I recently went to watch the Dutch Fischer Random Championship in my hometown, Amsterdam. I was just in time to witness what everybody felt was the ‘dream final’ - the decisive game between Dutch GM Dennis de Vreugt and Yasser Seirawan, who in regular chess beat many a World Champion in his best days, including Karpov and Kasparov.
This reminded me of one of the video clips in the recent St.Louis event (see Chess960 Kings and Queens for links) where someone mentioned that GM Seirawan was a former chess960 champion of the Netherlands. Now I had enough information to conduct a search with some hope of success. Living in bilingual Belgium, I understand some Dutch, which helped in the search.
After a few minutes I found Het Martin Walop toernooi om het open NK Fischer Random Chess 2011 which Google dates to June 2011. Unfortunately, the links near the bottom only lead to results, not to games. The home page of that site, Fischerz.nl, has a section 'Random Chess' in the sidebar with info on previous events stretching back to 2004, where Seirawan was the winner with a perfect +7-0=0, 1.5 points ahead of the runnerup.
The details from those events lead to the discovery of other pages, like Reinderman wint open NK Fischer Random (Google: May 2010), with a report on the 2010 event, including a few annotated moves and a couple of working videos at the bottom of the page. DGT, the Dutch supplier of chess clocks, including a chess960 model that I mentioned once in DGT960 Chess Clock, sponsored the event in recent years.
***
A recent post on Susan Polgar's blog, Chess 960, Breathing new life into the game!, pointed to a chess960 resource that looks like a recent convert: Chess 960, Breathing new life into the game! (OnlineChessLessons.net). The site, operated by NM Will Stewart (see his Chess Biography) has a heavy emphasis on bughouse, so maybe we'll see more on Fischer Random Bughouse.
Susan Polgar's post reminded me that she once played an early version of Fischer's invention with the 11th World Champion himself, a topic I explored in Pictures of a Fischer Random Precursor. It would be useful to explore her previous posts on chess960 (sometimes called 'Fischer Random' on her blog), but that will have to wait for another day.
2 comments:
Thanks for trying to bring together whatever Chess960 news there is out there Mark. There is information in your posts I certainly did not know about.
If you are watching the Tal Memorial right now, or indeed any big GM tournament, it's always fascinating to observe the first few rounds as the super GM's display the new ideas they have researched on their computers. After those rounds, they tend to run out of novelties I think. Kramnik's game I think it was against Carlsen, was wonderful in terms of a Chess960 feel where Kramnik played his king into a shelter on h2 and explored many unusual themes that you find in Chess960 all the time. Here's the link to that game:
http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7681
The part that I find mysterious is that Kramnik has been quoted as saying that he thinks Chess960 is a different game to Chess, yet the work he is doing at home to expand his repetoire, is full of Chess960 ideas that come out in the first round or two of his tournament play.
Cheers
Eh Mark oh dear Nakamura got hammered today by Ivanchuck at the Tal Memorial: http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7696
Why? Because Nak as white, deviated early from the normal Gruenfeld and tried a creative idea (Nb5!?/Bc7!?). He never recovered.
If Nak were playing Chess960, Ivanchuk would have a lot more problem against him. But as it stands, the weight of opening theory is against Nakamura.
However I guess you have heard that Kasparov and Nakamura are going to collaborate on opening theory. I sincerely hope that Kasparov does not diminish Nakamura's wonderful ability to be creative over the board from the outset.
The issue is that as Kasparov, fills Nakamura's memorisation cup ever more full of modern traditional computer analysed openings as he did with Carlsen, that he does not diminish Nakamura's wonderful creative spontaneity and interest in Chess960 values.
I hope not!
Cheers
Harry
Post a Comment