Korchnoi's Events 2000-01

In last Monday's post Carlsen, TCEC, Karjakin, Korchnoi, I decided to 'keep busy on Mondays with the Korchnoi TMER'. That meant continuing with Korchnoi's Events 1998-99 by adding the two following years. While updating Viktor Korchnoi's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (TMER, 1946-1977), I noticed that I had not ordered events for the years 1998-99 by month, so I added that field as well.

The year 2001 saw two tournaments in Korchnoi's honor:-

• THE WEEK IN CHESS 333 26th March 2001 • 'Korchnoi at 70 in St.Petersburg'
• THE WEEK IN CHESS 338 30th April 2001 • 'Kramnik wins the Korchnoi Anniversary Tournament' (Zurich)

Both TWIC stories were signed Mark Crowther (of course!).

'Chess in School' Summarized

It's time to wrap up the longest running series on this blog:-

• 2013-10-20: 'Chess in (the) School/Schools' • 'I'm not sure what it means.'

I quickly discovered that CIS was Multilevel, Political, Lucrative, Quantifiable, Sociable, Mantric, and Experimental. Those initial posts, a mini-series of their own, were listed in an intermediate summary:-

• 2014-02-23: 'Chess in School' Is Individual

By Individual, I meant that I was 'going to switch gears and look at some of the best known personalities in the field'. In fact I only looked at one and then launched into all sorts of related areas...

• 2014-03-09: 'Chess in School' : Robert Ferguson
• 2014-03-23: 'Chess in School' : Why?
• 2014-04-06: 'Chess in School' : Three Studies
• 2014-05-04: The Game at Chestes
• 2014-05-18: Journal of Chess Research
• 2014-06-01: The Riddles of Chess
• 2014-07-06: Chess Life for Kids
• 2014-07-20: Stavros Niarchos Chess
• 2014-08-03: Teaching Children or Teaching Adults?
• 2014-08-17: The Scholastic Chess Facilitators Crisis
• 2014-09-14: Chessathons and SuperNationals
• 2014-09-28: The First USCF Chessathon
• 2014-10-12: The First of the USCF Supernationals
• 2014-10-26: The Dark Side of Scholastic Chess
• 2014-11-23: Carlsen - Anand, Game 11 • 'Scholastic Club Starter Kit'
• 2014-12-07: Chess Stereotypes
• 2014-12-21: FIDE's 'Chess in Schools' 2014
• 2015-01-04: London Chess and Education Conference 2014
• 2015-01-18: Chess and Cognitive Training
• 2015-02-01: The Cognitive Training Swamp
• 2015-02-15: Confusion about Facts
• 2015-03-01: Pedagogical Pecking Order
• 2015-03-15: Are Boys Good at Chess?
• 2015-03-29: Google Autocompletes CIS

...That last post led to another mini-series eventually summarized in:-

• 2015-06-21: Chess Curriculum - Inventory

After another detour...

• 2015-08-23: It's All About Money
• 2015-09-06: FIDE's 'Chess in Schools'(++) 2015
• 2015-09-20: Judit Polgar's Chess Palace

...the mini-series continued, then culminated a few months later in:-

• 2015-12-27: Chess Curriculum - Summary

After more bouncing around related subjects...

• 2016-01-10: London Chess Conference 2015
• 2016-01-24: FIDE's CIS Chairman O'Connell
• 2016-02-07: Connecting Children with Chess
• 2016-02-21: Polgar Global Chess Festival, Budapest
• 2016-03-06: CIS Conference, Brussels 2016
• 2016-03-20: Armenian Candidates
• 2016-04-17: How to Acquire Reasoning Skills
• 2016-05-15: Nearly Two Decades Later
• 2016-05-29: A Way Station on the Journey Through Life
• 2016-06-12: Chess Software for Children
• 2016-06-26: Fritz and Chesster
• 2016-07-10: Chessmaster : Waitzkin Version

...I ended with a look at a critical U.K. study:-

• 2016-08-07: 'Chess in Primary Schools' Studied
• 2016-08-28: Does Chess.com Make You Smarter?
• 2016-09-11: Transfer in Chess Learning
• 2016-09-25: Baloney Makes You Smarter

There's much more to be covered here and if I ever come back to the subject, the unfinished 'best known personalities in the field' offers plenty of direction. Although I have a better idea now what 'Chess in School' means than I did three years ago when I started the subject, I feel that I've just scratched the surface.

Animating a Controversy

For this edition of Video Friday, I had the choice between two topics that were exceptionally popular over the past fortnight: the flap over the Women's World Championship -or- the 'Queen of Katwe'. Several years ago I posted about The Queen of Katwe (January 2011), and since Disney's story of Phiona Mutesi will likely be with us for some time, let's go with the other topic.

Female chess players boycott World Championship in Iran over having to wear hijabs - TomoNews (1:10) • 'ATHENS, GREECE - Top female chess players are threatening to boycott the 2017 World Championships after the World Chess Federation (FIDE) announced that the event would be held in Iran, which has in turn stated that women would be required to wear hijabs.'

The description continued,

The FIDE said that competitors would face arrest if they did not comply at the upcoming event slated for February 2017 in Tehran, Iran. The organization urged players to respect "cultural differences."

What's TomoNews?

Welcome to TomoNews, where we animate the most entertaining news on the internets. Come here for an animated look at viral headlines, US news, celebrity gossip, salacious scandals, dumb criminals and much more! Subscribe now for daily news animations that will knock your socks off.

Unfortunately, this video doesn't treat the subject seriously -- the comments are proof of that -- and it deserves another look.

Stats for Bored People

I could have titled this post New Stats for M-W.com, but since that title was already used (October 2015), I had to think of something else. The problem started when my web site went missing for a week -- see Site Available Again (August 2016) for the details -- then ended up migrated to a different host. Although outwardly exactly the same as before, inwardly it was much changed.

Take its statistics package, for example. Like everyone else who runs a web site, I like to know what visitors are looking at -- what's hot and what's not, as they say. I look at the overall stats once a day to make sure that everything is working correctly and to identify any anomalies as quickly as possible. After watching the stats for a while, I get used to certain recurring patterns in the numbers and know intuitively when something is off.

Near the end of last month I noticed a 50% jump in 'Visits' on one day and wondered what the cause of it might have been. The best place to get details is the server log, where actions are recorded for all files delivered to fulfill specific requests. I have database software to analyze the logs on the previous host, but did the logs on the new host use the same format? Thanks to a standard known as the Common Log Format (wikipedia.org), they turned out to be almost the same. The biggest difference was that where the logs were previously stored monthly, they are now stored daily.

I downloaded the log file for the day in question, loaded it into my database, and did some preliminary analyses. I quickly discovered that the spike in activity was traffic to the index page of my World Chess Championship site. It came from a domain called RandomWebSite.com. From the name I could guess the purpose of the site, but when I tried to access it, I received the message 'Server not found'. A search on the domain name returned top results like TheUselessWeb.com and Pointless.com. Another top result pointed to Random Website Machine, which explained,

Great for:
- Bored People: At least it's not Candy Crush!
- Web Designers: Looking for some inspiration? Or just some fresh ideas? Start here!
- Network Technicians: Need to test DNS servers? Make sure you aren't getting cached data, by loading totally fresh, random websites.

Since I doubt that anyone is coming to my site for tips on web design or testing DNS servers, that leaves bored people. My stats for September also showed that RandomWebSite.com was my top external referrer for the entire month. I hope those visitors found everything they expected!

***

In the unlikely event that anyone has randomly arrived at this post and read this far, here's a graphic from the new stats package.

It shows the number of visits (pages, hits, bandwidth) to my domain during every hour over a 24-hour day. The numbers include bored people.

October 1966 'On the Cover'

Fifty years ago, both of the main American chess magazines reported the latest results of their respective flagship open tournaments.

Left: 'U.S.Open Co-Champions' - Photos by Beth Cassidy
Right: 'New Golden Knights Face'

Chess Life

As reported in our September issue, Robert Byrne and Pal Benko each scored 11-2 to tie for first in the 1966 U.S.Open, which attracted an amazing turnout of 201 players to Seattle, August 14-26.

Chess Review

Jack P. Witeczek of Detroit, Michigan, won the 12th annual Golden Knights postal chess championship and the 1st annual U.S.Open postal championship, actually some months ago as reported then in the Postal Chess Dept. [June 1966]

For the USCF's U.S.Open, we have to go back more than a year to August 1965 'On the Cover': 'Fifty years ago Pal Benko received a double billing for placing first in two strong open tournaments' (CL: 'Benko, Lombardy Tie in U.S.Open'; CR: Eastern Open). If we go back another year, we see that the year 1966 gave Benko a hat trick; October 1964 'On the Cover': 'Grandmaster Pal Benko of New York won the United States Open'.

To find the previous year when Benko did not win the U.S.Open, we have to go back to September 1963. CL reported, 'Lombardy Wins U.S. Open Championship' (on tiebreak over Robert Byrne). Benko tied for 3rd-4th with S.Gligoric, who spent time in the U.S. after the 1963 (1st) Piatigorsky Cup. The full 1963 crosstable was printed in the November CL.

For CR's Golden Knights, we can go back to November 1965 'On the Cover': 'Raymond E.A. Doe has won the 11th annual Golden Knights Postal Chess Championship. He began play in the tournament in 1957.' That post included a link to Wikipedia's 'Golden Knights (chess)', which gives Witeczek's name as 'J.Whiteczak'.

I learned in a recent post, Shaping Chess History, that for the months June through November 1966, CL had an interim team editorship. The October masthead said, 'Editors: Lt. Colonel E.B.Edmondson and Wm.Goichberg'. In June 1966, Edmondson was USCF President (replaced by Marshall Rohland in August 1966) while Goichberg was 'Rating Statistician'.

Carlsen, TCEC, Karjakin, Korchnoi

After finishing Carlsen's TMER 2000-2016 (*), what little Monday project should I tackle now? My first idea was season nine of the Top Chess Engines Competition (TCEC), currently underway. I last looked at TCEC season eight in Chess Engine Summary (January 2016), and the current season started some months later: TCEC Season 9 officially announced (chessdom.com; April 2016).

Where is the competition now? Stage 3 finished on 8 September, with Stockfish and Houdini qualifying into the superfinal. The crosstable is shown below and a readable version is available on the TCEC Archive (click on a season, stage, and a game to see the corresponding crosstable).

Crosstable for TCEC Season 9 - Stage 3

The TCEC is currently featuring a side event -- TCEC rapid starts September 9th (chessdom.com) -- which looks like it has another three weeks (or so) to go. According to that page,

TCEC Superfinal: The Superfinal of TCEC will start right after the rapid section. It will be a 100 games match between Stockfish and Houdini.

That match will likely overlap the 2016 Carlsen - Karjakin World Championship title match, where game one is scheduled for 11 November, and tiebreaks for 30 November. That's a lot of great chess coming in November. In the meantime I'll keep busy on Mondays with the Korchnoi TMER, last seen in Korchnoi's Events 1998-99 / 2014-15 (August 2016).

(*) TMER = Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record

Skeleton, Marriage, Chess Watch

Here on Top eBay Chess Items by Price, it's been a few years since we last saw a watch with a chess theme. Two others were Time Is on My Side (July 2010; Tissot watch) and From Pocket to Wrist Watch (April 2013; Doxa watch).

The item pîctured below was titled 'Mens/Ladies Skeleton Vintage Watch by OMEGA Factory with CHESS from 1920's', and subtitled 'Quality Gold-Filled Engraved & Skeletonized Movement'. The winning bid was US $910 after receiving 12 bids from nine bidders.

The description included a 'History of Omega Watches'. About the item on auction it said,

This is a MARRIAGE watch. A marriage watch is the term used for a new, modern case that has been used to house a vintage pocket watch movement. [...] I am happy to offer for sale this beautiful amazing large skeletonized dress marriage watch that dates to ca 1920s and decorated of the HIGHEST QUALITY ENGRAVING with CHESS. It was made by the "Omega Factory" in Switzerland. [...]

This gorgeous, men's watch is a very handsome specimen and features a 60 minute outer track borders, black enameled Roman numerals and original blue steel Plume-style hands. The dial is made in the form of a CHESSBOARD. [...] It is fitted on a new 22mm black alligator style high quality genuine leather strap with fold-over ends and matching gold steel buckle, ready to be worn and enjoyed or made the new "prize" of your wristwatch collection.

Diameter (with crown): 57.00 mm
Diameter (without crown): 52.00 mm
Watch crystal diameter: 45.00 mm
Thickness: 19.00 mm

What's a skeleton watch? From Bare Bones: 10 Standout Skeleton Watches (watchtime.com; 'USA's No.1 Watch Magazine'):-

In skeleton watches, the watchmaker strips the watch's dial and/or movement to their bare essentials, revealing as much of the watch's interior as possible.

Of the many photos showing the watch, I chose the one that best illustrated its size.