2010 World Chess Championship

The 2010 World Chess Championship is currently being played out. The match is being played from April 24 to May 13, 2010 in Sofia, Bulgaria. It is a traditional one-on-one challenger vs champion match. The combatants are Challenger Veselin Topalov (2805, Bulgaria) and World Champion Viswanathan Anand (2787, India).

The World Championship is a twelve-game match, with a prize fund of 2 million euros.



(Click the image for enlargement.)

Interesting note: the Norwegian prodigy Magnus Carlsen (2813) very recently took up the FIDE No.1 World Ranking, displacing Topalov who had been No.1 for a while.

New Strategy Games Section

I have created a very primitive Strategy Games Section on the homepage. The purpose of the section is to discuss other strategy games similar to chess. Currenly, poker and the Rubik's Cube are considered. Although I may add another game such as checkers or shogi, I don't have any real plans to expand it.

Chess Engines Race!

I will need to update my Free Chess Programs article soon, as the chess engines section is constantly changing all the time.

As far as I know, the best CEGT-rated chess engine at the moment is Stockfish 1.6.3. On a 32-bit operating system and with 2 CPUs, the latest version of Stockfish is rated 3043, a whole 82 points above the free version of Rybka (version 2.2n2) on the same hardware.

The IppoLit family of free chess engines is still not rated by the CEGT Computer Rating List, but word around is that they are even stronger than Deep Rybka 3 (which is stronger than Stockfish). RobboLito, mentioned in my Free Chess Programs article, has now been superceded. RobboLito was surpassed by IvanHoe, which has now been superceded by the even stronger FireBird.

The creators of FireBird state that their goal was to "combine all the best ideas, features, and strengths from the IppoLit family of releases... IppoLit, RobboLito, Igorrit, and IvanHoe". Note that, unlike RobboLito, FireBird is now fully usable in an UCI interface such as Fritz and it now supports multiple processors.

FireBird has an estimated Elo rating of 3400, and even though computer testers haven't tested this engine yet, it is unofficially the strongest free chess engine available.

Nevertheless, I still recommend analysing with Rybka 2.2n2. Even though it has a miniscule rating of 2961, I believe it creates the most accurate assessments of positions. Rybka is known for its modest assessments of positions, making it very handy to use in analysis.

Whilst FireBird and Stockfish may play stronger moves purely on a numeric basis, they do not necessarily evaluate the position correctly. For example, they may assess a position as winning for White when in fact the correct assessment is a slight advantage for White. For this reason, they are less useful for human-assisted analysis.

However, the best way forward, if you have super-powerful hardware, is to run Rybka as the main engine and have FireBird kibitzing in the background.

Note that for people with a single processor and 32-bit operating system, there is a very obscure way to obtain a Rybka 2.3.2a (which is a tiny bit stronger than 2.2n2), detailed in my Rybka article.

How to Access CBH, CBV and PGN Files

A brief guide for beginners on how to access chess game formats such as CBH, CBV and PGN.

Click here to see the full article "How to Access CBH, CBV and PGN Files".

Smyslov passes away at age 89

7th World Champion Vassily Smyslov passed away peacefully on Saturday, March 27, 2010 at the age of 89.

Smyslov was known for his positional chess and superb endgame knowledge. A lesser known fact is that he was also a great combinational player, evident in a number of spectacular tactical shots thoughout his career.

Interesting fact: Apart from playing excellent chess, Smyslov sometimes gave musical performances during chess tournaments, often accompanied by fellow GM and concert pianist Mark Taimanov. In fact, he only decided upon a career in chess after when he failed an audition for the Bolshoi Theatre in 1950.

Click here to see ChessBase's tribute article to Smyslov.

Brief History of Chess

I compiled information from Encyclopædia Britannica and World Book to create a timeline on the origins of chess and other interesting historical data.

Click here to see the article "Brief History of Chess".

Best Chess Interfaces and GUIs

Chess engines are normally not standalone programs: they need an adequate interface in order to run them. Today, I'm going to run through a number of chess interfaces/GUIs (graphical user interfaces).

Nowadays, most leading interfaces support the Universal Chess Interface protocol, which is widely considered to produce the strongest engines in the world. Almost all of the following interfaces double as chess database/analysis software...

See the full article "Best Chess Interfaces and GUIs".