Hooray for Anand!

As many of you know, the world championship has ended, and Viswanathan Anand has finally left no doubt in anybody’s mind who the champion is, with a convincing 6.5-4.5 victory over Vladimir Kramnik. Kramnik at least made a fight of it, with a...

Western States Open, day 1

While Viswanathan Anand and Vladimir Kramnik are battling it out for world supremacy in chess, 245 chess players have come to Reno with a more modest goal — supremacy in the Western U.S. This is a very modest turnout by the usual standards of the Western States...

If only chess pieces looked like this…

Recently I found a Web page with some marvelous pictures of whimsical chess pieces brought to life as fantasy characters. They reminded me of Carina Jørgensen’s work, which I wrote about in this entry from October 2007. The person who posted the pictures...

Kramnik vs. Anand

What an exciting month for chess! Of course, tomorrow we will see the first game of the world championship match, Kramnik versus Anand. From everything I’ve read it should be a pretty even match, but with a vivid contrast in styles. Because it’s a short...

Karpov-Fischer

A couple nights ago I was browsing one of the Russian chess sites, www.64.ru, and came across an interesting article by Anatoly Karpov about the world championship match that never happened: Karpov vs. Fischer. The link is here if you want to test your Russian, but...