Breaking News -- Boston Blitz win first round

NEWS FLASH -- The US Chess League website has the Boston Blitz winning their first round against the Miami Sharks with an impressive 3-1 score. GM Christiansen led the way with a victory on board 1 over GM Becerra, while Vadim Martirosov and Ilya Krasik scored fine wins on Board 3 and 4, pushing the Blitz to a good start against a strong team. Kudos to Vadim who cemented a team win with a victory in a game where he was outrated by almost 200 points. Hopefully more news will follow....

Historical BCC Championship results

The 2006 edition of the Boylston Chess Club championship begins on September 11. It's a single round robin open to all club members 2200 and over, with one entry spot reserved for the winner of the Reubens-Landey 1800-2199 qualifier.

I don't know how far back the championship goes, but the crosstables on the USCF website go back to 1991, so, having too much time on my hands, I whipped up a chart of the results of the last 15 years. Numbers represent what place that person finished in; players are arranged in rough order of how impressive their results are. I did it by hand, and some results were tricky (a couple of times there was a double round robin entered as two distinct tournaments), so I'm not betting my life that it's all correct - let me know if you find any mistakes.

	91	92	93	94	95	96	97	98	99	00	01	02	03	04	05
Rasin	1	1	1	2	1	2	1	4
MacIntyre										1	1	2	1	1	3
Chase	4	4	2	1	3	4	2	1				6	3	2
Cherniack	3	7		5	1	5	4	2	1			4		4	5
Paschall	5		3	4	4	2				5		1	2
Riordan												3	4	5	1
Gelman						1	2
Broomes	1	5
Martisorov												4		2	2
Godin	8	2	8	7		6	9	5	5
Desmarais									2	3	4
Warfield										2	3
Orsher									2	4
Stancil								8	4		2
Resika		6	5	2
Porter								2
Casillas		3	3
Theil															3
Nemchenok							4
Schmitt	6	9	5	6		6	6	6	6
Astrachan											5		6
Leung												7	5
Rueda					5
Feinstein			5
Becker								6			6
Mishkin					6			9
Christiansen															6
Glickman														6
Spector										6
Armes							6
Magnuson	6
Clayton															7
Williams														7
Chisam						8	8
Woods		8		8
Kreps				8
Perez						9
Mays			9
Wuersch	9
Slive	10			10
Croxen			10
Lappin		10

Chris Chase wins the 2006 Charles Drafts Memorial

Walter Driscoll once again sponsored a tournament to remember his friend Charles Drafts. Bernardo Iglesias was the TD. 29 players competed last Saturday at the Boylston Club.






FM Chris Chase won four games to take the first prize ($100).







Evan Sonkin was the top under 1900 with 3.5.

Chess and Poker, or what's a meta phor...

This morning on the BBC I heard a commentator say something like this about the nuclear issue:

"The Iranians are patiently playing chess while the Bush administration is bluffing as in poker."

USCL Flops a Flush

The United States Chess League appears to have achieved a major coup by securing its first financial sponsor. Today, Commissioner Shahade announced an arrangement with online poker site PokerStars.com. PokerStars major claim to fame is that 2003 WSOP Main Event Champion Chris Moneymaker and 2004 Champion Greg Raymer both won their seats through satellites on the site.

Under the deal, each of the original eight USCL teams "...will receive a stipend for the season to help them pay their top players..." Apparently teams must complete a full-year in the league before becoming eligible for these payments. Therefore, neither Tennessee nor Seattle will be receiving the stipend this year. While the USCL announcement doesn't mention the value of the deal, in a comment to a previous post on BCC Weblog Shahade indicated that teams would be receiving $100 per match. For its part, PokerStars now has a banner advertisement prominently displayed near the top of the USCL homepage.

Obviously, PokerStars has recognized that chess players are often drawn to the game of poker. Our very own Bryan Clark could be exhibit #1 -- not to mention "Action" Dan Harrington, Howard "The Professor" Lederer, and many more. You can also check out this post on the Daily Dirt about chess players cashing at this year's Main Event. I suppose the big question for the tournament chess community is this -- after tasting the rewards of poker, do these individuals continue to play chess?
****
In other USCL news, the Boston Blitz have completed their 2006 roster by adding three additional names:

• GM Eugene Perelshteyn - Perelshteyn was the Blitz's strongest performer last season and joins this year's team as a newly-minted Grandmaster.


• FM Bill Kelleher - By contrast, Bill had the worst performance rating on the 2005 squad. One has to imagine that this was an odd aberration given his years of tournament experience.


• NM Vadim Martirosov - New to the team this year, Vadim is a strong master and all around nice guy. His chess teaching prowess is legendary.

Former member of the Blitz, IM Josh Friedel, has joined the San Francisco Mechanics as their top-rated player. Rumor has it that Josh is trying to get them to change the name of the team to the Maniacs.

Disclaimer: BCC Weblog provides independent coverage of the United States Chess League. It is not affiliated with the USCL or the Boston Blitz.

Prelude to a Championship

Invitations to the BCC Championship tournament have been sent out to all masters in the club and the winner of the Reubens-Landey qualifier. For those of you not invited (including me), now is the time to express your interest in playing in the Hauptturnier -- a round-robin tournament which runs in parallel to the Championship. Sign-up at the club or let Bernardo or Bob Oresick know of your interest.

The Championship and Hauptturnier begin on Monday, September 11th. In a significant change from past years, the time control will be 30/90, SD/45 -- making this the first time that there is no possibility of adjourned games.

In a related note, at last week's Board meeting BCF President (and former club champion) Paul MacIntyre was asked why two master lectures were scheduled for August. Regarding NM Riordan's lecture he replied, "I wanted Charles to have a chance to lecture while he is still champion."

Watch out! The pre-Championship trash talking has begun.

Measuring the Chess Blogosphere III

This is the third installment of my series on Measuring the Chess Blogosphere. In Part 1, I looked at unique visitor stats for chess blogs and in Part 2, Google Page Ranks. In this post, I'll be covering syndication subscriptions.

For those of you unfamiliar with syndication, you might be surprised to learn that many people read blogs without actually visiting them. How? They use something called an RSS reader which aggregates posts from a variety of sources and presents them in a consolidated form. There are many different readers available on the web (see the BCC Weblog sidebar for a list of several of them), and most personalized portal services, e.g., My Yahoo, My MSN, Google Homepage, etc. can aggregate syndicated feeds as well. What this means for the blog publisher is that visits to the site may significantly underestimate the actual number of readers of your blog.

For my purposes, syndication also provides another (imperfect) means of measuring relative reader interest across the chess blogosphere. To do this, I focused on one reader in particular -- Bloglines. When subscribing to a feed in Bloglines, the site shows all the feeds to that blog which are available and how many subscribers there are to each. As such, it is relatively easy to calculate the total number of Bloglines subscribers to each chess blog. Of course, it took a bit of time to do this for several hundred chess blogs, but that's why you read this blog (smile!).
Before looking at the data, a number of caveats are in order:

• The data below measures Bloglines subscriptions only, not the total number of subscribers to each blog. Bloglines is a very popular reader and therefore probably makes a good proxy for relative subscriber interest across chess blogs. However, if a disproportionate share of your subscribers use a different reader then your ranking in the list below will not be accurate. In particular, you will notice that no non-English chess blogs appear in the list. This could simply indicate that there is not much interest in these blogs among subscribers, or it might mean that another RSS reader is much more popular among these blogs' readers.


• Subscriptions don't die. Unless one deletes their Bloglines account or a specific subscription, that subscription will continue to be counted. It is certainly possible that some subscribers are no longer reading the blog they subscribed to. Further, there is little incentive to remove a subscription to a blog which has become inactive or posts irregularly. Therefore, a blog will tend to maintain its number of subscribers long after its visitors have moved on to more timely sources of content.


• Those of you who currently use Bloglines may find that the subscription numbers listed below do not correspond with the numbers you see for the same blog in your Bloglines reader. This is explained by the fact that many blogs have several feeds available within Bloglines. For example when subscribing to BCC Weblog, Bloglines presents you with four options: atom.xml (two different versions), atom.xml? bsuser= boylston-chess-club.blogspot.com, and feeds.feedburner.com/ BCC-Weblog. Once you have subscribed, you see only the number of subscribers to the feed you chose. The numbers below reflect all the feeds combined.


• Let me reiterate the standard caveat which applies to the entire Measuring the Chess Blogosphere series. None of these measures say anything definitive about the quality or worthiness of any blog. As always, that is a subjective judgment of each individual chess blog reader.

Now, let's move on to the data which was collected on August 16, 2006. I have included all currently active chess blogs with more than ten Bloglines subscribers:

Daily Dirt Chess Blog - 121
About Chess - 58
Susan Polgar Chess Blog - 55
Boylston Chess Club Weblog - 40
The Chess Mind - 40

Blue Devil - 24
Online Chess Blog - 22
J'adoube - 20
The Closet Grandmaster - 20
Temposchlucker - 19

ChessAssistance - 18
The Kenilworthian - 18
DreadPirateJosh - 17
Generalkaia - 17
Pawn Sensei - 17
Sancho Pawnza - 17

King of the Spill - 16
Pale Morning Dun - 16
Patzer's Mind - 16
ChessBase News - 15
Takchess - 15

Montse - 14
Phorku - 14
And Then There Was Chess - 13
Alberto Dominguez - 12
Chess News and Events - 12
Druss - 12
GM Alexandra Kosteniuk's Podcasts - 12
Man de la Maza - 12

Blunder Prone - 11
Chess for Blood - 11
Mousetrapper - 11
Qxh7# - 11

A few noteworthy findings:

• In Part 1, we didn't have any verifiable visitor stats for the Daily Dirt and had to take Mig at his word that he gets about 5,000 per day. While it is not a surprise, this data certainly confirms the hypothesis that his blog is the most widely read in the chess 'sphere. However, it is interesting to note that his subscriber counts are only 2-3 times as great as the nearest competitors, while the 5,000 visits number was 10-20 times as great as the next best in that category.


• You will notice that many of the Knights Errant are included in the list above. I believe this reflects the fact that many Knights have adopted Bloglines as an easy means for keeping track of their brethren.


• As I mentioned above, not one non-English chess blog made the list.


• I expected Chessbase News to be much higher, though it should be pointed out that they do not publicize the fact that they have a feed.

Please share your thoughts on the data in the comments.

*****
One last item before closing -- As I indicated above, this data is limited to Bloglines subscriptions and does not measure total subscriptions to a blog. However, many bloggers can determine (or at least estimate) their total subscriptions. The group that probably will have the easiest time are those who locally-host their own blogging software or use a web-hosted service which reports subscriptions. My useless advice for you -- look up the number. For the rest of us (i.e., mostly the unwashed Blogger masses), if you use Feedburner then I have a proposed estimation technique that you might find useful:

Step 1: Determine the total number of Bloglines subscriptions to your blog and the number just from the Feedburner feed (40 and 9 - for BCC Weblog).

Step 2: Determine the average number of total Feedburner subscriptions to your blog from the Feedburner site (42 - for BCC Weblog)

Step 3: Estimate total subscribers as follows: Total Feedburner subs x Total Bloglines subs / Bloglines Feedburner subs (42 x 40 / 9 = 187 - for BCC Weblog)

Of course, I have no idea how accurate this estimate is.

Dig this!

The "chess champion" e-mail spammer story is back in the local news.

Seems that Braden Bourneval's former partner in crime, neo-nazi Davis Wolfgang Hawke, went missing last year after a Virginia court awarded AOL a $13 million settlement against them. Now AOL is threatening to dig up the yards of Hawke's parents and grandparents in search of gold bars that they believe are buried there.

Read "You've got gold - AOL goes digging" from the Boston Herald.

Hat Tip: Howard Goldowsky

Something to bitch about

Book publisher Silman-James Press takes the New York Times to task for its hypocrisy (yes, I know, hypocrisy at the Times isn't exactly breaking news).

Apparently, after twice refusing to publish the name of Jen Shahade's book, Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport, in order to "... protect the sensibilities of its readers", the Times published a piece in the August 6th Sunday magazine, "... 'Pops Goes the Feminist', in which the word 'bitch' is used liberally."

Read Silman-James Press' letter to the New York Times.

Quote of the Week

"It is comparable to the Russian National Chess Team being schooled in their game by a group of drunken toddlers." - A member of the Critical Defects, a Salt Lake City indoor soccer team, explaining what it's like now that they are beating their much more experienced opponents.

From Ryan Byrd's Ramblings

Lecture Lecture

No, that's not an echo you hear... Between now and the end of the month the Boylston Chess Club will be featuring two events in its Master Lecture Series.

The Boylston Chess Club Master Lecture Series presents:

Endgame Insights -

An evening with the BCC Champion
A 90-minute lecture by NM Charles Riordan

When: Wednesday, August 23rd, 7:00 p.m.

Where: The Boylston Chess Club

Admission: Advance - $3/5 (BCC members/non-members), At the door - $4/6

Charles will present a selection of interesting and instructive endgames from some of his recent high-level encounters. He will let us in on the secrets of his post-mortem analysis and share the conclusions he was able to distill from them.

Charles crashed through the 2300 barrier at this year’s Amateur Team Championships East, where his team won that event and went on to become 2006’s Amateur Team Champions. Charles was undefeated on first board of the team he himself put together. Charles Riordan is, of course, the reigning Boylston Chess Club Champion. Other notable achievements include a tie for first at the 2004 New Hampshire State Championship and second place at the 2004 Massachusetts State Championship. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Boylston Chess Foundation.

Charles has taken some notable scalps. Most recently GM Julio Becerra was defeated by Charles in the endgame. He has defeated GM Sam Palatnik and has drawn once with GM Sergei Kudrin (an endgame swindle), once with GM Aleksander Wojtkiewicz, once with GM Alexander Yermolinsky, and twice with GM Ildar Ibragimov.

Light refreshments will be served.

The Boylston Chess Club Master Lecture Series presents:

A 90-minute lecture by GM Eugene Perelshteyn on his new book

Chess Openings for White, Explained

(Winning with 1.e4)

When: Wednesday, August 30th, 7:00 p.m.

Where: The Boylston Chess Club

Admission: Advance - $3/5 (BCC members/non-members), At the door - $4/6

Drawing from his freshly-published work on the openings for White, GM Eugene Perelshteyn will present an overview of topical openings and their usage, provide some pointers on how to study openings, and give us the inside story of the writing of the book. Copies of his book will be available for purchase and signing.

When Eugene last visited with us in 2005, he was still pursuing his grandmaster dream. I am happy to report that this time we will be receiving a lecture from Grandmaster Eugene Perelshteyn. He achieved his final norm this year at the great tournament at Foxwoods by tying for first with Loek Van Wely and Ilya Smirin.

Perelshteyn won the 2000 U.S. junior title and took clear first in the star-studded 2003 Generation Chess International Chess Tournament in New York City, ahead of veteran GMs Jaan Ehlvest and Larry Christiansen. He defeated Ehlvest again at Foxwoods and clinched a share of first place with a last-round win over Israeli GM Victor Mikhalevski.

Light refreshments will be served.

Adapted from the Boylston Chess Club website

Universal Donors

Every food tastes like chicken and every sport is like chess. This time it's lawn bowling.

It's like playing chess from 100 feet away; there's a tremendous amount of strategy...

Think: ESPN Classic

While waiting for the 2006 US Chess League season to start, you might want to relive some of the moments from BCC Weblog's 2005 coverage of the Boston Blitz.

August: BCC leads U.S. Chess League's Boston Blitz

September: Yankees Suck! - Blitz take early lead vs. Masterminds - Blitz seek rebound after disappointing draw - Live Blogging: Blitz vs. Cobras - Live Blogging: US Chess League - Week 4 - A Balanced Blitz? - The USCL and the Blogosphere - Boston Blitz in Action #1 - Tandem Live Blogging: Boston vs. San Francisco

October: Analytics vs. Intuition - Sharks bite down on Blitz - US Chess League Announces 2006 Line-Up - The Fat Lady has finished her warm-ups - Boston Blitz in Action #2 - Blitz unveil "Secret Weapon" - 1967 all over again? - Good luck, but not enough of it

November: Swan Song - Yawn! - USCL Championship Match Postponed - Blitz by Numbers

Boston Blitz Trading Cards: #1 - #2 - #3 - #4 - #5 - #6 - #7 - #8

Disclaimer: BCC Weblog provides independent coverage of the United States Chess League. It is not affiliated with the USCL or the Boston Blitz.

What'd he say?

Those Aussies don't just sound funny; they say some "funny" things:

The All Blacks proved themselves chess masters in overcoming a determined Australian assault to win the Bledisloe Cup...

Now, just imagine an NBA team with the same name.

August quads report

I didn't have time to play in the quads on Saturday, but I stopped by the club for the last round, and was pleasantly surprised to see seven full sections playing. (For a quad tournament, the players are divided into groups of four by rating, and each group plays a three-round round robin.)

Some highlights from the top few sections:

FM Chris Chase had Scott Didham on the defensive but wasn't able to make his initiative count, and ended up worse in a knight-vs-bishop ending, until Scott miscalculated on a sac-a-piece-to-promote-the-pawn tactic and realized a second later that the pawn could still be stopped (Bd4xb2?? Nd3xb2 and if e3-e2 then Nb3-d3 gets back in time). Chris won the section ahead of Patrick Sciacca, who lost a piece to Lawyer Times (...Re8-Re1+ Kg1-g2 Re1xBc1 Rxc1 Qg5+) but got a mating attack in return, with Lawyer's king trapped behind a Black pawn on g7 and White pawn on g6 and facing a marauding queen.

In the second section, Kyle Clayton and Jason Rihel engaged in a slow maneuvering battle until Jason suddenly dropped a piece (...d7-d5?? Qd1-a4+ and Qa4xBa6). The position was too closed for Kyle to immediately take advantage of it, though, and when Jason in desperation sacked a pawn to create a passed b-pawn, it looked like he might be able to swindle a draw if not more. With minutes left on the clock, Kyle gave back the piece to emerge two pawns ahead, and converted the victory in a time scramble to take clear first place. Meanwhile William Smirnov played a stylish double sac (Rf1xNf6 g7xf6 Bd3xh7+) against Evan Sonkin to gain an irresistible mating attack, which certainly inspired me to go make sure I know what to do against the Veresov.

In the third section, Natasha Christiansen fended off a dangerous h-pawn push from Jake Garbarino and secured a draw, while Kevin Croxen beat Edmund Staples to join the two of them for a three-way tie for first place.

And that's not even half of the games! It was great to see the club so active, and I hope next week's tournament is so well attended.

This and that

1. The 13th Annual Charles Drafts Open will be held this coming Saturday, August 19th at the BCC. More recent readers of the blog not familiar with the Charles Drafts story can read it here.


2. Chessbase has a story about a tournament held on mud flats during low tide. Players attempt to finish their games quickly, before the tide rushes in and drowns them. This got me thinking about an entire new category of chess -- Adventure Tournaments. Some of my initial ideas include matches held in a lion cage at the zoo, tournaments held in active war zones (e.g., 2006 Beirut Summer Open; did they hold a tournament in Sarajevo during the Bosnian conflict?), and blitz at the summit of Mount Everest. Any other ideas?


3. At Chess for Blood, Patrick is out for some of Jeremy Silman's. He reviews Silman's 'The Amateur's Mind', calling it "the most condescending book ever."


4. The Hungarian Knight has some fun with Google search referrals to his blog. At times, we've had some similar amusement here at BCC Weblog.


5. I found a new way to use the Google Blog Search Engine to search for chess-related blogs and discovered about a dozen new ones (new to me, anyway) -- mostly French and Spanish ones. Check out the listings for recent updates. At the same time, we say goodbye to ten bloggers who have become estranged from their keyboards -- most notably, Knight Errant Old Fart; sidebar residents Perceptual Pawn and Der Alter Goniff; King's Gambit, Delaware Chess Weblog, and The Chessic Musings of the Manley Nick.
   
   Update: Still coming across new finds with the search engine approach including a new blog from GM Nigel Davies, a new Knight who seems to have been previously discovered by Generalkaia, and a few others now in the general listings.

Reminds me of the Reubens-Landey

No wonder it's so hard to make a living playing chess. You pay hard earned cash for the opportunity to win nothing.

A critical position

So, I was having dinner with Gary Kasparov at one of those local Italian restaurants with the red checkerboard tablecloths. After the food arrived, it took him 40 minutes to respond to my request to pass the salt.

Adapted from More Funny Jokes - Chess Champion

How much for the movie rights?

The Chess-playing puppets from a story of India's literary genius enthralled an audience of children and adults on the 125th birth anniversary of Munshi Premchand, one of India's most outstanding literary figures of the 20th century.

A theatre group in northern Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, the home state of Premchand, suitably marked the occasion by enacting two of his stories in a puppet show.

"Shatranj Ke Khiladi" (The chess players), is set in colonial India and dwells on the politics of expansion by the British and the division of local Indian rulers.

Read "Puppet show to celebrate 125th birth anniversary of Premchand" from Zee News.

It was bound to happen

Drugs may or may not help you play better chess, but if we test, some will be caught.

The professional chess world was rocked today when 13 year old chess prodigy, Bobby Baines was disqualified for testing positive for steroids.

Clayton Groman, Director of the United States Chess Federation announced during a press conference from his offices in Crossville, Tennessee that Baines ... [is] under suspicion for blood doping and taking drugs on the USCF list of banned substances.

"We've had Mr. Baines in our crosshairs for quite some time," said Groman. "We first became suspicious when we noticed that he was becoming much more violent during matches ..."

Read "Anabolic Steroids Invade the World of Professional Chess."