The Chess Gods arrive in town - my home town!

I was privileged to attend the 2011 Grand Slam chess tournament, the first leg of which was played in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo - my home town. That's a misnomer of course, São Paulo is actually the largest city in Brazil, with a city population of about 11 million and almost 20 million in its metropolitan region (Wiki)

The world's elite were playing, including all three 2800+ players. So I was able to see World Champion Viswanathan Anand, World Number One Magnus Carlsen, Levon Aronian, Hikaru Nakamura, Vasily Ivanchuk, and Francisco Vallejo Pons (Chessbase)

As well as wanting to see the superstars in person, I was also pretty desperate to play some OTB games as my chess these days is exclusively played online. So I enrolled for a couple of tournaments (21 min games) which were organised alongside the main event. I should have paid my entry fee in advance through official channels but the organisers waived the rules. They asked me to promise to take the entry invoice to a bank and pay later. In broken Portuguese I said "You can trust me - I'm English!". How we all laughed! They were great, even printing off some tourney player lists for me whilst still in the middle of organizing the main tournament.

Anyway, when I entered these tourneys, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. It turns out that they included IM's, even a couple of GMs! Not to worry. Who else did I play (and lose against)? Let's begin with Suzana Chang.

I was pleased with my effort against Suzanah because I somehow won a piece for a pawn. I had no idea who I was playing, still playing without fear. Retribution soon came. I still don't know how she managed to conjure up a double pin which seemed to come from nowhere. Oh well. Wish I had the game scores to show you but I knew that I had enough to cope with in playing OTB for the first time in years, without having to try and record all the moves of a 21 minute game as well. She was very gracious about it all and I very much enjoyed the game.

Later on her husband, Luismar Brito, and I had a hilarious 5 minute knockabout game, accompanied by lots of bantering and general hilarity. Great fun! Luismar is a FIDE Master, currently rated 2278 (click on his image below for more details).

As a consequence of playing in these tourneys, I am now in the same photo gallery as Anand and Carlsen on this website page! Possibly, through some form of osmosis, this will result in me acquiring new and terrifying chess superpowers? Um, maybe not.

Here I am in the black T-shirt, skillfully finding losing moves against Thauane Ferreira de Medeiros (FIDE rating 1805) - though she's out of camera shot in this photo. I had a strong attack against her but she defended brilliantly and, with seconds left on the clock, beat me.

Here is a photo where you can at least see her properly - playing against a gentlemen who you probably recognise! In fact, she was one of the last players to succomb to Kasparov's formidable powers in a simultaneous he gave in the "Teatro do Sesi", São Paulo against 20 youngsters on 1 September 2011.

So this obviously "connects" me to Gary Kasparov according to the theory of "six degrees of separation" ie the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, "a friend of a friend" statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer. Well, maybe!

Incidentally, if you are interested in "professional networking", you can link to me on LinkedIn. This "operates on the concept of how many steps you are away from a person you wish to communicate with. The site encourages you to pass messages to people in your network via the people in your 1st-degree connections list, who in turn pass it to their 1st-degree connections". Then you, too, will be connected, through me, to Kasparov :)

Amongst the many other friendly folk at the event who I had the privilege to meet to Paulo Cesar Costa (FIDE 2061) who is an active chess teacher and has captained the Presidente Prudente city teams with excellent results (image below, as well as in one of the above photos). I also met Jorge Roberto Gonçalves (FIDE 2042) - a gentleman and a haiku poet. Yes, before you ask, I lost them both!

My thanks go to Stephen Tavares Neto (chess journalist, trainer and international chess referee) for sending me some photos from his blog - it has many original photographs from the event in the form of a slide show, as well as a report in Portuguese.
 
YouTube footage is already starting to appear - here and here.

Latest info at Susan Polgar's site here.

Click on the image below for coverage at ChessVibes of the crazy third round in which "both the World Champion and the world's number one player lost. After outplaying his opponent, Magnus Carlsen first missed a win and then blundered a full piece and lost with Black to Francisco Vallejo".

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Big Brother is on my side

I just won a game of Blitz on the ICC site. Well, not exactly 'win' as in checkmate or resign. In fact I was awarded the win by "JudgeBot". It thought that my queen looked pretty strong against a bishop and a knight and that I would have had plenty of time on the clock to eventually deliver a fatal blow - if my opponent hadn't bailed out and disconnected. Here's how "JudgeBot" describes itself:

"JudgeBot is a computer program that monitors every game in which your opponent disconnects. If JudgeBot determines that you are clearly winning, it will award the win to you ... and the game will appear as a win in your (games) history. There is no need to request the win or search for days for your opponent to resume!  It's automatic without you doing anything."

"We understand that in most cases when you get disconnected, you try to reconnect and resume the game. We apologize if your game got adjudicated, but keep in mind that JudgeBot only gives you a loss if it decides you are clearly losing the position. If the position has hope, it will not give you a loss and you can resume the game."

It's a great idea, I think and seems to work very well. Of course this is not going to stop me from extrapolating the concept into George Orwell territory ... by asking if you have you heard about the new program that's being developed? It's an extension of the "JudgeBot" program and goes by the name of "ToadBot"

ToadBot - Press Release

Thanks to new advances in Artificial Intelligence programming, a new plugin has been developed which completely removes human error from the Royal game. "ToadBot" analyses all aspects of your games and employs a predicative binary algorithm to determine what should or would have happened under ideal conditions in a perfect world. Obviously we would really like to be working on software to make a 'perfect world' but this is suffering from budgetary issues. Oh, yes, political issues too. Oh, and also ...

Anyway, "ToadBot" is capable of analysing any and all issues surrounding your chess games, including data collected from electrodes attached to you, your opponent and next door's cat. It takes into account such issues as:

How badly you want to win

How badly your opponent wants a beer as opposed to playing another boring game against you

How hungry the cat is

Whether you're playing chess to avoid dealing with other, more important, things in your miserable, and unimportant, life

And so on and so forth.

Typically, "ToadBot" soon passes over your unforgiveable ignorance of any but the most basic of opening lines and understands that your 12 move is not the "brilliancy" that you fondly believe it to be - but was simply the result of a mouse slip. It "knows" you see?

However it is also realises that losing the game will shatter your already dangerously low self-esteem - with dire consequences. At this point it will simulate the various scenarios (euphemism for 'rows') with your wife resulting from you losing the game and makes a judgement based on menstrual cycles, meteorological forecasts for the state of Nevada and, well, everything really - including how much time you have left on the clock.

And the result of it's cogitations? Oh. Um - you lose. Again. Blame the cat.

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