Chess in Manhattan

I added links for the official site (see nyc2016.fide.com) plus the latest FIDE news to my page on the World Chess Championship : 2016 Carlsen - Karjakin match. The latest news was announced in FIDE World Chess Championship Match 2016 (fide.com; 10 August 2016):-

The FIDE World Chess Championship Match 2016 is to take place at the Seaport District in Manhattan, New York. [...] The Match arena will be built within the Fulton Market Building, a five minute walk from Wall Street, and will also feature dedicated spectator and VIP lounges with panoramic views of the Brooklyn Bridge as well as retail space, a restaurant, TV studios and much more.

Match principals mentioned in the FIDE announcement included 'Ilya Merenzon, Chief Executive of Agon Limited, owner of World Chess and the commercial rights holder to the FIDE Chess Championship cycle' and 'Alan Baum of CAA Premium Experience'.

Formed in 2015, CAA Premium Experience is a best-in-class, full-service hospitality, event management, and marketing practice with more than 50 employees working with Fortune 500 companies across hundreds of global sports and entertainment events annually.'

Google Maps points to the site of the match....

...while New York news sources provided local commentary. Speculation Ends: Date and Venue Set for World Chess Championship in New York (nytimes.com):-

Mr. Merenzon said that securing a venue for such a long period proved harder than expected. Among the other sites considered: Trump Tower. The players will compete in a soundproof glass room, in front of 300 spectators plus VIPs, who will have a lounge area. Regular tickets will cost up to $50.

World Chess Championship to Be Played at South Street Seaport (wsj.com):-

The match -- a duel between two grandmasters in their mid-20s -- will take place on the second-floor atrium of the Fulton Market inside a glass, soundproof room that organizers are referring to as the "cockpit." As Carlsen and Karjakin play, attendees will be able to engage with the moves on the board in various ways. Since individual games can take hours, sometimes with prolonged stretches between moves, Merenzon wants to give attendees some options.

Cockpit? Where have we heard that before? In an early Agon press release from the previous cycle: Evolution of a Press Release (August 2012); 'the purpose-built arena and cockpit for the matches'.

22nd World Computer Championship

I added the PGN and crosstable for the 21st World Computer Championship (WCCC) held in Leiden (Netherlands) to my page on the World Chess Championship : Computer Chess. Just like the two previous events (see my post on the 21st World Computer Championship, November 2015), both files are packed into a single ZIP file. For more about the event, see

• WCCC 2016 [ICGA; 'From Monday 27 June until Friday 1 July the WCCC will be held in Leiden at the Leiden University, Snellius Building, Turing Room.'], and
• WCCC 2016 [chessprogramming.wikispaces.com]

The ICGA page links to a report that starts,

The 22nd World Computer Chess Championship started on June 27, 2016. Six programs participate in a double round robin tournament of ten rounds. The tournament takes place at the Leiden University and is organized by the ICGA, LIACS and LCDS. The sponsors are Google, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the municipality of Leiden, Leiden University, Faculty of Science, ICGA, iSSC, SurfSara, Digital Game Technology and NWO Exact Sciences. It is held in conjunction with the 19th Computer Olympiad and the 15th Advances in Computer Games conference.

The page also informs about the tiebreak,

Play-off between Komodo and Jonny: Two games 45 minutes + 16 seconds: 1-1. Two games with 5 min. + 5 seconds. 1-1. Two games with 3 min. + 5 seconds 1½-½ for Komodo

Chessbase.com published a commercial puff piece, Komodo is World Computer Chess Champion (July 2016), that started,

[Komodo's] stiffest competition came from the German program Jonny, running on a giant 2400-core machine. With only 48 cores the US program Komodo finished the computer tournament in Leiden, Netherlands, equal first with Jonny, then went on to win a hard-fought tiebreak, making it the 22nd World Computer Chess Champion. It may interest you to know that the latest version of our flagship chess engine, Komodo 10, was released just a month ago.

It received some pointed comments from skeptical readers, like

'Why didn’t Stockfish compete?' • 'I thought the TCEC tournament determines the World Computer Chess Champion? ' • 'Please explain how did these engines qualify to this competition, and how does this compare to TCEC.' • etc. etc.

Another resource that once documented the WCCC events but is now little more than a stub, is Leiden 2016 [game-ai-forum.org; formerly www.grappa.univ-lille3.fr]. For more about the computer chess world, see my main blog, e.g.:-

• Houdini, Komodo, Stockfish (February 2015)
• What Ticks Off Engine Users? (Part III; May 2015)
• Chess Engine Summary (January 2016)

How much longer will tradition continue to accept the ICGA events as World Championships?

Site Migration II

A week ago, in Site Migration, I quoted an email from my web site host: 'Your account has been successfully migrated to the new technology platform.' I quickly learned that while 'migrated' was an accurate term, 'successfully' wasn't. At the end of the post, I asked,

How long will it be out of service?

It took four days for technical support to update the nameserver info that redirects traffic to the new platform instead of the old, deleted platform. The following graphic shows the evolution of the migration in terms of the size of the log files that record traffic to the site.

The line for the day after migration reads

File: access_log_20160811.gz
Updated: 08/11/2016 9:15 AM EDT
Size: <1KB

Traffic doesn't occur on the site until

File: access_log_20160814.gz

In the last day or so traffic has returned to pre-migration levels, meaning that the site was out of service for nearly a week.

Site Migration

This morning I received the following message...

Subject: Your Account Has Been Moved to the New Platform
Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2016 8:03 AM

Your account has been successfully migrated to the new technology platform. This account is associated with the following domains: mark-weeks.com

The last step of the migration is pointing these domains to the new platform. If you are already using [our] name servers, we have made this change for you. (It usually takes just a few hours for domain name server (DNS) changes to take effect, though it can take up to 24 hours for the update to spread globally.) [...]

...While I knew the change was coming, I wasn't sure when exactly. I won't make any changes to the site until I'm sure that I'm using the new, migrated version.

***

Later: I received another message...

Subject: mark-weeks.com - Your Web Hosting account status
Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2016 8:37 PM

The Web hosting account [mark-weeks.com] has been suspended. If you recently received a migration message for this account, your account has been migrated to the new platform and you are receiving this notice as part of the cleanup process on the old platform. No further action on your part is required.

...The main WCC index page, The World Chess Championship, is now returning a '404 Not Found' message...

Not Found: The requested URL /chess/wcc-indx.htm was not found on this server.

...How long will it be out of service?

2015-2016 Women's Grand Prix, Chengdu

I added the crosstable and PGN for the fourth event in the 2015-2016 FIDE Women's Grand Prix, held at Chengdu (China).

The previous event was 2015-2016 Women's Grand Prix, Batumi. In that Batumi post I mentioned a fifth event that had not yet been scheduled. It is now listed on the FIDE calendar as:-

Women's FIDE Grand Prix Series; Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia; 12-Oct-2016 to 27-Oct-2016

Other than the updated calendar, I can find no announcement on the FIDE site.

An Infamous Unplayed Match

A few months ago I received a message concerning my page 1975 Fischer forfeits to Karpov.

Subject: World championship rules 1974
From: GMG

On your Fischer forfeits to Karpov page [link given above], you wrote, "The same rules governing World Championship matches had been in place since the 1949 FIDE Congress in Paris. They were confirmed at the 1974 Congress in Nice."

In Bozidar Kazic's article "Anatoly Karpov The New World Champion" in Chess Informant 19, he writes that "In September 1971, the FIDE Congress in Vancouver decided that ... the world title in 1975 will be played for 6 won games draws not counting." In 1972, Euwe reportedly tabled a proposal for a match of 30 games. At Helsinki, Fischer sent his 10 wins and 9-9 plan, and a commission was created to draw up rules. At Nice, Kazic has them adopting a match of 36 games where one could win ahead of schedule by scoring 10 wins.

GMG, Toronto

Indeed, the referenced Informant has two-and-a-half pages titled 'An Outline of the Dispute Over the Unplayed Match' with a summary of FIDE actions between 1971 and 1975. While looking a bit more into the background of the 1975 match, I discovered the following table in a 1974 article titled 'The Historical Background' by Frank Skoff, President, USCF.

Chess Life & Review, October 1974, p.652

Although it might contain its own errors, it's a good summary of pre-WWII top-level matches and shows that Fischer's demands were not as outrageous as many of his critics declared.

Postcard Pretty Merano

While searching for Korchnoi images on my main blog -- e.g. Korchnoi's Defection and Composite Korchnoi -- I came across a couple of attractive postcards.

The event was the 1981 Karpov - Korchnoi Title Match; Merano, X-XI, 1981. Merano/Meran has multiple associations with chess; from Wikipedia's entry on Merano:-

Merano or Meran is a town and comune in South Tyrol, northern Italy. Generally best known for its spa resorts, it is located within a basin, surrounded by mountains standing up to 3,335 metres (10,942 feet) above sea level, at the entrance to the Passeier Valley and the Vinschgau. [...]

A chess opening, the Meran Variation of the Semi-Slav Defense, is named after the town, from its successful use by Akiba Rubinstein against Ernst Grünfeld during a tournament held in the town in 1924. In 1981, the World Chess Championship match between Anatoly Karpov and Victor Korchnoi was held in Meran. The first act of the musical Chess also has a world chess championship match set in Meran, and features a song entitled "Merano", which includes the line, "rosy-cheeked Merano, flourishing to a fault".

I have spotted many examples of the upper card on eBay, but the lower card is seen less frequently.