2001 Leko - Adams on Geocities

As long as I'm on the subject of chess960 history, seen in last week's Bobby Fischer in 1996 (May 2022), here's another blast from the past that I discovered recently. These links are all from Archive.org, returning material originally found on a Geocities.com site, 'The Realm of the Citadel':-

• The Birth of Fischer Random Chess - Peter Leko Chamber
• Peter Leko vs Michael Adams; 'Interviews with GMs Peter Leko and Michael Adams about their unique match'
• GM Peter Leko: First Fischer Random Chess World Champion

The pages aren't dated, so I've organized them by page name: Fischerandom1/-2/-6. The missing page numbers (-3/-4/-5) are about pairs of games from the match. The third pâge on my list of links (no.6) has a photo from the match, reproduced here.

I've already posted a few times on the Leko - Adams match:-

• 2010-09-26: Shall We Play Chess960?
• 2012-10-13: 2001 Leko - Adams on Chessgames.com

Those references date the match to June 2001, meaning the Geocities pages were written some time after that. The last page in the series (no.6) has a good summary of the situation at the time of the match.

Peter Leko and Michael Adams were chosen as the most logical choices to play for the first Fischer Random title. Both players are in the top five in the January 2001 world rankings joining former and current world champions Kasparov, Anand and Kramnik.

Today, nobody injects more new super novelties to the known theories than Peter Leko. Leko has actually played some Fischer Random games with the inventor of the game himself, Bobby Fischer, who as everyone knows happens to be his friend although he says he prefers to keep the memories to himself.

There's more to explore here, but I ran out of time.

Bobby Fischer in 1996

Yesterday in a post on my main blog, Bobby Fischer Day by Day (May 2022), I introduced 'a site that offers [Bobby Fischer] newspaper clippings in chronological order'. What can we learn from that site about the development of chess960?

Last year in a post on this blog, The Early Evolution of Fischerandom (February 2021), I listed other posts that had tracked developments in the first half of the 1990s. I wrote,

We see that Fischer's early [chess960] activities were bunched into two time periods. The first period took place in 1992-1993, when Fischer developed the rules of his emerging invention. The second period took place in 1995-1996, when Fischer revealed his invention to the world.

A key event in that period was the announcement of 'Fischerandom' in June 1996. The site that records Fischer newspaper clippings is in fact a family of blogs, where each blog covers a full calendar year. The blog covering 1996, Bobby Fischer 1996, currently consists of only two posts:-

• 1996-02-10: Where In The World Is Chess Master Bobby Fischer? (bobby-fischer-1996.blogspot.com)
• 1996-06-20: Bobby Fischer Presents New Chess Game (ditto)

The February 1996 post answered the 'Where Is' question with 'Budapest, Hungary'. It confirms another of my own posts from last year, tracking Fischer's movements from 1992 and afterwards: From Sveti Stefan to Budapest (March 2021).

All of the posts in the family of Fischer blogs include a link to the original clipping. The June 1996 post links to Bobby Fischer Presents New Chess Game (newspapers.com), and adds a transcript of the clipping:-

Buenos Aires, Argentina (AP) -- Former world chess champion Bobby Fischer wants to bring the fun back into chess. To do it, he has created "Fischerandom," a computerized shuffler that randomly distributes chess pieces on the back row of the chess board at the start of each game. That creates 960 possible variations of starting positions -- the first modification to the game in 500 years, the Argentine Chess Club said.

While that appears to be a great start to clippings about the history of chess960, it's the only mention that I could find on the Fischer blogs. I checked all years from 1992, the year of the second Fischer - Spassky match, through 2001, the year of Fischer's most infamous radio broadcasts, and came up empty handed.

ChessBase CKO

Last month an intriguing comment appeared against an old post on my main blog, A Database of Chess960 Start Positions (December 2008). It said,

I'm looking for a key file (*.CKO) to use with base of games chess 960 with ChessBase 14.

Since the last time I used ChessBase software was, well, never, I first had to decipher the request. What's a *.CKO file?

I already knew that ChessBase management is no fan of chess960; see Purported Problems with Chess960 (April 2018) for the nitty gritty. If that isn't convincing, the user manual for Fritz 18 has a little more than one page out of 425 on Fischer's greatest invention, titled '3.2.10 Chess 960'. The space in front of '960' pretty much guarantees that it will never be found in any normal search. The page instructs you to 'pick a number for one of the predefined Fischer-Random positions', i.e. no built-in random position generator. After that,

Games you have played against the program are saved in the file Autosave-960.cbh in the users folder. Saved Chess 960 games in a database are given with the number of the predefined position with which they were played.

Back to *.CKO files, the best explanation I could find was ChessBase Support - Details : A tip for Full Analysis. It starts,

The function "Full analysis" on Fritz & Co produces a complete analysis of one or several games, including variations, textual commentary and even opening references. The analysis also contains indications of games which were played with that opening system.

For 'indications of games', I understand 'references to games' from another Chessbase database. The explanation continues,

With the help of a large reference database the program is able to classify the opening played in the game, integrate recent games for comparison and indicate the position at which the game being analysed diverges from opening theory.

How does that work?

If no openings key is present in the database you have defined as your reference database, the program cannot produce a reference. [...] If there should be no openings classification, the program automatically offers to classify them by means of a pre-existing key. [...] An openings key always has the file extension *.CKO.

Bingo. A chess960 CKO file would somehow index the 960 start positions. I also found references to a Chessbase CPO file ('positions, openings'). This might serve the same purpose for chess960 as a CKO file, although actionable information on this filetype was even sparser than for the CKO extension.

Will ChessBase someday offer a CKO/CPO solution for chess960? Maybe, but I wouldn't bet any money on it. If the company doesn't see a need to offer a random position at the start of a chess960 game, it won't see a need for more sophisticated functionality.

A Slippery Slope

It's been a while since I featured a video on this blog. For the previous video post, An Underused Resource (June 2021), I wrote,

For many reasons, we don't see too many instructive videos about chess960 -- small expert base, difficult thinking process, small subscriber base -- so any time a good video comes along it's worth featuring.

Here's another video, this time from YouTube's Chess.com channel.

No Human Would Sacrifice These Pieces! (16:35) • '[Published on] Feb 24, 2022'

The description said,

Join NM @James Canty III as he breaks down a thrilling Computer Chess Championship [CCC] Chess960 Blitz game full of sacrifices and tactics between Dragon and Rubi!

I don't agree with everything that NM Canty says about the game, in particular the opening, but I'm not sure I could do any better. Explaining games between top engines is a slippery slope even for world class grandmasters of the human species. As viewers of the same species, we want to be entertained and this video delivers.

Facebook to Lichess to ...

In the previous post, More from Google Search on Chess960 (March 2022), I wrote,

A resource from Facebook.com, 'Fischer-Random Chess (Chess960/FRC)', crept into the mix. I'll look at that page another time.

Since there's never a better time than the current time, let's go a little deeper. First, I'll repeat that link, Fischer-Random Chess (Chess960/FRC), which leads to a Facebook group. Most of the 'Discussion' posts consist of links to tournaments on Lichess. I found a notable exception at 'AS Mastur shared a link; 9 March [2022] at 16:33':-

• Visualdennis's Blog • My Ultimate Guide to Chess960 (lichess.org).

Written by someone who obviously knows a lot about both chess and chess960, the blog post links to HarryO's 'Chess960 Jungle' blog (also on the right sidebar here) and to this 'Chess960 (FRC)' blog. It also introduced me to two resources that I hadn't seen before:-

• 960 Brilliancies Project (lichess.org)
• Nine-Sixty (netlify.app) • 'Guide to 960: Helping you find your way in 960 since today', apparently by the same writer behind the 'Ultimate Guide'.

I'll look at those last two resources another time. Down the rabbit hole once again...

More from Google Search on Chess960

Once in a while I like to feature some curiosity from a Google search on chess960 noticed during recent explorations. Here's a list of relevant past posts:-

• 2021-06-26: People Also Ask About Chess960
• 2020-08-29: 'Chess960 Castling First Move' • 'Don't you hate it when you search for some topic on the web and the results point back to your own thoughts?'
• 2018-10-27: A Googly Gadget

In the post behind that last link, 'A Googly Gadget', I mentioned,

One curiosity I've noticed is that those two reference pages (both on m-w.com) rarely show up in the search results at the same time.

For the last six months, Google has frequently been displaying both reference pages together, as shown in the top portion of the following image (above the '***'). For good measure, it often includes a link to this blog, also shown in the image. Sometimes the three resources are shown bunched together, but in this case a resource from Facebook.com, Fischer-Random Chess (Chess960/FRC), crept into the mix. (I'll look at that page another time.)

For the last month, the two reference pages on m-w.com have reverted to appearing alone, with the other page nowhere to be found. I have no explanation for why this flip-flop occurs.

The bottom portion of the image shows an ad that appeared this past week on my weekly search for chess960. The link behind the ad went to Chess 960 - Chessable.com, a not very interesting comment dated 2017. I suppose the real purpose of the ad was to display the four Chessable links under the text snippet, which itself has nothing to do with chess960. Despite this disconnect, it's good to see a major commercial site in online chess bidding on the chess960 keyword. Another old post on this blog also featured a Google ad:-

• 2017-05-20: Play Chess960, Not War • 'Seen on this blog in the Google Adsense space on the right navigation bar. ... Under the title 'PLAY CHESS NOT WAR', former President Obama of the USA plays chess (or chess960) with President Putin of Russia.'

I doubt that anyone would run that ad -- or a similar ad -- in today's political climate. Putin's invasion of Ukraine strikes too close to any playfulness intended by the ad.

Hey, FIDE, Why Isn't There a Chess960 Commission?

[EOM]