Averbakh's Convekta

After writing the post on Averbakh's Endings, I became curious about the digital version of 'Comprehensive Chess Endings' (referred to below as CCE). Originally published by Convekta, there's a product page on their site titled Comprehensive Chess Endings.

FOREWORD by Yury L. Averbakh: The first English edition of Comprehensive Chess Endings was published almost twenty years ago. Much water has flowed under the bridges since that time; swift computerization has caused many changes in all realms of human life. Chess is no exception. The computer program has already defeated the world champion, and there exists a stage of the game where the computer is infallible. That stage is the endgame with few pieces left on the board.

The new time control has led to a drastic acceleration of play taking away both adjournments and resumptions into the past. If one could previously adjourn a game and analyze a certain position calmly, now everything is to be done right at the board and in a short time. This makes a good fundamental knowledge of basic endgames all the more important.

The main objective of this new edition is to unite the experience accumulated by many generations of chess players with the latest computer technologies. So no wonder that it is not released as a printed book but as a software product, prepared in co-operation with the famous chess software company Convekta.

I managed to procure a copy of the software, installed it on my laptop, and was disappointed to discover that it wouldn't execute. That same product page mentions that the software is compatible with Convekta's 'Chess Assistant Light', a product that I also have, although I haven't used it much. Sure enough, it worked without a hitch and even allowed me to extract the CCE data into an external PGN file. The PGN text format is useful for loading header data (event, players, etc.) into standard database software for further analysis.

For example, Averbakh claims that CCE includes 'over 4100 examples in total'. More specifically, I counted over 2100 studies and over 750 games. The other examples are mainly the sort of fundamental theoretical positions covered in all instructional endgame texts along with a generous number of schematic explanations. Of the studies, nearly 300 were composed by Averbakh himself, with over 200 by V.Khenkin and somewhat less than 200 by N.D.Grigoriev.

Of the games, Averbakh was one of the players in almost 50 of them, with nearly 30 each by Alekhine, Keres, Botvinnik, and Smyslov. Capablanca and Rubinstein break the dominance of the Soviet School with 20 and 19 games respectively.

Along with the digital version of Averbakh's texts, the software includes almost 3000 complete games (the 'Examples' database) illustrating various endgame themes in practice. The Convekta manual (see the Google HTML version) mentions a limitation here:-

If you have Chess Assistant installed on your computer, you can load the Averbakh and Examples databases, as well as the classifier, and operate them in all CA modes. In this case, however, you will be unable to use a unique feature of Comprehensive Chess Endings, which is not available in Chess Assistant. This is jumping to referenced games, described in Section 3.4 View Mode.

Maybe I'll eventually figure out why the CCE software won't run on my laptop. In the meantime I have a powerful tool for further exploration of endgame themes.

Morphy, Loewenthal, Young Man, and Lady

Here's a little mystery that I haven't been able to solve. The image on the top is a well known photo of Paul Morphy playing Johann Loewenthal (1810-1876). I've seen it several times on eBay, the last time with the description

Here's a copy from an 1860's stereoview of a young man and older gent, perhaps his father playing a game of chess. Note that this is a high quality pair of photos created from the original 1860's stereoview and affixed to a period mount.

The image on the bottom, which I've also seen before, was offered on eBay by the same seller at the same time. Its description said,

Here's a copy from an 1860's stereoview of a young man and his lady playing a game of chess.

plus the same note about being 'created from the original', etc.

Looking at the images separately, I had never noticed the similarity, but, viewed side-by-side, it's obvious that they were taken using the same setting. Although the angle of the camera (or whatever they used in the 1860s) is slightly different, the chess table is the same and the urn-shape behind the heads of the players sitting to the right is the same object.

Are the 'young man and his lady' related to or somehow connected to Morphy (or maybe to Loewenthal)? If so, how exactly?

Been There, Done That with TWIC

After I discovered that the next article to be converted on Been There, Done That, namely Improve Your Chess Game, was already on How To Improve at Chess, I could have had a day free of blogging. Instead, I added TWIC 500! to my page on Chess History. The TWIC article, which relied already in 2004 on both Archive.org and the Google groups archives, presented a special challenge since the article to be converted was also in Archive.org. After resolving the double archive references, I managed to find all of the original material.

At the time of writing this post, the current edition of TWIC is no.888, meaning that in 112 issues -- about two years and two months -- Mark Crowther will be producing TWIC 1000. Will he reach that milestone? I certainly wouldn't bet against it.

The National Sport of Azerbaijan

I stopped watching CNN last year when it seemed like they were broadcasting more and more features at the expense of less and less news. The following segment on chess is a good example of one of their features.

Chess: The national sport of Azerbaijan (2:25) • 'The young in Azerbaijan are obsessed with chess. CNN's Jim Boulden reports from the capital of Baku.'

For an introduction to the entire show, see CNN International - Eye on Azerbaijan. A few years ago, Azerbaijan ran a series of ads on tourism, one of them highlighting chess: Azerbaijan - Leyla Aliyeva. I believe the lovely Leyla Aliyeva is the daughter of Ilham Aliyev, the President of Azerbaijan.

Real Olympiad Gold

In this series on Top eBay Chess Items by Price, I've already featured an Olympiad souvenir in 1924 Olympiad Gold (sort of) and a gold coin souvenir in Gold for Fischer - Spassky. Pictured below is an Olympiad gold coin souvenir which was titled 'Slovenia: 20.000 tolar 2002 PROOF UNC GOLD Chess Olimpics Horse RARE 500 MINTAGE'. It sold for $1800, 'Best Offer'.

The accompanying certificate of authority said,

On the occasion of the 35th Chess Olympiad Bled, Slovenia 2002, the Republic of Slovenia herby issues a gold coin associated with the event (Official Gazette of the RS, no.53/02). Specifications: Denomination 20,000 Tolars. Alloy: 900/1000 gold. Weight: 7 grams. Diameter: 24 millimetres. • BANK OF SLOVENIA

The item's description added,

Full PROOF Uncirculated Coin, DEEP cameo and mirror like fields. Issued to commemorate 35th Chess Olympics held in Bled, Slovenia. On obverse there is a celtic horse and it's mirror look in the lake, reverse chess board and chess figures. MEGA RARE PIECE, mintage ONLY 500 PIECES!

and provided a web address -- More on coin -- where we learn that a silver coin with a face value of 2,500 Tolars was also issued.

Averbakh's Endings

Along with Levenfish and Smyslov's Rook Endings, last seen in The Bridge, the Diversion, and the Best Defense, one of my favorite endgame references is the multi-volume set by Averbakh, last seen in More R+P vs. B+P Magic. I've encountered several different versions of Averbakh's work, and before referring to it in any more posts, I decided it would be a good idea to catalog the various publications. Here are the sets I know of:-

• The original work was published in Russian in the 1950s; I'll call this (A).
• Batsford published a translation in the 1970s; (B).
• A second Russian edition was published at the beginning of the 1980s; (C).
• Pergamon published another translation in the mid-1980s; (D).

Wikipedia, in Chess endgame literature, mentions (A), (B), and (D).

Yuri Averbakh published a monumental set of books in Russian in 1956. The works were first published in English as several individual books [list of eight books] and later collected into the five-volume Comprehensive Chess Endings. It was also published in other languages (Golombek 1977). Bobby Fischer had these books sent to him during his World Championship match (Averbakh & Chekover 1977).

Comprehensive Chess Endings, by Yuri Averbakh, et al., 1983. In five volumes. A pretty detailed, advanced, and comprehensive look at various endings. intended for players with a rating of roughly 1880 or higher. Published by Pergamon Press. The work originally appeared as a series of smaller books (e.g. Bishop Endings, Knight Endings, etc.). Out of print in book form, but available on computer CD-ROM. [list of five books]

Three separate volumes made up the first Russian edition (A). I have the second edition (C) and there are five volumes -- B/N vs. same piece, R/B/N vs. different piece, Q, P, and R -- published in that order, one per year starting in 1980. The Pergamon edition (D) followed the same order and schedule, starting in 1983.

As for the Batsford edition (B), Wikipedia listed eight volumes, which I've determined were published in the following order -- P, Q&P, B vs. N, B, N, R vs. B/N, Q vs. R/B/N -- starting in 1974. Wikipedia also mentioned a volume on Rooks alone, but it must be less common than the other seven volumes, because I was unable to locate any info on it while preparing this post. Even the image on the left, from a recent eBay auction, shows only seven Averbakh volumes plus the Levenfish and Smyslov book on Rook endings.

As for the digital version of Comprehensive Chess Endings, the FOREWORD by Yuri L. Averbakh mentions,

Acknowledgements: First of all I would like to remark that the first three-volume edition of Shakhmatnye Okonchaniya, published in 1956-1962, was prepared with the assistance of the Soviet masters N.Kopayev, V.Chekhover, V.Khenkin and the famous endgame theorist I.Maizelis. The first English edition, published in 1983-1987 by Pergamon Press, was based on the second Russian edition, and was translated by Kenneth P. Neat. The latter was published in 1982-1986 by "Fizkultura i sport".

Will there be future hardcopy editions of Averbakh's monumental work? I doubt it, but I wouldn't be surprised to see another digital edition.

***

Later: In that last quote, it's curious that Averbakh mentions, 'the first English edition, published in 1983-1987 by Pergamon Press'. I would have guessed that the Batsford edition was the first in English.

Been There, Done That with Ratings

Moving along slowly but steadily with Been There, Done That, I added FIDE Top-10 Players (1975-2004) to my page on Chess History. The year 2004 seems like ages ago and while it might be interesting to bring the page up to date through 2011 (or 2012 in a few months), there are other fish to fry.