Web Watch 2 July 2003
Today I would like to continue my tour around different Web sites. Our first stop is Chess Café - one of the most popular chess portals. Over years Hanon Russell built an impressive site, with many top chess journalists and authors contributing to it. In his column 'An Arbiter's Notebook' Geurt Gijssen is talking about his experience during the recent St. Petersburg - Paris match, as well as answering numerous questions concerning the rules of chess. Mig Greengard recently started his ' ChessBase Café' column, where he explains how to get most of your Fritz and Chess Base programs. I am sure that many of our readers will find it useful. Chess Café has many more interesting columns - pay it a visit!
Grandmaster Mikhail Golubev is one of the most energetic personalities in the chess world - not only he plays in tournaments and in BL, writes books and contributes to Chess Today, but he also maintains a large and informative Ukrainian Chess Online website. In one of his recent postings (in Russian) Mikhail gives his view on the situation around FIDE and its Champion Ruslan Ponomariov. This posting is not surprising since Ukrainian Chess Online has a large section devoted to career and games of Ponomariov.
A couple of weeks ago the site published a letter (sorry, guys only in Russian!) from GM Evgeny Gleizerov, who talks about diminishing financial standards in professional chess (reduced appearance fees, stagnant prize money, etc) and the need for chess pros to unite in professional association. That association should then deal with chess organisers and make sure that its members obey the rules. I agree that such Union is much needed, but who is going to organise it? It will have to have certain budget, but I bet that players themselves will be against membership fees! Can FIDE's Players' Council do the job of uniting chess professionals? I doubt it - has anyone heard of any work done by that body? And for FIDE itself, this is what Gleizerov had to say: "A perilous threat to the tournament chess is the use of computers during the game. There have been only a handful of cases involving such cheating (though one was at the FIDE World Championship!), but as we all know, the 'progress' does not stand still... So, what does FIDE do in this situation? It introduces doping control! Coffee addicts may be fined up to $100,000 (this shows you how much FIDE knows about income of its players!), while those liking to consult a silicon friend during the game, do not risk anything!"
Now to chess sites run by amateurs players. There are hundreds of them, of course, but I know just a few. Susan Strahan (former GM Square Webmaster) runs the Tales of 1001 Knights, which, among other materials, has Fish Tales and Chess Chick's Guide To Girl Stuff columns. There are many games in HTML and Java on site, as well as articles and stories.
The current GM Square Webmaster - Arlen Walker - also has his personal website. It's called The Chessmill and it deals mainly with chess in Wisconsin. We often think that with the popularity of chess on the Internet and the rise of scholastic chess around the globe, chess tournaments are bigger now than ever before. In fact, this is no so, as Arlen quotes from the December 1949 issue of Chess Review:
“A junior chess tournament, sponsored by the Milwaukee Department of Municipal recreation and Adult Education in co-operation with the Milwaukee Journal, attracted a total of 2,995 boys and girls of all ages from less than nine up to 17. Of this number of starters, 785 qualified for the championship finals and 701 actually played. One hundred ten won chess sets, donated by the Milwaukee Journal.”
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