A Barleycorn Chess Set

What does a $4000 chess set look like? Like this...

Titled 'Antique Large Bone Barleycorn Jaques Chess set' on eBay, the set received 41 bids from 15 bidders, and the winning bid was GBP 2527.00 ('approximately US $4000.49' according to eBay). In the year and a half that I've been tracking Top eBay Chess Items by Price, I don't recall another chess set selling for so much. The description was unusually informative.

Antique Bone Barleycorn Chess set, Attributable to Jaques of London; 19th century • Excellent condition. No damage, no replacements, no missing pieces. King size 5,5 inches (14 cm). Made of very high quality white ox bone. Attributable to Jaques of London by Knight design and according to surviving pages of the Jaques Pattern Book. Please refer to Alan Fersht, "Jaques and British Chess Company Chess sets" (Cambridge 2010), page 44. This is a top-notch Barleycorn set of large size. They do not get much better, although some very rare larger examples of this design do exist.

I know that some sources prefer the word 'barlycorn' instead of 'barleycorn', but I'm not sure why. There are a number of other English Barleycorn Sets pictured on Crumiller.com and a description on the Anonymous Chess Collector blog: Barleycorn sets. Unfortunately, that blog is not updated frequently. Judging by the number of emails I receive on the subject (even though I state frequently that I'm not a collector), I'm surprised there aren't more blogs on the topic of chess collecting.

No Nose for FIDE News

The 82nd FIDE Congress, underway this week at Krakow, Poland, reminded me about FIDE's Chess News Corporation (or is it Chess Network Company?) that I wrote about a year ago in Critiquing the CNC. Although, at that time, the CNC's news site looked more like a pilot than an active site, I developed the habit of checking once or twice a month on its evolution.

In fact, the site never changed during the months after my Critiquing post, until July, when a completely redesigned site suddenly appeared. I've captured the current home page in the following image.

Chessnc.com: Chess Network Company

If you look at that page today, you'll see the same 'news' that appeared in July -- 'World Cup 2011 List of players and Round 1 pairings' -- even though the seven round event ended almost a month ago.

I've already mentioned several times on my blogs that the main FIDE site, Fide.com, has long been stripped of all meaningful news, unless you consider the comings and goings of the FIDE President to be newsworthy.

The FIDE President met this week with the Arch-Vice Minister of Belugastan. After bows and the exchange of traditional dairy products, it was announced that FIDE is considering the construction of a chess school in the form of an extra-terrestrial spaceship.

Now that the CNC news site has also turned out to be a dud, how does FIDE intend to communicate with the many chess fans around the world? Maybe an answer will emerge from the 82nd Congress, but something tells me this won't happen either. Did someone mention modernization?

Kasparov - Deep Junior, 2003

Continuing with Been There, Done That, I added Kasparov - Deep Junior, New York, 2003 to my page titled Improve Your Chess Game. As it turned out, the year 2003 was the last year where the best human chess players had a chance of drawing a match against the best computers.

21st Century Caissart

A few months ago, in Chess & Iphoneography, I spotlighted iPhone chess photos. For this post, I have iPad chess art.

life scene 687, chess or no © Flickr user patricio villarroel under Creative Commons.

More info from the artist:

This photo also appears in: iPad, iPhone and iPod touch finger painters group, Brushes Gallery – iPhone/iPad Art, iPad Paintings, and Artrage ('the stylish and easy to use painting package for Windows and OS X') • Tags: fingerpainting, mixedapp, mixedevice

There's another piece from the same artist using the same techniques at Storm over the chess master home.

The Longest Sidebar

Here's a little quiz to test your knowledge of chess blogs. What do the following three blogs all have in common?

• Alexandra Kosteniuk's Chess Blog
• Chess, Goddess and Everything
• Susan Polgar Chess Daily News and Information

If you answered, 'They're all pretty good blogs', no points for you. I wouldn't have listed them if they weren't a cut above your average chess blog.

If you answered, 'They're all administered by women', you get one point. Even if you'd never heard of Alexandra Kosteniuk and Susan Polgar, both former Women's World Champions, their first names should be a strong clue. The third blog is a little more challenging, but it doesn't take a genius to guess that a blog with the word 'Goddess' in its title isn't run by a 'dude' (as the blog's webmistress likes to call us guys).

If you answered, 'They all have incredibly long sidebars', then you win the jackpot. Their sidebars -- if you're not up on the lingo, that's the bar on the side -- go on and on and on and on and on and on and on...

I've long been curious which of our three women's blogs had the longest sidebar, but couldn't figure out how to measure it. Counting the number of times it takes to 'Page Down' from top to bottom doesn't seem very scientific and wouldn't be accurate enough to break a close contest. Then I found the program Web Screen Capture, and knew that I had the answer. This program doesn't just capture the part of a web page visible in your browser -- that can be done in many ways -- it captures the image of the entire web page from top to bottom. All you do is feed it the page's URL and the rest is magic.

Armed with my new tool, I pointed the software at a recent post in each of the three blogs and captured the full page image to a file. Then I loaded the images into image processing software and recorded the number of pixels in the vertical direction. Then I reduced the width and height of the images by a factor of a 1000 100 and displayed the images side by a side to get a visual comparison. That's the picture you see on the left.

Blog no.4 is the 'Chess for All Ages' blog that you are currently reading. At 4487 pixels long, my blog's sidebar isn't even in the competition. Blog no.3, at 11770 pixels, is more than two and a half times as long as mine, but no.3 is less than half as long as no.2, at 25623 pixels. The winner, as can clearly be seen in the picture, is no.1, a whopping 30532 pixels long!

Which of the three women's blogs is the winner? It's not hard to work that out for yourself, so I'll leave it as an exercise. And what's the longest sidebar managed by a 'dude'? I have no idea, but if you know of a candidate, leave a comment or shoot me an email at the address under my profile (located on the sidebar, of course).

Garry's Games

In a recent post, Garry's Story, I linked to a series of videos on YouTube that cover a set of five DVDs titled 'Garry Kasparov, My Story', originally issued in 2000. While I was watching the clips, I noted the games that Kasparov analyzed together with GM Plaskett, the host of the series. Here they are, with links to the corresponding games on Chessgames.com.

Part 1 - Teenage Prodigy

• Kasparov vs E Kengis; Riga 1977
• Kasparov vs A Roizman; Minsk 1978
• Kasparov vs Palatnik; Daugavpils 1978
• Kasparov vs Pribyl; Skara 1980
• Kasparov vs Csom; Baku 1980 [more kibitzing than in the duplicate: Kasparov vs Csom; Baku it, AZE 1980]
• Kasparov vs R Akesson; Skara 1980
• Kasparov vs Marjanovic; Malta 1980

Part 2 - Joining the Elite

• Kasparov vs Romanishin; Moscow 1981
• J S Neto vs Kasparov; Graz 1981
• Kasparov vs G Timoshchenko; Frunze 1981
• Kasparov vs Dorfman; Frunze 1981
• V Tukmakov vs Kasparov; Frunze 1981

Part 3 - Rebels and Renegades

• Kasparov vs Petrosian; Bugojno 1982
• Kasparov vs Gheorghiu; Moscow 1982
• Korchnoi vs Kasparov; Luzern ol 1982
• Kasparov vs Beliavsky; Moscow m (05) 1983

Part 4 - Hitting the Wall

• Kasparov vs Portisch; Niksic 1983
• Kasparov vs Korchnoi; London 1983
• Kasparov vs Smyslov; Vilnius m (03) 1984
• Karpov vs Kasparov (g.9; brief); World Championship Match 1984
• Kasparov vs Karpov (g.32); World Championship Match 1984

Part 5 - Rite of Passage

• Karpov vs Kasparov (g.16); World Championship Match 1985
• Karpov vs Kasparov (g.24); World Championship Match 1985

In a future post I'll discuss one or two of these games in more detail.

***

Later: This post appeared in November Chess Improvement Blog Carnival -- The Get 'er Done Version!.

U.S. Championships

Getting started with Been There, Done That, I added U.S. Chess Champions and U.S. Chess Championships (Closed/Invitational) to my page on Chess History. I wanted to tackle British and Canadian championships at the same time, but Archive.org was offline for maintenance, so my time was limited. Their error message pointed to a related resource which I hadn't seen before -- Internet Archive Blogs -- 'A blog from the Collections Team at Archive.org'.