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U.S. Chess League Is Loaded With Talent and Drama — If it were not for the Internet, there would be no United States Chess League, because it is the Web that allows teams from across the country to play one another without expensive airplane trips. For the third year in a row, the league has 16 teams — double the number when it started in 2005. One team, the Chicago Blaze, dropped out this year, but it was replaced by the Connecticut Dreadnoughts. The league’s president is still Gregory Shahade, an international master. Some of the country’s top chess players are on various rosters, including Joel Benjamin, a three-time United States chess champion; Boris Gulko, the only player to have won both the Soviet and United States chess championships; Varuzhan Akobian, who ...

Olympian efforts abound on Istanbul's lower boards — Just as in the five-ring Olympics where athletes compete in track events and on the ski slopes, many of the competitors and countries that show up at the biennial Chess Olympiad arrive knowing they have little hope of earning a medal. Men’s and women’s chess teams from more than 150 countries took part in the recent 40th Chess Olympiad in Istanbul, which once again was dominated by the globe’s long-standing chess powerhouses: Russia, China, Armenia, Ukraine and the U.S. World-class players from the top teams produced some gripping chess, from Russian former world chess champ Vladimir Kramnik’s positional masterpiece against Armenian No. 1 Levon Aronian to U.S. star Alex Onischuk’s heartbreaking loss to Chinese GM Ling Diren in ...

FIDE Grand Prix begins in London — The inaugural tournament for the FIDE Grand Prix is taking place in London Sept. 21 to Oct. 3 at the historic Simpson’s-in-the-Strand chess venue. The Grand Prix competition is a series of six events featuring the top chess grandmasters in the world. Each competitor must play in four of the six Grand Prix events with points awarded according to the final placements in each tournament. The chess player who finishes with the best overall result qualifies to the final Candidates match event, and the winner of that match becomes the challenger to the World Chess Champion Viswanathan Anand of India. Israeli Grandmaster Boris Gelfand, who challenged Anand for the World Chess Championship title in May of this year, currently sits in first place after ...

Did a Computer Bug Help Deep Blue Beat Kasparov? — In May 1997, an IBM supercomputer known as Deep Blue beat then chess world champion Garry Kasparov, who had once bragged he would never lose to a machine. Kasparov and other chess masters blamed the defeat on a single move made by the IBM machine. Either at the end of the first game or the beginning of the second, depending on who’s telling the story, the computer made a sacrifice that seemed to hint at its long-term strategy. Kasparov and many others thought the move was too sophisticated for a computer, suggesting there had been some sort of human intervention during the game. “It was an incredibly refined move, of defending while ahead to cut out any hint of countermoves,” chess grandmaster Yasser Seirawan ...

On Chess: Game not as hard as many think — Chess has an undeniable mystique. It is often thought to be the game of games — too difficult to master and best admired from afar. In fact, the rules are quite simple. It’s possible to learn them in less than a half-hour. Expertise is largely a matter of familiarity and practice. With only modest guidance, it’s possible to advance significantly from the beginning stage. Even advanced chess skills aren’t as difficult as one would think. In his book Lasker’s Manual of Chess, Emanuel Lasker (1868-1941) — a world chess champion, creative mathematician and philosopher — expressed his conviction that a young chess player, “even if he possesses no talent for chess,” can attain master strength with a mere 200 hours of application. How is ...

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— 5/20 12:00