Chess Sells, Propaganda Sells

In the most recent post about 'Top eBay Chess Items', Soviet Propaganda Porcelain, I wondered,

It escapes me why this current item might also be considered propaganda. Maybe I should look into that another time.

Of the first 21 images returned by a relevant search phrase, all but two of them feature the same chess set. Even after removing the keyword 'porcelain', at least half of the images are of that set.

Google image search on 'chess soviet propaganda porcelain'

The first image (top row, left) points to a post on this blog: Soviet Propaganda Chess Set (September 2009).

Originally the set was created on Lomonosov Porcelain Factory in 1920’s by a very famous and important artist - Natalia Danko. [...] This copy was made from an original set which is located in Lomonosov Porcelain Factory Museum.

The image next to it points to A Russian propaganda porcelain chess set (liveauctioneers.com; 'Sold For £1,100').

The Communists versus the Capitalists, Capitalist King as death, Communist King as a worker, Capitalist Queen in flowing robes, Communist Bishops as effete feudal clergy, Communist Knights as black and white horses, Communist Rooks as ships, Capitalist Rooks as black and white ships, Communist Pawns as healthy workers, Capitalist workers bound in chains, the King 10 cm high, the Pawn 5 cm high.

A later copy of the famous Soviet Propaganda set, designed by Natalia and Yelena Danko in the early 1920's. Literature:
- Bloomsbury Auctions, "Fine Chess Sets and Games", Tuesday 26th October, 2004, Lot 95.
- Bloomsbury Auctions, "Fine Chess Sets and Traditional Games", Thursday, 14th April, 2005, Lot 182.
- Collen Schafroth: "The Art of Chess", Abrams, New York, page 10.

The other images link to similar explanations. But what about my question on 'Top eBay Chess Items: Soviet Propaganda Porcelain'? The best explanation I could find was a booklet titled News From a Radiant Future: Soviet Porcelain from the Collection of Craig H. and Kay A. Tuber (amazon.com).

In a 1925 article on the post-Revolutionary production of the State Porcelain Factory in Leningrad, the ceramic artist Elena Danko described the factory's wares as "news from a radiant future." This volume is a catalogue of the Art Institute of Chicago's 1992 exhibit of Soviet porcelain from the collection of Craig and Kay Tuber. The essays included in News from a Radiant Future discuss the relationship between Bolshevik propaganda and the state porcelain factory, as well as the larger tradition of Russian imperial ceramics. They also consider porcelain's connection to the Russian folk heritage and specifically to the October Revolution.

In short, any Soviet porcelain that shows Lenin, Stalin, or workers is propaganda. The eBay item featured two workers (and a dog); that makes it propaganda; and that helps it sell. Capitalism won.

Korchnoi's Events 1998-99 / 2014-15

After my previous Korchnoi post, Events 1976-2000, I looked at TWIC's records starting with the year 1998, and added a summary for the years 1998-99 to my index page Viktor Korchnoi's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (TMER, 1946-1977). When does Korchnoi's TMER end? Wikipedia's page, Viktor Korchnoi, says,

Korchnoi became the oldest player ever to win a national championship, when he won the 2009 Swiss championship at age 78. He won the national title again a few months after his 80th birthday in July 2011 after a playoff game with Joseph Gallagher.

Chess.com's Peter Doggers, in Viktor Korchnoi, 1931-2016 (June 2016), wrote,

Korchnoi's last recorded games were the four rapid games that he played against Wolfgang Uhlmann at the 2015 Zurich Chess Challenge. He also played two rapid games against the same opponent in 2014 in Leipzig.

His last classical games were from 2012, played in the Swiss Team Championship. At the end of that year, when he was 81, he suffered from a stroke, and later he had problems with his heart as well. He was scheduled to play in the 2013 Zurich Christmas Open, but withdrew due to health reasons.

TWIC's Mark Crowther covered the two Uhlmann matches in TWIC 1014 & 1059. By the time I wrote this post, I had located four events Korchnoi played in his last two years:-

• Korchnoi Again Plays Chess. Against Uhlmann, not Spassky Though (chess-news.ru/en; March 2014)
• Pegasus chess extravaganza in Dresden (chessbase.com; September 2014) • 'The white side consisted of GMs Uhlmann, Darga and Hecht, while the black side was represented by Korchnoi, Taimanov and Padevsky. It was a discussion game: the three players would come to a consensus and then a move would be made.'
• Korchnoi vs. Uhlmann, two legends in Zürich (chess24.com; February 2015)
• The man who has spent his whole life in the game (chessdiagonals.ch; June 2016) • 'Viktor Korchnoi's last games in public were the four rapid games he played against his longtime friend from Saint Petersburg, Mark Taimanov at the [Lucerne] Chess Museum in November 2015.'

There were undoubtedly other games. Korchnoi must have been the most active chess grandmaster in history.

Does Chess.com Make You Smarter?

In my previous 'chess in schools' (CIS) post, 'Chess in Primary Schools' Studied, I promised to 'take a closer look at the EEF study', where EEF stands for the U.K. based Education Endowment Foundation. First, here's a recent video from Chess.com's Youtube channel.

Does Chess Make Kids Smarter? With GM Ian Rogers (3:06) • 'Renowned chess journalist and grandmaster Ian Rogers gives his two cents on the recent UK study that suggests chess does not improve math skills among kids.'

This links to another Chess.com video, ChessCenter: Does Chess Make You Smarter?, where the title covers a few minutes of discussion between IM Daniel Rensch and WFM Alexandra Botez starting at 6:20 into the clip. The commentators ask viewers to leave a comment on the survey question 'Do you think chess makes you smarter?'. (I recently featured the series in a Video Friday post, Chess.com's ChessCenter, June 2016).

GM Rogers penned a corresponding article on Chess.com, titled School Chess Fails PR Test, where he started,

Boris Gelfand’s musings in a recent interview on the benefits of children playing chess for its own sake - “Only a fraction will play professionally, but the rest will acquire the skill of strategic planning and the habit of thinking, taking responsibility for their actions and respecting their opponent; very useful skills.” - has proven remarkably prescient.

The original Gelfand interview can be found at Gelfand on missing the Baku Olympiad (chess24.com; 2 July 2016). As if all that weren't enough, Chess.com has another comments-only forum post, Playing chess doesn't make your children any smarter, study finds, which starts with a copy of the Telegraph article (13 July) that I referenced in my previous post. Of course, Chess.com isn't the only chess organization looking at the EEF study: more about that in my next post.

Chess with Walkie-Talkies

When was the last time you needed a drone to see the whole chess board?

Chess pieces are substituted by tractors in Spain (2:46) • 'In the small town of Hinojosa in the centre of Spain, 32 chess pieces took their position to begin the game on Saturday, August 20. But this time the figures were replaced by heavy agronomy machinery.'

The description continued,

This is the second time the inhabitants of Hinojosa have celebrated the event. Organisers say the chess game is an opportunity to vindicate agricultural labour and a call for youngsters to move to the countryside. Local farmer, Andres Lazaro, said the game also pays tribute to the effort of those who stay in the town to work the land. The tractors moved over a 25,000 square metres board sketched in the land. The game was played by two young adults on a regular chess board, but the players used a walkie talkie to give orders to move the tractors over the land.

Kasparov and Timman once played a game using forklifts, but this goes one step further.

Murky, Murkier, Murkiest

I ended my previous post, 2016 CJA Awards, with an action:-

As for winner of the best eBook, 'True Origins of Chess: Ancient Greece', that deserves a separate post.

Amazon.com's page for the book, 'The True Origins of Chess: Ancient Greece-Yes, India-No' by Dr. Gerald Levitt, has a 'Look inside' popup that includes an excerpt from floridaCHESS (Autumn 2014, p.24). Titled 'Pettia and Chess in Ancient Greece' and also by Dr. Levitt, it says,

As there is no factual evidence yet discovered that delineates the actual evolution of chess, we are forced to use circumstantial evidence. supposition, and imagination to develop a reasonable explanation as to how and where chess arose in history. The evidence used in the past was that the earliest written or illustrated references we had to the game of Chaturanga, came from India in the 6th century, A.D. This concept of the origins of chess has been accepted and I wholeheartedly agree that that idea is correct but I also believe it is not complete. Chataranga had to come from a forerunner. It seems so logical that the game evolved. But from where? And when?

His 'From where? And when?' is based on a tract titled,

An Inquiry into the Antient [sic] Greek Game supposed to have been Invented by Palemedes. Antecedent to the Siege of Troy. With Reasons for Believing the Same lo Have Been Known from Remote Antiquity In China, and Progressively Improved into the Chinese Indian, Persian. and European Chess (London 1801)

Levitt surmised,

I thought the author (later identified as being James Christie, founder of Christie's Auction House in London) had presented a logical but perhaps somewhat fanciful argument for the origins of chess having not sprung up out of nothingness from the Indian Chataranga, the accepted view at the time, but instead to have been birthed in earlier cultures, specifically Ancient Greece. Christie speculated that an earlier culture most likely led to the Greeks developing these earlier games into Pettia, the Greek game of pebbles. I feel that India deserved the credit that it had been the source leading to our modern game of chess through Chataranga [...] But the question still lingered, "Where did chataranga come from?"

I once looked into this subject while writing an introductory survey titled, The Origin of Chess. It says, 'India - Chaturanga: It is not surprising that the earliest evidence of chess is also the murkiest.' Levitt's book promises to make the subject even murkier.

2016 CJA Awards

In a follow-up to last month's post on this blog, 2016 CJA Award Entries, the Chess Journalists of America have released their Prize List for 2016 CJA Awards. True to form, the group's 2016 announcement is a copy-paste of last year's announcement where someone twice neglected to change the year (also the date?) in the introduction:-

[The CJA Awards Committee] has provided the following list of awards for the 2015 competition for best chess journalism, as announced at the annual CJA meeting on 7 August 2015.

I'd like to follow my own lead from last year's post, 2015 CJA Awards (August 2015), and list 'the four awards to which I pay the most attention'...

• Best Book (paper-printed only)
• Chess Journalist of the Year
• Best Chess Art
• Best Chess Blog

...but there's a hitch: the award structure isn't the same. The book award is now three awards...

• Best Book - Instructional (paper copy) -- 'Is Your Move Safe?' by NM Dan Heisman - Mongoose Press
• Best Book - Other (paper copy) -- 'Jose Raul Capablanca: A Chess Biography' by Miguel A. Sanchez - McFarland Pubishing
• Best Electronic Book -- 'The True Origins of Chess: Ancient Greece - Yes, India - No!' by Dr. Gerald M. Levitt

...which compensates for the disappearance of 'Best Chess Blog', with nary a trace in the awards list.

The most prestigious of the awards is undoubtedly 'Chess Journalist of the Year', won by Al Lawrence for the second time; the year 2000 was the first (see Chess Life, November 2000). Lawrence has already made several appearances in this blog; see The Start of the Scholastic Boom (July 2014) and Chessathons and SuperNationals (September 2014) for starters.

The award for 'Best Chess Art' went to 'The Chess Game' by Yael Maimon. Repeating here the composite image from July's 'Award Entries' post, the winning work is shown in the top left. An 'Honorable Mention' went to the work next to it, 'Walter Browne' by Scotty Phillips.

Since the purpose of this post is to showcase the 'Best Chess Blog', which was dropped from the awards, I'll mention 'Best General Chess Website' instead. The award went to The Oklahoma Chess Foundation (ocfchess.org). As for winner of the best eBook (why the separate category?), 'True Origins of Chess: Ancient Greece', that deserves a separate post.

Congratulations to all 2016 CJA prize winners!

***

Follow-up: Murky, Murkier, Murkiest (August 2016).

Korchnoi's Events 1976-2000

After that brief detour for Going Mobile : Responsive Ads, let's return to Korchnoi's Events 1977-1996. The original PGN file I used for that 1977-1996 post appears to have been from the 1990s UPITT collection and was named KORCH2PG.ZIP. It contained a file called FILE_ID.DIZ (what did a DIZ extension mean?) which informed:-

Expanded Viktor Korchnoi Collection:
3995 Games, from W. G. Sanderse.
Replaces KORCH-PG.ZIP

After I worked on that file, I found a second ZIP file in my own archive, originally from GM Khalifman's GMchess.com site. It was a good chess site for its time, but seems to have disappeared in 2007; it lives on at Archive.org: /web/*/gmchess.com. The original file contained 3832 Korchnoi games, of which 2282 were from the years 1976 to 2001. I added a summary of the file's contents for that period to my page on Viktor Korchnoi's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (1946-1977), aka 'Korchnoi's TMER'.

Although the GMchess file is better organized than the UPITT file, it's not perfect. The following table shows the summary of Brussels events from the 1980s.

As I recounted in My Two Encounters with Korchnoi (June 2016), I witnessed many of these events and am certain that the three events for 1986 were in fact two events; ditto for 1987. That leaves me with some work to merge and correct the two sources -- UPITT 1977-1996 & GMchess 1976-2000 -- plus add events Korchnoi played after 2000.

Soviet Propaganda Porcelain?

Talk about summer doldrums! For this edition of Top eBay Chess Items by Price, I had very few items to choose from, except giant chess sets. Since we already saw those a few months ago in Top eBay Giant Chess Sets by Price (May 2016), I had to find another angle. The last time this happened, in Two American Champions (March 2016), I went below my normal cutoff price and back more than two weeks. This time I decided to lower the cutoff until I found something.

You might think I should have kept going, but I liked the item pictured below. It was titled 'RARE old Soviet porcelain figurine "Tough Chess Move", KIEV, 1960s-1970s' and sold for US $307 after 21 bids from sevent bidders. At one point near the end of the auction the price rose over $200 in five minutes as one bidder tried to find the top bid.

The description added,

A typical example of 1960s Soviet propaganda porcelain. The cost of such figurines in the world of antique auctions is very high. The price can go up to several hundred or thousands of dollars for a single item. The problem is that such sales must be prepared for half a year. You must provide the object itself, collect the necessary documents, pay a fee, and [continue with] similar procedures. I have neither the time nor the inclination to deal with such matters. I sell items from my father's collection, because he died long ago, and I do not have time to deal with collecting.

We've already seen the keywords 'chess soviet porcelain' in one of my favorite 'Top eBay Chess Items' posts, Soviet Propaganda Chess Set (September 2009; 'works for me on several levels'). Note also the keyword 'propaganda'. It escapes me why this current item might also be considered propaganda. Maybe I should look into that another time.

***

Follow-up: Chess Sells, Propaganda Sells.

Singapore's Chess Avenue

Let's pretend that the blog's downtime never happened (see Site Available Again for an explanation), and just pick up where we left off a week ago. That means today is Flickr Friday.

Chess Avenue © Flickr user Choo Yut Shing under Creative Commons.

Giant chess pieces covered with flowers -- what's that all about? The photo's caption said,

The floral display at the Gardens by the Bay during the Singapore Garden Festival 2016.

The festival's official site, in Our Story, explains,

Enter a magical world of exciting garden designs and exquisite floral creations as Singapore goes into full bloom this July at the Singapore Garden Festival 2016. Whether you are a serious gardener, hobbyist or just looking for a wonderful day out with the family, you are in for delightful treats at the Festival. Held at the award winning Gardens by the Bay, this year’s Festival promises to be more spectacular than ever before.

Wikipedia, in Gardens by the Bay, informs,

Gardens by the Bay is a nature park spanning 101 hectares (250 acres) of reclaimed land in central Singapore, adjacent to the Marina Reservoir. The park consists of three waterfront gardens.

That plus the festival site's home page saying,

We’ll be back in 2018!

tells us everything we need to know.

Site Available Again

It's been a week since my previous post on this blog, Site Unavailable, where I noted,

I'm suspending new posts until the [m-w.com] site is available again. Apologies for the interruption!

I tracked the downtime of the site on my World Chess Championship blog, where yesterday's post, Site Migration II, announced,

In the last day or so traffic has returned to pre-migration levels, meaning that the site was out of service for nearly a week.

Since I use the site to store blog support material like images and downloads, being out of service means not having images. Blog posts looked like this...

...After the site came back, most of the images were available again, except for the one used in the post pictured above. It turned out that the files migrated for the site were copied a day or two before the migration took place, meaning that newer files were not available. Reloading those files required a working File Transfer Protocol (FTP), which took another couple of days to work properly, because my account's disk space limits had not been initialized correctly.

Fortunately, the bulk change I did for Going Mobile : Responsive Ads was included in the migration, so I didn't have to reload those files, which numbered nearly 400. Essential services appear to be working and I'll resume normal blogging tomorrow. The migration was a botch from start to finish.

***

Later: When I posted this, I noticed that someone had '+1'ed the Site Unavailable post. Are they trying to tell me something?

Site Unavailable

As I mentioned yesterday on my World Chess Championship blog, my m-w.com domain is in the process of Site Migration. Unfortunately, there are technical problems that result in 'Site Currently Unavailable'. Since this has an impact on the images I use for this CFAA blog, I'm suspending new posts until the site is available again. Apologies for the interruption!

'USCF' Out, 'USCHESS' In

Last summer, a little more than a year ago, the U.S. Chess Federation (known then as the 'USCF') changed its name and its logo. The group explained the name change in the August 2015 issue of Chess Life (p.12-13) and in A New Direction for US Chess (uschess.org),

One of the most important aspects of our new identity is the change from calling ourselves USCF to US Chess. Over the years, our organization has been known by many names including the United States Chess Federation, the USCF, US Chess, and the United States of America Chess Federation. Moving forward, while our corporate name, the United States Chess Federation, will remain the same, we will refer to ourselves as the US Chess Federation or US Chess for short.

The logo change is shown in the following image.

Following their lead, I changed my relevant blog label (aka tag) from 'USCF' to 'USCHESS'. Not only does it reflect the federation's choice, it also makes it easier to label general USA posts like the recent Strong American Chess Tournaments (August 2016). For more qbout the U.S. federation, see Happy Anniversary, Chess Federations! (January 2014).

Going Mobile : Responsive Ads

I have to interrupt the series on Korchnoi's TMER (Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record; last seen in Korchnoi's Events 1977-1996) to deal with an administrative problem concerning ads on my pages. While on vacation I received the following message:-

Subject: Google AdSense: Action required to comply with AdSense program policies.
From: adsense-noreply@google.com
Date: 21-Jul-16 12:50

This is a warning message to alert you that there is action required to bring your AdSense account into compliance with our AdSense program policies. We’ve provided additional details below, along with the actions to be taken on your part. [...]

Our program policies do not permit any alteration to AdSense code which artificially inflates ad performance or harms advertiser conversions. Your publisher account offers a number of options when generating the ad code, which we hope will allow you to create an ad layout that fits in with your site. It is also not allowed to place ads on mobile optimized sites so that they cover any part of the site content or implementing parts of a webpage to cover any portion of the ads. Please be aware that if you have a responsive website design that ads may shift into non compliant positions as the format of the screen changes.

In order to remain fully compliant please ensure that your site and ad layout remain compliant across all devices.

The offending page was Tales of Two Fischers. The code for the two ads on the page was identical to my other pages for that site and I hadn't made any content changes to the page in years, nor any 'alteration to AdSense code' (I wouldn't dare!).

I decided the warning had to be related to a small change I made last year which I documented in Going Mobile : CFAA Site (June 2015). That change was also ordained by Google.

That 'Going Mobile' post reminded me to do a Mobile-Friendly Test (on 'Two Fischers'); the result is shown on the left.

Although the test also gave me the message 'Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly.', the Adsense ad isn't displayed. It should be between the blue navigation links and the red titles. The test results also flagged another problem:-

How Googlebot sees this page: This page uses one resource which is blocked by ROBOTS.TXT. The results and screenshot may be incorrect.

ROBOTS.TXT is the file that tells web spiders what pages shouldn't be included in search results. I don't care what the spiders do with my pages and have never used the file. As far as I knew, I don't have one, but it turned out I do. The Google page Blocked JavaScript, CSS, and Image Files (developers.google.com) pointed to m-w.com/robots.txt. I decided that it must be a file that my ISP builds and that it was probably not the cause of the Adsense warning. What now?

I started reading forum posts from Search results - AdSense Help (support.google.com) for the phrase starting 'Our program policies do not permit any alteration'. While there were many possible reasons for the Adsense warning, including several that might apply to my pages, I decided that the most likely reason was the fixed size banner ads I was using. I changed these to what Google calls 'responsive ads': About responsive ad units (support.google.com):-

Responsive web design allows you to dynamically control the presentation of your website according to the properties of the screen/device that it’s being viewed on. A responsive ad unit allows you to control the size of the ads on your page, in line with how you control the layout of the rest of your page across devices.

I had already tackled the subject last year in Going Mobile : Responsive Design (May 2015), and was able to make the new changes quickly. Will this be enough to eliminate the Google Adsense warning? Time will tell.

'Chess in Primary Schools' Studied

Ever since the first post on 'Chess in (the) School/Schools' (October 2013), I've been meandering through the topic with follow-up posts every two weeks (or so), making it the longest-running series on this blog. I was planning to wrap it up and move on to another topic when a pair of British news sources introduced a fresh angle in stories published on the same day.

• Playing chess doesn't make your children any smarter, study finds (telegraph.co.uk) • 'Pushy parents sending their children to chess classes are not improving their school grades, a major study has revealed.'
  
  
• Playing chess does not make children cleverer, study finds (independent.co.uk) • 'In a study of 3,000 school children, researchers were 'suprised' to find those who were given chess tuition failed to see an impact on their school grades.'

The study is introduced on a page from the Education Endowment Foundation, Chess in Primary Schools (e*e*f*.org.uk), which starts,

Chess in Primary Schools is a whole-school approach to teaching primary school children how to play chess. Children take 30 hours of chess lessons delivered by a tutor who is an experienced chess player, and the school is given the option to set up a chess club as a lunchtime or after-school activity. Chess classes are delivered during the school day and are expected to replace subjects such as music or PE.

Before I wrap-up my own CIS series, I'm going to take a closer look at the EEF study.

Chess and Filmmaking

Given that it's been five weeks since my previous Video Friday post, World Champion Blitz, you might think I had plenty to choose from, and you would be right. My short list had more than 30 videos, but the top pick turned out to be a no-brainer.

The Kubrick Files Ep. 2 – What Chess Taught Kubrick About Filmmaking (6:47) • 'Kubrick had been obsessed with chess ever since he was a child and he used what he learned about strategy, logic, and patience and applied it to the decision-making process.'

For previous posts on this blog about chess and Kubrick, see They Played Chess with Kubrick (December 2013) and Bombs Away (March 2016).

Strong American Chess Tournaments

My latest 'On the Cover' post, for August 1966, covered the Second Piatigorsky Cup and quoted Chess Life:-

This double round robin, eighteen games over a one-month period, will undoubtedly rank with the greatest chess competitions of all time.

While that is certainly true, how many other American tournaments can be considered among the 'greatest chess competitions of all time'? I turned to Wikipedia's List of strong chess tournaments to help answer the question. Although the list is inconsistent, it's a start. I extracted the 981 events listed on the page, loaded them into a database, and isolated the American events.

I found 56 American events including 23 venues. Of these, 26 were played in New York. The table on the left shows the 25 most recent events.

Many of these events I don't recognize (1940 Dallas?) and further research would undoubtedly increase my limited knowledge of American chess history. There are as many tournaments listed in the 10 years leading to the 1972 Fischer boom as there are in the 40+ years following it.

The 30 year gap between 1982 Chicago (won by Huebner) and the start of the Sinquefield series is particularly noteworthy. Where were the strongest American players playing during that time?

August 1966 'On the Cover'

In the July 1966 'On the Cover', we saw the 'The Poor Man's Piatigorsky'. This month, 50 years ago, we get the real deal. Before reading further, can you identify the player shown in the right photo? His name is much better known than his face.

Left: 'Piatigorsky Cup - Relaxing before the tournament: Najdorf, Fischer, Portisch, Larsen, Ivkov, Unzicker'
Right: 'Wins record Eastern Open'

Chess Life

The First Piatigorsky Cup, presented in Los Angeles in July 1963, saw the introduction of a momentous event in the world of chess. Five nations were represented by eight of the most outstanding Grandmasters of our time as World Champion Tigran Petrosian tied for first place with his fellow player from the U.S.S.R., Paul Keres.

The Second Piatigorsky Cup, which began on July 17 and continued through August 15, 1966, at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, California, surpassed even the first event in this series with its drama, its grip on chess enthusiasts the world over, and the sometimes surprising results of its individual encounters between the titans of the 64 squares. This double round robin, eighteen games over a one-month period, will undoubtedly rank with the greatest chess competitions of all time.

Chess Review

Nick [Nicolas] Rossolimo emerged on top of the record-breaking field of 269 in the Eastern Open in Washington, D.C. He was undefeated in scoring 7-1 but triumphed by tie-break over fellow New Yorkers, Arthur B. Bisguier and Mike Valvo and 17-year-old Leroy Jackson of St. Louis. Pal Benko and Bernard Zuckerman were among those who finished "out of the money."

I predict that next month's 'On the Cover' will feature the Piatigorsky Cup for both magazines. As for GM Rossolimo, he deserves a post of his own.

Korchnoi's Events 1977-1996

Continuing with Viktor Korchnoi's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (1946-1977), aka 'Korchnoi's TMER', after Korchnoi's Matches 1946-1977 I had to tackle the post-1977 period. How to start?

In my archive a found a few PGN collections of Korchnoi's games that I had saved in the 2001-2002 time frame. Unfortunately, I didn't document the origin of these files, but I should be able to work that out as I delve into their contents.

I chose one of the files, extracted all games from 1977 and afterwards (2130 games, including many duplicates), and loaded the PGN headers into a database. The file I chose had no information in the PGN '[Event]' tag, so I was forced to work with the '[Site]' tag. This tag had never been standardized and I found over 730 different combinations of year/site, covering the period 1977-1996.

I decided to continue with all games where the same year/site combination occurred at least four times. I found 160 such occurrences and added the results to my page on Korchnoi's TMER. The result is less clean than I hoped to have at this point, but it gives me an overview of Korchnoi's events in the 20 year period starting with the 1977-1978 World Championship cycle.