Online Arbiters

Since I'm posting a series about The Switch to Online Chess, the following seemed a natural choice for this month's featured video.

Workshop for arbiters in online chess events (2:05:58) • 'Streamed live on Jun 10, 2020'

The description starts,

Hosts - IA Laurent Freyd, Chairman of the FIDE Arbiters' Commission and IA Tomasz Delega, Chairman of the ECU Arbiters' Council. • The hosts will share about online events and best practices to help arbiters fulfilling their role in the new context of online chess events.

That introduction is followed by a list of bullets like 'What's the role of the arbiter in online tournaments?' The workshop is centered on a presentation that starts around 10:50 into the clip. Although I couldn't find a separate copy of the presentation, I found a mention of the event on the subdomain for FIDE Arbiters' Commission (fide.com). It said,

The FIDE Arbiters` Commission wants to thanks everyone who attended the workshop on Wednesday, June 10th. It was obviously a challenge but it became a great success, with a lot of interaction among the participants in the chat and questions raised. At one point, there were 467 participants online from almost all Federations.

The video lives on Youtube's FIDE chess channel.

The Switch to Online Chess

Last week, in The Collapse of OTB Chess, I wrote,

Now that I've started looking into the data behind 'TWIC and the Coronavirus', I'll make a short series out of it.

The post was based on the following chart, which I include again to reference the relevant numbers of TWIC ('The Week in Chess' by Mark Crowther) and their issue dates.

The chess events reported in TWIC always carry a 'Place:' tag that documents where the events were played. Using the same eight issues of TWIC, I scanned the 'Place:' tag, searching for online sites, and developed the following chart. It shows online sites that were connected to an event covered by TWIC in a specific week.

T1323 : 'The Week in Chess 1323, 16th March 2020'

The chart shows three online play sites, plus 'TCEC-chess.com', an online engine vs. engine site. I've been following that site on this blog for the last few years, where the most recent post was TCEC S18 DivP Underway; CCC14 Started (June 2020). In the past Crowther didn't often report on computer events, so their inclusion was already a sign of the changing times.

The first TWIC issue in both charts (TWIC1323 16-Mar-20) carried reports on two online events, one played on Chess.com, the other on Chess24.com. Both were events that had started months earlier.

PRO Chess League 2020 • The PRO Chess League takes place 7th January to 5th May 2020. The Group stages finished last. The top 4 teams in each division will played off over two rounds, the final four will now play for the title. It seems unlikely they will do this in May in Norway due to the Coronavirus.

Chess24 Banter Blitz Cup 2019 • Chess24 Banter Blitz Cup takes place 25th September [2019] to some time in 2020.

The next issue of TWIC (TWIC1324 23-Mar-20) announced the shift to online play:-

Introduction • The FIDE Candidates are being led by Ian Nepomniachtchi with 4.5/6 going into the second rest day. The event has been interesting, no-one is playing really great chess but it's been gripping so far. Sadly the Coronavirus emergency is just getting worse, most chess events are being cancelled and I personally believe there's now less than a 50% chance of this Candidates tournament being finished without a long postponement.

TWIC will obviously have far less chess to cover in the coming weeks. I suspect I'll end up covering more computer chess (TCEC Premier League this week) and more online events. Note that the College Final Four in the States is going to use the Internet and arbiters to run their event. This will be a very interesting experiment to follow on 4th-5th April. I expect a postponed top class event to try something similar at some point in the coming months. I wish everyone well. Stay safe.

On top of the two online events in TWIC1323, the issue mentioned two more events on Chess.com:-

PNWCC Online Blitz - Jackpot II 2020 • The PNWCC Online Blitz - Jackpot II tournament took place on March 21st. Full details next week. 1st GM Lazaro Bruzon 9/11 half a point clear of Yaroslav Zherebukh, Kamil Dragun, Andrey Baryshpolets, and Zoran Jovanovic who all scored 8.5/11.

Forthcoming Events and Links • Note that most of these events will not take place now. The College Final Four [USA] will take place on the Internet [Chess.com].

The next issue of TWIC (TWIC1325 30-Mar-20) was back to the two events in TWIC1323 : 'PRO Chess League 2020' and 'Banter Blitz Cup 2019'. I've already covered that issue in the post titled 'Collapse of OTB Chess'. A previous post on this blog, Coronavirus Candidates (March 2020), covered the collapse of the last world class OTB chess event, the 2020 Candidates tournament played at Yekaterinburg, Russia.

Back to the second chart above, the next issue of TWIC (TWIC1326 06-Apr-20) saw the first significant increase in the number of online events. I'll cover that in the next post in this series.

TCEC S18 DivP Underway; CCC14 Started

This blog's previous report -- TCEC S18 L3/L2/L1 Finished; CCC14? (May 2020) -- on the two most watched engine vs. engine competitions was fairly routine:-

TCEC: The TCEC has progressed rapidly through three stages of season 18. • CCC: The CCC has been running a gigantic match between two top engines, cycling through the entirety of Encyclopedia of Chess Openings (ECO).

What has happened during the intervening fortnight?

TCEC: Premier Division (DivP) started two weeks ago and has finished the second of three double round robins, meaning it has another week to run. The first two engines will qualify into the S18 Superfinal (SuFi). Two points currently separate 1st and 4th places : Stockfish is a point ahead of LCZero, which leads Stoofvlees by a half point, ahead of AllieStein by another half point. The other four engines have negative scores.

CCC: CCC14 started with the following 'Format Information' (DRR = Double Round Robin):-

All games are 15' + 5". This is a double-elimination event. A 16 engine 1 x DRR starts the event. All 1 x DRR games are bookless. All other games in the event use a one-ply book.

DRR finishers 1-8 are seeded into the winners bracket of the event. Finishers 9-16 are seeded into the losers bracket. Being seeded into the losers bracket counts as an "elimination". Each bracket match is 12 games unless tiebreaks are required -- i.e. games are played until an engine achieves a +1.5 score. Losing a bracket match counts as an "elimination".

Close to 75% of the preliminary games have been played, with Lc0 and Leelenstein in 1st and 2nd places. Stockfish lost its individual match to both engines and is currently languishing in 7th place.

[For further information from the various stakeholders in the engine-to-engine events, see the tab 'TCEC/CCC Links' at the top of this page. • NB: Leela = LC0 = LCzero]

1982 Tbilisi Women's Interzonal

In the ongoing series about Top eBay Chess Items by Price (March 2010), tournament programs signed by the participants appear frequently. As far as I can remember this is the first program for a top women's event.

The item pictured below was titled 'Chess Programme Signed by Participants World Chess Championship Women Interzonal'. It sold for US $790, 'Best offer accepted'.

Top row: Savereide, Muresan (1st in tournament), Fischdick, Liu Shelan (3rd); Bottom row [1st image:] Akhmilovskaya, Levitina (2nd), Veroci-Petronic, Gurieli; [2nd image:] Gaprindashvili, Semenova, Lematchko.

The description said,

Chess programme signed by 12 participants plus Chiburdanidze and Gaprindashvili. • World Chess Championship (Women); 1982 Tbilisi Interzonal Tournament. • Size approx: 145 x 200 mm (5.7" x 7.9") • From the personal collection of Grandmaster E. Ubilava. • Condition is good.

The description also listed the names of the 14 players who signed the program, although all 15 Interzonal participants were pictured. I've shown only two of the four double pages that had photos of the participants, including the three top finishers.

Some of the info in the description, like the spelling of names, appears to have been taken from my page 1982 Tbilisi Interzonal Tournament. The three photos in the bottom row, second image, were the top finishers of the earlier 1982 Bad Kissingen Interzonal Tournament.

The three top finishers from the two Interzonals were seeded into the 1983-84 Candidates Matches. They were joined by Ioseliani, the runner-up in the 1980-81 Candidates Matches, and Alexandria, the loser (by a tied score) of the 1981 Chiburdanidze - Alexandria Title Match.

The quarterfinal round of the 1983-84 Candidates Matches saw only three matches. Lematchko didn't play and Alexandria started with a semifinal match. That circumstance deserves a mention and an explanation on the 1983-84 CM page.

The Collapse of OTB Chess (*)

Last month, in TWIC and the Coronavirus (May 2020), I wrote,

The Covid coronavirus lockdowns started mid-March. That means TWIC1323 (16-Mar-20) might serve as some kind of a baseline reference. Note how the subsequent TWIC files decrease in size for both the game file and the news file. The ratio also decreases, perhaps reflecting the size of the events being reported, i.e. events with a small number of elite players. The numbers start to increase at the beginning of May.

Of course, this is all speculation that needs to be confirmed by reviewing individual TWIC files. Maybe I'll do that another time.

For once, I managed to follow up an action. The following chart shows statistics for eight issues of TWIC ('The Week in Chess' by Mark Crowther). The first line is the baseline reference (TWIC1323 16-Mar-20) that I identified in the original post.

The fields 'EvntCt' and 'GameCt' show the number of events and games reported in an issue of TWIC. Since the first event in any TWIC issue is always 'Introduction' and the last is always 'Forthcoming Events and Links', the 'EvntCt' is two more than the real number of events.

The last gasp for OTB chess was apparently documented in TWIC1325 (30-Mar-20). The 11 events were a mixed bag:-

1. Introduction
2. FIDE Candidates Tournament 2020
3. 224th-225th YMCA Winter A and B 2020
4. 4th New Chess Brains Tournament 2020
5. 52nd Belgrade WGM 2020
6. RADNICKICHESS GM Round Robin 2020
7. TCEC Season 17 2020
8. Chess24 Banter Blitz Cup 2019
9. TCh-CZE 2019-20
10. Active Team Events
11. Forthcoming Events and Links

That issue, The Week in Chess 1325 - 30th March 2020 (theweekinchess.com), included the last four games of the cancelled Candidates tournament. In his 'Introduction' Mark Crowther wrote,

When the Candidates can be resumed and whether it will be in time for the World Championship match to take place as scheduled at the end of the year are questions that don't particularly interest me right now, I simply want this Coronavirus crisis to go away. Even if the Candidates and World Championship Match happen this year I wonder when mass participation international opens can realistically take place.

The immediate future of chess is online. There is bound to be much less chess in TWIC in the coming few months, I will use the time to improve the website and the program routines I use to produce the magazine. Most of all I'll try and stay safe. I wish everyone out there good health.

More than a third of the 341 games were from the 'YMCA Winter' event (Warsaw POL; Crowther: 'could not be completed due to the coronavirus') and none were from the 'New Chess Brains' tournament (Hamburg GER; 'I'm still looking for the games').

Now that I've started looking into the data behind 'TWIC and the Coronavirus', I'll make a short series out of it. I'll also return to TWIC Data Through the Years (May 2020), where I wrote,

These numbers in the charts raise more questions than they answer. Will I find time for further investigations?

I know that most people are only interested in the games distributed each week by TWIC. The series is also a trove of higher level data about chess since the mid-1990s.

(*) OTB Chess = 'Over the Board'

June 1970 & 1995 'On the Cover'

What was happening in the chess world 50 and 25 years ago? In 1970, CL&R featured the winner of a national tournament for the third straight month. You might never guess that the first nine pages of the June 1970 issue covered 'The Match of the Century', which in 1970 meant the USSR versus the 'Rest of the World'.

Left: 'National High School Champion'
Right: 'Silver Anniversary for the Amateur Teams; Hal Stone's Secret Life'

Chess Life & Review (50 Years Ago)

The Second Annual National High School Championship, played April 3-5 at the McAlpin Hotel in New York, was by far the largest rated tournament ever held in the U.S. 552 students from 26 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico competed -- an increase of about 50% over last year's turnout of 370. With the Continental Intercollegiate drawing 157 additional players, a grand total of 709 were playing concurrently at the same location, a figure that smashes the previous high for rated events, 492 players at the 1969-70 Greater New York Chess Congress.

We saw the first National High School Championship a year ago in May 1969 'On the Cover'. Robert Newbold, the winner of the 1970 event, was also featured in Early U.S. High School Championships (May 2017), where I found a mention of him in 1977.

Chess Life (25 Years Ago)

Hal Stone. 1911-1994, enjoyed a 30 year relationship with the New York Daily News as an illustrator. His historical works, commissioned by the government, are on permanent display at the U.S. Army War College in Washington, D.C. At the time of his death, he was putting the finishing touches on a mural at the Mount Kisco Hebrew Congregation, depicting the entire history of the Jewish people from biblical times to the creation of the State of Israel.

Hal Stone was the professional name for Harry Smilkstein, whose oil painting "White to Play and Win" graces our cover. Harry, as a life-long chess enthusiast, was one of the founders of the Max Pavey Chess Club back in 1954.

The rest of the Hal Stone story is available online. Follow the instructions in US Chess CL Archive (November 2019) to find the June 1995 issue.

World Champion Komodo

Which engine is the current World Computer Champion? If you follow the TCEC, you might say Leela Chess Zero, as in Leela Beat Stockfish in TCEC S17 & CCC13 Finals (April 2020). But, no, if you go to my page World Chess Championship : Computer Chess, you'll see that winner of the last four championships was Komodo. The full picture of the last 20 years is captured in the following image from that page.

I documented the latest WCCC tournament in 25th World Computer Championship [ICGA] (May 2020) on my World Chess Championship Blog. In fact, the event was held in August 2019, but I forgot about it until earlier this year.

In the 'Candidates Tournament' (aka 'Premier Division') for TCEC S17 (Season 17), Komodo finished a strong fourth after Leela, Stockfish, and AllieStein. Some observers consider the correct name for the 'ICGA World Computer Championship' is simply 'ICGA Computer Championship'. The ICGA event has been declining in importance over the last ten years. That's why my Computer Chess page groups the events as...

Full pages
ZIP files only
Blog posts

...indicating that I've attached less documentation to recent events. Other observers feel otherwise. Some recent discussions on the Talkchess.com forum have been:-

• 2019-06-09: WCCC vs TCEC Chess Engine Competitions
• 2019-07-28: WCCC 2019 Macau
• 2019-08-13: WCCC Engines Champ 2019 Tourney Underway!
• 2019-08-15: Congrats [to] the Komodo Team

Two members of the Komodo team -- Larry Kaufman ('lkaufman') and Mark Lefler ('mjlef') -- participate regularly in the Talkchess discussions; Don Dailey, a third member of the team, died in 2013. Other ICGA WCCC participants of yesteryear -- Robert Hyatt ('bob'; author of Cray Blitz and Crafty) and Ed Schroder ('Rebel'; also the name of his engine) -- appear frequently on Talkchess. In the first thread linked above ('WCCC vs TCEC'), Hyatt wrote,

The ACM events have become pretty much irrelevant, NOT because of the Rybka controversy. NOT because of the ACM leadership. But because of the evolution of world-wide computing. Makes no sense to travel and take two weeks, spend thousands of dollars on travel, hotels and food, when you can compete from your recliner in your living room, and not miss a single day of work.

Where Hyatt writes 'ACM', think 'ICGA'. For 'Rybka controversy', see The Rybka Affair: An Official Reaction (January 2012), and The Rybka - ICGA Ethics Judgement (October 2015) on this blog. He underestimates the importance of the Rybka affair to the rest of the chess world. The Rybka punishment was worse than the crime.