13 October 2012

2001 Leko - Adams on Chessgames.com

Some people collect stamps, others collect coins, still others collect chess sets. I collect links to web pages. You might think that my collection has no value, but you would be wrong. It's worth its weight in another intangible resource : time. Whenever I need an idea for a post, I sort through the collection of links and -- voila -- something always catches my attention. I hadn't looked at recently acquired chess960 links for at least six months, so when I started sorting through them for this post, dozens of ideas came to mind.

The link I finally chose was from Chessgames.com (CG.com), Peter Leko vs Michael Adams; Mainz CC Fischer Random 2001. The game is from the first chess960 'World Championship' match, as documented on my page Chess960 @ Chess Classic Mainz. It turns out that CG.com has a number of chess960 games in its database, linked from an index page Chess openings: Chess variants (000). From this page we find another game from the same match on CG.com, Peter Leko vs Michael Adams; Mainz CC Fischer Random 2001.

Fortunately, GM Gligoric's book, which I covered in a post with a similar title, Shall We Play Chess960?, gives the moves from all eight games of that match in an appendix. From this we learn that the first Leko - Adams game linked above was game one of the match, while the second linked game was game five. I don't know why these two games are available on CG.com and the other six games from the match are missing, but that 'Variants 000' page points to a few more chess960 games.

A few years ago I used a CG.com page as the basis for a preliminary post on a Chess960 FAQ. It might prove useful to discover what other chess960 resources are available on the same site.

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