ChessBase Magazine Online

$250,000 in Seattle
06.01.2003 – For the third year running, hip Seattle plays host to the cerebral challenge of the prestigious US Chess Championships, as 58 of the country's top chess masters battle it out over nine rounds (from January 9-18) for the biggest prize in chess history for a national title. We are talking a cool quarter of a million dollars. Fischer got exactly one hundred times less when he took the title in 1966. More
 

Peter Heine Nielsen wins Hastings
06.01.2003 – The Danish GM, who was recently spotted working together with Vishy Anand, has won the 78th International Chess Congress in Hastings. Nielsen clinched it in the penultimate round when he defeated co-leader Penteala Harikrishna, who is 16 years old and hails from India. Top seed K. Sasikiran (2670) came in a disappointing 7th. 12-year-old Sergey Karjakin came 5th with a 2590 performance. More
 

Time for work: our Prize Puzzle competition starts today
05.01.2003 – Over the holidays many thousands of visitors followed our Christmas puzzle pages. They were in light spirit and most of the solutions were given the next day. Now you have 26 days to solve six special tasks if you want to take part in special Prize Puzzle. You can win a copy of Fritz signed by a world champion, or a fascinating book by Garry Kasparov signed by the world's leading player.
 

Three-dimensional chess in the White House
05.01.2003 – Remember we told you about chess metaphors creeping into media reports on military situations? They are getting better at it, and the New York Times has even introduced a new dimension. "Right now the world must seem like a potentially deadly game of three-dimensional chess to the the Bush administration," they write. What will we see next in the headlines, the Benoni against Baghdad or the Petroff against Pyongyang? More
 

GMs and muggles decide: what are the best time controls?
04.01.2003 – While defining a new format for future world chess championships Yasser Seirawan polled the world's top 200 players on the proper time controls for blitz, rapid and professional chess games. Unfortunately he was not able to get as many GM's to vote as he would have liked. We bring you the results Yasser has received so far, as well as some of the messages we received from simple mortals. More
 

Picking stocks instead of chess moves
04.01.2003 – He is no longer world champion, just your humble highest-rated-player-on-the-planet. Certainly Garry Kasparov dominates the media. According to the latest Business Times story Kasparov is drumming up business for the Russian Growth Fund, aimed at investors bullish on his native land. Good timing: the Russian RTS stock market index was up almost 40 per cent last year.
 

The man behind the Fischer-Spassky show
03.01.2003 – In 1972 WNET/PBS aired the greatest TV show ever seen in chess, with millions of viewers glued for five hours to their sets. In a New York Time article Fred Waitzkin told the story of how a dour Latvian-American chess master and a Harvard-educated sociology teacher made the show a success (see report from 29.12.02 below). Now Wired Magazine Rudy Chelminski sets the record straight on some points and gives credit where it's due.
 

Training with GM Rogozenko
02.01.2003 – Grandmaster training free of charge. In his first session in 2003 GM Dorian Rogozenko will present the beauty of chess, showing most aestethic games featuring for example fantastic positional queen sacrifices - just the right chess appetizer to start the year with. This time, the session begins at 22.00 p.m. CET, on our server at Playchess.com
 

A very happy 2003!
01.01.2003 – We start the New Year with the best wishes to all our friends, chess players all over the world, casual visitors to our web site. And we start it with a final installment to our Christmas Puzzle week. Nothing really difficult, just right for the casual chess player. So pull out your trusty old chessboard and get to work. If you are lucky you may win a copy of Fritz, signed by a world champion. The new puzzles are here.
 

After-school chess a brain-twisting success
01.01.2003 – "I have, in my years of teaching, been fortunate enough to see how beneficial chess is to kids," says Jim Celone, who teaches advanced-placement calculus and statistics at West Haven High School and decided that chess is the game for students from elementary through high school. "It’s absorbing, it’s intellectually productive…it’s just the best tool to teach good decision making." Read about it in the New Haven Register.
 

Garry Kasparov wishes us all a Happy New Year
01.01.2003 – He does it in his own inimitable style, by climbing even higher on the rating lists. Do you have any idea how hard that is, when one is cruising around in the rarefied atmosphere above 2800? Still based on his amazing result in the Bled Olympiad Kasparov gained another 9.3 points in the 1st January 2003 list. We, too, wish everybody a Happy New Year, with exciting games and more rating points for everybody. We bring you the rating list and details of the Kasparov vs Deep Junior match
 

What a way to end the year!
31.12.2002 – We could of course do a retrospect of the chess politics, or look back at the Kramnik vs Deep Fritz struggle in Bahrain. But we prefer to let the year go out with a number of original problems by Dr John Nunn, which become part of today's Christmas puzzle page.