Two friendly matches started in St. Louis today. Hikaru Nakamura is competing against Fabiano Caruana, while Hou Yifan's rival is Parimarjan Negi. The GMs will play four different types of chess:
November 12 - Basque system (two games simultaneously, time control 90'+30");
November 13 - Fischer chess (four games, 20'+10");
November 14 - Rapid (four games, 15'+10");
November 15 - Blitz (eight games, 3'+2").
I once discussed a possible aspect of the Basque system (Day 1) on this blog in The More the Better (March 2012), 'seems like a natural way to conduct a chess960 tournament'. Regarding 'Fischer Chess' (Day 2), it's fitting that the word 'Random' was dropped from the Chess-news.ru report.
Kasparov Chooses Chess Positions for Showdown in Saint Louis (5:13) • 'Published on Nov 12, 2015'
The description for the clip said,
The Chess Club is running a poll on Twitter where followers may vote for the starting positions, selected by Garry Kasparov, of all four games of Fischer Random Chess during Showdown in St. Louis. These games will be played on Friday, November 13 at 1pm.
As for the chess960 games themselves, the Saint Louis Chess Club has an album on Flickr.com. Here is a composite image showing six of the photos:-
2015 Showdown in Saint Louis: Day 2
Chess.com's Mike Klein wrote a report about day 2 of the event in Big Swings As Nakamura, Hou Yifan Channel Inner Fischer (chess.com).
After day one's Basque Chess, the players shifted to four games of Fischer Random, also known as Chess960, played at the rapid time control of G/20+10. Nakamura dropped game one but took 2.5 of the next three against GM Fabiano Caruana, while the former women's world champion won three straight against GM Parimarjan Negi and missed a chance to possibly make it clean sweep, drawing game four.
Unfortunately, a technical glitch prevented automatic recording of the game scores: 'There are no PGNs for Fischer Random, due to the fact that the notation system cannot understand the castling rules.' That explanation doesn't make sense, but a comment to the post does: 'From what I understand about DGT, they can easily detect that a piece is on a square, but it would be much more difficult to detect which piece it is. So you'd have to enter the initial 960 formation somehow else.' Can DGT chessboards not track random start positions for chess960 games or were the boards not prepared properly? The blog Chess960 Jungle managed to record at least two of the games:-
- Showdown in St. Louis - Fischer Random Style
- Transcript of Showdown in Saint Louis 2015 - SP112 Nakamura v Caruana
- Transcript of Showdown in Saint Louis 2015 - SP112 Negi v Yifan
The Basque and chess960 experiments were only used in the 2015 Showdown. The 2016 and 2017 editions of the event reverted to traditional rapid and blitz formats using SP518 (RNBQKBNR).
No comments:
Post a Comment