Blue Ribbon Chess Books 2010

Time stands still for no one and a year after my post on Blue Ribbon Chess Books 2009, I'm ready to add the 2010 'Book of the Year' awards to my page on Award Winning Chess Books. Following up a comment to last year's post, I also added awards issued by Guardian News. The first such award was made in 2007 and, as the 2011 award will be the fifth, it looks to be a fixture in the world of chess book publishing.

In a curious case of symmetry (or is it nationalism?), Yasser Seirawan's 'Chess Duels' won both 2010 awards by American sources, while Jacob Aagaard's 'Attacking Manual' won both awards issued by British sources. Two of the awards for 2011 are already known -- three in fact, as there were two Cramer awards this year -- so I might start posting the next annual roundup when the last of the awards, ChessCafe's in February, is known.

Chess Clocks

Next on the list for Been There, Done That is a piece on Chess Clocks. After converting it, I added the link to Chess for Fun. Clocks definitely make chess more fun.

Today's Winning Canadian Chess Film

A few months back, in 'Korchnoi = Don Quixote', I featured a clip titled 'An old segment on a younger Korchnoi', which appeared to be a segment of a longer documentary. The full film has recently surfaced on YouTube and is even better than the 'Younger Korchnoi' extract.

The Great Chess Movie (1/3) (30:46) • 'A Canadian chess documentary featuring Bobby Fischer, Mikhail Tal, Anatoly Karpov, Viktor Korchnoi, Jan Timman, Vassily Smyslov, Lajos Portisch, Anthony Miles, and many other historical grandmasters.'

The most recent events discussed in the documentary were played in 1981. The credits start 40 seconds into the clip: 'Starring Karpov, Korchnoi, Fischer, ...; Direction: Gilles Carle, Camille Coudari; Production: Hélene Verrier'.

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.