2011-12-03 00:00:00 ->
2012-03-03 00:00:00

We think of it this way: even though there is no suitable Chess960 viewer now, one day there surely will be, and then these things can be fixed.

even though there is no suitable Chess960 viewer now, one day there surely will be...>

Well, I hate to break the bad news but time doesn’t seem to care too much about Web-based Chess960. For the record, I made some effort a while ago and even posted this Fischerandom Chess (on Feb-25-09). Unfortunately, time didn’t help me either, and almost four months later nobody cared to reply or, at least, dismiss my attempt. I might be wrong but the attitude I’m detecting is very discouraging. Things aren’t any better with the unfortunate X-FEN extension to PGN. A very promising but incompatible solution is the Shredder-FEN proposal. I feel that a good start for the Chess960 community will be to admit what a complete failure X-FEN was. (Several software titles already silently did so.)

We will reproduce the email below, so that others can benefit from the email and also so that future queries can be answered with a single link. Perhaps with a little proofreading this could be incorporated into our help page.

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Dear _________:

There are several ways to use Chessgames to study a particular chess opening.

1. Simply search for games with the opening that you want to master. For example suppose you want to learn how to play the Queen's Gambit Accepted from Black's persepective, there are a few ways to find such games, a simple way is the "EZ Search" which would take you here:

search "queen's gambit accepted"

You can further filter the games so that you only see victories by Black (therefore presumably the best opening play by Black) by clicking on the "0-1" at the bottom of the list:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/ches...

Now you've got 1,325 games to look at. Of course you can't look at all of them, but maybe find some names of players that you admire and want to emulate.

2. You can use Guess-the-Move to play through games of the opening that you want to master. Normally, Guess-the-Move will drop you off at the end of the opening, after the first several moves have been played, but there is a feature called "Opening Selector" which will allow you to start from move #1. You can also search Guess-the-Move for games with a certain opening. For the Queen's Gambit Accepted the list is here:

Guess-the-Move

(It only shows you the first 50 results, but as you play more games it will fill in with games you haven't played yet.)

Please note: when you use the "Opening Selector" feature your score will NOT count for your guess-the-move session. It's what we call "drill mode"--you are "drilling" on a certain opening and not necessarily playing full rounds. Once you make it out of the opening you can quit, and start a new game.

3. You can discuss the opening with other members by going to pages specific to the variation you are interested in. Continuing with the Queen's Gambit Accepted example, that page would be here:

Queen's Gambit Accepted (D20)

You locate that by searching for "D20" on the homepage search. ("D20" is an ECO code, there is a complete list of ECO Codes that pops up when you click "ECO Help" on our homepage.)

4. Finally we have our flagship product the Opening Explorer which lets you study the opening move-by-move:

Opening Explorer

If you click in the moves 1.d4 d5 2.c4 dxc4 you would be in the area of Queen's Gambit Accepted. You probably want to click on "flip board" to see it from Black's perspective. If you do it right you'll come to this page:

Opening Explorer

As a rule of thumb, the moves played most often are the best moves--although this is not always the case. That's why we provide statistics next to each move. In this example you are learning an opening for Black so you would be most interested in moves that have a large black area in the win-draw-loss percentage bar.

The help page to the Opening Explore is here:

Opening Explorer Help Page

I hope that this answers your question, and thank you for supporting Chessgames.com.

We are in the process of phasing-in a new feature called "My Favorites Page" which will hopefully help make Chessgames a more fun and tightly knit community. In short, this new page shows you detailed information about the members on your favorites list. It shows you who is on right now, who's been on today, and in the last month, and longer. It also shows you their most recent post in its entirety.

This page is only functional if you actually have a favorites list; if you don't have a favorites list already, now is a great time to make one. If you don't know about favorite-lists, please see the Premium Membership Help Page.

The product is in a beta-test right now. Although we took great efforts to make sure it is working, there might be some wrinkle we overlooked. To help with people who are debugging it for us, here are some nitty-gritty details which are not fully explained in the Help File:

<1> We took great care to make sure that this page does not make any slip-ups when it comes to protecting private areas. Therefore, it should be impossible to "peek" into the discussion of a team game unless you are in fact a member of that team. Likewise, members who have set their forum to not show messages on the Recent Chessforum Activity page will also not show messages on this new page. If you notice any breach of this (e.g. if you can indeed 'peek' into something you shouldn't be able to) please notify us at once.

<2> The setting in your preferences called "Don't show me on the homepage recent visitors" is taken into account on this page as well; this is what we call "site usage privacy". This means, if you have that feature set then people will NOT know when you are using the site--you will instead appear on the list based on the last time you actually posted, or at the bottom in a special section called "others".

This means that the sorting order is a little bit hard to explain. It's sorted chronologically, by a date defined by either the last time the user was on, or (in the case of time-privacy users) the last time they actually posted a message.

<3> You can get to this link either from the "Profile" link in the upper right, and it is now an option in the Menu Configuration Page. When you activates "favorites" from your customized menu, it shows up as <Favorites [edit]> where the 'edit' is the old page and the 'Favorites' takes you straight to the new feature.

<4> We plan on putting it on the homepage once we're satisfied that it's working properly. It may appear under the 'Recent Kibitzing' section.

<5> Links at the top read <Past Hour | Past Day | Past Month | Others>. These links fail to operate (they don't do anything) if there are no users in the category. We may decide to change this, but we don't regard it as a bug.

<6> Grandmasters like User: Mikhail Umansky who decide to make a favorites list will not see Chessgames Challenge discussion, even if their favorite members post there. They will know that something was posted, but all they can read is "You cannot read this message; you are not part of Team Black."

<7> The links to the people on your favorites list appears at the top of the My Favorites page in alphabetical order, not chronological order. Our reasoning was that it will be easier to locate people in your list this way. Again, we may decide to change that, but it's not a bug.

Would you be so kind as to use it on his page, please?

The Wesley So Fan Cult should be ashamed of themselves for bringing such dishonor and disrepute upon their favorite player, and double points off for playing the Race Card. As the Vladimir Kramnik page is a permanent memorial to personal attacks against other users, the Wesley So page will forever be a testament to prevailing in a posting contest through underhanded methods. In a word: cheating.

Wake me up when somebody else have more fans and kibitzers...

We had 192 kibitzers/members as of today in the Wesley page and counting, and we are even recruiting from other chess sites to come here.

I just emailed you a request for an avatar (yeah it has been over a year if that policy still holds)!!!!

If my memory serves me right, there were only 3 correspondence game played.

We're just here to support GM Wesley So...

As a matter of fact, i don't want his page to be no.1 anymore. It attracts too much attention and detractors at the same time.

We'll be happy to stay 2nd to Carlsen and out of the limelight.

http://previews.chessdom.com/dortmu...

As you can tell from the homepage, we now have the 2009 World Computer Championship and also the Dortmund page.

We will be showing the Dortmund games live. We may open up the live games to non-premium members at the end but for the most part it will be a premium-only broadcast.

<tpstar> We have considered dispensing altogether with the lists "users with most kibitzes" and "pages with most kibitzes" altogether, due to concerns that it encourages some people to flood the site with huge quantities of posts, without regards to quality. We are not saying that has happened on the Wesley So page, at least not intentionally, but in some cases there does seem to be an intentional effort of posting just to boost some meaningless statistic.