Prelims of World Chess Correspondence Championship 2014 Begin

Chess Blog for Daily Chess News and Trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2014

Hello everyone,

ICCF is the International Correspondence Chess Federation. ICCF was founded in 1951 as a new appearance of the ICCA (International Correspondence Chess Association), which was founded in 1945, as successor of the IFSB (Internationaler Fernschachbund), founded in 1928.

2014 WCCC Preliminaries Sections
Monday, March 03, 2014: The 2014 WCCC Preliminaries Sections (WCCC 38 PR) have been started on ICCF web-server.

Official start-date: March 20, 2013
Category III (average rating of each Section: from 2314 to 2317)
15 Sections with 13 players each (i.e. 195 players)

TD: Sections 1-10: IA Neil Limbert (ENG); Sections 11-15: IA Adrián de Blois Figueredo (ESP)

Players from 44 different NFs - 2 or 3 players from Germany, 1 or 2 players from RUS, no more than 1 player from any other NF in each Section

2 GM; 29 SIM; 48 IM

The winner and the runners-up of each Section (i.e. 30 players) qualify to a WCCC Semifinal

Official website

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Imagine two years to finish a chess game!

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2012


Hi everyone,


There are all these interesting chess interviews that make you feel so happy about chess. Here's one such interview. Our question is - ever played a chess game that took two years to finish? Howzzat? Read on to find out!
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Noble pursuit

A grand master always stays ahead of the game in his strategy, writes LEE MATTHEWS.

A chess grand master can literally see the future. It's not crystal-ball gazing; no fortune-telling hokum. What a chess grand master sees, spread out in the mind's eye, is simultaneous visualisations of what's going to happen on the chess board if this piece moves here, that piece moves there, then another piece shifts somewhere else. It's a different logic chain for every move, every piece on the board.


New Zealand's correspondence chess grand master and across-the-board fide master Mark Noble, who recently moved to Feilding, says the skill for any chess player to learn is to foresee what's going to happen, regardless of what move is made. "It's complicated. At the beginning of every game, the opening move, white has 20 possible moves. Black then has 20 possible replies. So that's 20 times 20 possible combinations just in those first two moves.


"Second move and reply, it's up to 30 possibilities for each colour. Keep that up, and you're suddenly looking at a lot of zeroes, very quickly."


Many possible moves are quickly eliminated, but Noble works 10 or 12 moves in advance in his mind, knowing what will happen if any piece anywhere moves in any order. It's about recognising patterns, having a plan, and being able to rapidly change that plan if something goes against you.


He tries to set up what he calls his "pet lines" – game strategies where his moves drive the other player into a mistake, or into the trap he's setting.


"If you can make the game move along one of those lines, you know the strategy, you know all the tactics for it. You're playing to a logical conclusion. And if your opponent doesn't know what you're doing, they have to make the perfect move every time to evade the trap."


But chess is too complicated, with too many variables, to ensure these pet lines happen every move, every time. There's always potential for surprise, for being out-visualised and out-thought.


Noble's the first correspondence chess grand master in New Zealand history. He won the rank in 2010, after playing chess for 36 years. Murray Chandler was the first Kiwi over-the-board or face-to-face grand master, who won the rank in 1982, playing for England. Both got their start at the Pencarrow Chess Club in Wainuiomata, coached by Brian Foster, who ran Sunday afternoon junior classes.


"I'm 49, Murray's several years older than me. He was already New Zealand champion when I started playing ... he went to England and played over-the-board for England for 30 years, got his grand mastership there. New Zealand's really too small to have enough competition at the top level."


Noble started chess at intermediate school, and the game was useful therapy for what happened next. Aged 13, he was hit by a car and his left leg was severely damaged. He was in hospital for months, underwent a series of operations, and he actually won the Pencarrow club's C-grade competition from his hospital bed. It gave him a taste for correspondence chess – a good sport for a lad who loved lots of sports, but who walked with a limp. Chess also further honed his photographic memory; he can recall pretty much every game of chess he's ever played, move by move.


"It helps if I write the moves down in a chess book; the writing helps me remember it better. But I'm hopeless with names, I could meet you down the street next week and I'll look at you blankly, sorry."


He says computer technology and the internet have revolutionised correspondence chess.


"In the old days, it took years, I think 20 years was the limit for a game. If I was playing somebody in Russia, I'd post my move to him, and it would take six to eight weeks to get there. He'd think about it, post his reply back ... four months to make a move, three moves a year. The longest posted game I ever had was probably nine years ... very drawnout, and expensive in stamps."


Technology has speeded up the exchange of moves, taking out letter travel time. An internet correspondence game now allows 50 days to make 10 moves, which sounds a lot of time, but isn't.


"It takes about 10 hours of thinking, real thinking without distraction, to fully visualise a move. I can get a five-hour bracket between 8pm and 1am, so that's two nights to think through a move."


Even so, it can take two years to finish a game. He's currently playing 130 correspondence games at once. Fourteen of these games are in the current Chess World Cup.


"There's World Cup, and World Championships. I'm playing in the 15th World Cup now, and I've qualified for the 20th World Championships, they're playing the 19th ones now. Both correspondence."


Correspondence chess suits him better than over-the-board. He's a fide (or third-level) master in over-the-board, and he's working to improve that. The problem is the time required for over-the-board competitions. Two weeks to qualify, another two weeks of games at a national competition, then more time overseas battling up the seeding order.


"If you have to work, have a life with children and obligations, it's hard to find that sort of time."


He works part-time for Idea Services (formerly IHC), and he's slowly developing work coaching chess in schools. Feilding Intermediate, led by principal Stu Trembath, last year decided to introduce chess as a brain-training tool. Mr Trembath says his staff report that chess players' thinking and problem solving is noticeably in advance of children who don't play.


"To be a good chess player, you have to be patient, you have to visualise what's going to happen, you need tactics and strategy, you need to prepare for what you're doing. Those are good skills," Noble says.


He'd like to see all 5-year-olds introduced to chess as soon as they start school.


"Teach them how the pieces move, and when they get confident, start playing seriously with them. Take their pieces as they make mistakes. You'll see their thinking develop with every game."


That developed thinking gets applied to everything the chess-trained child does.


"I just think if you get kids going with this, they're going to succeed in other things as well. I'm not looking to turn out 300 champion chess players from a school, I just want to see the thinking happen in all their areas."


He teaches children to control the middle of the board, and the crucial moves in a game are probably moves 12 to 20.


"Think of the middle of the board as a hill, with a war being fought up and and around it. Get to the top of that hill, and you'll win, that's elementary battle tactics."


His study is set up with a computer, with chess books and a board and pieces handy. There's a shelf loaded with championship trophies, and a packet of pineapple lumps to satisfy the snack attack during late-night thinking sessions.


Noble also plays lawn bowls, has joined Palmerston North's Northern Bowling Club, and recently, with Manawatu international Sharon Sims, won the centre title mixed pairs. He says there's many similarities between bowls and chess, similar thinking and tactical play, trying to force the opponent to certain sequences of action.


"The thing about chess is that there's always something to think about. The game's as old as humans, it's gone on forever, and it's never been mastered. The best player in the world still gets beaten when somebody else out-thinks them ... and you only learn from your losses."


Computers as chess opponents are hard to beat, but in certain circumstances the human brain still out-think it.


"Computers don't handle an unbalanced game very well; you get four pawns on one side of the board, for instance. The logic they use can't compute it correctly, somehow. We can. And using computers, well, it defeats the point of using your own brain."



From Alexandra Kosteniuk's
www.chessblog.com
Also see her personal blog at
www.chessqueen.com

Special interview: The charm of correspondence chess

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2011

Hello everyone,

This was a neat chess interview we found of Wayne Pressnall, 76, of North Platte, who is the highest-rated postal chess player in Nebraska, having achieved a master's rating in the USCF! He began playing chess at age 17 when he was a projectionist at the local movie theater in Wymore and needed to pass time between changeovers.

He won a couple of college championships but he found little competition when he started his teaching career in 1959 at Fullerton. "With nothing much else to do there, I found a copy of Chess Review on a newsstand somewhere and found that I could enter a postal tournament."

He entered a Class B tourney and won a section, helped by an opponent who sent his first move for game and an "If" move for game two, playing g6 and Bg7 to any two moves by Wayne.

"I learned then and there that there is no way to forgive an opponent anything at postal chess. There are no take backs or give backs in the rules."

He said he learned about the dark side to postal chess: players who, behind in their position, would just stop sending moves or resignations. Some would sign up for games and never make a move.

"But the most frustrating thing was that the postal director hated to forfeit anybody for gross lateness. With these annoyances, I thought of quitting postal chess several times."

He adds the games were fun and the correspondence between players was also fun. He quit postal chess for a while when he received an NSF fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania where he earned his M.S. His wife, Gloria, also delivered their second child.

"I decided the busy life was not conducive to postal chess. So I quit."

By 1967, he had taught three years at Peru St. College Campus H.S. He was also helping raise their two children, Gretchen and Will. He read in a paper that the Campus School would be closed so he landed a position teaching physics, chemistry, and sometimes freshman science and algebra at Schuyler. He took up postal chess again.

He was inspired to play over the board (OTB) chess reading Chess Review, which mentioned the Midwest Open in Lincoln.

"I thought on the basis of my experiences so far, that I would just go down and win the $100 first prize. I was 32 then. One Bud Narveson showed me the error in my thinking in the very first round." He did go 3-2 and won the unrated trophy and received a class B rating. It was then he discovered the difference between correspondence and OTB chess.

"In postal, one can be analytical and try out one's ideas before sending a move. In OTB, to try something is to make blunders and I was very prone to that. In fact, I believe that one out of every 40 OTB moves I made was a blunder." He won the OTB state championship in 1995. He stopped playing OTB about 1998. He saw his rating plunge from 2025 to a floor of 1800.

"My main talent had become falling asleep during the games." His best postal finish was in the 1978 Golden Knights where he finished a couple of points behind the winner, raising his rating to 16th in the country.

He said he has about 20 games going at any one time. "The hardest part of keeping up with them is the amount of traveling Gloria and I do."

He said he averages less that two days reflection time while the rules permit three days. "I don't have as much problem with falling asleep during planning a move. I can wake up and not have to move while groggy. So CC is for my present condition as a 76-year-old with conditions."

He said he struggles with notation errors mostly now. "I have lost my master's rating and failed to place well in the Golden Knights just on notation errors."

He said a computer database that he bought to record moves is helping some. But the compter is also making the game tougher.

"Nobody makes simple errors anymore. I suspect that this has something to do with the various chess playing engines out there. But there is no way to know that. Many players will admit having an opening database, but few will tell how else they use their computers. A few would like to change your CC game over to a computer game, but I always refuse. The computer games always seem to put pressure on one to move at a faster pace than my schedule permits and I always have projects that tie up my computer anyway. So normally I play only by postcard."

Among his funny experiences in CC was the time a lower-rated player caught him making a hasty move before Wayne left town on a trip, resulting in Wayne being a piece down.

"I decided to make another move anyway and my game improved and kept on improving move by move until it was drawn and then it was won. It turned out he had played the game without his extra piece on his record board."

It's all part of the wonderful game of chess.

"CC can take some strange turns like OTB and as it is chess it is still interesting and often fun."

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From Alexandra Kosteniuk's

www.chessblog.com

Also see her personal blog at

www.chessqueen.com