September 1970 & 1995 'On the Cover'

Last month's 'On the Cover' post, August 1970 & 1995, featuring the top American chess magazine from both 50 and 25 years ago, 'celebrated two tournaments that were open to the amateur player'. This month we see a mixture of elite and amateur events.

Left: 'Lubomir Kavalek. Winner at Caracas.'
Right: '1995 Macy's / Excalibur U.S. Chessathon'

Chess Life & Review (50 Years Ago)

Don't Walk -- Run by Lubosh Kavalek • What does it mean to be a "runner" in chess? There are many kinds of grandmaster in the world. Some think that good prizes can be won by winning a few games and, by playing to avoid risk, drawing the rest. This is the "middle class" of grandmaster. But what happens if they lose a few games? Then their idea doesn't work. One should try to win every game. It is a little risky because of the possibility of losing, but if you do well you can be first in many tournaments, like Bobby Fischer, Bent Larsen and Victor Korchnoi. When you try to win every game and gain many points, then you are a runner. My time for running was at Caracas -- I just arrived there and ran.

I was happy when the USCF offered me the opportunity to represent the United States at the international tournament in Caracas June 19 - July 12. I thought that I must replace my Czechoslovakian flag as the Czech Chess Federation has protested against me twice already (in San Juan 1969 and Wijk aan Zee 1970). Most chess players run from one tournament to the next. When you are in that situation and have no country to go home to, you feel all at sea. But when I came out of the sea to Caracas and saw the American flag on my chess table, I know I was firmly on the ground.

Wikipedia's page Lubomir Kavalek explains,

When Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in August 1968, Kavalek was playing in the Akiba Rubinstein Memorial in Poland, in which he finished second. Kavalek, who had always hated Communism, decided to defect to the West rather than return to Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia.

Kavalek finished first in Caracas, a full point ahead of Oscar Panno and Leonid Stein. He identified Lubomir Kavalek vs Anatoly Karpov; Caracas 1970 (chessgames.com) as his best game from the event.

Chess Life (25 Years Ago)

Not only was June 10th at Grand Central Terminal a great day for the media, but the 4th annual CHESSathon, sponsored by title sponsors Macy's and Excalibur, also provided a field day for photographers. as witnessed by what we believe to be an award-winning photograph of five-year-old Noah Belcher.

A few years ago I posted about the initial event in The First USCF Chessathon (September 2014). The four page story on the 1995 Chessathon, filled with color photos like those on the CL cover, was perhaps overshadowed by a second story introduced as a 'NEWS FLASH':-

The PCA is thrilled to announce that the 1995 Intel World Chess Championship will be held at the Observation Deck of the World Trade Center! Garry Kasparov and Vishy Anand will slug it out each Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday at 3 PM starting September 11th and continuing until one player reaches 10 1/2 points. General admission $9.00 (plus $6.00 Observation Deck ticket), King Room VIP seating $75 per session. Tickets are limited, so order today!

This was followed by a second part of the 'On the Cover' introduction:-

WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP • The story broke in Germany, and was quickly reported on the Internet. The PCA World Championship match between Garry Kasparov and Viswanathan Anand will be held at the World Trade Center Observation Deck in New York City, beginning September 11th.

From the other side of the world, FIDE Challenger Gata Kamsky received word from FIDE Secretary Casto Abundo that no bids had been received for the Karpov — Kamsky match, as of the deadline of July 1st. FIDE suggested that the federations of the two participants split the organization (and cost) of the match.

As the result of a joint FAX from Karpov and Kamsky, FIDE President Campomanes has extended the bidding deadline until 17:00 hours. (Switzerland Time), September 15, 1995, conditioned on the match being organized and finished in 1995.

The acronym PCA refers to the Professional Chess Association. For more about the organization, see my page World Chess Championship : FIDE/PCA Chronology.

TCEC S19 DivP Started; CCC15 in Brackets

Two weeks ago, the title of the post, TCEC S19 Underway; CCC in 'Pre-CCC15' (August 2020), gave the overall status of the two leading engine vs engine tournaments. The following summary gives some of the details.

TCEC: Before the start of Season 19 (S19), the TCEC announced its format; the organizers are following the same format they used in S18. A new engine 'SlowChess' won both QL and L3 by significant margins. The site is now in testing for League 2 (L2). • CCC: The 'AlphaZero Simulation Match' finished with Lc0 beating Stockfish 8, the version used in the 2017 AlphaZero - Stockfish match. After that ended, the CCC started running a series of 'Pre-CCC15' events. The name of the next event will be 'CCC15: Bullet II' and it should start this week.

In the meantime, both tournaments have completed subsequent stages.

TCEC: Losing only L2 one mini-match to 1st placed Igel, SlowChess finished 2nd to qualify for L1. There it finished 3rd, a half point short of qualification into the Premier Division (DivP). Fire and ScorpioNN qualified into DivP, which is just getting started and which will run for almost three weeks. The top two engines will qualify into the final match (aka Superfinal or Sufi).

CCC: In my previous post ('CCC in Pre-CCC15'), I noted,

A preliminary document showing the planning for CCC15 is available, but is too cryptic to understand.

It turns out that CCC15 is a straightforward bracket structure starting with a preliminary round-robin equivalent to 12-game mini-matches. That event determined the starting positions for the brackets. The structure of the first three rounds of CCC15 is shown in the following chart.

Stockfish won the preliminary event ('Round 1') by a significant margin. Since there were 17 engines, the two last-placed engines played a qualification match for the 16th place:-

CCC15.01 has been stopped on account of awfulness, and Defenchess declared the winner [over Winter].

Thus spake the arbiter: 'stopped on account of awfulness'. The 'Round 2' matches are underway and the world waits eagerly for the result of Stockfish vs. Defenchess. Will it be a whitewash?

[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]

Top Tweeters

Today being the fifth Sunday of the month, I have an extra day for another post in the endlessly interesting series about The Sociology of Chess (November 2016). This video is from Youtube's Best Of Chess Channel.

The Top Chess Twitter Accounts (2:41) • '[Published on] Jul 16, 2020'

The description of the video is a list:-

The current top 15 Twitter accounts:
#1: advorkovich
#2: Kasparov63
#3: vishy64theking
#4: @Magnus Carlsen
#5: @ChessQueen
[...]

@ChessQueen is the one and only Alexandra Kosteniuk, who led the pack for a long time but has fallen behind during the past few years. For the other ten names, see the original Youtube page (right click the video for the address). This is the third time I've featured a video using this time travel bar chart technique. The first two were:-

• 2020-03-08: Youngest GMs
• 2020-05-21: Breaking the 3100 Barrier

I called it the 'time travel bar chart technique'. I wonder what the real name is. A discussion in the comments went like this:-

Q: 'what is the cause for Dvorkovich losing so many followers over the last couple years?' • A: 'I think that is Twitter cracking down and closing bots, and his account has more bot followers than other accounts.'

Why would Dvorkovich need bot followers? Since he is FIDE President, I would imagine that anyone interested in world chess would be dissecting his every word.

Update on Online Chess Events

At the beginning of the summer, in No Online Chess Yahoos (June 2020), I developed a chart showing online chess events across various online play sites, based on TWIC reports ('The Week in Chess' by Mark Crowther). For easy reference, here is the same chart.

T1331 : 'The Week in Chess 1331, 11th May 2020'

As we reach the end of the summer, I developed a similar chart showing the online events over the last eight weeks.

T1339 : 'The Week in Chess 1339, 6th July 2020'

Activity for the three main sites has declined, reflecting perhaps the gradual lifting of coronavirus lockdowns or perhaps the frustration of interminable cheating scandals. Tournament activity generally increases during the summer months.

Note two changes to the names on the chart: the ICC appears for the first time and Europe-Chess has been corrected to Europe-Echecs; it is a French site, after all. Sacré bleu!

Top News/Tournaments in August

At the end of last month, in a post titled Top Tournaments in July (July 2020), I took a survey of chess news stories reported by Google News and came up empty-handed for anything out of the ordinary. This current month had a number of good stories, all of them related to online chess. Here's the first:-

• 2020-08-04: Agadmator: From smalltown Croatia, an unlikely chess phenomenon (espn.com; Susan Ninan)

I mention the author because we already saw her in Coronavirus Candidates (March 2020), where I noted,

Going back even further in time, most -- if not all -- of the older ESPN chess stories had something to do with India. Take this next one, for example. [2020-01-09: Q&A with Viswanathan Anand; ...] The same Susan Ninan was the writer of the four stories on the Candidates.

Two more Google News stories highlighted two of the most visible (and vocal) players of our time:-

• 2020-08-21: Magnus Carlsen wins richest and most-watched online chess event ever (cnn.com; video) • 'The Norwegian world champion has won the finale of the Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour, the richest and most-watched chess event in history.'
  
  
• 2020-08-27: Esports giant TSM signs Hikaru Nakamura, its first pro chess player (theverge.com) • 'Nakamura is also a popular Twitch streamer'

On the Carlsen story, the headline is more accurate -- 'richest and most-watched *online* chess event ever' -- but I'm not complaining. In 'Top Tournaments in July' I identified the top five events in each weekly edition of Mark Crowther's 'The Week in Chess' (TWIC). Let's do the same for August.

1) Introduction

THE WEEK IN CHESS 1343 - 3rd August 2020
2) Legends of Chess 2020
3) 53rd Biel Chess Festival 2020
4) Polish Chess Championship 2020
5) ACP - Chessbase Knock-Out 2020
6) FIDE Online Olympiad 2020

THE WEEK IN CHESS 1344 - 10th August 2020
2) Legends of Chess 2020
3) Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour Final 2020
4) 7th Prague Summer Open 2020
5) 4th Irena Warakomska Memorial 2020
6) Polish Women's Championship 2020

THE WEEK IN CHESS 1345 - 17th August 2020
2) Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour Final 2020
3) 56th Rubinstein Memorial 2020
4) 91st ch-GER 2020
5) Barcelona August Closed Tournaments 2020
6) Santo Tirso Chess Tournament 2020

THE WEEK IN CHESS 1346 - 24th August 2020
2) Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour Final 2020
3) 31st Porto San Giorgio Open 2020
4) BSSZ Aranytiz 2020
5) Plzen Chess Festival 2020
6) ch-ISL 2020

The 'M.C. Chess Tour' received TWIC's top billing for the last two weeks listed above. In his introduction to TWIC 1346, Crowther wrote,

Magnus Carlsen won his tour final against Hikaru Nakamura but it was an extremely close contest settled by an Armageddon tie-break that could have gone either way. Nakamura showed that his online skills are pretty much undimmed and Carlsen clearly was very frustrated with the problems he set him. Already Chess24 have announced another longer tour starting in November and running well into 2021. I've said many times that we're not getting back to normal any time soon and we will be reliant on chess online to keep us going.

After a few words about the Armageddon format that decided the Carlsen - Nakamura match, Crowther signed off with:-

There will be more online chess from Saint Louis next month. Right now the Online Chess Olympiad is reaching its climax with some very strong players competing and the many of the usual suspects making it to the final eight next week that decides the prizes. Still plenty to look at.

It's curious that the Olympiad received top-five billing only once in August. In TWIC 1346 it was listed at no.21 out of 23 events, just behind the 'PNWCC Online Blitz - Jackpot XVIII'.

CCC PGN II

Near the end of last year I posted CCC PGN (December 2019), which started,

The 'CCC PGN Archive' (see the tab 'TCEC/CCC Links' at the top of this page) hasn't been updated in over six months, and only shows events through CCC8.

While preparing that post I found a more recent archive and documented its existence in the same tab 'TCEC/CCC Links'. That second archive was only maintained another four months before it, too, stopped being updated. Recently, another attempt was made at documenting CCC PGN files via the site's Discord resource:-

#complaints

the_real_greco 25/07/2020
@LILMAFYA Someone just gave me this, which has a huge number of our old PGNs (I haven't checked it for completeness).

https://cdn.discordapp.com/.../CCCC.xlsx

If it's still missing anything you want (and you're still interested), let me know. You'd actually be doing me a favor if you could point out any that are missing.

See the Discord resource for the full URL of the XLSX file.

I downloaded the XLSX file, loaded it into a database, and discovered that 'huge number' meant 144 PGN files plus one 'TBA'. After doing that, I produced the chart on the left. It shows the number of PGN files per CCC season.

The XLSX data is also useful for a number of other tasks. First, it can be used to crosscheck the older archives mentioned in the original 'CCC PGN' post. Second, I can use it to catalog the CCC-live weekly snapshots that I've been taking for the last year or so. These show the name of the live event that was running at the time of the snapshot, plus events just before the live event.

I didn't have time to complete either of those two other tasks. I'll try to do that another time.

Political Pundits and Pogchamps

For this edition of The Sociology of Chess (November 2016), we return to Pog Champs (June 2020). That was our sociology post of the month when the world was emerging from covid lockdown.

Hikaru on Bobby Fischer, Chess Drama, Iranian Chess Players and other issues (23:24) • '[Published on] Aug 4, 2020'

The description of the video says,

Hikaru [Nakamura] and David Pakman discuss Bobby Fischer, Chess Drama, Levon Aronian, the Iranian chess players and officials, and other controversies in chess.

What does that have to do with 'Pog Champs'? A recent announcement, Chess.com Announces The Next Pogchamps (chess.com; July/August 2020), explains,

Chess.com is announcing the second edition of Pogchamps, the critically-acclaimed Twitch streamer chess tournament featuring some of the most well-known content creators in the world. [...] In preparation for this Pogchamps, top streamers have already begun their training with coaches, including political pundit David Pakman, League of Legends star Gripex90 and others.

Political pundit Pakman has his own Youtube channel: David Pakman Show. Comparing his '962K subscribers' with GMHikaru's '347K subscribers' gives one side of the story, but the clip embedded above has more than 125K views, which would be a decent number even for Pakman.

Why are the two thirty-somethings talking to each other? See The Endgame With David Pakman - A Beginner's Chess Lesson for a Pogchamp (youtube.com; GMHikaru), 'Hikaru gives Pogchamp2 Player David Pakman a beginner chess lesson'. It's called training, but as we all know, there's more to chess than two armies fighting on 64 squares.