines
---- Nous avons besoin d'un traduction français!
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List of Decisions of the 2015 1st Quarter
FIDE Presidential Board Decisions
Chengdu, 27 April, 2015
There are 43 points, all of which receive approval, except one. Try to find the odd man out among these on the list:
1PB-2015/13. To approve the list of time controls and publish them.
1PB-2015/14. To approve the proposed team compositions for FIDE team competitions.
1PB-2015/15. To study the Bucholz proposal in more detail.
1PB-2015/16. To approve Competition Rules and publish them.
1PB-2015/17. To approve Chess in Schools Commission report.
1PB-2015/18. Not to accept any of the Women’s Chess Commission proposals.
1PB-2015/19. To approve Social Actions Commission report.
1PB-2015/20. To approve Social Projects Commission report.
1PB-2015/21. To approve Chess for Disabled Commission report.
1PB-2015/22. To approve Medical Commission report.
1PB-2015/23. To approve IO titles.
1PB-2015/24. To approve Events Commission report.
1PB-2015/25. To approve Journalists Commission report and proposals.
1PB-2015/26. To approve two panels for Anti-Cheating Commission investigation.
1PB-2015/27. To approve the proposal of Mr. Freeman to authorize the President to approve Anti-Cheating investigation panels.
1PB-2015/28. To approve Anti-Cheating Commission report.
1PB-2015/29. To approve the report and proposals of Online Commission.
1PB-2015/30. To authorize the President to decide on the dates of the Women’s World Championship match following his trip to Lvov, Ukraine, based on a request from Ms.M. Muzychuk.
1PB-2015/31. To approve the organization of the World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championship in Berlin, Germany, 9-15 October 2015, by World Chess Events Ltd.
Balzac wrote a novel called “A Woman of Thirty.” Realities of that time said that any woman who was over thirty, thirty-odd years, lost her feminine appeal and relevance in the eyes of society.
Simone de Beauvoir in her book “The Woman Destroyed” puts the Balzac Age as forty-four. That was in the last half of the twentieth century. Today perhaps, with modern advances in medicine and social understanding, there is no Balzac Age.
In Russia, a Sex and the City, clone started on television in 2004. It was called Balzac Age, a euphemism for women over 30 and followed the adventures of four single female friends, all well into the Balzac Age.
All of this because of an interview with Beliavsky.
He discusses the age when talented chess players start to falter. The three in that bracket now are Boris Gelfand, Vassily Ivanchuk and Vishy Anand.
Beliavsky: Ivanchuk’s talent is phenomenal! But the main thing is his attitude to chess, his unique devotion to it. You can, of course, say that Vassily was unlucky, but you can also talk about psychological factors: at critical moments he would lose control of the situation. Take, for instance, the match against Ponomariov, when Ivanchuk was the undisputed favourite. Now Vasya is at a critical age. I call 42-43 years old the “Balzac age” for chess players. And he’s already crossed that threshold, a truly critical one, when very strong chess players – suddenly! – collapse in some tournaments. And later, approaching 50, they collapse in more and more…
And when Ivanchuk told me, “Somehow I’ve started to “blunder” recently…” I replied, “Vasya! Don’t pay any attention! Be grateful that you’re winning two tournaments out of three, because later you’ll win one, and then not even one…”
That Balzac age for a chess player is the point after which it’s very tough to fight for the World Championship title.
________
Thanks, Wayne. Interesting interview. I especially liked this comment of Beliavsky's:
"The chess players of that generation loved to say they were great strategists, but in actual fact they were above all great tacticians – because chess, for the most part, is a tactical game. It becomes a strategic game only when pawn chains are formed. When the pieces don’t come into contact with each other and a wall is formed between them you need to think about how to relocate your pieces. But when that pawn wall isn’t there it’s about calculation: “I go here, he goes there”."
"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." - Aesop
"Only the dead have seen the end of war." - Plato
"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination." - Thomas De Quincey
In Round One of Stavanger 2015, Magnus Carlsen overstepped the time control on move 60, was flagged and lost. He said that the control limit must have been in the contract he signed but, even if it were announced at the first of the round and he were present, he probably wouldn’t have noticed.
Two quotes:
June 16
Daniel King: As P.G.Wodehouse might have said, it's as though a rainbow leaped up and bit him on the leg.
Vishy Anand on players finding out the time control: You'd think we would, but surprisingly we don't!
I'm rather partial to the annotation notes after move 25 in this 'Chess Notes' piece in the 'Boston Globe': "Computers are funny. It thinks the position is more or less equal. I am thinking that it really doesn't appreciate what the psychological advantage of the initiative is." (:
In the 60s, 70s and 80s there were a number of postal strikes in Canada and abroad. I suppose with the advent of email the unions lost much of their power and now we may even lose daily home delivery.
I was doing graduate work in England when we were hit with a postal strike in 1971. It lasted from Jan 20 to March 8 – about 7 weeks. There was no way of getting any real chess news. I relied heavily on subs with BCM and CHESS. The latter was produced by B.H. Wood at an old railway station in Sutton Coldfield, a suburb of Birmingham.
While I languished without chess news in Manchester, a colleague later told me that he had simply got on a train, picked up the three issues of CHESS that would normally have been mailed to him and he was happily reading them!
Apropos of the postal strike, Edward Winter’s Chess Notes says that on page 322 of CHESS, July 1971, the magazine quoted a correspondence player:
‘Between my fifth and sixth moves in this game, I grew a moustache.'
(Number 9337)
Also from Chess Notes (Number 9357), a remark by Fred Reinfeld on page 106 of Great Moments in Chess (New York, 1963):
‘Teichmann, a stalwart of the old school, made the surly comment that in the first place there was no Hypermodern school, and that in the second place Nimzowitsch was its founder.’
A while ago the book 888 Miniature Studies came out. It is by Genrikh Kasparian (1910-1995), one of the foremost endgame study composers of our time.
The handsome volume is in English, hardbound, 384 pages, with large, clear diagrams. The publisher is BeoSing, Belgrade, 2010.
Evidently, it is the second edition of Kasparian’s 555 etiudov miniatur, Erevan, 1979. One is reminded of Sutherland and Lommer’s 1234 Modern Endgame Studies that was followed by their 1357 Endgame Studies, 1975.
In this compilation, a miniature means a total of seven or less men on the board.
Illijin in the introduction says that the book has the ideal material for a coach, who wants to put his students to work to achieve a high level performance. All the greats are there – Troitzky, Rinck, the Platov brothers, Kubbel, Sehwers, Mattison.. If you had to have just one book on studies, this would be it.
And now the reason for the Chess Quotes. The blurb on the book’s back is by Marjan Kovacevic and links up fathers and sons, legacy, chess and composition:
“Only a year ago, the literature world waited impatiently to see the last and unfinished novel by Vladimir Nabokov, 33 years after the writer’s death. It was his son Dmitri, who decided not to burn the father’s manuscripts, against what had been reported as his father’s last wish.
It is less known that Nabokov was also a passionate chess composer. Now, the centenary of the chess study magician Genrikh Kasparyan (1910-1995) should bring us his last and unfinished book – 15 years after the author’s death. Again, it was the son who decided his father’s work should be saved and published. Being also a study composer himself, Sergey Kasparyan concluded his father’s book “888 Miniature Studies”. With about the same excitement and controversy that the last Nabokov novel caused, the chess problem world now awaits the last book of the famous chess composer and theoretician of the chess endgame study.”
Marjan Kovacevic
FIDE Grandmaster for Solving
and Composing Chess Problems
_______
Note Added Later: Perhaps the English in the book needs a good editing. This comment after the famous Joseph study:
“A clever achievement, which neither today didn’t lost the freshness.”
Last edited by Wayne Komer; Friday, 10th July, 2015, 02:47 PM.
Reason: the English - tsk, tsk
Claude Frizzel Bloodgood would be 78 today were he still alive. Paul Hoffman, in his 2007 book, 'King's Gambit', devotes a number of pages to "perhaps the greatest chess con of all time" and has this intriguing quote from Bloodgood's 'Chess Openings for Hustlers' (which I believe was the subtitle of Bloodgood's 'Blackburne-Hartlaub Gambit'):
"The game of chess is the second most entertaining diversion ever created by the mind of man. It is second, of course, only to chess with money on the table. If you've ever played under the gun, with your cash at stake and the clock ticking, you know what I mean."
Actually the best is contra chess with money on the table (chess with a backgammon cube) - not for the faint of heart.
Correct me if I'm wrong, Hans, but the acceptance of the bet double gets you draw odds. That is to say the cube-giver must win, a draw counting as a loss.
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