"The Campbell Report" - Sites of Note

	The Campbell Report Correspondence Chess
"Sites of Note"

Here is my list of "interesting" chess web sites I've run across. Some sites are excellent, some are small gems worth at least one visit, and many are outrageous or awful, something I must share with my friends! To keep the page size reasonable, only recent selections are listed here. For older selections go to the "Sites of Note" Archive Page.
-- J. Franklin Campbell

[12 August 2007] Chess Today

This web site is the home of GM Alex Baburin's daily email chess magazine Chess Today, one of the best English-language chess publications available! It's amazing enough that the staff manages to publish every day, but the content is up to date and makes wonderful reading. Most days there are 1-3 chess challenges (positions from current or past events with one side to move and win), news of current events, one fully annotated game and a database of games from current events (including the annotated game of the day). Other features appear from time to time, such as cc news, endgame analysis, open letters, letters from readers, editorial comments, etc. It is a great publication distributed in Adobe PDF format for easy reading/printing for off-line reading. I particularly like the well organized monthly database distributed to subscribers containing all the hundreds of games distributed with the newsletters during the previous month. I keep a special database in ChessBase where I append these monthly databases and gradually have built up a very nice database of thousands of important games, many of them fully annotated.

[12 August 2007] Chess 22 - GM Etienne Bacrot

The personal web site of GM Etienne Bacrot of France. It is in English and French. This looks like a recently created site with minimal content at the moment, but appears to have promise. It currently has a biography of Bacrot and pages devoted to chess news, Bacrot's tournaments, a little chess theory, chess puzzles (one at this moment), a gallery of photos and a couple basic links. Hopefully it will be expanded with time. Thanks to Chess Today for the link.

[12 August 2007] Mida's chess corner - chess BLOG of FIDE Master Dario Mione

Here I am!

The personal chess BLOG of FIDE Master Dario Mione of Italy (in English). This chess journalist also contributes regularly on the Italian-language chess web site http://www.messaggeroscacchi.it/. "Mida" writes in an entertaining style and provides chess news, photos, games for replay and some interesting opinions. This obvious fan of Ivanchuk adds entries fairly often. This BLOG is worth checking on a regular basis. Thanks to Chess Today for the tip!

[26 May 2007] Chessdom

A general chess site with news and photos from the world of top level chess. For instance, they presented a video interview of Silvio Danailov during the M-tel Masters tournament on the future of the new Chess Grand Slam organization as well as complete coverage of the M-tel Masters tournament. You can read profiles of some of the top players, both current and historical. There are also some games in replay format, some nice chess quotes, jokes and other features. Since it's new there is limited material available, but if it lives up to its promising start it should be a very useful site.

[4 May 2007] Maxim Dlugy, International Grandmaster

This is the personal web site of GM Maxim Dlugy of the USA, which appears to be quite new. There are short sections on biography, his tournament record, description of his tenure as President of USCF, his business career, a few photos and a small selection of games in replay format. He has announced plans to start a chess league with information to come. The site is attractive and I would expect will expand in the future.

[21 March 2007] Alisa Maric, Official site of chess grandmaster

This is the personal web site of WGM Alisa Maric of Serbia, one of the top women chess players in the world (twice 3rd in the rating list). The provided features are: biography, games in replay format (including wins over Anand and Nisipeanu), an interesting selection of photos (using Adobe Flash) and a "Press Info" page providing some of the stories published about this talented chess player. There is a cute flash logo at the top of each page that runs each time a page is loaded. Unfortunately, there is also an irritating (to me) sound effect each time you go to a different page, and the photo page actually plays music (there is a control on the page to stop the music). Some will probably enjoy the music. Otherwise, the site is very nicely designed with good navigation and an attractive layout. Thanks to FM Josip Asik, a chess journalist of Belgrade, for bringing this site to my attention.

[14 August 2006] The Chess Mind - chess BLOG of Dennis Monokroussos

Dennis Monokroussos has created an interesting BLOG which he appears to update frequently. The archives are worth investigating as well. According to his opening comments, "This is a blog for chess fans by a chess fan, one who loves the beauty of the game and wants to share it with those who are like-minded. Yet the chess mind is not only a chess mind, and other topics, such as philosophy, may appear from time to time." He is well known for his programs on the ChessBase playchess site.

[8 August 2006] Susan Polgar Chess Blog

GM Susan Polgar has created a very interesting web log (blog) which she appears to update frequently. She provides chess news, commentary, chess problems, and lots of photos. Besides the interesting content, she provides great entertainment. I strongly recommend a visit to this unique site.

[4 August 2006] Alexander Morozevich Official Site

GM Alexander Morozevich. This neat site offers news about Morozevich's latest triumphs, provides a database of games in PGN (and a link to the ChessBase collection of his game with on-screen replay), photos, an analysis of his ratings, and some interesting interviews. If you're a Morozevich fan you'll want to visit this site. In English and Russian.

It appears to me (a non-Russian reader) that there may be more content in the Russian section, so you may want to scan through the Russian part to see what you can pick out. This site is certainly worth a visit.

[18 July 2006] Victor Viorel Bologan

GM Victor Viorel Bologan. This nice-looking site has many features. A chess biography of Bologan, a listing of his tournament results, a fully annotated Game of the Month in DOC format (November 2005 is the most recent entry), an ACP Tour standings (a bit dated, it is for 2005), a links page (only three links shown), a small collection of photos (latest event 2005), and a few game collections in PGN format. While most of the pages seem to not have been updated recently, the home page is right up to date with news of quite recent events. If you are a fan of GM Bologan you'll definitely enjoy this site. A word about the Game of the Month feature. If you don't have the CA fonts already installed you'll need to do so. The main Game of the Month page has links to download the two fonts you'll need. Unfortunately, the games are in a simple word processor format, so it's rather like reading the games in a printed magazine. You may want to print out the games to view them.

[18 July 2006] Alexander Onischuk

The home page of 2006 USA Champion GM Alexander Onischuk. It looks quite professional but doesn't have much content yet ... obvious it is just getting started. Still, there are some nice portraits of some of his friends and the start of a biography. Also available in Russian.

[30 May 2006] ChessVista

Quoting from the introduction page, "This site is not just another chess news website. The primary goal is to provide the international chess community with high quality chess photos from international events. On the home page there will be visual reports on what is new in the world of chess. In the photo album there will be chess photo collections with tournament shots and with thematic features, all with short captions."

Congratulations to chess photographer Frits Agterdenbos of The Netherlands on this great new and highly visual web site. It's a pleasure to see such high quality chess photos. Hopefully, he can continue publishing material at the high level of these first efforts. He has started with daily reports from the Chess Olympiad - Torino 2006 with some superb photos of the competitors.

[28 April 2006] 13^th CC World Champion Mikhail Umansky

13^th CC World Champion GM Mikhail Umansky has announced the launch of his personal web site with biographical information, results, photos and games. He plans to add more annotated games in the future. It is available in English, German and Russian.

[1 March 2006] 2006 US Chess Championship

The USA OTB Chess Championship will be played in San Diego, California. 64 men and women who have qualified for the championship will be divided into two groups which will play a 9-round Swiss system tournament. The top man and woman in each group will advance to the final to determine the men's champion and women's champion. Strangely, after playing standard time limits to qualify to the final match, the championship finals will be determined by a pair of rapid games. Each of the two groups will have 25 men and 9 women.

[8 January 2006] Tag Team Match

A unique tagteam match is now taking place with the game displayed with a couple moves delay.

Playing White: 7th USA Champion Dave Taylor and IM Chris Sergel (2512)

Playing Black: SIM Jason Bokar (2571) and GM Peter Coleman (2597)

The basic rules, as supplied by Dave Taylor:

No consultation between players.
Each move made independently and partner does not know what move you are going to make. Only consultation would be just to agree to offer a draw or resign.
Time limit: 10/60. But game is expected to be fairly rapid.
Dave Taylor played first move, then Peter Coleman, then Chris Sergel, then Jason Bokar.
Move delay is only so posters on TCCMB can chat about the game without effecting the outcome.
A strictly "for fun" match and all participants have agreed on everything.
If one player takes a vacation/time out--for one time--his partner can make a move--or the partnership can just take the time off their accumulated time.

[1 December 2005] The Right Move

This is the campaign web site for the 2006 FIDE Presidential election to take place in May 2006. Bessel Kok (representative of the Dutch Chess Federation) and Ali Nihat Yazici (President of the Turkish Chess Federation) are running for President and Deputy President, respectively. This web site has their biographies and some short descriptions of why they are running for these offices. This appears to be the most serious challenge to the presidency of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov (President of Kalmykia) since he captured the office ten years ago. My personal intention is to fully support this campaign to make FIDE a modern and effective chess organization. I want to see an end to the dismal record of FIDE over the last decade in its dealings with the top players and with sponsors. It's time to get the World Championship and its candidate events back into good order.
J. Franklin Campbell, webmaster and ICCF International Arbiter

[27 November 2005] FIDE World Chess Cup 2005

This site is devoted to the FIDE World Chess Cup, with the first round starting today (27.11.2005). You'll find a complete list of the 128 players participating and the pairings for each round. Of course it has a picture of FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov right at the top (all praise to his Excellency!). Click on the "Results" link at the top to see the results of the individual matches. For each game there is also a "View" link to view the game using a Java replay application (I couldn't get it to work for all games). If the Java replay doesn't work for you, you can still download the PGN file from the Java page using the "click here to download this game" link.

[2 October 2005] Ponomariov.com

A very nice looking site devoted to GM Ruslan Ponomariov. It is available in both English and Russian, so if you see the Russian version just look for the "English" link near the top left. It has the features you would expect: photos, collection of his interviews, collection of games, biography, list of recent accomplishments. It also has an unusual feature for submitting questions directly to the GM.

[24-September 2005] WCC San Luis 2005

This is the official site of the 2005 FIDE World Chess Championship tournament in Potrero de los Funes, San Luis (Argentina). The participating players in the double round robin event are: Rustam Kasimdzhanov, Michael Adams, Peter Leko, Vishy Anand, Veselin Topalov, Alexander Morozevich, Peter Svidler, and Judit Polgar. The first round is on Wednesday, 28 September 2005. The time limit: 40 moves in 2 hours, followed by 20 moves in one hour, followed by 15 minutes plus 30 seconds for all remaining moves. Rest days October 2, 7, 12. The site is in both Spanish and English.

[12 May 2005] Ward Farnsworth's Predator at the Chessboard

The site (subtitled "A Field Guide to Chess Tactics") was created by Professor Ward Farnsworth to offer instruction in chess tactics. He provides examples of various tactical motifs. The site appears to be well designed and thorough in its treatment of chess tactics. Excellent work by Ward Farnsworth!

[1 May 2005] M-TEL Masters Super Tournament

As part of the "Ten Years of Mobiltel" Anniversary, Mobiltel and Kaissa Chess Management are organizing an international Super chess tournament May 11th - 22nd, 2005 in Sofia, Bulgaria. It will be a classical time limit two round all-play-all (double round robin) event with the following participants: Viswanathan Anand (India), Veselin Topalov (Bulgaria), Vladimir Kramnik (Russia), Ruslan Ponomariov (Ukraine), Michael Adams (England) and Judit Polgar (Hungary). Their news section proclaims, "Bobby Fisher is expected to honour the Tournament as a special guest." It appears they sent an invitation for Fischer to attend. This demonstrates their great optimism and enthusiasm. It looks like a grand tournament well worth following. The web site is still under construction, but they promise live coverage.

[24 April 2005] Chessville

Congratulations to Chessville on reaching their 150th issue! In honor of the occasion they have introduced their new logo (shown here). A chess enthusiast cannot go wrong purchasing a subscription to the daily Chess Today and registering for a free (!) weekly issue of Chessville. Each Sunday I welcome the latest edition of Chessville into my email inbox. It contains articles, puzzles, annotated games, book reviews and (my favorite part) a review of new items on the net at other web sites. You never know quite what you'll find in Chessville, but you can be sure it will be informative and entertaining. I got the first issue and it's hard to believe three years have passed since then. The dedication of the Chessville people to quality and their obvious enthusiasm for chess and chess journalism has led to a continual improvement to this outstanding publication. I would like to thank David Surratt for creating Chessville and for making this great publication available to all chess enthusiasts. Thanks to the entire Chessville team: David Surratt (Publisher & Newsletter Editor) Jens Madsen (Editor), Pablo Sierra (News Editor) and Kevin Fonseca (Forum Host).

[15 April 2005] Sigeman & Co Chess Tournament 2005

This 9-round event is being held April 15 - 24, 2005 (one rest day on April 20). The first five rounds will be played at the classical Hipp Theater in the center of Malmo, and the tournament will be concluded with four rounds in Copenhagen. The games start at 8:00 am ET and are covered live by this official site and by the Internet Chess Club. The participants are GM Hikaru Nakamura (USA), GM Jan Timman (Holland), GM Krishnan Sasikiran (India), GM Curt Hansen (Denmark), GM Jonny Hector (Sweden), GM Tiger Hillarp-Persson (Sweden), IM Emil Hermansson (Sweden), GM Viorel Iordachescu (Moldova), GM Sune Berg Hansen (Denmark), IM Davor Palo (Denmark). There are pictures and bio's of the participants, results and games of previous years' events, Pairings, and even maps of the cities showing the locations of the tournament.

[11 April 2005] Dennis M's Chess Site

Dennis Monokroussos is a USCF rated master. This web site is his chess BLOG, and it looks well done to me. Currently it has some interesting analysis of a R&P vs. B ending. You may know of Dennis through his ChessBase on-line lectures (he provides links to his archive of lectures here). He is talking about moving his blog to another service, so watch for a change of URL in the future.

[5 March 2005] United States Chess League

Greg Shahade is organizing a chess league to allow the major cities in the USA to compete on-line. So far three cities are signed up: New York City, Philadelphia and San Francisco. League play will begin in the Fall of 2005. 8-player teams will compete on Wednesday evenings using the Internet Chess Club to broadcast the games on-line. I suggest following the developments by checking out the web site from time to time. It sounds like a great concept.

[26 February 2005] ajedrez en Linares

This is the official web site for the Linares Super-GM tournament held in Linares in Spain. The dates of the current event are 23-Feb-2005 through 10-Mar-2005 (rest days on March 1 and March 7). Seven players are participating in this double round robin event: Garry Kasparov, VIswanathan Anand, Peter Leko, Rustam Kasimdzhanov, Michael Adams, Veselin Vopalov and Francisco Vallejo Pons. For each round the site provides the games in replay format (Visor de partidas), downloads of games in PGN format (Partidas PGN) and photos of the players at the board at the beginning of the games (Fotos). I don't see a live coverage facility, but there may be one there.

[18 February 2005] Stuyvesant Town Chess Club

This is an interesting little chess site of a USCF affiliate chess club. It's worth poking around a bit on the site. My favorite page is the Chess Maxims page where you can read some wonderful chess quotes.

[8 February 2005] The Baysholiss Collection

This web site is the work of Lawrence Totaro of Las Vegas, Nevada (USA). Here he presents signed score sheets, photos and other chess memorabilia and material of historical interest. Anyone interested in the history of chess should find material of interest at this web site.

[5-January-2005] Corus Chess Tournament

The annual Corus chess tournaments in the Netherlands are always among the few top events every year. The 2005 edition will be held 14-30 January 2005 in Wijk aan Zee and have the following players in the top Grandmaster A section: Viswanathan Anand, Veselin Topalov, Vladimir Kramnik, Peter Leko, Alexander Morozevich, Michael Adams, Peter Svidler, Judit Polgar, Alexander Grischuk, Ruslan Ponomariov, Ivan Sokolov, Loek van Wely, Nigel Short, Lazaro Bruzon. The Grandmaster B section also looks interesting: Predrag Nikolic, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Alexander Onischuk, Peter Heine Nielsen, Sergey Karjakin, Ivan Cheparinov, Magnus Carlsen, Friso Nijboer, Daniel Stellwagen, Sipke Ernst, Alejandro Ramirez, Antoaneta Stefanova, Alexandra Kosteniuk, Jan Smeets. There will probably be live coverage at this site. I'll probably follow it on the Internet Chess Club and listen to coverage on Chess.FM, if they cover it.

[24-November-2004] 2005 USA Championships (OTB)

This is the official web site for the 2005 USA Chess Championships (Over the Board, both men and women). I wondered what they would do ... the USCF staged a special 2004 Women's chess championship earlier in the year to allow them to replace the 2003 women's champion on the Olympiad team (the team automatically included the women's champion ... since the 2003 champion wasn't acceptable they ran another championship to replace her). The solution ... call both the men's and women's the 2005 championship. It actually makes some sense anyway, since the champion's reign will be almost entirely in the year 2005. 64 or the top players, some by rating, others given entry by earning places through various competitions) will play a 9-round Swiss with the winner declared men's champion and the top-scoring woman the women's champion. Ties will be broken by playoffs. The games will start at 1:00pm PST, except for Thanksgiving day Nov. 25, which will start at noon. There will be two free days without play Nov. 27 and Dec. 1. There are news, press releases, live coverage and a chess blog updated daily.

[23-November-2004] Marf's Russian Chess Translations

There is some great stuff on the web in the Russian language. To quote the intro to this site, "Here you will find great annotations to recent high-profile events in the chess world, formerly available ONLY in Russian, translated by James Marfia (USCF rated chess Master and translator of Bronstein's Zurich 1953)." To start with he has translated the material on the 2004 Russian Championship Superfinal on the http://www.chesspro.ru web site. This is great stuff! Thanks to Chess Today for bringing this site to my attention. Here's hoping that Marf will be able to continue posting his high quality translations.

[21-November-2004] The Bobby Fischer Unofficial Home Page

Whether you love former world champion Robert J. Fischer or hate him, it's impossible to ignore him. This web site contains much of interest about Fischer, including 800 games you can play via a Java aplet, over 800 games in a downloadable database, biographies of Fischer and other world champions, photos, articles published about Fischer, information about Fischer Random Chess (Chess960) and a collection of Fischer links. Congratulations to Chuck Ayoub on his excellent and very interesting web site!

[24-October-2004] Anjelina Belakovskaia Home Page

Here's a nice site featuring 3-time USA champion WGM Anjelina Belakovskaia. It has a professional appearance and presents her primary interests: chess, educational, professional, photos. The photos are NOT the cheesecake type photos we are seeing more and more ("chess babes") but are of her travels around the USA and the world (photos aren't high quality, though). There is a small selection of her games with annotations, but there are no java replay games. The site is worth a look, though, and will give you a flavor of the life and career of a talented woman chess player.

[30-August-2004] Vladimir Kramnik - World Chess Champion

Just in time for his world championship match against Peter Leko this new web site has appeared. It has a biography of the current world champion Vladimir Kramnik, some photographs, an interview, three games set up for reply, and a database of over 1,500 games for download. There is also a short set of links. The web site isn't very impressive yet, but hopefully it will be expanded as time goes on. It also has a broken link to a non-existant web site for the upcoming World Championship Match. Hopefully this is only a temporary problem. With the championship match with Leko scheduled for 15-Sept-2004 to 18-Oct-2004 perhaps we can expect some additional material on the site soon. The appears to be a professionally designed web site which might become quite interesting very soon. It is already interesting to read the comments by readers on the Message Board (see the bottom of the main page for links).

[20-June-2004] ICCF Amici On-line Magazine

For some time the ICCF on-line magazine has been rumored to be in the works. Now it is a reality. Congratulations to ICCF for launching this on-line "ezine" to inform ICCF players and organizers. Time will tell exactly what function this magazine will perform, but I have high hopes that this new publication will provide the kind of interesting material missing from the ICCF web site. The first issue contains a lengthy and quite interesting President's Column by Josef Mrkvicka (CZE) and several interesting and entertaining articles by Alex Dunne (USA), Eugen Demian (CAN), Iain Macintosh (SCO), Eric Ruch (FRA), M. Samraoui (ALG), Tansel Turgut (TUR) and Marius Ceteras (ROM), for a truly international group of journalists. Congratulations to Editor Alex Dunne (USA) and Webmaster GM Raymond Boger (NOR) on their accomplishment getting this off the ground and for delivering a high quality first issue.

[18-June-2004] ChessChamps.com

Another new Garry Kasparov site! This web site serves the purpose of publicizing Kasparov's new book series 'My Great Predesessors', but Kasparov claims a more comprehensive goal:

"For some years now I have been working on 'My Great Predecessors', the series of books where I outline my opinion on the great chess players and what they have contributed to the game. This website is in part to support and promote that work but I hope for something more.

"One of my dreams is that there should be a bridge between mainstream culture and chess culture, or if you like that the ICC crowd merges with the Yahoo or MSN crowd. I hope my work in general, the books and this website will all be part of that bridge. While this site may offer something for the serious chess player, it is not aimed at them. I want it to reach the mainstream public."

The webmaster is the respected and well-known chess personality Jon Levitt. There are several sections to the site:

Downloads: A curious name, but this section contains a lot of interesting material, including a gallery of photos of past great chess players, various reviews of the books, some games, articles, excerpts from the first to volumes and some biographical information on Kasparov and the books' co-author Dmitry Germanovich Plisetsky.
Feedback: This contains a discussion forum. an analysis forum and "Garry's Diary", some comments from Kasparov which should prove interesting.
Connections: Here you can read a welcome message from Karparov and information about the books and it's publishers.

The site appears to be pretty new, so the content is modest so far, but it will probably grow with time. I can recommend a visit to this site and suggest keeping an eye on it as it expands.

[4-June-2004] Correspondence Chess League of Australia (CCLA)

Congratulations to the Correspondence Chess League of Australian (CCLA), their President Tim Runting and Webmaster Clive Murden on their great new web site. Though it is primarily aimed at Australian players it should prove interesting to others as well. There is an International News section and pages are planned for puzzles and "live" games. Every national federation would love to have a web site of this quality.

[10-May-2004] Szachy Korespondencyjne - Correspondence Chess

This is the web site of Maciej Tritt (POL). He has started showing some of his games with a 3-move delay starting at move 10, to following the new ICCF guidelines. So far he has games from two events: Poland - Hong Kong team match and ICCF section ICCF/EM/MN/076. Nicely done.

[2-May-2004] Welcome to My World of Chess!! (IM Wolfram Sch�n)

IM Wolfram Schön (GER) has created a nice little web site with an annotated game, crosstables, his finished games from the ICCF WC17 Candidates (3/4-Finals) and "live" coverage of his games in the ICCF WC18 Final (World Championship Final). He's promised some interesting stories from his competition, and I have no doubt he'll add more excellent content. To my knowledge, he is the first to add "live" coverage of on-going correspondence chess games under the new ICCF Code of Conduct regulation.

[29-February-2004] Chess Review Online Archive

The US Chess Federation (USCF) has initiated a new weekly on-line newsletter to keep people updated on the activities of USCF. Members can sign up for email notification. This web page is an archive of all the issues published, four so far. Just click on the links to read the newsletters on web pages. There's not much cc news, naturally, but USA chess players will find this newsletter worthwhile, in my opinion.

[28-February-2004] ICCF Europa

The web site for the ICCF European Zone has just launched. It includes the ICCF Photo Album mentioned below, but it also lists all the Zone officials, gives zonal news, has a host of crosstables for zonal tournaments and has more. With the enthusiastic group in charge of the zone this web site is sure to add more interesting features in the future. Congratulations to webmasters Giorgio Ruggeri Laderchi & Maurizio Sampieri on the creation and launching of this ambitious and excellent web site!

[26-February-2004] ICCF Correspondence Chess Photo Album

These pages contain a massive collection of photos and thumbnail biographies of ICCF personalities. Labeled as by Maurizio Sampieri with the collaboration of Gian-Maria Tani and Marco Caressa, this team is to be congratulated on putting together such a comprehensive collection of information. These pages, which appear to be part of a new (under construction) European Zone web site ICCF-Europa, give the impression of being a contribution by the Italian ASIGC Italian national federation. I found many photos in this collection that I've never seen before. Check it out and I'm sure you'll find many familiar names (and unfamiliar faces).

[16-February-2004] John Edwards Chess Blog

John Edward's Chess is Fun site is rightfully well known. Now he has a chess blog. There are many blogs covering all sorts of areas of interest. My wife frequently reads knitting blogs. John Edwards, the 10th USA cc champion (see 10th USCCC Report), is posting his daily thoughts on chess at his blog. He covers his chess activities, such as his OTB tournaments, chess book reviews, lots of games, and he's promised to post daily reports of the upcoming Linares super GM tournament. I haven't noticed any particular cc material yet, but his postings make for very interesting reading. I strongly suggest that you check it out.

[3-January-2004] Chess Odyssey

This site was created by the Portland, Oregon Chess Odyssey organization and is aimed primarily at children or people involved with teaching children (entirely OTB oriented). However, there is a lot here to appeal to any chess player. The "USCF/FIDE" page has brief descriptions plus links to many national federation web sites. The Attitudes page is thought-provoking. Throughout the site there is a lot of good advice for the young OTB competitor. I recommend checking the Chess News page. There is a large Chess Dictionary that might be of interest. As with some other things it is thought-provoking ... I kept thinking "I would have defined that differently" but trying to come up with my "better" definition wasn't so easy. There is an interesting article Chess in Education Research Summary. I have a feeling this interesting web site will continue to develop and grow. I think it is most encouraging to see a relatively new web site like this ... it says something good about our society. The site appears to be in transition from angelfire.com, so if the various links to specific pages above don't work, just go to the main site link and find the appropriate links on the site.

[2-January-2004] Corus Chess Tournament 2004

The annual Corus tournament in the Netherlands is one of the strongest OTB tournaments every year. There are actually several tournaments running simultaneously, but the Grandmaster-A event is the most prestigious one with many of the top Grandmasters in the world participating. This site gives a lot of information about the events, mostly in Dutch but with a some useful content in English (the features are clearly labeled with language used). This year the main event runs 9-25 January 2004 with the following players participating: Vladimir Kramnik (RUS), Viswanathan Anand (IND), Evgeny Bareev (RUS), Alexey Shirov (ESP), Michael Adams (ENG), Peter Svidler (RUS), Peter Leko (HUN), Alexander Morozevich (RUS), Ivan Sokolov (NED), Vladimiar Akopian (ARM), Viorel Bologan (MLD), Loek van Wely (NED), Zhang Zhong (CHN), Jan Timman (NED). Wow, what a line-up!

[1-December-2003] The Chess Drum

This is an excellent site that exudes enthusiasm for the Royal Game. Last year I recall in the 2002 CJA chess journalism competition that the webmaster for The Chess Drum Dr. Daaim Shabazz made a number of quality entries and won both 1st place and an honorable mention in the Best Tournament Report category (he also tied for second place for Chess Journalist of the Year behind GM Yasser Seirawan). The site appears to have maintained its quality content and is also very pleasing from an artistic viewpoint. Check out the articles in the section called The 65th Square. I very much enjoyed the latest article "My Trip to Nigeria" by IM Amon Simutowe. The focus is on African and African-American OTB chess players, but everyone will find this web site a delight.

[23-November-2003] King's Head Chess Club

A nice site presented by the London chess club King's Head. There are links and articles. This is a site that looks worth exploring. There are a number of annotated games throughout the site that can be played through on screen.

[17-November-2003] Correspondence Chess Absolute Championship Review

The United States Chess Federation (USCF) has been running their most prestigious championship event The USCF Absolute Championship for many years. They are now trying to create an archive of this event consisting of crosstables, player profiles and games (to be available via a replay page). This page shows their progress so far.

[5-October-2003] 4NCL - Four Nations Chess League

This is a nice little site dedicated to the premier team chess league in England. A lot of strong International players participate along with a lot of lesser stars from England. I particularly enjoyed their selection of photos and a view of a scoresheet by Korchnoi in the "Items of Interest" section. There are also game downloads, news and other features. It all makes me wish I could play in a league like this.

[28-September-2003] Chess Book Covers and Other Artwork

If you enjoy chess art, this page is worth a look. You probably won't spend more than a few minutes here, but I enjoyed checking out the graphics. I suggest just going to the first image and clicking the "Next" arrow at the bottom to step through the images. Thanks to Karsten Fyhn for bringing this site to my attention in a posting on TCCMB.

[21-September-2003] CC Tandem Chess

SIM-elect Jason Bokar is hosting a fascinating correspondence chess match at his site SIM-elect Jason Bokar's Chess World. Here you can follow live coverage of a match played by 2-man teams, where team members take turns making the move in a single game ... without consulting each other!. Quoting from the page: "Grayling Hill (2346) and Jason Bokar (2509) Ave. Rating = 2428 vs. Dave Taylor (2528) and Ken Reinhart (2458) Ave. Rating = 2493 Referee: Steve Ryan Rules: Alternating moves from each player on the team. No consultation on the opening and no consultation during the game. Time limit is 10/30." The page shows a ChessBase generated JavaScript replay page which allows you to examine the moves on a board. If the commentary to the moves continues to be as entertaining as the first few, then this will be an event your must not miss!

[10-September-2003] The Ukrainian Chess Federation

This is the new web site for the Ukrainian Chess Federation. This URL takes you to the English pages. So far it is quite limited in scope, but I'll be surprised if additional content isn't added in the near future. So far there doesn't seem to be any news on the cancelled Ponomariov vs. Kasparov match, but you can see a few nice pictures and read about some young talent. It's always fun to investigate the links at a new site. You'll find a short list here of sites mostly in Russian, but one site that could be useful is Welcome to chess.vrsac.com! which has some interesting OTB tournament coverage with a nice Java viewer. On some occasions I've spent considerable time following one link after another, snaking from one site to another. You can easily spend the whole evening doing this.

[8-September-2003] Chess Players United

A new players organization is being formed for professional OTB chess players. They have a catchy acronym CPU and have lauched a decent web site. I think it will be interesting to watch their growth and am hopeful of additional content in the future. Perhaps an organization created by middle players instead of those at the top will have a better chance to succeed. It's worth a look at this web site if you follow the news of the top OTB players, as I do. The little flash display has no information content but is amusing. There is a forum where you can sign up and post your own suggestions.

[24-August-2003] Jos� Ra�l Capablanca

For fans of Capablanca, or people with some interest in his career, this site offers a summary of his career along with some stories about this great world champion. Many of his games are shown using ChessBase generated JavaScript game replay pages. You can find his famous loss to Richard Reti at the 1924 New York International tournament, ending his huge streak without a loss (his ten wins are also given). Losses were extremely rare for this man sometimes referred to as a chess machine. The author of the page has given a large number of his decisive games for replay (draws are avoided). There are a few pictures and a useful collection of links to web pages related to Capablanca.

[10-August-2003] Chess Classic Mainz

The 2nd Mainz Chess Classic event is coming up August 13-17, 2003. You can find out about CCM2 here, as well as read about Chess960 (also called Fischer Random Chess). The main events are two GM matches, a regular 8-game rapid match between Viswanathan Anand and Judit Polgar and a chess960 "World Championship" match between Peter Svidler and Peter Leko. Leko beat Michael Adams last year in the feature chess960 match while Svidler won last year's open tournament to qualify. This year there will be another open tournament to determine the challenger for next year's match against the winner of the Svidler-Leko match. This site is available in English, German and French.

[3-August-2003] Chess History Center

An interesting little site by chess historian Richard Forster, former Late Knight columnist at Chess Cafe. The site uses frames so I won't give specific links, but it's worthwhile poking around the various pages. "The Critical Eye" has some critical comments about Karparov's latest book On My Great Predecessors, Part 1 and Weltmeister Robert James Fischer, a ChessBase CD-ROM by Robert H�bner. The "Puzzles and Mysteries" page makes for interesting reading. I just suggest checking out every page ... it's a small site but potentially has something to interest you.

[2-August-2003] ChessWatch

I've appreciated this "site" before. Once it was part of the Club Kasparov web site; now it has found a home at the Internet Chess Club site. Mr. Gene Venable collects interesting web page URLs from the Internet and posts them here, allowing you to quickly find some of the best chess postings currently available. If you feel like browsing the web a bit for chess news and information, this is a good place to start. Congratulations to Mr. Venable for finding such a valuable way to serve the chess community.

[11-July-2003] INTERNATIONAL MASTER BEN FINEGOLD

Many outstanding chess players have their own personal web sites. If you are a fan of a particular player this can be a real boon, providing interesting photographs, documenting the player's record and biographical information and providing interesting personal observations and games. IM Ben Finegold of Ann Arbor, Michigan (USA) isn't as well known as many GM's, but he is an excellent player who routinely defeats leading grandmasters. This site's real attraction is the many games available for replay. Here you can see a leading master play both famous GM's and more ordinary opponents in local tournaments. Too bad none of the games are annotated.

[24-June-2003] chessgames.com

This looks like a very useful site with many valuable features. There is a serchable library of 256,000 chess games, Game of the Day, Player of the Day, Opening of the Day, a list of recent tournaments with complete lists of the games played, and some great player profiles with links to games. I checked out a sample search to view "Alekhine plays the Alekhine" and found 36 games. The game lists are rather neat. Each line in the list shows players, result, # moves, year played, event and opening (both ECO code and the name). Click on the players link and you get a java replay of the game. Click on the ECO code and you get a quick rundown of the opening with name, main practitioners, popularity by decades, winning/drawing percentages and number of games in their database. If you do a search for games by a specific player from a dropdown list, you get a nice profile page of that player, sometimes with a photo. I couldn't find any cc specialists in the list, such as our cc world champions. It's a cool site with more features not mentioned here.

[4-June-2003] The Scotsman (John B. Henderson chess columns)

To quote from the self-description of this site: "We at Rochade Kuppenheim were happy to present JOHN B. HENDERSON and his near-daily column from "The Scotsman" with online games, game download and archives. Besides that John writes regularly, for example for The Week in Chess (TWIC). He is present at all big chess events and reports extensively with often humorous articles. " Many of the columns will reflect local Scotish activities, but you'll find a lot of international stuff here. Recommended!

[3-June-2003] Ksenya Rybenko home page

Here's another fashion web site of a Russian female chess player, only I like the selection of photos better than Kosteniuk's. The ChessBase site refers to their "babe watch" coming up with this site. There's little chess on this site but lots of photos. The navigation is poor, making it time consuming and difficult to find the photos you may want to look at. I suggest going to the ChessBase description, which you may find easier than viewing the site itself.

[15-May-2003] Chess Weekly

According to Alexander Baburin's Chess Today newsletter, this new web site was created by the Russian weekly magazine Chess Weekly and the software company Convekta Ltd. (publishers of the chess database program Chess Assistant) to be an English-language weekly news site, publishing a new issue each Thursday. They are up to issue #8 now, with links to their previous seven issues. One of my favorite features is the Blunder of the Week, showing how even the top players can make those really stupid moves. They have reports on current events with commented games using java replay generated by Chess Assistant 7.1. I was surprised to see the following game moves, though.

I've seen this sort of thing before in ChessBase when I didn't have a required chess font installed. I checked and found a link along the top of the site labeled "Chess Fonts". After downloading the font zip file and unzipping the two true type fonts into Windows/Fonts I got the following display.

It would have been helpful it instructions had been provided. The java player seemed to function well, showing both main line moves and variations.

This site is modest, with very short reports of events, a few photos, a few games and slightly stilted English. I recommend checking it out, though. It makes for a concise weekly report of events and may, with time, grow a bit. If nothing else, check those blunders of the week!

[21-April-2003] GM Peter Svidler Unofficial Page

This is a fan page for GM Peter Svidler. It gives a brief biography, a list of his best results, an extensive set of photos of Svidler (many photos contain other famous chess players), and a game or two. It was obviously very recently updated. I would be surprised if the game collection of java replay games didn't expand quite soon. The only things I don't like are those nasty popup advertisements and the extensive use of underlining (I kept trying to click on the text, thinking they were links). Svidler fans will appreciate this site.

[11-April-2003] Patzer's � Point

Chess enthusiast Craig Sadler has set up this page on the Ottawa Chess Club web site. Here he has gathered together pictures, bio's and games of the correspondence chess world champions from the first (Cecil Purdy of Australia) through the 13th (Grigorij Sanakoev of Russia). Given that there have been two additional champions crowned I would guess this page hasn't be updated for a while, but it's worth a look now (before it may disappear!). This shows what a chess enthusiast can put together with a little energy and creativity. Perhaps you may be inspired to create your own web page focusing on your particular interest. No need to create an entire site ... see what this individual has done with a single page.

[4-April-2003] Jon Edwards' Book Reviews

10th USA cc Champion IM Jon Edwards is well known for his delightful and useful web site Chess is Fun. Now he has created a companion site providing book reviews and other useful information for those just learning chess. If you are a new student of the game or provide instruction to others then you may find this site most useful. The two sites are linked together to act as a single web site. The link Book Reviews and Great Game Archive goes from the Chess is Fun site to the book reviews and Free Chess instruction goes back to the original Chess is Fun site.

[10-March-2003] The World Chess Championship

Here is a worthy attempt to gather comprehensive information about all the OTB world championship competitions, including challengers' events. Congratulations to Mark Weeks who has presented this labor of love. He covers all the matches from Labourdonnais - McDonnell up through the current attempt to unify the championship with results and games for download.

[11-February-2003] Hull Chess Club (UK) Online

Many chess clubs have established web sites, and it can be most interesting to explore them. The Hull Chess Club in Yorkshire, England has a very nice site. They provide a download of French Winawer games, some interesting chess challenges and some brief book reviews, in addition to information of interest to local prospective members. I was delighted to find Team CC.COM on their links page. They must be a very enlightened group of chess enthusiasts!

[10-February-2003] Ponomariov-FIDE Crisis: materials and messages

The upcoming matches meant to create a single unified world champion of OTB chess is in trouble. The official FIDE World Champion GM Ruslan Ponomariov has demanded that his match with GM Garry Kasparov be played at the FIDE time limit used in the last FIDE Championship Knockout event, where he obtained his title, and he has also insisted on draw odds in the match (GM Vladimir Kramnik is getting draw odds in his match with GM Peter Leko). You can read a lot of material on this dispute at this page, part of the Ukrainian Chess Online web site, edited by GM Mikhail Golubev.

[8-February-2003] WorldChessRating.Com

This site is based in Moscow and appears to be a first rate chess news site. Perhaps it will be a good replacement for the defunct KasparovChess site. If you enjoy following the top OTB events this site should serve you well. [March 2003: Oh, oh, financial problems have struck this site and they've stopped updating it].

[4-February-2003] ChessNinja

This is the personal web site of chess journalist Michael Greengard, widely known as Mig. He has written a popular column for years titled ,"Mig on Chess". This column has been carried on a variety of popular web sites from TWIC and KasparovChess to its current home at ChessBase. If you enjoy his style you'll certainly want to visit this entertaining personal site. I recommend you check out his Daily Dirt page and look for any special features or interviews listed, such as his Interview with David Levy. I won't comment on his newsletters which provide training for a fee, since I have no interest or experience in this area. However, there are bound to be a few items of interest for you here. He's started archiving his old Mig on Chess columns, which is good news for us fans.

[25-January-2003] ChessBase On-line Database

If you're like me, you have a large chess database sitting on your hard drive, but it doesn't contain games from the last several years. It's hard to keep databases current. The excellent ChessBase web site offers this database of "2.7 million up-to-date games" (they just updated it) which can be searched on-line using their clever JavaScript code. You can move the pieces on the diagram using your mouse, select a year span and rating spans for the players and then click "Search". After a little delay you'll be given a list of games. Click on one and you can go through the game using their replay function. Click on "View as PGN" and a window pops up with a PGN version which you can copy & paste into your database program. Of course, it's not as easy to use as your resident database search facility, but you do get a very up-to-date collection of games.

Be patient loading the page, though. It takes a little time to load all that JavaScript code. I was pleasantly surprised at the search speed, though. Also, when you enter an opening position for searching, click on the piece you want to move and drag it to the destination square. You won't see the piece moving till you release your mouse button.

[18-January-2003] Kalli's Chess Tournament Calendar

If you follow OTB events as well as cc you may find this German site of interest. It has a lengthy list of OTB events. If you read German you may find some of the other pages of interest as well.

[6-January-2003] America's Foundation For Chess

This is the Seattle group that "saved" the USA Championship a few years ago. This year they are once again organizing the championship with expanded player list and more prize money. The USA Championship starts on January 9 and this site promises live coverage of the games. I'll be checking it out and hoping for the best. Games begin at 1:30pm Eastern Time.

For more "Sites of Note" go to the Sites of Note Archive

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